 Justice is the virtue governing our relations with others. It is the perpetual and constant will to render to each person what is due to them. Unlike virtues concerned with inner states, justice is inherently other-regarding. Its violation is not merely a personal failing but an active injury to the community and the social order.
 Temperance is the virtue governing appetite and pleasure. It is the mean between the vice of deficiency called insensibility, and the vice of excess called licentiousness or profligacy. Its object is not the negation of pleasure, but rather the rational governance of pleasure: ensuring desire is subordinate to reason, which is to say, subordinate to the good of the whole person. I often prefer the translation self-mastery over temperance, and you will see me use both names for this virtue in my work.
 This reflection offers a framework for cultivating the cardinal virtue of andreia, which is often translated as courage or fortitude. Its most literal translation, however, is manliness. That tells us a lot about the virtue, and a lot about manliness.
 Our good life, and so our practice here, centres on the cultivation of reason, wisdom, and virtue. In a previous post we discussed phronesis—practical wisdom. I said that, as an intellectual virtue, wisdom is the source of the moral virtues. To those we now turn.
 This post is about φρόνησις or phronesis, which we translate as wisdom or practical wisdom. Wisdom is knowledge and understanding about life. That includes:
 Most men today who discover Stoicism encounter it as a collection of practical techniques. They find guidance on managing anger, overcoming adversity, and finding calm. This is a worthy introduction. But to understand its true power, one must see Stoicism not as a set of isolated tips, but as the logical and systematic heir to a radical idea born centuries earlier in Athens. Stoicism is the practical fulfillment of a revolution started by Socrates.
 Socrates guides us in reason and the examined life. His student Plato provides us with a map of the soul and of the virtues that make us strong, good, and happy. Aristotle--Plato’s student--developed a detailed, systematic psychology for understanding and cultivating wisdom and virtue and a flourishing life.
 Kramer: Do you ever yearn?
George: Yearn? Do I yearn? Kramer: I yearn. George: You yearn. Kramer: Oh, yes. Yes, I yearn. Often, I... I sit... and yearn. Have you yearned? George: Well, not recently. I craved. I crave all the time, constant craving... but I haven't yearned.  "[O]n a Socratic view, philosophy is relevant to just about everything, high and low. It isn't a set of problems that some care about and some don't. Philosophy means thinking carefully about whether you believe all that you say and whether it's true. It is the effort to stay awake."
--Ward Farnsworth, The Socratic Method: A Practitioner's Handbook. |