技艺与德性中的实践智慧——基于亚里士多德伦理学与当代伦理学自然主义的比较

亚里士多德在其古典伦理学中讨论了作为制作活动的技艺与作为实践活动的德性以及二者所依赖的实践智慧的联系与区别。基于亚里士多德的思想以及当代认知科学,这一类比研究延续到当代自然主义伦理学及其反思中。自然主义伦理学主张技艺与德性及其实践智慧之间存在着某种类同关系,源于亚里士多德德性伦理学的辩护者则主张技艺行为与德性行为的实践智慧在诸多方面存在区别。更进一步的研究表明,技艺行为和德性行为的实践智慧应当有效地整合,即技艺行为的实践智慧可能使人们对整体生活目标的反思更为正确,同时,技艺行为的实践智慧也同时应当遵从基于"好的人类生活"的更高规范标准。     

论一门哲学伦理学的可能性

作为实践哲学的哲学伦理学与作为应用的“实践”伦理学的严格区分,是随着近代以来“理论”和“实践”的二元对立兴起的,在古代的哲学中不仅不存在这种区分,而且在亚里士多德那里“理论”也是一种“实践”,一种最高的生活方式。理论与实践的二元区分使得哲学伦理学本身变得可疑,事实上也陷入了困境,而要走出这种困境,在哲学伦理学内部可以看出有两条可能的出路,一条是康德的形式主义路线,一条是亚里士多德的道路。但两者都不能独立解决这一困境,而要互补为一门伦理学可能的部分才是可行的。     

“技艺模仿自然”——亚里士多德《物理学》第二卷第8章的自然目的论

亚里士多德在《物理学》第二卷第8章为自然目的论提供了“驳运气论证”和“自然—技艺类比论证”。第一个论证通过反驳恩培多克勒的运气论思想，充分证明了自然中存在目的，从而证明了自然目的论。亚里士多德之所以又提出“自然—技艺类比论证”,并不是想要添加一个并列的论证，而是为揭示自然目的论对于自然世界的普遍性以及存在论上的基础性。其普遍性和基础性就在于，人类的实践活动同样服从自然目的论，理性的思虑活动并不能为人类的实践活动赢得超自然的特殊地位。     

当代西方“实践智慧”问题研究的四种进路

当代西方实践哲学积极地阐发了亚里士多德实践哲学中的实践智慧(Phronesis)概念,并在当代的思想与实践语境中提出了一些新的问题与解答,形成一股实践智慧复兴的潮流。在诸多关于实践智慧的哲学研究中,大致可以区分出四种研究进路:伦理学进路、存在论及诠释学进路、修辞学进路,以及后现代进路。本文旨在对这些进路分别进行扼要的分析和述评,为读者呈现出当代实践智慧研究的一个全景式的概观。     

马克思“劳动成为生活的第一需要”论断的溯源与释义

在西方“亚里士多德—康德”主义思想谱系中,存在一种“实践—劳动”二元论逻辑,这一逻辑内蕴一种对劳动的偏见和蔑视。洛克、斯密、黑格尔等确立劳动作为市民社会以及人之生成的建构性原则的地位和意义,但劳动总体上被归结为“谋生手段”,因而在根本上并未突破“实践—劳动”二元论逻辑。马克思超越“实践—劳动”二元论传统,通过融通劳动概念与实践概念,阐明劳动作为“生活的第一需要”的内涵、本质和条件。在马克思看来,作为“生活的第一需要”的劳动,就其基本内涵和本质规定而言,是以人的能力本身的发展为目的的自由活动;就其价值立场和承载主体而言,是基于消灭劳动剥削的“人人都必须”承担的社会活动;就其历史延展和实现条件而言,是在人类社会辩证运动中不断生成的历史活动。     

“文化实践”:在实践哲学的谱系内——早期文化研究思潮的“文化实践”理论

无论是当代西方马克思主义还是中国特色社会主义,几乎不约而同地都把目光聚于文化,强调文化在批判发达资本主义,建设中国特色社会主义的重要意义。这意味着提出了一种新的实践形态和实践领域——文化实践。本文论述了早期文化研究思潮的“文化实践”理论并把它安置在实践哲学的谱系中,认为亚里士多德“伦理-政治”实践哲学已经蕴含了实践与文化关系的某些线索,但是这一线索并未彰显出来,其实践哲学主要存在于政治领域。马克思“劳动-社会”的实践哲学把实践置于社会领域,社会包含了文化,然而出于现实的需要,马克思主要强调了社会的制度和组织方面。为了理解无产阶级在发达资本主义社会的革命动力问题,早期文化研究思潮挖掘和彰显了马克思社会实践的文化内涵,系统论述了文化实践理论,构建了文化实践的新模式。这是在当代全球化时代,适应时代发展的实践形式;它有力地批判了单一的经济决定论,为实践哲学开辟了可能性;它使马克思的“劳动-社会”实践哲学潜在的文化意义彰显出来,使马克思的社会实践理论更加完整;它关注大众文化实践,加强了马克思实践哲学的反精英主义。     

纳斯鲍姆论亚里士多德的实践智慧与好生活

纳斯鲍姆在《善的脆弱性》一书中以“运气”对好生活的影响为主线,考察了亚里士多德为经验立场之下的实践智慧进行辩护的理由.亚里士多德和柏拉图的“神目观”不同,他重视偶然的灾难等不可抗拒的因素对人类的好生活的影响.好生活本来是具有脆弱性的,纳斯鲍姆分析了人面对这种脆弱性表现出来的实践智慧.在这种情况下,好生活的特点是不可通约的、多元的、不确定的,实践智慧的洞察力也是非理性的、非演绎性的.只有这样,伦理学才是以人类为中心的.这也表明了亚里士多德思想的巨大张力.     

哲学退位——论康德哲学中哲学和政治的关系

V．格哈特从西方哲学传统和政治传统来解读康德的《论永久和平》,从康德对“公共契约”中“秘密条款”的反讽论述中揭示出康德的真正意图是为人民提供权利、并实现哲学和政治之间的关系的重要变革。在康德之前,西方哲学传统和政治传统一直继续柏拉图和亚里士多德的路线。按照柏拉图,哲学和政治应当合而为一,最高的理想是“国王从事哲学、或哲学家变成国王”;按照亚里士多德,哲学和政治具有一种类比结构,“从事统治就像从事哲学”。在康德那里,哲学和政治相分离,哲学批判和政治实践隶属于两个完全独立的行动领域,“从事统治和从事哲学是互补的社会活动”;因而康德为哲学和政治之间的关系确立起一个新的范式模型。这个范式模型意味着：哲学退出政治。格哈特把康德对哲学和政治的分离归因于理论知识和实践知识之间的差异。过去的哲学家往往把理论知识和实践知识同一化,从理论知识来推导实践洞见;康德看到,理论知识是先天的,实践知识则与境遇性和经验性的事务状态相关,因而不能从理论知识来推导实践知识。     

亚里士多德实践智慧思想及其复兴

亚里士多德的实践智慧(phronesis)概念是其阐释实践哲学的重要范畴,也是西方实践哲学发展的重要基点.这个概念在经过了N.马基雅维利和F.培根的改造之后其本真的内涵却被遮蔽了,甚至退化为计算与权术的代名词.但是,进入到现代之后,亚氏的实践智慧概念开始复兴.这实际上已经标识出实践智慧的普遍意义,而对此问题的研究也已关系到对整个传统哲学的理解以及对整个现代西方哲学的理性重建.本文以此为基点,在厘清亚氏实践智慧的本真内涵及其重要意义的同时,也进一步阐明现代哲学在此理路上所应具有的样态.     

海德格尔对亚里士多德实践智慧(Phronesis)的存在论诠释

海德格尔在早期对亚里士多德的实践哲学进行了独特的存在论的诠释.他的基础存在论是这一诠释的重要成果.其中,海德格尔对亚里士多德伦理学中的实践智慧的诠释居于中心地位.海德格尔把实践智慧诠释为此在揭示真理的根本方式.实践智慧是促使人进行本真的决断的"良知",因此它是人本真的个体化存在的前提.而在决断中,体现出一种特别的时机性.正是从亚里士多德描述的人的行动的时机性概念中,海德格尔揭示出了源始的时间性--融将来、过去和现在于一体的绽出的当下.     

Why the Practice of Medicine is Not a Phronetic Activity

This essay argues that the practice of medicine is not a phronetic activity in the original Aristotelian sense of that term. Jonsen and Toulmin are two philosophers who have conflated the techne of medicine with phronesis. This conflation ignores Aristotle's crucial distinction between techne and phronesis and his use of the medical analogy. It is argued that medical reasoning is similar to phronesis but does not exemplify it. Phronesis will not save the life of medical ethics. The concept could be utilized as a moral prosthetic.     

PHRONESIS,CLINICAL REASONING,AND PELLEGRINO's PHILOSOPHY OF MEDICINE

In terms of Aristotle's intellectual virtues, the process of clinical reasoning and the discipline of clinical medicine are often construed as techne (art), as episteme (science), or as an amalgam or composite of techne and episteme. Although dimensions of process and discipline are appropriately described in these terms, I argue that phronesis (practical reasoning) provides the most compelling paradigm, particularly of the rationality of the physician's knowing and doing in the clinical encounter with the patient. I anchor this argument, moreover, in Pellegrino's philosophy of medicine as a healing relationship, oriented to the end of a right and good healing action for the individual patient.     

Phronesis, Poetics, and Moral Creativity

At least since Aristotle, phronesis (practical wisdom) and poetics (making or creating) have been understood as essentially different activities, one moral the other (in itself) non-moral. Today, if anything, this distinction is sharpened by a Romantic association of poetics with inner subjective expression. Recent revivals of Aristotelian ethics sometimes allow for poetic dimensions of ethics, but these are still separated from practical wisdom per se. Through a fresh reading of phronesis in the French hermeneutical phenomenologist Paul Ricoeur, I argue that phronesis should be viewed as at least in part poetic at its very core. That is, phronesis deals with the fundamentally tragic human situation of moral incommensurability, and it responds to this by making or creating new moral meaning. Such a poetics of practical wisdom helps phronesis stand up to significant and important critiques made of it by a range of modernists and post-modernists, pointing a way forward for some important contemporary moral debates.     

The destiny of modern virtue ethics

The revival of Aristotelian virtue ethics since the 1980s does not signify that it goes back to its original form; rather, it is generally manifested in three different variations: The first is a variation of what is known as communitarianism, the second is universalism, and the third is phronesis. On the social level of morality, the serious attempt of modern virtue ethics towards improving the moral spirit of society is laudable. However, its method and reasoning deviates greatly from the demands of modern society’s integration of its operating rules and regulations, and concept of values; hence all of its attempts can hardly escape the fate of becoming just a fantasy. Yet, on the level of dealing with ethic conflicts and moral paradox, modern virtue ethics—via interpreting the theory of phronesis by Aristotle—proposes the valuable thought of a balanced morality that principlism should concern itself with and nourish itself from.     

技艺与价值:分裂还是关联?--柏拉图的整体论解答及其当下意义

在当代技术哲学研究中,柏拉图有关技艺与价值关系的论述日益受到重视。只是目前已有的技术批判与技术建构两种视角并不能完整地展示柏拉图的这方面思想,其实他在其相关的对话中试图为技艺与价值的关系提供一种整体论伦理学基础,即技艺只有包含参照善的罗格斯才能获得健康发展。当环境破坏作为文明危机日益展现在人类面前时,柏拉图的这一整体论见解尤其显得具有实践意义。     

THE BIRTH OF PSYCHOANALYSIS FROM THE SPIRIT OF TECHNIQUE1

The author aims to demonstrate, through a textual analysis of Freud's work, how the creation of psychoanalysis as a plausible set of understandings of the human mind has a methodological origin that has sometimes been overlooked: in the Greek concept of techne. Freud, an acknowledged pupil of Brentano, was well versed in Aristotelian rhetoric, and selected this instrument of investigation, dependent on language, from the outset of his efforts to describe, understand and treat the world of the unconscious mind. Working in the tradition of techne Freud actually rehabilitated ‘guessing’ (zu erraten) ‐ although it became a largely overlooked concept in Freud's work ‐ and so sought to place conjectural reason as the definitive form of knowledge for the investigation and treatment of the mind. This explains why the 1895 ‘Project’ could not succeed and why technique became irreplaceable as the via regia in ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’. Its model is founded in Aristotelian rhetoric, whose conception of language was first rediscovered by Nietzsche and was used therapeutically by Freud. Freud's view is apparent in his 1923 definition of psychoanalysis which is compared to the current IPA definition, a definition which, the author suggests, gives a misleading prominence to ‘theory’ and which shows how far a questionable rationality has removed conjectural reason from the field, to its detriment. From this point of view it is argued that the ‘precious conjunction’ (Freud) between investigation and treatment has been abandoned, and the concept of historical truth and its significance for psychoanalysis obscured.     

Managed Care's Reconstruction of Human Existence: The Triumph of Technical Reason

To achieve its goals of managing and restricting access to psychiatric care, managed care organizations rely on an instrument, the outpatient treatment report, that carries significant implications about how they view psychiatric patients and psychiatric care. In addition to involving ethical transgressions such as violation of patient confidentiality, denial of access to care, spurious use of concepts like quality of care, and harassment of practitioners, the managed care approach also depends on an overly technical, instrumental interpretation of human beings and psychiatric treatment. It is this grounding of managed care in technical reason that I will explore in this study. I begin with a review of a typical outpatient treatment report and show how, with its dependence on the DSM-IV, on behavioral symptoms and patient 'functioning', on the biomedical model of psychiatric illness, and on gross quantitative measures, the report results in a crude, skeletonized view of the human being as a congeries of behavioral symptoms and functions. I then develop the managed care construal of human existence further by showing its grounding in technical reason, exploring the latter in its modern embodiment and deriving it and its opposite, practical reason, from Aristotle's distinction between technical and practical reason, techne and phronesis. In this analysis of the role of technical reason in managed care, I point out that managed care did not have to develop its rationale de novo but could rather lift its arguments, e.g. the biomedical model, from contemporary psychiatry and simply apply them in a restrictive manner. Finally, I conclude this study by arguing for psychiatry's status as a discipline of practical knowledge.     

Modesty without Illusion

The common image of the fully virtuous person is of someone with perfect self-command and self-perception, who always makes correct evaluations. However, modesty appears to be a real virtue, and it seems contradictory for someone to believe that she is modest. Accordingly, traditional defenders of phronesis (the view that virtue involves practical wisdom) deny that modesty is a virtue, while defenders of modesty such as Julia Driver deny that phronesis is required for virtue. I offer a new theory of modesty—the two standards account—under which phronesis and modesty are reconciled. Additionally, since the two standards account involves reflection on moral ideals, I provide an account of the proper nature of moral ideals.     

Engagement and suffering in responsible caregiving: On overcoming maleficience in health care

The thesis of this article is that engagement and suffering are essential aspects of responsible caregiving. The sense of medical responsibility engendered by engaged caregiving is referred to herein as ‘clinical phronesis,’ i.e. practical wisdom in health care, or, simply, practical health care wisdom. The idea of clinical phronesis calls to mind a relational or communicative sense of medical responsibility which can best be understood as a kind of ‘virtue ethics,’ yet one that is informed by the exigencies of moral discourse and dialogue, as well as by the technical rigors of formal reasoning. The ideal of clinical phronesis is not (necessarily) contrary to the more common understandings of medical responsibility as either beneficence or patient autonomy — except, of course, when these notions are taken in their “disengaged” form (reflecting the malaise of “modern medicine”). Clinical phronesis, which gives rise to a deeper, broader, and richer, yet also to a more complex, sense than these other notions connote, holds the promise both of expanding, correcting, and perhaps completing what it currently means to be a fully responsible health care provider. In engaged caregiving, providers appropriately suffer with the patient, that is, they suffer the exigencies of the patient's affliction (though not his or her actual loss) by consenting to its inescapability. In disengaged caregiving — that ruse Katz has described as the ‘silent world of doctor and patient’ — provides may deny or refuse any ‘given’ connection with the patient, especially the inevitability of the patient's affliction and suffering (and, by parody of reasoning, the inevitability of their own. When, however, responsibility is construed qualitatively as an evaluative feature of medical rationality, rather than quantitatively as a form of ‘calculative reasoning’ only, responsibility can be viewed more broadly as not only a matter of science and will, but of language and communication as well — in particular, as the task of responsibly narrating and interpreting the patient's story of illness. In summary, the question is not whether phronesis can ‘save the life of medical ethics’ — only responsible humans can do that! Instead, the question should be whether phronesis, as an ethical requirement of health care delivery, can ‘prevent the death of medical ethics.’     

Clinical wisdom in psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy: a philosophical and qualitative analysis

To precisely define wisdom has been an ongoing task of philosophers for millennia. Investigations into the psychological dimensions of wisdom have revealed several features that make exemplary persons "wise." Contemporary bioethicists took up this concept as they retrieved and adapted Aristotle's intellectual virtue of phronesis for applications in medical contexts. In this article, we build on scholarship in both psychology and medical ethics by providing an account of clinical wisdom qua phronesis in the context of the practice of psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy. With the support of qualitative data, we argue that the concept of clinical wisdom in mental healthcare shares several of the key ethical dimensions offered by standard models of phronesis in medical ethics and serves as a useful, albeit overlooked, reference point for a broader development of virtue-based medical ethics. We propose that the features of clinical wisdom are pragmatic skills that include, but are not limited to, an awareness of balance, the acceptance of paradox, and a particular clinical manner that maintains a deep regard for the other. We offer several suggestions for refining training programs and redoubling efforts to provide long-term mentorship opportunities for trainees in clinical mental healthcare in order to cultivate clinical wisdom.