Prudence

Whether prudence and practical wisdom may be used as synonyms is more than a question of verbal equivalence, for there is an issue in theory concerning the unity of wisdom on which Plato differs from both Aristotle and Aquinas. Plato does not divide wisdom into a speculative and a practical branch. The knowledge by which the philosopher contemplates the Good is, on his view, the same knowledge by which the city is rightly governed; and it is because the two are one that he holds the philosopher, and none but the philosopher, fit to rule. Practical wisdom is thus the application of genuine knowledge to the sphere of action, and genuine knowledge, rather than opinion or custom or convention, is what the sphere of action requires. The consequences of denying the division are treated more fully under the idea of Wisdom.

The argument of the Meno turns on the sort of knowledge that virtue involves. Socrates suggests that if there be any good distinct from knowledge, virtue may be that good; but if knowledge embraces all good, then virtue will be knowledge. Testing the hypothesis, he considers the various qualities men count advantageous and finds that none of them, neither courage nor temperance, profits a man unless it be accompanied by what translators render sometimes as wisdom and sometimes as prudence. Everything the soul attempts under the guidance of wisdom ends in happiness, and everything it attempts under the guidance of folly ends in the contrary. From this Socrates concludes that prudence is virtue, either the whole of virtue or some part of it at least.

The same argument yields the Socratic doctrine that no man wills or chooses anything evil, and that whoever sins does so through ignorance. If a man chooses what is in fact bad for him, he does so only by the mistake of deeming it good. Aquinas judges this to rest on a false supposition, since the appetitive faculty obeys reason with a certain power of opposition; yet he allows that there is some truth in the saying, provided the knowledge in question involves the use of reason in the individual act of choice. Whether the critics of Socrates accurately perceive his intention is a problem of interpretation as difficult as the question of where the truth in the matter lies. Much depends on whether the knowledge said to produce right action is knowledge of the good in general or knowledge of what is good in a particular case.

Aristotle holds that Socrates was in one respect on the right track and in another went astray: wrong in thinking that all the virtues were forms of practical wisdom, right in saying that they implied it. That criticism opens the long dispute over the relation of knowledge to virtue, and with it the separation of speculative from practical wisdom which Aristotle and Aquinas afterward maintain. The connected question whether the virtues can exist apart from one another belongs to the chapter on Virtue.

Aristotle insists upon the distinction between the wisdom which is the ultimate fruit of the speculative sciences and the wisdom which belongs to the sphere of moral and political action, and it is the second of these, phronesis, that his translators render as practical or political wisdom. That practical wisdom is not scientific knowledge he takes to be evident from the fact that young men become geometricians and mathematicians while a young man of practical wisdom cannot be found. Such wisdom is concerned not only with universals but with particulars, which become familiar from experience, and it is length of time that gives experience. Since particulars are variable and contingent, they belong to the realm of opinion rather than of demonstration, and deliberation about them cannot issue in the certainty that science affords.

Aristotle alone raises the further question how prudence differs from art. The artist also deals with particulars, and in that sense art too is practical; but the word productive should be used in distinction from practical to mark the difference between making and doing. The knowledge which the artist possesses can moreover be set down in a body of rules, and a man may acquire the skill of an art by practicing according to them. What the prudent man knows appears much less capable of being communicated by precept, since what he knows is how to deliberate well about things to be done. Prudence is further marked off from art in that it is not deliberation about the means to any end whatever, but only about those means which conduce to the good life in general.

That prudence is a moral as well as an intellectual quality follows from this restriction of its end, and Aristotle makes the dependence run both ways. Virtue makes us aim at the right end, he writes, and practical wisdom makes us take the right means; but no skill in choosing means is truly prudence unless the man who calculates well is also inclined by the moral virtues toward a right end. Conversely the moral virtues depend on prudence, since the mean in which they consist is in most cases relative to the individual and cannot be fixed by measurement. Reason must determine it by a prudent weighing of the circumstances. On this basis Aristotle takes himself to refute the dialectical argument that the virtues exist in separation from one another, a matter treated at length in the chapter on Virtue.

A man may be able to do the things that tend toward the mark he has set himself, and this Aristotle calls cleverness: laudable if the mark be noble, mere smartness if the mark be bad. The distinction leaves room for the counterfeits of prudence, the craft of Hobbes and the cunning of the Machiavellian prince, which later writers examine at length. Aquinas takes over the whole analysis and adds to it, distinguishing private from domestic and political prudence; Hobbes retains the tie to experience while severing the tie to virtue; Kant assigns prudence to the hypothetical imperative and denies it moral standing, a dispute belonging to the chapters on Duty and Happiness. Aristotle's own remark that political and practical wisdom are the same state of mind though not the same in essence leaves open how far the prudence of the ruler differs from that of the ruled.

If prudence is confined to the things within our power, the question at once arises how wide that province extends; and on this the Stoics take the narrowest view in the tradition. Epictetus divides all things into those which are in our power and those which are not, assigning to the first opinion, choice, desire, and aversion, and to the second the body, property, reputation, and office. Practical wisdom accordingly consists in the correct use of impressions, which is to say in judging rightly, at each moment, whether what presents itself is truly good or evil and whether it lies within the compass of the will. The man who has this discipline neither pursues what cannot be obtained nor flees what cannot be avoided. The connected problems of what falls within deliberation and choice are treated under the ideas of Will and Liberty.

So conceived, prudence covers less ground than it does for Aristotle, and covers it differently. The Aristotelian prudent man deliberates about the means conducing to a good life which includes goods of body and fortune; the Stoic reduces the goods properly so called to the single item of right judgment, so that deliberation about external means loses much of its importance. It may be asked whether what remains deserves the name of prudence at all, or whether it belongs rather to temperance and continence, since its work lies chiefly in the government of desire. Epictetus himself makes no such division, holding that the correct use of impressions is at once the whole of knowledge and the whole of virtue.

The Stoic doctrine also bears on the question who is capable of prudence. Where political prudence has often been thought to require birth, education, or office, Epictetus, who was himself a slave, teaches that the discipline of the impressions lies open to anyone who will undertake it, and that a slave may be freer than an emperor who is governed by appetite and opinion. Prudence in this sense is neither the possession of the learned nor the privilege of the powerful. Whether such an inward freedom is sufficient, or whether the prudent man must also order his household and his city, is the point at which the Stoic account parts from the Aristotelian.

The Stoic turn inward leaves practical wisdom concerned with the management of one's own judgments rather than with the conduct of external affairs. Aquinas, who draws on both traditions, keeps the Aristotelian account of deliberation about means while giving the government of the passions its own place among the parts of prudence. Hobbes moves in the contrary direction, restoring prudence to the world of expectation, power, and survival, and defining it by the foresight which the Stoic thought least worth cultivating.

Aquinas defines prudence as right reason about things to be done and calls it the charioteer of the virtues, since it determines how each of the moral virtues is to be exercised in the particular case. His Treatise on Prudence gives the most extended analysis the subject has received, dividing the virtue into eight integral parts: memory of what is past, understanding of first principles, docility or willingness to be taught, shrewdness in the quick grasp of means, reason in extended deliberation, foresight of consequences, circumspection with regard to attendant circumstances, and caution against obstacles unforeseen. These are not so many separate virtues but the several aspects of one capacity for deliberating well. What Aristotle indicates by saying that prudence requires experience and cannot be reduced to precept, Aquinas sets out as an ordered account of the acts which good counsel involves.

The dependence of prudence on the moral virtues is stated as strongly here as in Aristotle. One cannot have prudence unless one has the moral virtues, Aquinas holds, since prudence is right reason about things to be done and it is by moral virtue that a man is rightly disposed toward the end. He adds another condition which Aristotle leaves less explicit, namely the intellectual virtue of understanding, which consists in the knowledge of first principles in practical as well as in speculative matters. The first principles of the practical reason are the precepts of the natural law, and as sound reasoning in speculative matters proceeds from naturally known principles, so also does prudence. Understanding is nevertheless omitted, along with art, science, and wisdom, from the enumeration of the four cardinal virtues, which are cardinal in the sense of being indispensable to a good human life.

Prudence is further divided according to the sphere in which it operates, into private, domestic, and political, and within the political sphere Aquinas gives special place to what he calls reignative prudence, the kingly prudence which Dante says sets the prince apart from ordinary men. He also distinguishes an artistic or technical prudence from the moral kind: those who give good counsel in matters of warfare or seamanship are called prudent officers or prudent pilots, but not simply prudent, for only those are simply prudent who give good counsel about all the concerns of life. The ordering of things toward their ultimate end he treats as the chief part of prudence, to which remembrance of the past and understanding of the present are directed; and it is in this sense that providence, or prudence, may suitably be attributed to God.

The division of prudence by spheres was afterward disputed. Hobbes denies that to govern a family and to govern a kingdom are different degrees of prudence, holding them different sorts of business, no more than drawing a picture small or large is a difference of degree in art. The issue bears directly on the forms of government, for if only a few men can acquire the reignative or legislative mode, rule by the few or by one might seem naturally best, whereas if the citizens of a republic rule and are ruled in turn, each must have whatever prudence both tasks require. Aquinas's account of the interdependence of prudence, the moral virtues, and the natural law remained the standard treatment until Hobbes reduced prudence to experience and Kant removed it from morality altogether.

Montaigne approaches prudence by way of a skepticism about the systems which undertake to define it. Where Aristotle and Aquinas divide the virtue into parts and assign it a place among the others, Montaigne asks what in fact serves men of the various and unsteady sort he finds himself and his neighbors to be. The essay On Experience contains his most sustained treatment. Experience rather than doctrine is there made the school of practical wisdom, and the man who has watched himself closely and long is held to be better furnished for conduct than the philosopher who has read everything and lived narrowly. In this Montaigne stands with Hobbes, who likewise derives prudence from experience and memory of like things and their consequences, though the two draw very different lessons from the same principle.

The Essays are themselves an exercise of the discipline they recommend. The continuous examination of how the author lives, thinks, changes, and contradicts himself is offered as the only reliable road to self-knowledge, and Montaigne claims no more for it than that he has looked honestly at the same questions for many years. The Socratic saying that a man's wisdom begins in knowing that he does not know is here turned against the moral systems, which are charged with not knowing that they do not know. Whether such self-knowledge amounts to prudence in Aristotle's sense, or only to the material out of which prudence is formed, is a question the Essays leave open.

Montaigne also presses the variability of circumstance further than the scholastics had done. What served yesterday may not serve today, and what was rightly done in one conjunction of circumstances may be wrongly done in another; the man himself alters no less than his situation. He is on this account suspicious of fixed rules, including the maxims of prudence which later writers were fond of collecting. The prudent man, on his showing, is distinguished less by the soundness of his principles than by his readiness to see what is actually before him. Mill makes a related observation when he remarks that in every moral system there arise unequivocal cases of conflicting obligation, overcome in practice according to the intellect and virtue of the individual.

The turn from system to experience which Montaigne makes anticipates the temper of the following two centuries. Hobbes shares the distrust of abstract principle while building from it a doctrine of prudence as fallible expectation, and Bacon, opposing hopefulness to a prudence which is diffident upon principle and in all human matters augurs the worst, treats the same disposition as a temperamental trait rather than a virtue. Kant sets himself against any account of this kind, on the ground that what is drawn from experience and varies with circumstance can furnish counsels but never a law. The question whether prudence belongs to character or to the mind is taken up again in the chapters on Virtue and Habit.

Hobbes treats prudence as a kind of wit rather than a virtue, and derives it wholly from experience. When the thoughts of a man who has a design in hand run over a multitude of things and observe how they conduce to that design, and when his observations are such as are not easy or usual, this wit of his is called prudence, and it depends on much experience and memory of like things and their consequences heretofore. Because it rests on experience, prudence is not knowledge in the ordinary sense and cannot be set down in propositions as science and art can. Hobbes marks the difference in the older Latin terms: as much experience is prudence, so is much science sapience, the Latins ascribing the former to experience and the latter to science. Aristotle draws the same distinction between phronesis and sophia, though he treats prudence as an intellectual virtue and Hobbes does not.

Prudence so conceived carries no certainty. The judgments it yields are all uncertain, Hobbes holds, because to observe by experience and remember all the circumstances that may alter the success is impossible. When the event answers expectation, the prediction is attributed to prudence, yet human foresight being fallible, it is but presumption; for the foresight of things to come, which is Providence, belongs only to him by whose will they are to come. Perfect prudence thus belongs to God alone. Aquinas reaches the same conclusion by another route, attributing providence to God because the ordering of things toward their ultimate end is the chief part of prudence.

The severance of prudence from moral virtue is not complete, for Hobbes still distinguishes prudence from its corruption. If you permit to prudence the use of unjust or dishonest means, he writes, you have that crooked wisdom which is called craft. What remains within the name of prudence is nevertheless indifferent to the ends pursued, and its characteristic employment in the Leviathan is the securing of life and peace. The sovereign who preserves the commonwealth, the subject who calculates where his safety lies, and the man who reads other men's intentions from their interests rather than their professions are all exercising the same faculty. Hobbes likewise denies that prudence differs in kind with the sphere of its exercise: to govern well a family and a kingdom are not different degrees of prudence but different sorts of business, no more than to draw a picture in little or great are different degrees of art.

By identifying prudence with foresight and experience, Hobbes puts it on the side of memory and imagination rather than of moral character, and so revives a conception which Aristotle had allowed only in a qualified sense when he admitted that some of the lower animals may be said to have practical wisdom insofar as they have a power of foresight regarding their own lives. Kant continues the separation from a different direction, granting prudence a real office in the pursuit of happiness while denying it any share in morality. The dispute over whether governing a household and governing a state require the same prudence bears on the forms of government and is pursued in the chapters on State and Government.

Kant associates prudence with expediency and self-seeking and separates it from action performed under the categorical imperative of the moral law. Prudence has meaning for him only in relation to a hypothetical imperative, which expresses the practical necessity of an action as a means to the advancement of happiness. Granted that a man seeks his own happiness, then skill in the choice of means to his greatest well-being may be called prudence; and the imperative referring to that choice remains always hypothetical, since the action is commanded not absolutely but only as a means to another purpose. The maxim of self-love, Kant writes, only advises, while the law of morality commands. Dividing the imperatives of conduct into the pragmatic and the moral according as they refer to welfare or to duty, he assigns prudence entirely to the first, so that it does not belong to morality at all.

The pragmatic imperative of prudence resembles the technical imperative of art, which is likewise conditional and concerned with determining means to an end. If it were only equally easy, Kant remarks, to give a definite conception of happiness, the imperatives of prudence would correspond exactly with those of skill. The office of reason in this sphere is to bring the ends aimed at by our inclinations into the one ultimate end of happiness and to show what agreement should exist among the means of attaining it. Reason can here present no more than pragmatical laws of free action, and is incompetent to give laws determined completely a priori. The precepts of prudence are accordingly used by reason only as counsels, and by way of counterpoise against seductions to an opposite course.

Kant does not rest his criticism on the private character of the happiness prudence serves, since prudence may also serve the public welfare; a history is composed pragmatically, he writes, when it teaches prudence and instructs the world how it can better provide for its interests. He distinguishes worldly from private prudence, the former being a man's ability to influence others so as to use them for his own purposes, the latter his sagacity in combining all these purposes for his own lasting benefit. Where a man has the first without the second, Kant judges him clever and cunning but on the whole imprudent. The questionable worth of prudence he takes to be shown by the difference between the man compelled to say that he is a worthless fellow though he has filled his purse and the man who approves himself as prudent for having enriched his treasure.

The issue between Kant and Aristotle or Aquinas on prudence forms part of the larger issue between them on the first principles of morality, discussed in the chapters on Duty and Happiness. In Kant's view those who make happiness the first principle of conduct, whether ancient or modern, are pragmatists rather than moralists, and he admits that men who live for happiness require a great deal of prudence in order to adapt practical rules to variable circumstances. Those who live according to the moral law require none, since the law commands punctual obedience from everyone and must therefore be so plain that the commonest understanding, even without worldly prudence, can apply it rightly. Later writers in the Aristotelian line reply that a law so applied still needs the perception of particulars which prudence supplies, and Mill undertakes to rebuild the connection between judgment and principle on utilitarian ground.

Mill assigns prudence a department of its own within what he calls the art of life, placing it beside morality and aesthetics as one of the three divisions under which conduct may be judged. Prudence or policy is there concerned with what is expedient, morality with what is right, and aesthetics with what is admirable or noble. Since on the utilitarian view the standard of right conduct is the general happiness, the determination of which actions will conduce to it requires the same combination of general principle with the perception of particulars that Aristotle ascribed to practical wisdom. Mill differs from Aristotle chiefly in holding that the requisite knowledge of consequences is cumulative and social rather than the possession of any one deliberator.

On this account the experience which prudence draws upon extends beyond the individual life. The accumulated observations of mankind concerning the effects of actions on happiness are embodied in the received rules of morality, which Mill treats as secondary principles rather than as ultimate ones, and a man who sets aside these rules in favor of his own calculation is likely to err in proportion to his inexperience. Yet the secondary rules do not decide every case. There exists no moral system, Mill writes, under which there do not arise unequivocal cases of conflicting obligation, and these knotty points are overcome practically, with greater or less success, according to the intellect and virtue of the individual. Both prudence and virtue thus appear necessary to good action in particulars, and without them the knowledge expressed in moral principles does not of itself lead a man to act well.

Mill's separate placing of prudence carries a certain diminution of it. Discussing the duties we owe ourselves as against those we owe others, he observes that the term duty to oneself, when it means anything more than prudence, means self-respect and self-development, which seems to imply that prudence by itself falls short of a proper and justifiable regard for one's own good. Kant found in this same neighborhood the ground for excluding prudence from morality altogether. On Liberty nevertheless restores something to it, arguing that men learn the government of their own lives only by exercising it, and that the freedom to make experiments in living is the condition of acquiring the judgment by which conduct is guided.

Mill's treatment restores the connection between prudence and moral judgment which Hobbes had cut and Kant had denied, while retaining the happiness of men as the end by which conduct is measured. Kant would count him for that reason a pragmatist rather than a moralist, and would place him with Aristotle and Aquinas among those who make the ordering of means to happiness the whole business of practical reason. Writers in the Aristotelian line reply that a calculation of utilities, however well informed by the experience of the race, still leaves unexplained the perception by which a man sees what the case before him requires. The comparison of prudence with the speculative wisdom to which it was anciently opposed is pursued in the chapters on Wisdom and Virtue.