Delphic Maxim 17: Exercise prudence

I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.

17. Exercise prudence

Often when scholars write about Aristotle, they reference a kind of triad of capabilities: episteme, techne and phronesis. I want to locate prudence within the third of these, but first I think it’s important to explain a bit about each.

In really basic terms, episteme refers to what you might call ‘book smarts’ — it’s about scientific knowledge of the world, or your theoretical understanding of how things are, exist and come to be. The word ‘epistemology’ — the study of how we can know what we know — derives from episteme.

Techne refers to ‘technical’ knowledge, or what you might think of as art and craftsmanship. If you think of the engineering knowledge someone has of a car (how it runs, why combustion drives engines forward, etc) as episteme, then techne is the kind of knowledge a mechanic has (how to fix the motor, or even how to build it from scratch).

Finally, we have phronesis, and we don’t necessarily have a really obvious parallel word in contemporary english for this quality. Most often it is translated as ‘practical wisdom’. You might think of it as ‘street smarts’, but without the ‘street’ connotations. Phronesis is the kind of expert wisdom that someone gets with experience, it’s the ability to think naturally, even unconsciously, about a situation and just feel what is the right thing to do.

In life, I like to think that we all strive towards phronesis. It’s domain-dependent, by the way, which means that you can achieve phronesis in your career (you could be a ‘natural’ at your job by picking up the tacit rules and workflows that make it easy to do), or you might have a phronetic ability to network and relate to other people (you display phronesis in a social domain). Basically it’s about having what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called ‘a feel for the rules of the game’ (though Bourdieu didn’t use the word phronesis as much as he could have — he was too busy stealing other words from Aristotle).

Do you get the sense where I am going with this? I think that prudence is a necessary quality in achieving phronesis. Prudence isn’t just about exercising caution, though that’s the most commonly associated meaning. ‘Caution’ can become overcautious, which conflicts with the Aristotelian virtue of courage. But prudence is about a sensible degree of caution. In fact, it’s about being sensible in general. Someone who has practical wisdom in a situation knows when it is wise to act, and when it might be more appropriate to wait, or to exercise restraint. This isn’t overly cautious; a prudent approach is about showing just the right amount of caution.

But it’s also about just making good decisions. Sometimes taking a slightly less risky decision is appropriate — perhaps because we don’t have all of the information that we need (and perhaps because this incomplete information means that we can’t yet know our opportunity). It might also involve a sense of probability — estimating the likelihood of a particular outcome and adapting accordingly. Being prepared is a sign of prudence. If there isn’t much extra cost to having a Plan B, or if you take precautions against something failing, someone being late, or some key dependency letting you down, you are being prudent. Prudence, then, is a sensible way to carry yourself from situation to situation — not one that puts a brake on joy, but rather ensures that you are living a good life that isn’t likely to be disrupted.

For me at least, the exercise of prudence is a fundamental necessity for achieving practical wisdom. Without building up a huge amount of practical experience, it’s not possible to achieve phronesis, and without prudence it’s very difficult to build up that practical experience. So be careful, prudent and wise!