The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

a philosophical psychology? 317exercise of any virtue. It should not be sorted away as a minor aspect oftemperance.I agree with Peterson, Seligman, and their collaborators that the exactsorting of strengths into the wider virtues is not very important to theirproject, since their empirical work goes on always at the level of “strengths”or at the still lower level of “situational themes.” Yet the sorting is importantfor my own project, namely, finding how the classical virtues lie down oncapitalism. The team appears to me to have sorted mistakenly here, mainlybecause it has not looked closely enough into the meaning in Western ethicalhistory of “prudence” as against “wisdom” and “temperance.” That’s nogreat sin in a splendid project. After all, even a well-regulated team of overforty people can’t do everything, and they are to be congratulated for theirjust and prudent gestures toward the history of ethics.One side of the problem, I would argue, is that the authors have confusedphronēsis, practical wisdom, with sophia, theoretical wisdom. This at anyrate is the way Aristotle typically used sophia, as a supreme and scientificknowledge. According to Liddell and Scott, earlier sophia does refer in factto “skill” or indeed “practical wisdom.” You could contrast phronēsis insteadwith episteme, the usual Greek word for knowledge. 8 But anyway phronēsisis devalued by the prestige of Theory. Aquinas, as I’ve noted, did not thinktheoretical, speculativus wisdom was a virtue at all, but a gift of the HolySpirit, though he himself possessed the gift to a miraculous degree. Aquinasdistinguished, for example, the theoretical “knowledge” of chastity, the kind,say, a philosopher might have, from the prudential “knowledge by connaturality”that a truly chaste person has in her life. 9The definition of wisdom given in chapter 2 of the Peterson and Seligmanbook, “Universal Virtue? Lessons from History,” drafted by KatherineDahlsgaard, depends revealingly on a German source, namely, certainresearchers at the Berlin Max Planck Institute. It is “revealing” because,remember, all Germanic languages except English have difficulty in translatingLatin prudentia = Greek phronēsis. The Berliner Max Planckers speakof wisdom as “good judgment and advice about important but uncertainmatters of life.” 10 Yes. But this is precisely phronēsis, or Latin practical prudentia,not Germanic Weisheit or wisdom, which mixes the practical and thetheoretical. The Dutch word for philosophy is wijsbegeerte, wis[dom] desire,a calque on the Greek literal meaning, philo-sophia, “love of theoretical wisdom.”English/French/Latin “prudence” is not Aristotle’s theoretical sophia,