Practical Logos in Aristotle’s Ethics, Rhetoric and Politics

In Aristotle’s Rhetoric, logos is given a very specific, though central role as one of three key constituents in the art of persuasion (Rhet. I.2 1356a 1-20).[1] To persuade others requires that speakers not only possess excellent reasoning skills (logos), but also be of good character (ethos), and be able to move, inspire or evoke in us feelings of compassion, righteous anger or indignation, sorrow or solidarity (pathos).[2]  

There is a very good reason why Aristotle decided to enlarge the art of persuasive speech to include both ethical and emotional dimensions. In the practical public realm of ethical-political decision-making and persuasive speech, opinions proliferate and circumstances change, but things nevertheless need to get done. To get things done, the complex, obscure and abstract must be rendered straightforward, accessible and concrete. Long chains of intricate argument will not be very helpful here. To be sure, reasoned speech (logos) is central to rhetoric. But civic audiences must also “feel” that what is being proposed is “the right thing” to do. In political rhetoric, ethos and pathos are guided by logos but have a role that is at least as important as logos since the end or telos of rhetoric is judgement (krisis) and the latter is not wholly oriented by the strict logic of argument but also by ethical evaluation and emotion.

Speakers persuade audiences when the latter are able to acknowledge the reasonableness of a given course of action (logos), in light of shared ethical-political ends (ethos) in a way that “feels” right (pathos). The best speakers are those who over time have gained practical wisdom (phronēsis) and insight (nous) into the workings of the polis and the human peri psyches or soul. Thus if ‘logos’ is the word for the animal that reasons, phronesis is the word that captures how logos takes shape in the world of ethical, rhetorical and political affairs, where ethical deliberation and persuasion are vital to realizing the good. Here we speak of the rhetorician as phronimos, or the rhētōr as a person who embodies (logos) practical wisdom in all that they do. It is the intellectual virtue of phronēsis that orients logos as ‘right logos’ in the practical and speaking realms of ethics, politics and rhetoric. Thus, logos as phronesis situates ethical and political judgement within the realm of praxis and embodied human learning and experience—‘back to the rough ground’ of lived experience, as Joseph Dunne has aptly described it.[3]

            In bringing the cognitive, evaluative and affective dimensions together in rhetoric Aristotle is telling us not just that there are emotional and reasoning elements in deliberation and persuasion, or that a robust concept of human rationality must not exclude the emotions. In both the excellent rhetor and the virtuous individual emotion and reason work together. In this sense, as Eve Rabinoff persuasively argues “desires and emotions are rational in the sense that they are implicitly mediated by reason.”[4]  More importantly, Aristotle’s rhetoric presupposes a radical reimagining of the human psyche such that the emotions are seen as fundamentally suffused with reason, and logos as reasoned speech is complemented rather than undermined by pathos. Indeed, it could be claimed that Aristotle’s effort to bring together the thinking, feeling and normative judgment under the roof of a more philosophically oriented rhetoric was his way of preventing the latter from too easily devolving into sophistry. To be sure, in ethics, politics and rhetoric complete certainty is never possible. We can misperceive the world, make erroneous or bad judgments, allow our emotions to get the better of us. But it is precisely because of these epistemic limits, normative failings and affective excesses that rhetoric must assiduously guard against the specious arguments of the sophist. The rhētōr as phronimos is able to do this because he has a solid moral character—that is, he acts, feels, and speaks as the ‘right logos’ commands and has gathered through long experience the capacity to deftly mediate excesses and deficiencies, discovering the appropriate “mean” in any particular circumstance.  Moreover, if he is to move an audience, or put it in a proper emotional frame of mind, the speaker with good character must know the “means by which the several emotions may be produced or dissipated, and upon which depend the persuasive arguments connected with the emotions” (Rhet. II.11 1388b29-31). He must also be seen as someone who entertains “the right feelings toward his listeners and also that his hearers themselves should be in just the right frame of mind” (Rhet. II.1 1377b25-27).

            All of this is to say that the logos of rhetoric is for Aristotle a situated, civic, participative and practical logosoriented toward action that is realized through the virtue of phronēsis. In this sense rhetoric can be considered to be the bridge between ethics and politics. To put this in another way, logos as reasoned speech is not only complemented by ethos and pathos, but each of these elements of rhetoric subtly orients the others. They belong together in a human world where decisions need to be made and things need to get done for the good of each and all. Logos would be merely procedural and devoid of content without ethos; it would be indifferent without pathos. Ethos would be erratic without logos and unfeeling without pathos. Pathos would be aimless without ethos and potentially warp judgment without logos. It is these uniquely practical limits as well as ethical and political concerns that persuaded Aristotle of the need to broaden the meaning and application of rhetoric beyond mere ornamental speech. This is achieved through the subtle interplay of logos, pathos and ethos in persuasive speech. But importantly it is an interplay that is carried through by way of phronēsis and nous.

            In the following, I will argue two related theses. First, I will claim that precisely because we inhabit a practical world of words and deeds, of emotions, evaluations and reasoning, of probability, particularity and human finitude, logos will be enacted with and through others, but it will be practically realized through the intellectual virtue of phronēsis and what Aristotle describes as “insight” or nous. Phronēsis, or “practical wisdom” is not something that unfolds in a private or “subjective” realm. Rather, it is a kind of wisdom that involves acute discernment, and can only be acquired over time in the activity of doing and being with others. Phronēsis and nous are the means through which logos becomes practical logos inextricably tied to ethical choice and insight regarding individual and collective goods. Secondly, I will claim that by extending the application of phronēsis elaborated by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethicsbeyond this latter work to his discussion of rhetoric and politics, we can begin to grasp how it is that logos, ethos and pathos work together in a world where situated and participative reasoning, speaking, and listening is paramount. In ethical discernment, rhetorical persuasion and political deliberation practical logos does not emerge as abstract reasoning that yields certain truth. Rather, it inhabits a world where reasoning and insight occur at the level of the concrete and the particular, yielding probabilities rather than certain truths. As such practical logos is implicated in the everyday doing of things—where logoi kai erga (words and deeds) “work” together and where the evaluative, cognitive and affective dimensions of rhetoric, ethics and politics are inseparable. It is precisely because we inhabit this practical world of words and deeds, of emotions, evaluations and reasoning, of probability, particularity and human finitude, that practical logos is enacted with and through others, but practically realized through phronēsis and nous.

I. Phronēsis and Nous in Aristotelian Virtue Ethics

Both rhetorical and ethical deliberation concern particulars. Thus, the intellectual phronēsis is perfectly suited to the latter since it is both reasoning with regard to particulars or situated contexts, and a developing capacity to properly determine what the good is for the individual and the polis. As a reasoning capacity it is widened and deepened through human experience. More importantly, it is not merely our reasoning faculty that is engaged here but our entire psyche or “soul”—including our memories, emotions and insights. What this means is that in the exercise of phronēsis we are not merely cultivating our reasoning capacity, but schooling the desires and emotions that will help us realize the ends which we determine as good. Neither reason nor desire alone will be able realize the genuine good. Accordingly, when Aristotle tells us that the “intellect itself moves nothing” (EN VI.2 1139a35) but instead that appetite “originates movement” (DA III.10 433a32-433b1) and that it is in virtue of “imagination that appetite is capable of self-movement” (DA III.10 433b27-30) he is not just saying that practical reasoning (orthos logos) and right desire (orthē orexis) must work together to achieve the good, but that at a fundamental embodied level human, choices presuppose that desires can be understood as thoughtful, and reasoned thinking can be animated by emotions—or to use Aristotelian terms choice involves desiderative reason and ratiocinative desire. (EN VI.2 1139b4)

            Ethical reasoning involves both choice and sound deliberation. Thus, desiderative reason and ratiocinative desire presuppose that our reasoning can help us choose “that which is intermediate, not the excess nor the defect” (EN VI.1 1138b15).  Our reasoning must be true and our desire right in each particular occasion where deliberation is called for. How do we know when we have hit the mark? When Aristotle tells us that virtue is “a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean, i.e. relative to us, this being determined by a rational principle, and by that principle by which the man of practical wisdom would determine it” (EN II.6 1106b36-1107a3) we may still wonder what precisely is the rational principle or standard of judgment that helps our reasoning move toward the truth in practical affairs that is also in accord with right desire. It will not be an abstract or a priori principle.  Nor will it be one that can be taught in any conventional formulaic way. What Aristotle has in mind is not theoretical knowledge but practical wisdom. Here we are brought to one of key sections of the Nicomachean Ethics: Book VI. 

            In Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle tells us that we arrive at the theoretical, philosophical or practical truth of things in five distinct ways that realize different levels of certainty: epistēmē  knowledge that seeks the necessary and invariable truth of things (EN VI.2 1139b15-35); sophia or philosophical wisdom (EN VI.7 1141a10-20); nous or intuitive knowledge or insight, which takes two distinct forms depending upon whether it is paired with scientific or with practical knowing. Nous, is situated in the realm of “that which cannot be otherwise,” that is, in the eternal, divine or unchanging world presupposed by science and philosophy, and in the realm of “that which can beotherwise,” the practical world of ethics. Nous plays an epistemological role in the acquisition of theoretical and practical wisdom, but it is not a “reasoning” or calculative mode of knowing; technē or making that includes, but is not limited to, craftsmanship or skill in fine art. Like phronēsis, technē involves reasoning in the context of the variable (EN VI.4 1140a5-20); phronēsis, or “a reasoned and true state of capacity to act with regard to human goods” (EN VI.5 1140a25-1140b30).  Phronēsis is practical reasoning in the context of the changing or variable, dealing with reasoned “doing” rather than reasoned “making.” 

            In rhetoric, in ethics and in politics it is not technē, sophia or epistemē that is central, but phronēsis and practical insight (nous). It is phronēsis that reorients and disciplines rhetoric as a civic, ethical, deliberative undertaking as distinct from a technē. We can begin by taking note of four key aspects of phronēsis and elaborating these latter within the context of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. The first thing to notice about phronēsis is that it is an intellectual virtue that helps us determine the best means to achieve a given end. Secondly, because it is reasoning that is ongoing and related to everyday practice, phronēsis is the intellectual means through which we may cultivate a virtuous character by instructing us in how to deliberate and choose well in situ. Choosing well presupposes both that our reasoning is true, and that our desire is right (EN VI.2 1139a20-25). Thirdly, phronēsis is an intellectual virtue that belongs to us as individual thinking-desiring beings, but also as beings whose self-understanding is intimately tied to practical relations with others. In other words, it is not the sort of theoretical reasoning that helps us determine universal or unchanging moral commands, or subsume particulars under universals, but reasoning about how best to realize character virtues of justice, courage, moderation in this or that particular situation or context, so that we might live well with others in a shared community or polity. We become accomplished at this sort of reasoning in situ not by abstracting from but by closely attending to the particular situation, and also to each other. Indeed, according to Aristotle, we only become capable of embodying the intellectual virtue of phronēsis by observing others who do it well—by attending closely to those who embody practical wisdom in all their determinations (EN VI.5 1140a24-25). Not only do we grasp what phronēsis is by observing it in others, we realize the arête or excellence of phronēsis in the political and ethical realm only in concert with others who, alongside us, deliberate regarding “the good life in general” (EN VI.5 1140b25-30). Fourthly, we do not excel at phronēsis by rote memorization of formulae, or by slavishly or literally adhering to laws or commandments. Rather, we excel at phronēsis when we demonstrate that we can, at once, insightfully and reasonably grasp what the particular situation is calling upon us to do or say in light of past determinations and perspectives, the particularities of the present contingent situation, and future considerations of how best to realize well-being (eudaimonia) in ourselves and in our polity. We can sum these four aspects of phronēsis up by saying that the latter is practical reasoning about the best means to secure given ends that, at the same time, solidifies good character and virtuous relations with others within a past, present and future self-understanding. However, we cannot fail to also remember the pivotal relation that phronēsis or practical reasoning has to desire or what Aristotle describes in the Rhetoric as pathos or emotions.

            What phronēsis entails is that we are not merely thinking or rational beings, but also feeling, expressing, acting, embodied beings, and that all of these latter elements can be understood together as exemplifying our distinctive logos-comportment. Thus, we do not cultivate merely the reasoning capacity that helps us realize practical truth; we also cultivate the accompanying right desire to follow in the path of such a course of truth. This relation of co-determination between desiring and reasoning gives us a clue to why Aristotle believes that unlike other sorts of reasoning states (for example technê) phronēsis is reasoned knowing that cannot be forgotten. To forget phronēsis would be, in a crucial way, to forget or lose oneself. This is because phronēsis is the embodied bringing together of our individual experience of “being” “acting” “reasoning” and “desiring”: that is, it implicitly recognizes that “who we are” is related to what we do and how we reason and deliberate, and conversely, “what we do” establishes “who we have been”, “who we are” and “who we want to be”. To put this in more familiar modern terms, to cultivate the virtue of phronēsis is to embody a certain temporalizing self-understanding—a way of being, or, if you will, a way of seeing our experiences, desires and actions as part of a distinctive and intelligible temporal whole. 

            Aristotle argues that moral virtues such as, temperance, civility, justice, courage, and sincerity are not anything we have innately “by nature”, even though “nature” in some sense (that is, our reasoning and linguistic capacity) makes it possible for us to receive them. However, when he states that “it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man; without doing these no one would have even a prospect of becoming good” (EN II.4 1105b9-12), he is not assuming that becoming virtuous is a question of unthinking repetition. In each new situation we are called upon to thoughtfully deliberate and adjust our emotional judgment, heighten or relax our activity according to the mean relative to us in this or that particular case. Aristotle’s intuition here is that the sort of in situ reasoning that phronēsis embodies allows us to meet the challenge of contingency and particularity by occasionally interrupting routine or habitual thinking. Phronēsis is activated when we are confronted by the unique situation before us, and it helps us get things right because we cannot always rely on conventional habits of thinking and doing. Sometimes we must innovate. But, importantly, our innovations presuppose a certain background of commonly held general rules, conventions or assumptions that were themselves arrived at through the particularity of many experiences over time. Phronēsis is thus a kind of practical reasoning that enables us to take these background assumptions, traditions or rules and test their intelligibility and applicability against the in situ contexts that arise in a variety of different experiences. Thus, Aristotle relates that “wisdom is concerned not only with universals but with particulars, which become familiar from experience” (EN VI.8 1142a13-15).  Each new experience broadens and deepens our perspective and our capacity to meet the new and unforeseen with equanimity.

            Over the course of time we become capable of responding in the right way at the right time according to the right desire. We are thus continuously refining our ability to reason well, while at the same time forming and cultivating those desires or emotions that will stand us in good stead each time we are confronted by a new situation. We are not only thinking about doing the right thing, at the right time, in the right way; in so doing, we are implicitly reinforcing a desire to follow this reasoning course, thereby deepening our capacity to resist the desire to act in a thoughtless or unreflective manner.

            Again, it is important to remember that this reflective and reflexive capacity does not unfold at the theoretical or philosophical-contemplative level. Rather it is activity-oriented thinking, that is, the logos of phronēsis is its embodiment as praxis. Aristotle reminds us that the goal of his inquiry into ethics is not to “know” definitively what virtue is, but “to become good” (EN II.2 1103b28-30). The problem then (and, arguably, still today) is that instead of grasping the centrality of praxis, philosophers typically “take refuge in theory and think they are being philosophers and will become good in this way, behaving somewhat like patients who listen attentively to their doctors, but do none of the things they are ordered to do. As the latter will not be made well in body by such a course of treatment, the former will not be made well in soul by such a course of philosophy” (EN II.4 1105b13-19).

            Thus, it is not established theory that guides us in ethics, but rather the activity of reflection and emotional judgment here and now in this situation. We become adept at such thinking and judging when we attend closely to how others who have practical wisdom—who have achieved a certain excellence of practical logos in phronēsis —consistently “do the right thing”. Bearing witness to the wisdom of others can take a number of forms: observing or interacting with them while in the activity of doing something, listening to elders or teachers, grappling with authoritative texts and so on. Aristotle’s insight here is simple. When we are young we do not really understand the full spectrum of reasons regarding why we should do certain things or why we must “choose” a certain course of action.[5]The pedagogical notion presupposed in phronēsis is simply that as we mature and experience a world with and among those who have already in some measure embodied practical wisdom, and as we ourselves thoughtfully respond to different situations, our practical logos is enriched and deepened.[6]  Two things are happening here: we are becoming better at reasonably grasping what is at stake in any particular context and we are schooling our desires in such a way that they tend us toward and not away from the good. How does phronēsis relate to the virtues of character?

            With respect to virtue Aristotle tells us that in every particular situation there is a “mark” that those who embody the arête of the logos of phronēsis will unfailingly aim for—a mark that instructs them when to “heighten or relax” their response accordingly (EN VI.1 1138b20-25). This mark is a “mean” between excess and deficiency relative to the given situation we find ourselves in, which could be anything from a battlefield, an occupational context, a law court or a political assembly. To say that we enact phronēsis in any of these situations is to say that the “mean” we discern is a mean determined by a logos (a reasoning expressed in words) that not only “hits the mark”, but hits it in a way that would be immediately and obviously “right” to any practically wise and insightful person (EN II.6 1106b36-1107a5).

            It is crucial to see here that determining an intermediate point between a vice of deficiency and a vice of excess is not a calculative exercise. It is not as if we were mathematically plotting a definitive course on a coordinate graph. Nor does it involve “splitting the difference” between two extremes or vices in order to determine a “middle ground”. Rather, phronēsis is activated by each particular and concrete situation. Each situation calls upon us to exercise phronetic reasoning in order to determine a mean that is relative to us—it must be relative to us not in the sense that we are some “abstract individual” but relative to the situation we find ourselves in. The mean is not, therefore, something arithmetically equidistant between two points that is unchanging. It must be an intermediate that is characterized by fluidity or elasticity since human experience is marked by difference, alteration and diversification. Ethical decision-making is decision-making that must take account of the fact that things could be otherwise, and that we might often find ourselves in differing situations and contexts that presuppose distinct possibilities and limits. If we have properly informed our practical logos through the exercise of the intellectual virtue of phronēsis, we will be able to locate where the intermediate is in each different situation, and thereby grasp how to respond with equanimity, or how to determine the best means of persuasion, or how to realize the over-all well-being of the polis. However, discovering the mean relative to the situation we find ourselves in is not something we accomplish in a vacuum. Rather, it is something that occurs to us in the midst of a situation and in relation to others. It is in these situations with others that we are called upon to reflect, interpret, modify and judge what we deem as the best course of action—or again as a rhetor, what needs to be said at this particular moment in time.

            Put another way, to determine the mean “relative to us” could never be to say that we, as autonomous agents, are the sole measure of truth or good. It is true that each of us has a slightly different capacity for practical reasoning because each of us will have experienced life differently through a broad range of activities. For example, if I am an experienced parent, teacher, speech-writer or janitor, the determination of a mean—not going too far one way, or falling too short in another—will be less difficult for me to determine than it would be if I were very new at parenting or speech-writing. Indeed, as a novice, I will precisely lack phronēsis. I will be much more susceptible to being rash, incontinent, inarticulate, fearful or indecisive. On this interpretation “relative to us” does not mean relative to me in the sense of “subject to my whim”, but relative to me in the sense of being defined in reference to the particularities of the situation itself and my own depth of experience. It does not mean that ‘I can do whatever I want’, but exactly the opposite—that I am enjoined to do what is appropriate and correct in the situation that calls for me to decide. What is appropriate and correct in the situation will be discovered through virtues that are oriented by eudaimonia (well-being or flourishing) not merely as individual, but finally, as a member of the polis or community. We do not, therefore, reflect and act as if we were wholly egocentric or autonomous individuals, detached from the world. Rather, we act “as if” we embodied the practical logos of the phronimos—a practical logos that presupposes that evaluative (ethos), affective (pathos) and cognitive elements (logos) work together in each particular situation, and a practical logos that is shaped, cultivated and deepened only with, through and among others.

            Not only is phronēsis enabled through our being-with others, it is complemented by insight or nous. If phronēsishelps the phronimos reasonably determine the best means to realize a given end, it is insight that suggests which ends might better enable us to realize our individual and collective well-being (eudaimonia). In a manner of speaking nous is the active intuitive and intellective capacity—the “light” —that makes ends visible to us. In Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle tells us that nous or intuitive reason is what “grasps first principles” (EN VI.6 1141a7). In the Posterior Analytics he relates that “we suppose ourselves to possess unqualified scientific knowledge of a thing, as opposed to knowing it in the accidental way…when we think that we know the cause on which the fact depends, as the cause of that fact and of no other, and, further, that the fact could not be other than it is.” (An Post I.2 71b8-12). Therefore, in the theoretical realm nous is indispensable insofar as it apprehends fundamental truths or principles—an apprehension that occurs not by way of demonstrative reasoning or inference, but through insight. Insight is a grasping power that operates independently of sense perception, though it is connected to the latter. Aristotle tells us that “it is clear that we must get to know the primary premises by induction” (An Post II.19 100b3-5), but “it will be intuition (nous) that apprehends the primary premises” (An Post II.19 100b13) (emphasis added). Apprehension here is not arrived at through deduction or even sense perception. Rather it is a sudden “intelligent grasp of things”.[7] To put this in more modern phenomenological terms, induction is the content-oriented noematic “gathering together” of many instances, and nous is the intelligent or noetic “grasping together” of these latter. Interestingly, Aristotle thinks that our capacity to suddenly apprehend first principles is the defining mark of our particularly “human” logos—a logosunderstood not just as “theoretically” but also practically oriented (EN VI.11 1143a35-1143b5). The question is then how nous is configured within the realm of practical concerns—how does it work with phronēsis?

            As mentioned earlier, on a conventional interpretation it would seem that phronēsis is really only concerned with reasoning about means, not ends—ends which presuppose that the telos (purpose) of ethical, political and rhetorical thinking is, in fact, to aim towards living well overall—i.e. with and among others. However, it is clear that phronēsis is not meant to operate entirely in isolation from other modes of practical reasoning. A more nuanced approach would grasp phronēsis as reasoning towards ends in conjunction with nous or insight. Nous is distinct from, yet a necessary counterpart to, phronēsis. (EN VI.11 1143a-1143b) The power of moral insight or nous is not occult or paranormal, but unfolds within the medium of our experiences. Thus, as we are exposed to the different situations and possibilities which living amongst each other provides, nous is that sort of noetic act of perception that can help us immediately and intuitively grasp what the most basic “first practical principles” must be in order for us to realize the virtues of character and the good of the polity. Just as nous and epistēmē yield theoretical wisdom, nous and phronēsis give us practical wisdom. Nous is the immediate grasp of that which is individually and collectively of ultimate concern to us. It is the grasp of, and the desire for, the particular end as well as a concomitant desire to integrate that end into our character in order to realize eudaimonia or well-being as a whole. Therefore, nous operates in two directions: it gives us insight into the general or ultimate good, and insight into how the specific situation we are confronted by relates to that general good. Aristotle affirms that not only must the man of practical wisdom know particular facts, but understanding and judgment are also concerned with things to be done, and these are ultimates. And intuitive reason (nous) is concerned with the ultimates in both directions…intuitive reason which is presupposed by demonstrations grasps the unchangeable and first terms, while the intuitive reason involved in practical reasons grasps the last and variable fact, i.e. the minor premises. For the variable facts are the starting points for the apprehension of the end, since the universals are reached from particulars; of these, therefore, we must have perception, and this perception is intuitive reason. (EN VI.11 1143a33-1143b7)

            Why is all of this important in the context of phronēsis? The limitation of phronēsis would appear to be that it must be confined to deliberation about means.[8] Phronēsis does not contemplate ends because the activity of phronēsis is its own end. In other words, the “end” of phronēsis is realized in the very doing of it—not the imagining of a good as something outside of it. Phronēsis does not give us the reasons why we should be virtuous or why we should work towards realizing one sort of state rather than another. The question then is: “How do “ends” make themselves known to us” if not through reasoned determinations? The fact is that they do make themselves known both before and after nous or insight has unveiled what the good is.

            Firstly, we know that the ends we arrive at must be grounded in our experience of the world. What nous provides for us is precisely this grasping power or insight that issues from such experience, and is thereafter articulated through the arête of practical logos as phronēsis —that is, our many engagements and experiences with and among others are intuitively grasped under principles and ends; through individual and collective deliberation we determine how these principles and ends can be realized in the practical contexts of action.  If, as Aristotle claims, what uniquely defines us as “human” is a capacity to reason in various ways with regard to various ends, then our ultimate telos, from an ethical perspective, is to strive through our practical thinking activity to continuously extend and elaborate such a reasoning capacity in as many different spheres as possible.   

            Beyond the determination of ends, there is another important reason to pair nous with phronēsis. It is evident that practical wisdom as a whole would be rather limited if it were to reside only in the rational determination of where an intermediate is located relative to the situation we find ourselves in. In other words, it is often the case that the wisest among us are wise precisely because they have that sort of insight which is not an exclusive matter of rational calculation or cleverness. Indeed, their wisdom often lies outside of conventional logical thinking. The wise person often surprises us because her thinking abruptly interrupts our reasoned opinions, inductions and conventional perspectives. Her insights can, in fact, turn our truisms upside down, forcing us to suddenly see the world, or the matter at hand, very differently. Anyone who has observed this kind of practical insight in someone will know precisely how arresting it can be. It is not that the practically wise person is irrational or injudicious, but that she perceives a truth that we can easily miss, often because we fail to attend carefully to all of the particularities of a situation, or fail to grasp the good towards which we must strive towards.  

            What enables nous, what allows it to get to the heart of the matter and suddenly “see” things, is clearly a certain range and depth of experience. However, nous is enabled also by an acute quality of mind and depth of character that has been instructed through phronēsis. It is evident here that once we grasp the wisdom that nous suddenly arrives at, we can then immediately step back and grasp why this must be so at a more conventional rational level. In this sense the arête of logos actualized in phronēsis both precedes (through experience) and follows (by way of reason) our insightful grasp of things. In a parallel way, to follow Aristotle’s original thinking, nous or insight grasps both the general or ultimate good and the good that a specific situation points to or must be grasped within.

            What is interesting and rather paradoxical is that the phronimos (i.e. the person that quintessentially embodies phronēsis) is considered wise not just because her logos is an achievement of excellence through practical reasoning, but also because her reasoning acumen has uniquely combined with her years of experience in a way that yields perceptive insights that often run against the grain of rationally-arrived-at rules and conventions. The wisdom of the phronimos relies upon the day-to-day experience of reasoned deliberations and determinations where a relative “mean” might be discovered in each particular situation. The contingency and particularity of these experiences are, if you will, the conditions of its possibility. However, because her exemplary orthos logos realizes phronēsis and nous together in a way that allows thinking to reach beyond the limitations implied by reason alone, she can think new possibilities of meaning and understanding—she can, to use a modern expression, creatively think “outside of the box”. This is why it is a mistake to believe that nous and phronēsis operate independently of each other, or that the arête of our practical logos lies exclusively with reasoning instructed by phronēsis in the absence of nous.

            Described in a modern idiom, phronēsis assumes that the world of ethical and political decision-making is characterized both by tradition, or what has been, and by otherness or by “that which could be other than it is”. It is precisely this effort continuously to mediate difference and sameness, familiarity and strangeness, particularity and generality, that characterizes the hermeneutic depth of activity that phronetic reasoning encompasses. Thus, as practical wisdom is gradually embodied over time, we find ourselves occasionally running slightly against the grain of a formerly learned habit of thinking or saying. We encounter difference or ambiguity, and we experience various insights about the present and future ramifications of our decisions and deliberations. It is not then merely the linear accumulation or aggregation of decisions that defines phronēsis, but an ever-widening and deepening capacity to grasp different possibilities and situations by thinking laterally, or sometimes against a convention or rule. It is the sort of built-in elasticity or flexibility which inheres in practical reasoning as phronēsis and noetic nous that make the latter indispensable for understanding how we can adopt and cultivate a critically-oriented awareness that is not confined merely to ethical discernment, but also informs the rhetorical and political fields of human practical activity.

II. Phronēsis and Nous in Rhetoric and Politics

            I have described how practical logos realizes excellence by way of the intellectual virtue of phronēsis along with nous or insight in our ethical orientations. In Aristotelian ethics the character virtues such as courage, temperance, justice and the like, are brought together with the intellectual virtue of phronēsis and insight or nous. We have now reached a point where it is possible to see how phronēsis and nous are indispensable in the practical activities of speaking, listening and legislating—or simply put, in both rhetoric and politics. This is important not only for understanding how these three subjects form a unified practical perspective in Aristotle, but it also can shed light on our present day understanding of the relation between rhetoric, ethics and politics.

            It is clear that Aristotle is most interested in deliberative or politically-oriented rhetoric because it is here where much is at stake for individuals and the polis. It is also at the political level where rhetoric either becomes associated with truth or devolves into the sort of sophistry that condemned Socrates to death (and later threatened Aristotle with a similar fate). Political discourse and public reasoning would have been just as essential for democracy in Athens as they are in the modern state. This is not merely because rhetoric enables debate about the common good, but because in doing so it provides a public space for the proliferation of different opinions as well as the articulation of something true. It is the rhētōr as phronimos who knows this. She not only includes and invites listeners into a kind of conversation, she also asks them to participate in acknowledging the truth of what is being said.

            To make such a truth claim it is not only necessary that a rhētōr reason well, but that he have practical insight into what is important for the future of the polis. This assumes that deliberative rhetoric should not be merely a matter of technē, but fundamentally oriented by the virtues of character and phronēsis.[9] To be sure, when the rhētōr puts forward a persuasive argument she is in an important sense “making” or “producing” something, as any craftsman would. This qualifies rhetoric as, in some measure, a question of what was earlier described as technē. However, it is also clear that rhetoric is “making” as an “art”, which means that it is “making” that follows a true course of reasoning (Rhet. I.2 1355b26-27). Insofar as this is the case, rhetoric will always involve making wise determinations about where the intermediate between excess and defect should be located. This presupposes that rhetoric will involve phronēsis —an intellectual virtue associated with character virtue. However, it will also involve nous. Since the rhētōr is publicly situated she must not only be adept at determining the best means (phronēsis), but the best ends: ends that realize the flourishing of the polity as a whole (eudaimonia) and ends that are intuitively arrived at through nous or insight. She must observe and draw upon “the available means of persuasion” to produce good arguments, and she must also determine within a particular situated context, what will count as good reasons that support her conclusions. In so doing, the rhētōr as phronimos expresses, creatively, through argument, not only appropriate logical reasoning, but practical reasoning in the form of deliberation. Moreover, she also says something about who she is—what her character (ethos) is—as well as demonstrating a practical knowledge of the varieties of human experience and desire. It is this combination of practical reasoning acuity (logos), sympathetic understanding (pathos) and good character (ethos) which, for Aristotle, allows an audience to differentiate the rhētōr as phronimos from the rhētōr as sophist.

            It is the relation that rhetoric has to phronēsis and nous that should then signal to us that “observing the available means of persuasion” is an invitation to look at the many-sidedness of persuasive speech, not a casuistic conclusion that “anything goes”. Rhetoric is not sophistry. As a practical desire to persuade along ethically-oriented truthful lines Aristotle unhesitatingly declares that “what makes a man a sophist is not his faculty but his moral purpose” (Rhet. I.1 1355b17-18). He not only reminds us repeatedly that rhetoric is useful, but crucially that using it rightly or speaking well confers “the greatest benefits whereas wrongful use inflicts the greatest of injuries” (Rhet. I.1 1355b6-8). Aristotle, student of Plato, would have recognized more than anyone that rhetoric has the power not only to persuade persons of the good, but also the power to destroy those who embody virtues of character and intellect. The rhētōr does not only go wrong when he makes logical errors; he goes wrong when he hubristically turns rhetoric into a tool of power over others. For Aristotle, it is clear that such a debasement of rhetoric obstructs our most basic natural desire to realize human flourishing (eudaimonia) by upholding what is true and just (Rhet. I.1 1355a20-23). One cannot read the latter passage without hearing echoes of the voices of Socrates and his accuser Meletus in Plato’s Apology.[10]Indeed, it is precisely the lack of good character that shows through in Meletus’s rhetoric. It is this lack of good character that insures Meletus will not be able to speak the truth either persuasively or wisely.

            What does good character (ethos) amount to with respect to rhetoric? For Aristotle, as we have already noted, the development of good character through virtue is a way of saying that we become what we do—our actions make possible a certain sort of character and a certain quality of thinking and feeling. Good character is not something we develop wholly on our own—it is also cultivated through the right polity that has a just “constitution”. Hence, it is no surprise that Aristotle would assert that “legislators can make citizens good by forming habits in them” (EN II.1 1103b3-5).[11] But we can also emphasize that for Aristotle speaking is a human activity enacted with and among others. It is speech that contributes to the formation of character over time. Not only must the rhētōr exhibit virtuous character and wisdom in her speech (and thereby prove an exemplar of good judgement and deliberative excellence), she must also, in the course of interchange with citizens of the polis, fortify the goodness of her and their characters.

            We can conclude that the cognitive, emotional and deliberative capacities that Aristotelian rhetoric presupposes under the definition of rhetoric as a “faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion” point to phronēsis as central. Rhetorical speech is well-reasoned speech when speakers embody the virtue of phronēsis and eudaimonia or concern for human flourishing. Phronēsis enables the individual moral agent to deliberate well; it enjoins the rhetorician to balance reason and passion, intellect and desire, in his search for the best possible means of persuasion. It gives a space of possibility for the citizen and legislator to enjoy the “greatest degree of happiness, and acquire fullest measure of virtue.” When rhetoric is seen through the lens of phronēsis and the constituents of practical wisdom, it becomes less obviously reducible to merely a technique or technē, and becomes, instead, a practical-reflective, ethically and politically oriented enterprise.

            What of politics? Politics, like rhetoric, was considered by Aristotle to be both a practical “activity” and a kind of “making”. The activity of rhetoric within politics is persuasion, and persuasion, in part, involves producing convincing argument. Similarly, politics involves the practical activity and creative making of laws and constitutions that will help us to live a good life. The end or goal of both disciplines is not a matter of securing self-aggrandizing power, but one of advancing the good of the individual and the good of the state. The opening words of Aristotle’s treatise on Politics make this quite clear:

Every state is a community of some kind, and every community is established with a view to some good; for mankind always act in order to obtain that which they think good. But, if all communities aim at some good, the state or political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest good. (Pol. I.1 1252a1-5)

Aristotle’s Politics should not then be considered as merely a description of different sorts of government. It is, in fact, a normative account of what Aristotle believes would comprise the best sort of city-state—a state that is a community of free persons (Pol. III.6 1279a22) that comes into being not merely to meet the exigencies of bare existence but for the sake of “a good life” (Pol. I.2 1252b27-30). It is, in other words, a good political state is a state that is concerned witharête—with the virtues:

If what was said in the Ethics is true, that the happy life is the life according to virtue lived without impediment, and that virtue is a mean, then the life which is in a mean, and in a mean attainable by everyone, must be the best. And the same the same principles of virtue and vice are characteristic of cities and of constitutions; for the constitution is in a figure the life of the city. (Pol. IV.11 1295a35-40)

Thus, in the best political state, more important than the accumulation of external goods is the solidity of excellence of character (ethos). In the Nicomachean Ethics we saw that excellence in character presupposes the kind practical wisdom (phronēsis) that enables us to determine the appropriate mean between excess and deficiency in any given circumstance. In the politics, likewise, the best kind of government will be one that discovers the mean between the excess of wealth and deficiency of poverty, the excesses of exclusive rule by the rich and the deficiencies of exclusive rule by the poor. Even though politics is considered by Aristotle to be the master art that includes rhetoric and ethics (EN I.2 1094a28-1094b10) it is clear that he believes the best sort of politics is one that is grounded in an ethics of right reason and right desire. In this sense it is both the case that ethics needs politics and politics presupposes ethics.

What mediates between the ethical and political, what enables the possibility of an ethically oriented politics is the rhetorician who embodies in persuasive speech the right admixture of argumentative acumen (logos), good character (ethos) and a perspicacious grasp of human emotion (pathos). If the phronimos as political rhētōr possesses these qualities she will have the power to appeal to reason in order to change attitudes and put audiences in the right frame of mind by heightening the right emotions or censuring the wrong emotions. In so doing, she will be determining the “mean” relative to the particular situation at hand in a way that furthers the good of individuals and the polity.

            We may wonder at this point what rhetoric or politics might look like without phronēsis and the context of the virtues. Clearly, Aristotle thinks it is quite possible for a speaker or politician of bad character, if he is clever, to persuade an audience to draw conclusions about some state of affairs that he himself does not believe, or perhaps actually knows are untrue or fantastical. This is certainly the case when persuasion is reduced to technē—mere cleverness as persuasion is in this sense mere sophistry. This does not mean that the phronimos as rhētōr cannot be clever, but only that he cannot be merely clever, since his cleverness will always be associated with virtue. Phronēsis, Aristotle reminds us, must be realized as presupposing virtue: “Practical wisdom…this eye of the soul acquires its formed state not without the aid of virtue…therefore it is evident that it is impossible to be practically wise without being good.” (EN VI.12 1144a26-32). Given this, the wise rhetorician will employ enthymemes cleverly (persuasively), but also in such a way that the conclusions reached articulate what is good or best for human flourishing. What is “good” or “best” is what aims at human flourishing, or the good “with and among others” in a just polity. This is the realization of the excellence of rhetoric through phronēsis in the context of realizing eudaimonia as an ongoing activity that attempts to encourage, realize and sustain the flourishing of the individual and the state.[12]

What I have proposed in the foregoing analysis is that the relation between Aristotle’s ethics, rhetoric and politics is governed by practical logos. It is practical logos that makes our status as “political animal” unavoidable, and our need for rhetoric inescapable. More than that, Aristotle reminds us that the aretē of practical logos is not arrived at through theory but by way of practical wisdom or phronēsis—an intellectual virtue that can only occur in us with, through and among others.

[1] I deal in the main here with deliberative or political rhetoric since the ends of the latter deal with concerns of goodness or harm for the polis as a whole (Rhet. I.2 1358b5-25)—even if they are addressed to particular audiences that are making determinations about a specific matter at hand.

[2] In more modern terms we might translate these three components as the cognitive, evaluative and affective dimensions required for speech to be persuasive speech.

[3] Joseph Dunne, Back to the Rough Ground: ‘Phronesis’ and ‘Techne’ in Modern Philosophy and in Aristotle. University of Notre Dame Press, 1993. E. Diamond draws a very interesting analogy between our hands and our capacity to use language: “What I am suggesting is that the way our hand and its power to make any number of tools is the physical manifestation of our productive thinking, that our mouths and their ability to address through articulate language our fellow citizens and family members through education, debate, and political deliberation are the physical embodiment of nous praktikos.”  See Diamond, “For there are gods here too: Embodied Essences, Two-footedness and the Animal with Logos”.

[4] See Eve Rabinoff, Aristotle on the Rationality of Virtue. Rabinoff argues that “excellent rationality belongs to the virtuous soul as a whole, rather than being the possession of one part to the exclusion of the other” and that “in the virtuous soul emotion and thought work cooperatively and inseparably in producing virtuous action, such that the virtuous person’s thinking is emotional and her emotions are thoughtful. Emotion and thought—virtue and practical wisdom—name two distinct but united aspects of the virtuous person’s psyche. More specifically, the former makes what is truly good appear to the virtuous person, the latter makes the truth or the goodness of what is good appear. Thus, what practical wisdom contributes to virtuous action is full awareness of the virtue of the action and of the actor. This is essential for the virtuous person’s excellence to be distinctly human excellence.” In an important sense, logos not only mediates emotion and desire in the virtuous person, but in so doing enables excellence in speech and deliberative political affairs.

[5] Worldly experience is for Aristotle crucial for “while young men become geometricians and mathematicians and wise in matters like these, it is thought that a young man of practical wisdom cannot be found. The cause is that such wisdom is concerned not only with universals but with particulars, which become familiar with experience; but a young man has no experience, for it is length of time that gives experience” (EN VI.8 1142a12-16).

[6] It may appear odd to speak of phronēsis as a paideia when it is clear that for Aristotle it cannot be “taught”. However, it is crucial to grasp that phronēsis involves not just right reasoning but the deepening of a dispositional self-understanding through doing. In other words, phronēsis involves a praxis that forms us as a certain kind of knowing-being: a being who has achieved practical wisdom. This is quite different from making which involves a “knowing how” or knowing that”. This latter distinction between phronēsis (acting) and technē (making) has profound implications for pedagogy. A pedagogy based on technē would be one the sophists might easily embrace—as well as their modern counterparts who extol the virtue of a method-driven, instrumentally-oriented, “behavioral objectives model of teaching to the test. Both would relegate teaching to an instrumental approach to students guided by “efficiency” and ‘success-orientations”. This approach intentionally and systematically removes contingency and particularity, flattens differences, and minimizes anything resembling independent thought and reflection, or the cultivation of “qualities of mind and character, a habit of truthfulness, a sense of justice, a care for clarity and expressiveness in speech and writing” (Joseph Dunne, Back to the Rough Ground 1993. p. 6).

[7] In his article “Aristotle’s Animative Epistemology” (Idealistic Studies Vol. 25 No. 3, p.246-9) John Russon does a very nice job of illustrating how this kind of ‘sudden grasp of things” might work in the context of the classroom where after many repetitions and continuous engagement with the text and lectures on the text students suddenly put together or synthesize a number of disparate elements into a coherent whole.

[8] It is noteworthy that when Aristotle discusses the ethical aspects of rhetoric he speaks of aretē or virtue not as a state or “hexis” but as a capacity (i.e. as dunamis): “Virtue is, according to the usual view, a faculty of providing and preserving good things; or a faculty of conferring many great benefits, and benefits of all kinds on all occasions” (Rhetoric I.9 1366a36-1366b1).

[9] The idea of linking rhetoric to virtue and phronēsis is not new. Cf. Susan K. Allard-Nelson, Philosophy & Rhetoric Vol. 34, No. 3 (2001), pp. 245-259. See also Lois S. Self, Philosophy & Rhetoric, Spring1979, Vol. 12 Issue 2, p130.

[10] Plato, Apology 24d-26a.

[11]From Aristotle’s perspective, even if legislators, educators and rhetoricians cannot “teach” virtue in any direct sense, there is no reason to believe that they cannot play a crucial role in educating citizens by showing in exemplary fashion how the character virtues and the intellectual virtue of practical reasoning or phronēsis can be realized through right rhetoric and just laws that realize the good of the state for all citizens. This is precisely what the rhētōr or statesman as phronimos embodies. We cannot be taught virtue, but we can learn from the example of others in their speech and action how we might be able to perceive, in a more complete way, what the good is. Through the example of others who have a measure of wisdom we might also discover how we are often blind to our own prejudices and, therefore to the good itself.

[12] The realization of eudaimonia (and I would add politics and rhetoric) as ongoing and open-ended is thoughtfully summed up by John Russon in his discussion of two senses of entelecheia (actuality): “the idea that we can take a perspective on our lives as a whole and ask the question of meaning, the question of happiness, means that we experience ourselves as beings of possibility.  It is precisely because we know our own actualization has not lived up to our first actuality that we can have our future path as a question, that we can have choice.  But this also means that nothing we do will ever settle the question.  We will always experience ourselves as more (and less) than what we are.  We will always be able to see how our potentiality is not fully captured or expressed in any choice we make, in any situation to which we commit ourselves.” See J. Russon, “Actuality in the First Sense” and the Question of Human Nature in Aristotle in the present volume.

The above article by Fred Guerin is excerpted from Aristotle on Human Nature Edited by Gregory Kirk and Joseph Arel, Bloomsbury Publishing