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The Rationality of PracticeRichard Smith aa University of Durham , United KingdomPublished online: 11 Aug 2006.

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Curriculum Studies, Volume 3, Number 2, 1995

REVIEW ESSAY

The Rationality of Practice

RICHARD SMITHUniversity of Durham, United Kingdom

Back to the Rough Ground:'phronesis' and 'techne' in modern philosophy and in AristotleJOSEPH DUNNE, 1993University 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 beautifullyproduced: much credit to the University of Notre Dame Press) book on oneof the most important philosophical questions of the late twentieth-century, particularly but not only as it affects education. That question isjust how far what he calls 'technical reason' is adequate to guide us incomplex areas of human life such as medicine or teaching. In the late 1970sDunne was encouraged to inflict the behavioural objectives model ofplanning and conducting lessons on his college of education students: hisinstinctive and philosophical dissatisfaction with that model was the gritthat, more than a decade later, produced this substantial work. Though hemakes no reference to the fact, the view of education which emphasisesoutcomes, effectiveness and accountability has of course become in thedecade since then even more virulent in many respects and stands stillmore in need of the extended criticism to which Dunne subjects it here.

Dunne sees the root of the problem in the tendency of some ClassicalGreek thinkers to elevate techne - roughly, instrumental reason with a'scientific' (as we would now understand it) flavour - to the status ofuniversal paradigm of rational human action. The carpenter, for instance,does more than stumble instinctively, through a collection of 'knacks' andthe 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 thewhy of what he does, and this makes him eminently suitable to be a teacherof carpentry as well as a practitioner of it. The attraction of the model ofcraftsmanship is partly that what counts as success here has relativelyclear criteria of success. The product is concrete and definable (it may wellbe precisely defined by the customer). Outcome is all: you have to make agood bed, not talk it. The enduring fascination of the 'craft model' can befollowed with no difficulty into modern conceptions of teaching, thoughDunne does not do this. Numerous books of the last twenty years inparticular have (rightly of course, as far as they went) encouraged studentsand new teachers to 'hone their skills' and acquire 'the craft of theclassroom'. 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 skillscontrasted with the benighted abstractions of woolly theory. What Dunnehas 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 thisillness, but that it is good for all relevantly similar persons similarly afflicted.For many enthusiasts for behavioural objectives techne seems to offer thesame 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 takesto be the Aristotelian distinction between techne and phronesis. Phronesis ispractical reasoning or practical wisdom. Its hallmarks are flexibility andattentiveness to the details of the particular case (what Aristotle callsaesthesis, translated by modem writers as 'perception' or 'situationalappreciation'; Dunne prefers 'perceptiveness"). It is characterised by'sensitivity and attunement' towards, rather than a concern for mastery ordomination of, its subject-material (p. 256). Rather than being a purelyintellectual process occurring before, or separable from, experience (such aswe might now mean by 'theorising") it is exercised in the course of experienceand involves being open to experience. To adapt one of Dunne's examples(p. 304), a teacher shows phronesis when responding to a pupil who ismisbehaving. Is the child bored, insufficiently stimulated, driven bypathological fear of failure not even to try? No general explanatory knowledgewill suffice here: there is no general principle that all children who misbehavedo so because their work is not interesting enough The teacher must beresponsive to the case of this particular pupil, in this particular class hereand now. And she must be aware too of the quality of her ownresponsiveness, conscious that late in a trying day she may be more readythan usual to see the pupil as merely tiresome. In this way the exercise ofpractical wisdom is irreducibly ethical, involving the question of what kind ofcharacter 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 personof good practical judgement uses principles then it is in the way a judge usesthem: for the judge, laws are best thought of as summaries of previous wise

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decisions, to be corrected where necessary by new wise decisions to meetthe exigencies of unique circumstances. 'Never touch a child in affection oranger', perhaps, but particular circumstances (comfort for the distressedmaybe) might point to an exception even to that sensible principle.

Roughly half the book consists of very detailed discussion ofAristotle's treatment of these ideas in his Nicomachean Ethics and EudemianEthics and elsewhere. The other, and first, half of the book approaches theAristotelian treatment by way of an examination of the relations betweentechnical and practical reason in five more modern writers: John HenryNewman, R.G. Collingwood, Hannah Arendt, Hans-Georg Gadamer andJurgen Habermas. All of these thinkers are held to have opposed the marchof technical reason in ways that Aristotle would have acclaimed and that wecan draw upon to oppose its hegemony in our own era. Newman's notion ofthe 'Illative Sense' is that of an irreducibly personal capacity that mustunderlie any procedures of logic. To apply the general laws of ethics toparticular cases we can go nowhere but to 'the living intellect, our own, oranother'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. Wedo not use language to express pre-existing emotions, as means to pre-ordained end. Language is an activity we are caught up in that is alreadyexpressive: it 'speaks us', in Heidegger's phrase. Until we have expressedour emotions we do not know what they are. Expression of emotions istherefore an exploration of them, and 'expression is an activity of whichthere can be no technique' (The Principles of Art), it cannot be understoodin means-end terms at all. Dunne's discussion here is particularlyilluminating and ought to be read by all those who write about language asthough 'self-expression' was one more purpose for which we learnlanguage, a matter of letting out, probably for reasons of enhanced self-esteem, the emotions seething inside us. For Arendt, politics is the arena inwhich the fatal shift has taken place from 'action' to 'making'. Instead ofallowing people to realise themselves as distinct individuals, modernpolitics becomes a matter of the efficient administration of society, thecreation of the forms of bureaucracy which, as the embodiment of technicalrationality, render the citizen a mere subject. Here Dunne's account isunfortunately lacking in any examples at all. How, one wonders, would herelate Arendt's analysis to the apparent attempts of the last decade to 'rollback the state' and empower the ordinary person? Is this all camouflage forthe unfettered exercise of power, or do choice and the 'market' give morescope 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, beingtogether of roughly the same extent as the treatment of Aristotle. I cannotdo justice to them here. Gadamer attempts to disabuse us of the idea thatwe can survey the past from any secure present uncontaminated by thevery phenomena we are investigating. We must constantly re-define and re-identify 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 tounderstand something of the 'prejudices' I necessarily, and properly, bringto that attempt. I am not the 'scientific' investigator, detached from thedata, of the action research paradigm, but a person in particular historicaltime: in the mid-life of late twentieth-century Western man, say, when myown sensitivity to 'transitions' may make me more, or less, inclined to seethat the pupil is passing through the transition of adolescence and thustouching my raw nerves or sympathies. It is part of our 'finitude' that we arethus co-participators and not 'objective observers'. Our condition is one'over which one cannot exercise the kind of mastery that craftspersonsexercise over their material' (p. 14).

Habermas, by contrast, while equally critical of 'technicist rationality',is sceptical of attempts to reinstate Aristotelian notions of practice andphronesis, considering them too rooted in established ways of life to be ableto mount a properly rigorous, and appropriately theoretical, critique. In theEnlightenment tradition Habermas favours a more open and transparentrationality, subject to discursive criticism and justification. I return toHabermas's objections to the conservatism of neo-Aristotelian approachesbelow; it is worth noting here that Dunne has characteristically given one ofthe most trenchant critics of the Aristotelianism he favours considerablespace, and interpreted him generously.

In the rest of this review I will concentrate on Dunne's treatment ofAristotle, as seems appropriate in view of the shape of the book. Whatmotivates Dunne, as indeed Gadamer and perhaps Newman, is the urge tokeep some area of human conduct safe from science, technology andtechnical reason: to insist that there are modes of knowing that do notconform to the 'scientific' paradigm (it must be said however that much ofcreative science does not conform to it either). The enterprise is a necessaryone, for the reductive, positivistic ways of thinking that are generallyindicated 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 standardsthat can be quantified and used to construct league-tables to the way inwhich a conception of English teaching as the cultivation of 'effectiveness' ofcommunication is destroying other traditions which placed personal growth,or the critique of ideology, at the heart of the discipline. The question is, whatadvantage lies in relating this to what Aristotle says about phronesis? For hisaccount is notoriously sketchy and unsatisfactory, and it is not clear thatDunne has done much to repair its deficiencies.

Some of the deficiencies can be sketched here. The distinctionbetween phronesis and techne is supposed to map onto the differencebetween two different ways of acting or making, praxis and poiesis. Poiesis,which belongs with techne, is broadly speaking a matter of the productionof an object, externally determined as the end to which the making is themeans. Praxis, which is guided by phronesis, is a form of ethicallycommitted action which realises the good at which it aims through theaction 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, wouldhave teaching fit the same paradigm: teaching does not, indifferent to themeans, aim at pre-specifiable outcomes. The good of teaching is realised inteaching, which must be characterised in a certain way as an activity andnot through its 'products' merely. But Aristotle is happy to talk of thedoctor, as well as the navigator, as having a techne: their ends are therestoration of health or reaching the destination (cp. Mackenzie, 1991). YetDunne seems to regard the doctor and the navigator as major exponents ofphronesis, the latter especially as he must deal with the 'limitless' sea whichis the archetype of that which cannot be brought within the compass offixed rules (cp. pp. 362-364). Dunne's proposed solution is to interpretAristotle as including under techne some activities 'which can scarcely besaid to be technai at aW (p. 258), as if Aristotle envisaged 'a kind of scale inrespect of the degree of complexity of individual cases within their generalrules and prescriptions', medicine and navigation being at the lower end ofthis scale and bearing comparison rather than contrast with phronesis (p.260). However, there is no real textual warrant for this assertion, andAristotle explicitly contradicts it. A related difficulty is that the craftsman issaid 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 'isconstituted through the actions which disclose him both to others and tohimself as the person that he is' (p. 263). A teacher, we might say, identifiesherself 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 fromtheir teachers as well as the overt subject-matter of the lesson. Thecraftsman does not in the same way 'put himself into his work'. But this isuntrue; it is an instance of the denigration of manual work that haunts ourculture. Our gardens or the rooms we decorate reflect the kind of person weare, 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 becomingincreasingly impossible with such paid work, often unskilled, managerial orsupervisory, as we can now find. The craftsman moreover cultivates virtuessuch as patience and accuracy, and needs to be aware, at the margins of hisvision, of what qualities he is bringing to the task in hand - a tendency todwell overlong on a pleasant part of the work, perhaps - as much as theteacher whose excellence consists partly in being aware of the quality ofher own responsiveness (see above).

There are grounds, then, for thinking that the notion of techne withwhich Dunne wants to contrast phronesis is a misleading one. A furtherproblem here is that Dunne wants to follow Aristotle and Plato in regardingtechne as 'strikingly theoretical': that is, the person who possesses techneknows 'the why and the cause', can construct generalisations and spell outprocedures. When Dunne comes to apply all this to the praxis of teaching, itis an unfortunate consequence that because he does not want to seeteaching as a techne he is led to reject 'educational theory' in favour ofimmersion in practice as a solution to the question of how the phronesis ofthe 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, behaviouralobjectives model appears to blind Dunne to what he elsewhere seems tounderstand well enough which is that practice alone will not producephronesis in teaching or in any other sphere.

What else, then, is needed? How do we help people towards practicalwisdom? Dunne's answer to this must, like Aristotle's, be pieced togetherfrom scattered remarks and insights; this is not inappropriate, sinceanything more thorough-going might suggest that there is a science ofphronesis. Practical wisdom embraces experience, judgement andcharacter, and much of the work we do with those whom we help towardsphronesis (or they do with us) must be done more in the manner of acounsellor, or mentor perhaps, than that of a teacher in the ordinary sense.We listen, help the learner identify the problem, encourage him to lookhonestly at his experience, to use his own judgement and not to over-relyon ours; we offer some confirmation of those aspects of his character thathe might give freer rein to. There is also scope for some direct teaching, togive the learner a richer sense of the different kinds of ideas and differentkinds of language that are available for thinking and talking about teachingand education. For without this the learner's capacity to exercise aesthesis,'situational appreciation', is not nourished. Here is a role that educationaltheory must perform better than it has often done in recent years, helpingteachers cultivate attentiveness to the richness of the phenomena and thediverse ways they can be seen and responded to. Literature, poetry, filmand a study of how the media represent education might play a larger partthan they traditionally have done in any reconstituted version ofeducational theory.

It is a major disappointment that Dunne never returns to a thoroughdiscussion of the questions with which the book started, and an analysis ofhow the issues with which the book is centrally concerned bear on teachingnow. The diminished autonomy of the profession, the threat to its veryprofessional status and the host of other factors that make teaching in theearly 1990s different from teaching in the late 1970s are not alluded to here atall. There is, we might say, not enough of a return to the 'rough ground' ofpractice which gives the book its title. This is a particular pity because itdeprives Dunne of the opportunity to note that a 'phronetic' view of teachingpromises to re-instate much of what has been taken away: if character andjudgement are at the heart of phronesis then it becomes impossible to regarda teacher as essentially the deliverer of a curriculum, preferably throughteacher-proof materials. The kind of person a teacher is, and the state of hisor her morale, become crucial and not luxuries that can be dispensed with intimes of recession or for reasons of political expediency. As one whoexercises personal and professional judgement, and as a model of phronesisto pupils (rather than as, for example, a technical wizard of the classroom),the teacher needs to work in a democratic environment which exercises andsupports 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 attemptsto recover a conception of teaching as an autonomous profession neo-Aristotelian ideas of phronesis especially, are really necessary or helpful.They are often charged - and this is the force of the Habermasian critiquewhich Dunne does full justice to - with being conservative, evenreactionary, of favouring existing modes of practice and even assimilatingphronesis to a commonsense inhabiting less the rough ground of experiencethan its cautious middle-ground. The phronimos, the practically wiseperson, 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 todistance himself from the wider neo-Aristotelianism of such as AlasdairMaclntyre (as expressed in After Virtue'), with its 'strong animus againstmodernity' (p. 377). Perhaps this distancing could have been done morefully, and the dangers in neo-Aristotelianism recognised more clearly. But itremains true that we badly need some account of the humane alternative tothe technicist models that stand at the shoulder of administrators, eager tohelp with appraisal and accountability, the drawing up of tick-lists andschedules that have insinuated themselves into the heart of education forwant of our continuing articulation and defence of a more subtle andprofound vision. Aristotle has given us 'resources for thinking about therationality of practice' (p. 363) that, for all their flaws, are suggestive of howthe subtler vision of education and of teaching might be recovered anddeveloped. Dunne has done us a considerable service in making theseresources more accessible and showing how they can be put to the serviceof education. If I have disagreed with him in many places this is a tribute tohis success in posing important questions with such clarity and energy thatthe reader's critical faculties are kept constantly engaged. This is a book tothink with, to read in the spirit of praxis as one prepared to work alongsidethe writer rather than one impatient for conclusions-as-outcomes (thereare, in 492 pages, no bullet-points or diagrams). If Dunne is only nearly rightthen no book that does justice to the nature of teaching could be otherwise.

CorrespondenceRichard Smith, School of Education, University of Durham, Leazes Road,Durham DH11TA, United Kingdom.

ReferencesLetwin, 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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