Prudence, Part 2

Breaking on the Floor, Docility, etc.

As I suggested last week, the idea behind the virtue of Prudence is that you can only “realize”the good—that is, bring good into being—if you are open to reality. As Josef Pieper puts it,

Realization of the good presupposes that our actions are appropriate to the real situation, that is to the concrete realities which form the “environment” of a concrete human action; and that we therefore take this concrete reality seriously, with clear-eyed objectivity.

“Clear-eyed objectivity” is a big ask, I know. We all have our biases and our blind spots, not to mention our perceived self-interests and our desire not to be kicked out of whatever in-group is important to us. That’s why I like the language of “openness” to reality. Can you at least want to align with reality, even if reality turns out to be different than you thought? Reality, after all, is the only place you can be useful and fulfilled and happy.

In his excellent book, How to Think, Alan Jacobs writes about “breaking on the floor.” It’s a phrase used by debaters in the Yale Political Union to mean changing one’s mind in the middle of a debate, with everybody watching. (Unlike the “competitive” format used by high-school and college debate teams, in which debaters are assigned a pro or con position and expected to score points making the best possible arguments whether they believe them or not, in the YPU debaters express their actual positions and actually try to persuade.) According to former YPU debater Leah Libresco, candidates for leadership in the YPU are asked “Have you ever broken anyone on the floor?” Have you ever been so persuasive that you have caused your opponent to change his or her mind? To a debater, obviously, breaking someone on the floor would feel like a triumph. But the next question is just as important: “Have you ever broken on the floor?”

And to this question, Libresco says, “The correct answer was yes.” After all, “It wasn’t very likely that you’d walked into the YPU with the most accurate possible politics, ethics, and metaethics. If you hadn’t had to jettison some of your ideas several years in, we had our doubts about how honestly and deeply you were engaging in debate.” James Boswell, in his famous Life of Samuel Johnson, speaks of Johnson’s habit of “talking for victory,” but in the YPU, at least at its best, this would not be a virtue.

In that sense the stakes in the YPU were considerably higher than the stakes of standard competitive debate: you didn’t just win or lose according to what some judges decreed about your ability to defend a designated position; you were vulnerable to changes of your own mind.

This seems like a good place to return to Pieper’s great phrase that I cited last week: “the limberness of humility and objectivity.” It is easy to be rigidly committed to the story in your own head about how things are or how they ought to be. Your mind is a microcosm, a little cosmos that gives you access to a macrocosmos shaped by the mind of God. Speaking for my own self, I find it pretty tempting to shut out the macrocosmos and dwell in the microcosmos of my mind as if it were the whole world. But, as Thomas Aquinas put it, “No man is self-sufficient in matters of prudence.”

As if the word prudence weren’t sufficiently old-fashioned and baggage-laden, Pieper (drawing on Aquinas) introduces docility. I don’t especially like to think of myself as docile, but Pieper offers docilitas as an ideal to strive for:

What is meant [by docilitas] is the kind of open-mindedness which recognizes the true variety of things and situations to be experienced and does not cage itself in any presumption of deceptive knowledge. What is meant is the ability to take advice, sprung not from any vague “modesty,” but simply from the desire for real knowledge.

The desire for real knowledge—there lies the essence of real humility. By contrast, writes Pieper, “a closed mind and know-it-allness are fundamentally forms of resistance to the truth of real things.”

Prudence, as I wrote last week, is the starting point for all the virtues: Justice, Fortitude, Temperance, Faith, Hope, and Love all require an openness to the truth of real things. We’ll get to those virtues in the coming weeks.

Meanwhile, a summation of Prudence, adapted from Pieper’s Four Cardinal Virtues: Prudence transforms knowledge of reality into realization of the good by way of

• the humility of unbiased perception

• the trueness-to-being of memory

• the art of receiving counsel

• alert readiness for the unexpected

• studied deliberation, and

• boldness of decision (after deliberation).

Next week, an etymological interlude about docility and related words, then on to Justice.

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Mitali Perkins on Just Making

Mitali Perkins (mitaliperkins.com) has written many books for young readers, including You Bring the Distant Near (nominated for a National Book Award) and Rickshaw Girl (adapted into a film), all of which explore crossing different kinds of borders. Her goal is to make readers laugh or cry, preferably both, as long as their hearts are widening. Her new book is for grownups. It’s called Just Making: A Guide for Compassionate Creatives. In it, Mitali begins answering the questions, “Why should we make art while injustice and suffering wreak havoc?” “How can we justify making beautiful things?” and “How do we keep doing the work?” In this episode Mitali Perkins and I talk about justice and creativity, the ups and downs of Mitali's career, five destructive interior forces that keep us from doing creative work, and practices that counteract those forces.

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