Back to the Rough Ground

Practical Judgment and the Lure of Technique

Joseph Dunne

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 1997
• ISBN:
  9780268161132
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Pragmatism in Philosophy

Back to the Rough Ground is a philosophical investigation of practical knowledge, with major import for professional practice and the ethical life in modern society. Its purpose is to clarify the kind of knowledge that informs good practice in a range of disciplines such as education, psychotherapy, medicine, management, and law. Through reflection on key modern thinkers who have revived cardinal insights of Aristotle, and a sustained engagement with the Philosopher himself, it presents a radical challenge to the scientistic assumptions that have dominated how these professional domains have been conceived, practiced, and institutionalized.

PART 1

The Retrieval of Phronesis and Techne in Modern Philosophy

We accept the fact that the subject presents itself historically under different aspects at different times or from a different standpoint. We accept that these aspects do not simply cancel one another out as research proceeds, but are like mutually exclusive conditions that exist each by themselves and combine only in us. Our historical consciousness is always filled with a variety of voices in which the echo of the past is to be heard. It is present in the multifariousness of such voices: this constitutes the nature of the tradition in which we want to share and have a part.

H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method

Philosophy proclaims its devotion to the universal. But as the profession of cosmopolitan philanthropy which is not rooted in neighborly friendliness is suspect, so I distrust the universals that are not reached by way of profound respect for the significant features and outcomes of human experience as found in human institutions, traditions, impelling interests, and occupations. A universal which has its home exclusively or predominantly in philosophy is a sure sign of isolation and artificiality.

John Dewey, “Context and Thought”

1. J. H. Newman’s Appeal to Phronesis in A Grammar of Assent

1. Newman’s Critique of Rationalism: Preliminary Remarks

In setting out to trace a line of resistance to modern rationalism that is at the same time an attempt to retrieve Aristotelian phronesis, I begin with the work of John Henry Newman. This may seem an unlikely starting point for a study that purports to address a crucial issue in contemporary culture that will bring us eventually very near the center of current philosophical reflection. Newman, after all, was a nineteenth-century Christian apologist whose work has been of, at most, only marginal interest to philosophers. Moreover, even in his own time (and notwithstanding his many public controversies—with prime ministers¹ no less than with leading academics and churchmen) the distinctive cast of his mind and his singular career made him an isolated figure. His being unconvinced by the rationalism that seemed irresistible to most contemporary intellectuals was only the broadest aspect of this isolation. Brought up an Anglican, and having become at Oxford the leader of the most vigorous theological movement in that church for a century, he was estranged from most of what by sentiment and affection was dearest to him when he converted to Roman Catholicism because of what he had come to regard—primarily through reflection on fifth-century theological disputes—as irremediable defects in the authoritativeness of the Anglican Confession. And as a Roman Catholic, the exigent intelligence which had led to his conversion (and by no means been forfeited through it) made him chronically suspect to the leaders of a church then deeply entrenched in anti-modernist reaction. From all this it may seem to be fairly judged that “Newman belongs to no school. In the history of philosophy and theology he appears as a great outsider.”² Even if he did not write as a philosopher, however, and was out of season in his own time, I shall try to show that Newman is a particular beneficiary of the “temporal distance” which separates his age from ours and that the very factors which made him uncomfortable in the intellectual landscape of Victorian England fit him for intimate partnership in our philosophical debates.³

The fact that he was above all a religious thinker and that religion was the field which suffered the first and most obviously damaging encroachments of rationalism forced Newman into an early confrontation with a problem whose full brunt would be felt in other fields only when (as we shall see in later chapters)⁴ the fuller expansion of rationalism had come to threaten the integrity of practice itself in any field whatever. Newman’s significance lies precisely in his diagnosis of the problem as a generic one that required less a defense of religion than a challenge to the paradigm of rationality which would so summarily discredit it⁵—and in his consequent articulation of a rationality which would not only leave room for religious belief but, while doing so, would also do justice to the many ways of being reasonable that are embedded in our social practices. The rationalism that he set out to contest was not of course the exclusive preserve of the skeptical critics of religion; for it was hardly less evident in the kind of apologetics (for which Newman himself had no taste) that felt confident of trading arguments with atheistic all-comers and of making religion prevail just through the force of superior argument on what was supposed to be the level ground of “reason.” Newman’s own concern was not to provide explicit ‘proofs’ for theism or Christianity but, rather, through a kind of phenomenological analysis, to reconstruct the processes of inference and assent that ground the conviction of ordinary, intellectually unsophisticated believers⁶ and to demonstrate their reasonableness as not being essentially different from the processes which operate in concrete reasoning in any field whatever, be it in a law court, in conducting a historical inquiry, in deciding the authenticity of an artwork, or in solving an engineering problem. If Newman was uninterested then in the ‘God of the philosophers’, this did not lead him to regard faith as an irrational ‘leap’. It is a movement of the mind which indeed involves a venture—while at the same time being conditioned by previous commitments and anticipations—but Newman’s purpose is to demonstrate that in this it is similar to the reasonings exemplified in all areas where people deal with matters concretely.⁷

My own interest here, then—since “when faith is said to be a religious principle, it is … the things believed, not the act of believing them, which is peculiar to religion”⁸—will not be in the specifics of Newman’s defense of religious belief but in his general account of what it is to be reasonable. The core of this account is its denial of the possibility of our constructing—or even reconstructing from successful practice—a method or system (i.e., a techne) whose proper application would yield true knowledge or at least provide an unequivocal criterion of it. Rationalism, in its various versions, was the supposition that such a system existed, whether supplied by or modeled on logic, mathematics, or the hypothetico-deductive method of the empirical sciences. The most significant upshot of rationalism was its exclusiveness: its drastic contraction of the range within which assent can legitimately be given or, in other words, its withdrawal of the status of rationality from large areas in which people not only reason but suppose that they can (even if they do not actually) reason correctly. Newman’s basic conviction was that in many areas “thought is too keen and manifold, its sources are too remote and hidden, its path too personal, delicate and circuitous, its subject-matter too various and intricate to admit of the trammels”⁹ of any formal method, and that consequently “methodical processes of inference, useful as they are, as far as they go, are only instruments of the mind, and need, in order to their due exercise, that real ratiocination and present imagination which gives them a sense beyond their letter, and which, while acting through them, reaches to conclusions beyond and above them. Such a living organon is a personal gift, and not a mere method or calculus.”¹⁰ His purpose, then, being to counter the rationalist position with an account of reason as “an intrinsic and personal power, not a conscious adoption of an artificial instrument or expedient,”¹¹ his procedure is similar to Aristotle’s in the Ethics: not to construct a theory which practice must accommodate to if it is to pass muster, but rather to articulate the structure and defend the integrity of what is already recognizable in the way of life of a community as good practice (in Aristotle’s case: acting virtuously, in Newman’s case: reasoning well—though, as we shall see, the two cases are closely akin).

In developing my outline of Newman’s position, I shall confine attention to his main work, A Grammar of Assent (and, to a lesser extent, to the much earlier University Sermons, which contain his first published reflections on the problem of rationality and provide the essential background to the Grammar); and even with respect to the Grammar, my focus will be almost exclusively on the second part of the book, on “Assent and Inference.”¹² What I shall try to bring out, in considering Newman’s argument, is the way in which it is under Aristotle’s influence, as well as the extent to which it anticipates—while at the same time, in certain respects, undeniably differing from—the major strand of contemporary European philosophy which we shall be exploring in later chapters.

2. Newman and Aristotle

Newman had no compunction about identifying “Aristotelic argumentation in its typical modes and figures” (or “the Aristotelic syllogism”)¹³ as a leading exemplar of the type of rationality whose limits he was seeking to expose, nor about writing: “In spite of Aristotle, I will not allow that genuine reasoning is an instrumental art [i.e., a techne, the techne of logic itself].”¹⁴ Still, when he came, in a later part of the book, to sketch the unsupersedable personal capacity—which he called the “Illative Sense”—which informs reasoning and leads to correct judgment in all concrete matters, it was precisely Aristotle’s concept of phronesis that he invoked. In ‘phronesis’ he found that Aristotle had long ago uncovered, in the field of moral practice, just that resourcefulness of mind and character which, through his own ‘Illative Sense’, he wished to recognize in all the fields and contexts in which we reason concretely. “Aristotle,” he tells us, “calls the faculty which guides the mind in matters of conduct, by the name of phronesis”; and he then goes on to outline, as eloquently as anyone ever has, the peculiar nature of phronesis:

What it is to be virtuous, how we are to gain the just idea and standard of virtue, how we are to approximate in practice to our own standard, what is right and wrong in a particular case, for the answers in fulness and accuracy to these and similar questions, the philosopher refers us to no code of laws, to no moral treatise, because no science of life, applicable to the case of the individual, has been or can be written.… An ethical system may supply laws, general rules, guiding principles, a number of examples, suggestions, landmarks, limitations, cautions, distinctions, solutions of critical or anxious difficulties; but who is to apply them to a particular case? Whither can we go, except to the living intellect, our own, or another’s? What is written is too vague, too negative for our need. It bids us avoid extremes; but it cannot ascertain for us, according to our personal need, the golden mean. The authoritative oracle, which is to decide our path, is something more searching and manifold than such jejune generalizations as treatises can give, which are most distinct and clear when we least need them. It is seated in the mind of the individual, who is thus his own law, his own teacher, and his own judge in those special cases of duty which are personal to him. It comes of an acquired habit, though it has its first origin in nature itself, and it is formed and matured by practice and experience … it is a capacity sufficient for the occasion, deciding what ought to be done here and now, by this given person, under these given circumstances.¹⁵

Newman enthusiastically embraces that whole tendency in Aristotle’s thought whose fullest expression is in the concept of phronesis because he finds confirmation in it of what long years of reflection had taught him to recognize in his own experience and in that of his friends: that “many of our most obstinate and reasonable certitudes depend on proofs which are informal and personal, which baffle our powers of analysis and cannot be brought under logical rule.”¹⁶ He quotes with approval the wellknown remark in the methodological preface to the Nicomachean Ethics about its being the mark of an educated person to expect only that degree of accuracy which is appropriate in each field (and so not to make mathematical rigor the standard in all fields). And, in support of his conception of the necessary “elasticity” of concrete reasoning (which is “oppressed and hampered, as David in Saul’s armour,”¹⁷ if it is made to follow strict logical rules) he alludes to a nice metaphor which Aristotle uses in the discussion of justice which precedes his treatment of phronesis in the Ethics: “In old times the mason’s rule which was in use in Lesbos was, according to Aristotle, not of wood or iron, but of lead, so as to allow of its adjustment to the uneven surface of the stones brought together for the work. By such the philosopher illustrates the nature of equity in contrast with law, and such is that phronesis, from which the science of morals forms its rules and receives its complement.”¹⁸ Or again, in the same vein, he quotes a remark from book six about the possibility of young men becoming accomplished mathematicians, but not phronimoi (people of practical wisdom), since phronesis—in Aristotle’s words—“is concerned with … particulars, which become familiar from experience.”¹⁹

Newman’s emphasis on experience is all of a piece with his insistence on judgment as the crucial, unsubstitutable quality of a person who knows his way around an area: “Instead of trusting logical science, we must trust persons, namely those who by long acquaintance with their subject, have a right to judge. And if we wish ourselves to share in their convictions and the grounds of them, we must follow their history, and learn as they have learned. We must … depend on practice and experience more than on reasoning.… By following this we may … rightly lean upon ourselves, directing ourselves by our own moral or intellectual judgment, not by our skill in argumentation.”²⁰ By way of precedent for this view—which flies in the face of modern rationalism and which, in particular, rules out the possibility of our ever devising anything that would even approximate to a person-proof method (or, in the case which launched my own inquiry here, a teacher-proof system of teaching)—he quotes the “grand words” of Aristotle: “We are bound to give heed to the undemonstrated sayings and opinions of the experienced and aged, not less than to demonstrations; because from their having the eye of experience, they behold the principles of things.”²¹

A reader of the Grammar who comes to it already familiar with the Ethics, even when she does not find Aristotle quoted or directly alluded to, will still find him resonating throughout the work. She will read, for instance, that we are forced “instead of devising, what cannot be, some sufficient science of reasoning which may compel certitude in concrete conclusions, to confess that there is no ultimate test of truth besides the testimony borne to truth by the mind itself, and that this phenomenon, perplexing as we may find it, is a normal and inevitable characteristic of the mental constitution of a being like man on a stage such as the world”²²—or in similar vein elsewhere that “in no class of concrete reasonings … is there any ultimate test of truth and error in our inferences besides the trustworthiness of the Illative Sense that gives them their sanction,”²³ so that in each subject-matter “our duty is to strengthen and perfect the special faculty which is its living rule.” When she reads this she can hardly fail to connect it with the notoriously Aristotelian tenet that the spoudaios (or person of sound disposition and outlook) is not such because he keeps the moral rules, but rather that the rules are such because they are implied in the pattern of living of the spoudaios; or, more precisely, with the view that virtue is “to be determined by a rational rule and by that rule by which the phronimos would determine it”²⁴—a rule (logos) which, when Aristotle comes to analyze it in book 6, turns out to be no rule at all but rather a capacity for insight and judgment which is inseparable from the character of the phronimos himself.

Or again, when she reads in Newman: “As to logic, its chain of conclusions hangs loose at both ends; both the point from which the proof should start, and the point at which it should arrive, are beyond its reach; it comes short both of first principles and of concrete issues … even its most careful combinations made to bear on a conclusion want that steadiness of aim which is necessary for hitting it,”²⁵ she must think of the equivalent point which Aristotle makes in book 6 of the Ethics when he points out a twofold need for intuitive mind (nous) in order to make up for a double deficiency in syllogistic or deductive reasoning: “Nous is concerned with the ultimates in both directions; for both the primary propositions and the ultimates are objects of nous and not of argument, and in demonstrations nous grasps the unchangeable and primary definitions, while in practical reasonings it grasps the last and contingent fact…. [Hence nous is both beginning and end; for demonstrations are from these and about these.]”²⁶ And she will notice too that Newman’s metaphor of the archer (far too unreliable a model for a modern rationalist) is the same one that Aristotle uses quite unselfconsciously at the beginning of his discussion of phronesis in book 6: “in all the states of character we have mentioned, as in all other matters, there exists some mark, as it were, to be hit, upon which the man who has the rule keeps his eyes, and bends his bow more or less strongly accordingly…”²⁷

As a further example of the deep affinity between the Grammar and the Ethics we may take the way in which in both of them a view fundamentally at odds with modern rationalism is proposed, namely, that in human affairs a merely calculative intelligence is no more capable of truth than it is of goodness—or, rather, that without goodness even the most subtle intelligence will find truth...