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The Rationality of Practice

Richard Smith

University of Durham , United Kingdom

Published online: 11 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Richard Smith (1995) The Rationality of Practice, Curriculum Studies, 3:2, 209-215
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0965975950030207

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Curriculum Studies, Volume 3, Number 2, 1995

REVIEW ESSAY

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The Rationality of Practice

RICHARD SMITH
University of Durham, United Kingdom

Back to the Rough Ground:

'phronesis' and 'techne' in modern philosophy and in Aristotle
JOSEPH DUNNE, 1993
University of Notre Dame Press, pp. xvi. + 499. $45.95 (hardback).
ISBN 0 268 00689 X
Joseph Dunne has written a scholarly and finely-crafted (and beautifully
produced: much credit to the University of Notre Dame Press) book on one
of the most important philosophical questions of the late twentiethcentury, particularly but not only as it affects education. That question is
just how far what he calls 'technical reason' is adequate to guide us in
complex areas of human life such as medicine or teaching. In the late 1970s
Dunne was encouraged to inflict the behavioural objectives model of
planning and conducting lessons on his college of education students: his
instinctive and philosophical dissatisfaction with that model was the grit
that, more than a decade later, produced this substantial work. Though he
makes no reference to the fact, the view of education which emphasises
outcomes, effectiveness and accountability has of course become in the
decade since then even more virulent in many respects and stands still
more in need of the extended criticism to which Dunne subjects it here.
Dunne sees the root of the problem in the tendency of some Classical
Greek thinkers to elevate techne - roughly, instrumental reason with a
'scientific' (as we would now understand it) flavour - to the status of
universal paradigm of rational human action. The carpenter, for instance,
does more than stumble instinctively, through a collection of 'knacks' and
the intelligence of his hands, towards the finished table or bed. Rather he
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can give some kind of account of his procedures: he knows the how and the
why of what he does, and this makes him eminently suitable to be a teacher
of carpentry as well as a practitioner of it. The attraction of the model of
craftsmanship is partly that what counts as success here has relatively
clear criteria of success. The product is concrete and definable (it may well
be precisely defined by the customer). Outcome is all: you have to make a
good bed, not talk it. The enduring fascination of the 'craft model' can be
followed with no difficulty into modern conceptions of teaching, though
Dunne does not do this. Numerous books of the last twenty years in
particular have (rightly of course, as far as they went) encouraged students
and new teachers to 'hone their skills' and acquire 'the craft of the
classroom'. Most recently the qualities of the teacher have been defined,
officially and authoritatively, in terms of 'competences'.
The trouble with techne, however, is that it is essentially theoretical.
This sounds odd to our ears, used as they are to hearing practical skills
contrasted with the benighted abstractions of woolly theory. What Dunne
has in mind is that, for the Greeks, techne promises access to the universal:
not just that this medicine was good for Brown and Jones when they had this
illness, but that it is good for all relevantly similar persons similarly afflicted.
For many enthusiasts for behavioural objectives techne seems to offer the
same kind of certain knowledge: an algorithm or manual of procedures,
perhaps; at any rate a way of working that leaves 'nothing to chance'.
One of Dunne's central purposes is to restate and clarify what he takes
to be the Aristotelian distinction between techne and phronesis. Phronesis is
practical reasoning or practical wisdom. Its hallmarks are flexibility and
attentiveness to the details of the particular case (what Aristotle calls
aesthesis, translated by modem writers as 'perception' or 'situational
appreciation'; Dunne prefers 'perceptiveness"). It is characterised by
'sensitivity and attunement' towards, rather than a concern for mastery or
domination of, its subject-material (p. 256). Rather than being a purely
intellectual process occurring before, or separable from, experience (such as
we might now mean by 'theorising") it is exercised in the course of experience
and involves being open to experience. To adapt one of Dunne's examples
(p. 304), a teacher shows phronesis when responding to a pupil who is
misbehaving. Is the child bored, insufficiently stimulated, driven by
pathological fear of failure not even to try? No general explanatory knowledge
will suffice here: there is no general principle that all children who misbehave
do so because their work is not interesting enough The teacher must be
responsive to the case of this particular pupil, in this particular class here
and now. And she must be aware too of the quality of her own
responsiveness, conscious that late in a trying day she may be more ready
than usual to see the pupil as merely tiresome. In this way the exercise of
practical wisdom is irreducibly ethical, involving the question of what kind of
character the teacher has, what kind of person he or she is, rather than what
'skills' he or she is exercising. There are no rules to follow here. If the person
of good practical judgement uses principles then it is in the way a judge uses
them: for the judge, laws are best thought of as summaries of previous wise
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THE RATIONALITY OF PRACTICE

decisions, to be corrected where necessary by new wise decisions to meet

the exigencies of unique circumstances. 'Never touch a child in affection or
anger', perhaps, but particular circumstances (comfort for the distressed
maybe) might point to an exception even to that sensible principle.
Roughly half the book consists of very detailed discussion of
Aristotle's treatment of these ideas in his Nicomachean Ethics and Eudemian
Ethics and elsewhere. The other, and first, half of the book approaches the
Aristotelian treatment by way of an examination of the relations between
technical and practical reason in five more modern writers: John Henry
Newman, R.G. Collingwood, Hannah Arendt, Hans-Georg Gadamer and
Jurgen Habermas. All of these thinkers are held to have opposed the march
of technical reason in ways that Aristotle would have acclaimed and that we
can draw upon to oppose its hegemony in our own era. Newman's notion of
the 'Illative Sense' is that of an irreducibly personal capacity that must
underlie any procedures of logic. To apply the general laws of ethics to
particular cases we can go nowhere but to 'the living intellect, our own, or
another's' (A Grammer of Assent).
Collingwood, a philosopher badly neglected by writers on education,
helps us to understand the way in which language is related to emotion. We
do not use language to express pre-existing emotions, as means to preordained end. Language is an activity we are caught up in that is already
expressive: it 'speaks us', in Heidegger's phrase. Until we have expressed
our emotions we do not know what they are. Expression of emotions is
therefore an exploration of them, and 'expression is an activity of which
there can be no technique' (The Principles of Art), it cannot be understood
in means-end terms at all. Dunne's discussion here is particularly
illuminating and ought to be read by all those who write about language as
though 'self-expression' was one more purpose for which we learn
language, a matter of letting out, probably for reasons of enhanced selfesteem, the emotions seething inside us. For Arendt, politics is the arena in
which the fatal shift has taken place from 'action' to 'making'. Instead of
allowing people to realise themselves as distinct individuals, modern
politics becomes a matter of the efficient administration of society, the
creation of the forms of bureaucracy which, as the embodiment of technical
rationality, render the citizen a mere subject. Here Dunne's account is
unfortunately lacking in any examples at all. How, one wonders, would he
relate Arendt's analysis to the apparent attempts of the last decade to 'roll
back the state' and empower the ordinary person? Is this all camouflage for
the unfettered exercise of power, or do choice and the 'market' give more
scope for the exercise of practical reason? One weakness of Dunne's book,
to which I return below, is that it floats in an historical void.
The discussions of Gadamer and Habermas are substantial, being
together of roughly the same extent as the treatment of Aristotle. I cannot
do justice to them here. Gadamer attempts to disabuse us of the idea that
we can survey the past from any secure present uncontaminated by the
very phenomena we are investigating. We must constantly re-define and reidentify ourselves as we try to make sense of the objects of our attention.
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Attempting to understand a pupil's behaviour, say, requires me also to

understand something of the 'prejudices' I necessarily, and properly, bring
to that attempt. I am not the 'scientific' investigator, detached from the
data, of the action research paradigm, but a person in particular historical
time: in the mid-life of late twentieth-century Western man, say, when my
own sensitivity to 'transitions' may make me more, or less, inclined to see
that the pupil is passing through the transition of adolescence and thus
touching my raw nerves or sympathies. It is part of our 'finitude' that we are
thus co-participators and not 'objective observers'. Our condition is one
'over which one cannot exercise the kind of mastery that craftspersons
exercise over their material' (p. 14).
Habermas, by contrast, while equally critical of 'technicist rationality',
is sceptical of attempts to reinstate Aristotelian notions of practice and
phronesis, considering them too rooted in established ways of life to be able
to mount a properly rigorous, and appropriately theoretical, critique. In the
Enlightenment tradition Habermas favours a more open and transparent
rationality, subject to discursive criticism and justification. I return to
Habermas's objections to the conservatism of neo-Aristotelian approaches
below; it is worth noting here that Dunne has characteristically given one of
the most trenchant critics of the Aristotelianism he favours considerable
space, and interpreted him generously.
In the rest of this review I will concentrate on Dunne's treatment of
Aristotle, as seems appropriate in view of the shape of the book. What
motivates Dunne, as indeed Gadamer and perhaps Newman, is the urge to
keep some area of human conduct safe from science, technology and
technical reason: to insist that there are modes of knowing that do not
conform to the 'scientific' paradigm (it must be said however that much of
creative science does not conform to it either). The enterprise is a necessary
one, for the reductive, positivistic ways of thinking that are generally
indicated by the pejorative sense of 'scientific' show little sign of diminishing.
In education the triumph of scientific rationality can be seen everywhere,
from the idea that quality in schooling is a matter of conforming to standards
that can be quantified and used to construct league-tables to the way in
which a conception of English teaching as the cultivation of 'effectiveness' of
communication is destroying other traditions which placed personal growth,
or the critique of ideology, at the heart of the discipline. The question is, what
advantage lies in relating this to what Aristotle says about phronesis? For his
account is notoriously sketchy and unsatisfactory, and it is not clear that
Dunne has done much to repair its deficiencies.
Some of the deficiencies can be sketched here. The distinction
between phronesis and techne is supposed to map onto the difference
between two different ways of acting or making, praxis and poiesis. Poiesis,
which belongs with techne, is broadly speaking a matter of the production
of an object, externally determined as the end to which the making is the
means. Praxis, which is guided by phronesis, is a form of ethically
committed action which realises the good at which it aims through the
action rather than as some independently specifiable aim. The paradigm of
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such action is politics, and Dunne, like some other recent writers, would
have teaching fit the same paradigm: teaching does not, indifferent to the
means, aim at pre-specifiable outcomes. The good of teaching is realised in
teaching, which must be characterised in a certain way as an activity and
not through its 'products' merely. But Aristotle is happy to talk of the
doctor, as well as the navigator, as having a techne: their ends are the
restoration of health or reaching the destination (cp. Mackenzie, 1991). Yet
Dunne seems to regard the doctor and the navigator as major exponents of
phronesis, the latter especially as he must deal with the 'limitless' sea which
is the archetype of that which cannot be brought within the compass of
fixed rules (cp. pp. 362-364). Dunne's proposed solution is to interpret
Aristotle as including under techne some activities 'which can scarcely be
said to be technai at aW (p. 258), as if Aristotle envisaged 'a kind of scale in
respect of the degree of complexity of individual cases within their general
rules and prescriptions', medicine and navigation being at the lower end of
this scale and bearing comparison rather than contrast with phronesis (p.
260). However, there is no real textual warrant for this assertion, and
Aristotle explicitly contradicts it. A related difficulty is that the craftsman is
said to differ from the agent of praxis in that the former is not significantly
'invested' in what he does. The 'practitioner' on the other hand 'is
constituted through the actions which disclose him both to others and to
himself as the person that he is' (p. 263). A teacher, we might say, identifies
herself with her teaching, and her teaching is an expression of herself:
Children learn something of what it is to be a grown-up human being from
their teachers as well as the overt subject-matter of the lesson. The
craftsman does not in the same way 'put himself into his work'. But this is
untrue; it is an instance of the denigration of manual work that haunts our
culture. Our gardens or the rooms we decorate reflect the kind of person we
are, and one reason that we value craft-activity (as hobby or do-it-yourself)
seems to be that we can 'put ourselves into it' in a way that is becoming
increasingly impossible with such paid work, often unskilled, managerial or
supervisory, as we can now find. The craftsman moreover cultivates virtues
such as patience and accuracy, and needs to be aware, at the margins of his
vision, of what qualities he is bringing to the task in hand - a tendency to
dwell overlong on a pleasant part of the work, perhaps - as much as the
teacher whose excellence consists partly in being aware of the quality of
her own responsiveness (see above).
There are grounds, then, for thinking that the notion of techne with
which Dunne wants to contrast phronesis is a misleading one. A further
problem here is that Dunne wants to follow Aristotle and Plato in regarding
techne as 'strikingly theoretical': that is, the person who possesses techne
knows 'the why and the cause', can construct generalisations and spell out
procedures. When Dunne comes to apply all this to the praxis of teaching, it
is an unfortunate consequence that because he does not want to see
teaching as a techne he is led to reject 'educational theory' in favour of
immersion in practice as a solution to the question of how the phronesis of
the teacher is to be acquired, very much as though 'theory' and 'practice'
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carried their Aristotelian connotations rather than their modern meanings.

Here the implicit equation of 'theory' with the technicist, behavioural
objectives model appears to blind Dunne to what he elsewhere seems to
understand well enough which is that practice alone will not produce
phronesis in teaching or in any other sphere.
What else, then, is needed? How do we help people towards practical
wisdom? Dunne's answer to this must, like Aristotle's, be pieced together
from scattered remarks and insights; this is not inappropriate, since
anything more thorough-going might suggest that there is a science of
phronesis. Practical wisdom embraces experience, judgement and
character, and much of the work we do with those whom we help towards
phronesis (or they do with us) must be done more in the manner of a
counsellor, or mentor perhaps, than that of a teacher in the ordinary sense.
We listen, help the learner identify the problem, encourage him to look
honestly at his experience, to use his own judgement and not to over-rely
on ours; we offer some confirmation of those aspects of his character that
he might give freer rein to. There is also scope for some direct teaching, to
give the learner a richer sense of the different kinds of ideas and different
kinds of language that are available for thinking and talking about teaching
and education. For without this the learner's capacity to exercise aesthesis,
'situational appreciation', is not nourished. Here is a role that educational
theory must perform better than it has often done in recent years, helping
teachers cultivate attentiveness to the richness of the phenomena and the
diverse ways they can be seen and responded to. Literature, poetry, film
and a study of how the media represent education might play a larger part
than they traditionally have done in any reconstituted version of
educational theory.
It is a major disappointment that Dunne never returns to a thorough
discussion of the questions with which the book started, and an analysis of
how the issues with which the book is centrally concerned bear on teaching
now. The diminished autonomy of the profession, the threat to its very
professional status and the host of other factors that make teaching in the
early 1990s different from teaching in the late 1970s are not alluded to here at
all. There is, we might say, not enough of a return to the 'rough ground' of
practice which gives the book its title. This is a particular pity because it
deprives Dunne of the opportunity to note that a 'phronetic' view of teaching
promises to re-instate much of what has been taken away: if character and
judgement are at the heart of phronesis then it becomes impossible to regard
a teacher as essentially the deliverer of a curriculum, preferably through
teacher-proof materials. The kind of person a teacher is, and the state of his
or her morale, become crucial and not luxuries that can be dispensed with in
times of recession or for reasons of political expediency. As one who
exercises personal and professional judgement, and as a model of phronesis
to pupils (rather than as, for example, a technical wizard of the classroom),
the teacher needs to work in a democratic environment which exercises and
supports that judgement, instead of being the object of decisions taken,
increasingly, by 'line management'.
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We might, however, again press the question whether in our attempts

to recover a conception of teaching as an autonomous profession neoAristotelian ideas of phronesis especially, are really necessary or helpful.
They are often charged - and this is the force of the Habermasian critique
which Dunne does full justice to - with being conservative, even
reactionary, of favouring existing modes of practice and even assimilating
phronesis to a commonsense inhabiting less the rough ground of experience
than its cautious middle-ground. The phronimos, the practically wise
person, does often look remarkably like the English gentleman (p. 374).
perhaps as depicted by Trollope (and analysed by Shirley Robin Letwin
[1982] in a book of great philosophical interest). Dunne attempts to
distance himself from the wider neo-Aristotelianism of such as Alasdair
Maclntyre (as expressed in After Virtue'), with its 'strong animus against
modernity' (p. 377). Perhaps this distancing could have been done more
fully, and the dangers in neo-Aristotelianism recognised more clearly. But it
remains true that we badly need some account of the humane alternative to
the technicist models that stand at the shoulder of administrators, eager to
help with appraisal and accountability, the drawing up of tick-lists and
schedules that have insinuated themselves into the heart of education for
want of our continuing articulation and defence of a more subtle and
profound vision. Aristotle has given us 'resources for thinking about the
rationality of practice' (p. 363) that, for all their flaws, are suggestive of how
the subtler vision of education and of teaching might be recovered and
developed. Dunne has done us a considerable service in making these
resources more accessible and showing how they can be put to the service
of education. If I have disagreed with him in many places this is a tribute to
his success in posing important questions with such clarity and energy that
the reader's critical faculties are kept constantly engaged. This is a book to
think with, to read in the spirit of praxis as one prepared to work alongside
the writer rather than one impatient for conclusions-as-outcomes (there
are, in 492 pages, no bullet-points or diagrams). If Dunne is only nearly right
then no book that does justice to the nature of teaching could be otherwise.

Correspondence

Richard Smith, School of Education, University of Durham, Leazes Road,

Durham DH11TA, United Kingdom.
References
Letwin, Shirley Robin (1982) The Gentleman in Trollope: individuality and moral
conduct. London: Macmillan.
Maclntyre, Alasdair (1982) After Virtue. London: Duckworth.
Mackenzie, Jim (1991) Street phronesis, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 25,
pp. 153-169.

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