1

The Rough Ground and the Consolations of Techne

Scott H. Moore
Baylor University

Modern life is saturated with the consolations of techne. This is perhaps nowhere
more true than in the Academy and in the lives of those of us who work there. Christian
faculty and scholars are particularly prone to this temptation. One of the most damning
indictments against the Christian intellectual community is not merely our failure to
recognize these consoling fantasies for what they are but more importantly the ease with
which we have sought, and ultimately baptized, these illusive consolations. In this essay
I will attempt to defend this claim and offer an alternative.
My argument assumes that Christian education must be education in intellectual
virtue. Intellectual virtue is incoherent without moral virtue, and thus Christian education
must be built around the unity of the virtues. I shall not argue for any of these
assumptions. Each of them may of course be disputed. While I will not argue for these
assumptions, I will offer a brief word of explanation. What I mean by education in
intellectual virtue is (or includes) the cultivation of those intellectual habits and
dispositions that enable one to tell the difference between various types of intellectual
inquiry and to know which type or types of intellectual virtue are necessary to achieve the
end in mind.
Thus my essay is not a diatribe against techne itself. Techne is an essential
intellectual virtue without which one will not flourish. Moreover, a great deal of
university education is explicitly and properly focused the cultivation of those necessary
forms of techne which constitute the skill sets required by the academic discipline in

question. This is not just the case with disciplines such as computer science, accounting,
or engineering, in which acquiring the necessary techne constitutes the largest part (but
rarely the whole of) the knowledge base of the discipline. This is also the case for
disciplines like history, philosophy, and theology which each require the student to
acquire certain competencies to be able to practice and pursue the discipline with skill.
Education in intellectual virtue requires the student to be able to know when techne is
required and when it is insufficient for the task at hand.
Following Aristotle, I want to highlight the differences between phronesis and
techne and emphasize the necessity of pursuing the difficult prudence of phronesis while
resisting the all-inclusive allure of techne. This construal seems to me to be the standard,
noncontroversial understanding of these two cardinal, intellectual virtues. What may be
counter-intuitive, however, is my desire to understand this distinction as an instance of
the difference between the Nice and the Good and to see the Nice as a false good
which perpetuates a blinding, consoling fantasy. On my reading of these matters, it
makes sense that Christian education should recognize these realities because the
character of the Christian life itself, as one of stewardship and discipleship, mandates that
we distinguish between the Nice and the Good. This difficult yet good life is indeed that
life lived in response to grace, in which human beings achieve eudaimonia.
In order to make my argument, I need to bring in some rather disparate voices,
most importantly Aristotle and the Anglo-Irish novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch.
Murdoch was always quite clear to describe her own philosophical inclinations along
Platonist, rather than Aristotelian, lines. Since Murdochs work is less well-known, I will
concentrate on her unique contribution to this inquiry. Along the way I will appeal to

insights and illustrations from the twentieth century philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Alasdair MacIntyre. Chief among my debts is the marvelous
1993 volume by Joseph Dunne, Back to the Rough Ground: Practical Judgment and the
Lure of Technique (Notre Dame Press). Dunnes title, of course, comes from
Wittgensteins aphorism, Back to the Rough Ground!1
My own conclusion is similar to Dunnes. Phronesis is not the ideal, frictionless
world of ice. It is, in many respects, a rough ground, a place of friction and contact. And
yet this rough ground not only enables us to recognize when misdirected techne offers
false consolation and but also equips us to distinguish between the Nice and the Good.

A picture held us captive.

I begin with Wittgenstein. In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein
asserts a picture held us captive. He goes on to note, And we could not get outside it
for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.2 It seems to
me that there is a common marriage between proceduralism in pursuit of efficiency and
utility and proceduralism as an instance of methodological neutrality (and methodological
neutrality turns out to be one of the most important features of inquiry). In both cases,
we are pushed toward method and procedure as exemplifying the most important
characteristics for inquiry. It seems to me that these dual proceduralisms both spring from
the consoling lure of techne.
For it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.
Efficient, useful, practicalthese words now carry connotations against which it is

1
2

PI, 107.
PI, 115.

almost impossible to argue. These characteristics are thought to be intrinsically positive.

Phrases like the value of inefficiency are simply incoherent to most people. What
could possibly be good about inefficiency? What could that even mean? If some bit of
knowledge is not useful, what good is it? When I question these kinds of assumptions
with my students they invariably think that Im trying to make a point through
exaggeration.
A picture held us captive. Captive? One might reasonably ask, Surely this is
an exaggeration. Is the consolation of techne really such a problem that one would
describe it as a kind of prison? Captivity and enslavement metaphors have a long and
varied history in philosophy, but it does seem to me that Wittgensteins language is
appropriate, particularly with regard to the allure of this kind of consolation. Below I
will address the extent to which consolation itself is a problem, but it seems to me that
the consolations of techne occur in a variety of forms and many of them are pernicious.
There is the technological messianism of our general culture in which we strive for ever
more sophisticated technologies to organize and (here is the key word) manage our
affairs and our world. It is not merely the existence of these wonderful gadgets (no small
number of which may be found in my own briefcase); it is the delusory fantasy which
many of us entertain that, through technology, we will finally be able to overcome the
challenges which we face. Surely I need to be able to access all of Plato, Aristotle,
Augustine, Shakespeare, Dickens and Dostoevsky on my Kindle wherever I travel. If I
am not able to send and receive text messages and phone calls, check my email, my
Twitter, my Facebook accounts, surf the web for everything from news updates to movie

schedules, how can I reasonably operate in the modern world? If I do not have the Find
a Starbucks App on my phone, how will I survive in Honolulu?
Technological messianism is only one species of the consolations of techne,
however, and I am not in this essay principally concerned with the consolations of
technology. I am much more concerned about the menagerie of beliefs which arise from
our over-dependence on technology, and these beliefs are the consolations of techne.
Take for instance the ways in which the easy access to information can corrupt us. When
I can always look it up, I have no reason to learn it. As Jacques Barzun noted in The
Culture We Deserve, long before the revolution of hand-held technology,
So much compiling and disseminating of data in small bundles is, among other
things, an orgy of self-consciousness. We seem to live mainly in order to see how
we live, and this habit brings on what might be called the externalizing of
knowledge; with every new manual there is less need for its internal, visceral
presence. The owner or user feels confident that he possesses its contentsthere
they are, in handy form on the handy shelf. [] The master of so much
packaged stuff has less need to grasp context or meaning than his forebears: he
can always look it up. His active memory is otherwise engaged anyway, full of
the arbitrary names, initials, and code figures essential to carrying on daily life.
He can be vague about the rest: he can always check it out.3
The same goes for my relationships with my students or colleagues. Concerning
students, to combat plagiarism, must I require all of my students to turn their essays into a
phrase-checking data base which will tell me what percentage of their work is original?

Jacques Barzun, The Culture We Deserve (Hanover, New Hampshire: Wesleyan University Press, 1989),
39.

How is my relationship to them, to their work, to their futures, transformed through the
mediation of techne? Have I even actually accomplished my goal of detecting
plagiarism? If so, for how long? When my university now requires that all papers use
Turnitin.com, what does this do to our communal culture? In what subtle ways do I
now believe that what I really need to solve this age-old problem is a technological
solution?
Similar transformations occur in my relationships to my friends and colleagues.
Notice how language is transformed. Words such as friend, chat, text, and
hundreds more all have new meanings. This is not a complaint against meaning as use.
It is the recognition of how technologically mediated engagement becomes the new
standard. Convenience becomes the standard. Just as one cannot argue against
efficiency, one cannot argue for inconvenience. But the problem is far greater than
simply convenience or inconvenience.
We see the lure of techne in our academic disciplines. Greater precision and
sophistication in analysis always calls for more exacting, technical vocabularies and
methodologies. But there is a way in which we can become so comfortable with our
methodologies that we fail to recognize or exercise the necessary hermeneutical
dimensions to our work. And as Hans-Georg Gadamer notes, hermeneutics must always
rely on phronesis rather than techne. In my own discipline, philosophy, one sees the
glorification of techne at every turn. Method and procedure reign supreme.
The analysis or critique of work principally becomes the analysis of whether
proper procedure was followed. It is a confusion of validity with truth, and in such

an environment, techne becomes the new sophia, and thus what was traditionally the
love of wisdom becomes the love of techne.

Techne and Phronesis in Aristotles Ethics

The most important classical formulation of the distinction between techne and
phronesis is found in Book VI of Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics, in which he turns to
the examination of the intellectual virtues. The five primary intellectual virtues he
discusses are episteme (scientific knowledge), techne (art or skill), phronesis (practical
judgment), nous (knowledge of first principles), and sophia (wisdom). For my purposes
in this essay, I need to examine the relationship between techne and phronesis.
For Aristotle, techne is that intellectual virtue which is exemplified by technical
skill, craftsmanship, or artistic ability. (Remember, for Aristotle, virtues are dispositions
rather than feelings or capacities, so the virtue of techne is not the skill itself; it is the
reasoned productive state which produces the skill or the ability.) Techne is a kind of
know how which enables one to know how to build a house, train a dog, paint a
picture, or pay bills on a computer. Lest it seem that techne is reserved only for mundane
activities, it is also the kind of knowledge which enables one to do differential calculus,
perform thoracic surgery, or recognize modus tollens. It is also the necessary (though
perhaps not sufficient) condition for writing poetry in a second language, dancing the
Tango, or playing Bachs cello suites.
Phronesis, on the other hand, is usually translated as practical judgment,
prudence, or practical wisdom. It is that insight into the world of human affairs
which rightly orders action. Aristotle contrasts it with episteme (scientific knowledge)

because phronesis equips one with the knowledge to respond to variable causes (things
which are not necessarily the case) and with techne because the goods of human affairs
cannot be ordered in the ways that inanimate objects or nonrational animals can be
ordered. According to Aristotle, phronesis is the most important intellectual virtue for
political science and life in community because it enables one to understand the variable
ways in which human beings relate particular facts to generalized principles. With both
episteme and techne there is a necessary relation of fact to principle.
Hans Georg Gadamer takes up the theme of techne and phronesis in his great
work Truth and Method. It is, perhaps, not too much of a stretch to describe the most
important work in philosophical hermeneutics as an extended reflection on the distinction
between techne and phronesis. One might render the thesis of Gadamers book that
Method is no guarantor of Truth, indeed, Gadamers principal aim seems to be to
disabuse his readers of the commonplace notion that somehow Method just is Truth.
Gadamer rejects this notion. For our purposes, it is important to recognize that Method is
a kind of techne.
What follows from this distinction between techne and phronesis? It means that
one cannot repair ones marriage in the same way that one repairs ones computer. There
is no single set of rules or skills or formulae which may be used to solve the problems
which vex human community. Despite the fact that the shelves at Barnes and Noble sag
from the weight of all the books that promise to teach us how to solve our interpersonal
relationship problems, overcome our dysfunctional families, win friends and influence
people, most of these volumes mistakenly offer the promise of a techne to accomplish
what only a difficult phronesis can achieve.

The Lure of Technique and the Nice and the Good

Dunnes objective in Back to the Rough Ground had been to explore the way
certain educational techniques (the behavioral objectives model), which were designed
to achieve greater education, were in fact undermining the real goals they had been
inspired to accomplish. He notes that the lure of technique offers a false promise to
educators that they need only to learn a certain technique or follow a special set of rules
or employ a new procedure in order to achieve all their educational dreams.
I would like to equate the lure of techne with what the Anglo-Irish philosopher
and novelist Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) called the Nice. Murdoch was a Fellow at St.
Annes College, Oxford, where she taught Moral Philosophy and Metaphysics. She was
also a Tutor at the Royal College of Art, London, and she lectured and taught at
numerous British and Continental universities. She authored dozens of important
philosophical essays and several books. She wrote what is arguably the first substantial
English-language assessment of the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1982, she
was named a Gifford Lecturer. She is often described as one of the three great women of
Oxford Philosophy (with Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot). Her philosophical
achievement was of the first order.
Murdoch, however, was also a novelist, a poet, and a playwright. She is, by
common recognition, the pre-eminent female English novelist of her generation. (John
Updike asserted that she was the pre-eminent English novelist of her generation, period.)
She wrote twenty-six novels, and along the way, received numerous awards, including
the Booker Prize for achievement in fiction (for The Sea, The Sea). Her last novel,

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Jacksons Dilemma, was published in 1995 as she began her descent into Alzheimers
Disease. She died in 1999.
Over and over again, throughout both her philosophy and her fiction Murdoch
juxtaposes the Nice with the Good. The Nice and the Good is in fact the title of one
of her novels, but the tension and the difference is found throughout her corpus. For
Murdoch, False love moves to false good. False love embraces false death.4 The
false good that most often tempts Iriss characters is the lure of the Nice and the
temptation to confuse the Nice with the Good. The Nice is the cosy, tidy world without
muddle, a world of easy love and convenient relationships, an ideal world in which
problems disappear. This is the Nice, and it is a consolation to those who think they have
it and an all-encompassing temptation for those who do not. In contrast, the Good is
neither easy nor convenient. It is always difficult and it resists easy definition. It is the
magnetic centre towards which love naturally moves.5
In her 1968 novel The Nice and The Good, we encounter a community of friends
who do indeed confuse the Nice for the Good. In the worst cases (like Kate and Octavian
Gray), the Nice has simply become the only Good they are capable of pursuing, or even
recognizing. In the best cases (like Mary Clothier and John Ducane), one sees the great
difficulty of identifying the Good while recognizing that pursuing it (and achieving it)
will not be Nice. As the narrator asserts near the end of the novel, Uncle Theo
recognized something more terrible still which he had feared and fled from. Theo is

4
5

SoG, 100.
SoG, 100.

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one of the few who has a glimpse of the distance which separates the nice from the
good, and the vision of this gap had terrified his soul.6
Now I need to be very careful here, because in her philosophical works, techne
plays an important role in Murdochs own thinking about the nature of art and its relation
to philosophy and (conjunctively) to truth. (She notes Beauty and the technai are, to
use Platos image, the text written in large letters. The concept Good itself is the much
harder to discern but essentially similar text written in small letters.7) And I do not want
to suggest that Murdoch principally thinks that the Nice is a techne. However, there are
two ways for her in which techne contributes to the Nice.
First, professional philosophy often has reduced traditional philosophy to techne.
As practiced in the Oxford analytical establishment (within which she was both student
and professor) professional philosophy is principally directed toward conceptual
clarification through propositional analysis. Murdoch claimed to Bryan Magee that
Literature . . . does many things, and philosophy does one thing.8 On another occasion
she noted that philosophy is fantastically difficult and I think those who attempt to write
it would probably agree that there are very few moments when they rise to the level of
real philosophy. . . . I dont think Ive done it in more than a few pages in all the stuff that
Ive written about philosophy.9 This is not false modesty on Murdochs part. As she
said to John Haffenden in 1985, if youre not doing philosophy pretty well, youre not

Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good (London: Vintage, 2000), 348.
SoG, 88
8
Murdoch, Literature and Philosophy, Existentialists and Mystics, 4.
9
Murdoch to Jean-Louis Chevalier, Closing Debate, Recontres avec Iris Murdoch, cited in From a Tiny
Corner in the House of Fiction, ed. Gillian Dooley (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press,
2003), 78.
7

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doing it at all.10 Murdoch both idealized philosophy and was frustrated by it, in no small
part it seems to me, because of this tendency toward techne as the standard of excellence
for philosophy. (She gave up her teaching position in philosophy at St. Annes College,
Oxford, in 1963.11)
Second (and of lesser importance, I think), there are indeed some characters in her
novels who might be described as pursuing techne as a way of achieving the Nice or of
finding their consolation in this techne. Such examples include Charles Arrowby in The
Sea, The Sea, Thomas McCaskerville in The Good Apprentice, and Hilary Burde in A
Word Child, among others. On the whole, however, this is not her primary focus. For
Murdoch, the Nice is a false good. It is a blinding and consoling fantasy and a product of
ones failure to pay attention to reality or how things really are. My thesis moves in
the other direction.
I want to suggest that the pursuit of techne and its consolations are for us a Nice
which must be distinguished from the Good. These consolations are a false good which
blinds us to how things really are and corrupts our attempts to be formed by the
community of faith. We are (illegitimately) consoled by our appeal to utility and
efficiency, and our clinging to these consolations becomes for us the new Nice. Weve
done everything we can. Weve done everything properly.
The more important point, from Murdochs perspective, is that techne can never
satisfy the demands of the moral life, and it is this point that we Christian professors who

10

John Haffenden, John Haffenden Talks to Iris Murdoch, (London: Methuen, 1985), cited in TCHF,
125.
11
Murdochs resignation of her fellowship at St. Annes is a complicated affair. She resigned in part
because of her unwillingness to practice philosophy in the analytic mode, in part because of her desire to
devote herself more to her fiction, and in part because of an unfortunate relationship with a colleague. Peter
Conradi, Iris MurdochA Life (London: Harper Collins, 2001), 456-58.

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quest after the new Nice and are consoled by the fantasies of techne must learn again.
What does Murdoch have in mind here? The techne that she has in mind is the techne
that is embodied in modern scientific methodologies and assumptions (for instance, some
forms of psychology or psychologically driven philosophical approaches) which pretend
to understand the human being so well as to overcome the essential variability of the
human person and the human predicament. (It is important for us to remember that this
essential variability in human goods is what demands phronesis rather than techne for
Aristotle.) She writes, But why should some unspecified psychoanalyst be the measure
of all things? [] The notion of an ideal analysis is a misleading one. There is no
existing series the extension of which could lead to such an ideal. This is a moral
question; and what is at stake here is the liberation of morality, and of philosophy as the
study of human nature, from the domination of science: or rather from the domination of
inexact ideas of science which haunt philosophers and other thinkers.12 Murdoch is
clear that her work should not be thought of as a formula which can be illuminatingly
introduced into any and every moral act. There exists, so far as I know, no formula of the
latter kind.13

The Consolation of Techne

Consolation itself is almost always suspect in Murdochs philosophy. In On God
and Good, Murdoch asserts that The chief enemy of excellence in morality (and also in
art) is personal fantasy: the tissue of self-aggrandizing and consoling wishes and dreams

12
13

SoG, 26.
SoG, 41.

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which prevents one from seeing what is there outside of one.14 And in The sovereignty
of good over other concepts, she asserts, Any story which we tell about ourselves
consoles us since it imposes pattern upon something which might otherwise seem
intolerably chancy and incomplete. It is the role of tragedy, and also of comedy, and of
painting to show us suffering without a thrill and death without a consolation.15 It seems
to me that the consolation of techne is abundantly found in the imposition of patterns
upon something which might otherwise seem intolerably chancy and incomplete. It
should not be missed that tragedy, comedy, and painting are also artsthe product of
techne.
Above I note that consolation is almost always suspect in Murdochs
philosophical thought; it is not always so. The two most important exceptions to this rule
concern austerity and love. Concerning austerity, Murdoch notes, if there is any
consolation it is the austere consolation of a beauty which teaches that nothing in life is
of any value except the attempt to be virtuous.16 Likewise with love. In Metaphysics as
a Guide to Morals, Murdoch affirms that In spite of all of the warnings mentioned
above, love, love of lovers, of family, of friends, is an ultimate consolation and an
ultimate savior.17
I think that Murdoch is mistaken here on the larger question of the value of
consolation (but not about love). There are more legitimate forms of consolation than she
explicitly allows. Indeed, I believe that a close reading of her work would demonstrate
that she makes allowances for a variety of forms of consolation, including the practice of

14

SoG, 57. [emphasis mine]

SoG, 85.
16
SoG, 85.
17
Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Penguin, 1994), 346.
15

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writing, swimming, friendship, and many more. Even traditional (as opposed to
professional) philosophy can probably be consoling for Murdoch, as Boethius taught so
long ago.
However, for my purposes, it is important to note not the small thing that
Murdoch gets wrong, but the very large thing which she gets correct. In many, perhaps
even most instances, we pursue and cling to consolation as to a kind of fantasy. We must
hear her clearly when she describes fantasy as tissue of self-aggrandizing and consoling
wishes and dreams which prevents one from seeing what is there outside one.18

Conclusion: Moral vision and phronesis

Above I note that phronesis can be understood as a kind of insight. It has
qualities of vision which enable the one who possesses this virtue to see through the
variability of human goods. For Murdoch, overcoming the fantasies of consolation
requires vision, and she relies on metaphors of sight throughout both the fiction and the
philosophy. As such, it should not be surprising that she describes fantasy as blinding
and that which prevents one from seeing what is there outside of one.
In a famous statement from her 1964 essay The Idea of Perfection, Murdoch
noted, I can only choose within a world I can see, in the moral sense of see which
implies that clear vision is a result of moral imagination and moral effort. She places
this view in the minds of many of her characters. For instance, in The Book and the
Brotherhood after Jenkin tells Gerard one has to think outward, onward, into the dark.
Gerard replies, Only as far as one can see. After that its fantasy.19

18
19

SoG, 57
BB, 244 [emphasis in the original]

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It is important here to see the contrasting pictures. If a picture has held us

captive in the one sense, then another picture must help liberate us or move us toward a
new vision of what we might see. According to Sami Pihlstrom, Murdoch advises us to
turn our gaze from philosophical abstractions or, in other words, from analytic
metaethics to the endless varieties of moral (forms of) life we engage in. It is here that
her Wittgensteinianism also becomes visible.20 Turning to a series of questions which
require phronesis rather than techne, Murdoch writes,
Our attachments tend to be selfish and strong, and the transformation of our
loves from selfishness to unselfishness is sometimes hard even to conceive of.
Yet is the situation really so different? Should a retarded child [sic] be kept at
home or sent to an institution? Should an elderly relation who is a trouble-maker
be cared for or asked to go away? Should an unhappy marriage be continued for
the sake of the children? Should I leave my family in order to do my political
work? Should I neglect them in order to practise my art? The love which brings
the right answer is an exercise of justice and realism and really looking. The
difficulty is to keep the attention fixed upon the real situation and to prevent it
from returning surreptitiously to the self with consolations of self-pity,
resentment, fantasy, and despair. [] Of course virtue is good habit and dutiful
action. But the background condition of such habit and such action, in human
beings, is a just mode of vision and a good quality of consciousness. It is a task to
come to see the world as it is.21

20
21

Sami Pihlstrom, Pragmatic Moral Realism: A Transcendental Defense (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 25.
SoG, 89.

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This seems to me to be exactly correct: good habit, dutiful action, a just mode of
vision, and a transformed consciousness. In the Christian idiom, this is what is known as
santification. My own interpretation of Murdoch leads me to wish that she had taken her
own advice further in these matters. Commonly described as one of the most religious
atheists of the twentieth century, Murdoch rejected belief in God principally out of a
rather uncritical acceptance of popular, religious demythologization and because she
thought that belief in God itself led to consoling fantasies. We might all wish that her
commitment to really looking had extended further in this regard. There is of course
no guarantee as to what she would have seen. She was, in many respects, very close to
faith. She noted that the existence of love is the unmistakable sign that we are spiritual
creatures, attracted by excellence and made for the Good.22 It seems deeply unfortunate
that she could not see how her own demythologization was both consoling and limiting to
a twentieth-century intellectual.
Nevertheless, in so many respects she is a model for Christian intellectuals who
seek to overcome those consoling fantasies of techne which prompt us to imagine that
through rules and formulae and procedure we might escape the difficulties of this mortal
coil. These difficulties, this variability of human goods, do lead us to recognize the need
for attention and habit formation which pushes toward the difficult phronesis rather than
the consoling techne. This is the pursuit of that Good which is the eudaimonia made
possible by divine grace. It is Good, but it must not be confused with the Nice.
Back to the rough ground!

22

SoG, 100