My husband, Joe, is fond of saying that if you don’t look back on yourself from five years ago and cringe, you’re not growing properly as a person. He usually tells me this when I’m in full-on cringe mode, but if growth is relative to cringe, I should be roughly the size of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man by now.

But Joe isn’t talking about physical growth, of course. He’s talking about the growth of wisdom in all its many facets. According to Aristotle,1 ethos is broken down into three categories, the first of which is phronesis. We in the modern world would call it practical wisdom or prudence. Joe is talking about developing phronesis. It’s a special type of wisdom; none of that esoteric, theoretical nonsense. Phronesis is applied wisdom, the kind that requires experience. Aristotle argued that a child could be intellectually brilliant, but a child does not have the capacity to be wise because wisdom can’t be taught.2 Youngsters simply don’t have the requisite experience to develop wisdom. They haven’t lived through a whole lot yet. Hermann Hesse, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, wove this idea into Siddhartha, a novel about a quest for enlightenment:

“Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else ... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.”3 (115)

We can all learn facts or data or theories from teachers but learning how to behave ethically requires a student to graduate from the school of hard knocks. For example, in my story about the Miracle of the Sun, I learned that I should be good because goodness is the right and expected behavior; but I hadn’t chipped away at phronesis. Phronesis is the knowledge not only of what good is but how to be good and why to be good so we can improvise goodness in any curveball situation we’re thrown into. I’m still chipping away at phronesis and expect that I will be for the rest of my life. Learning how to apply wisdom in real time takes time, practice, and patience. It just does. And if you find that frustrating, you’re in good company; our friend Siddartha did, too:

“I have had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so much error, so much nausea, disillusionment and sorrow, just in order to become a child again and begin anew.” (78)

I’ll admit I have a difficult time with this. I’m impatient to have a fully-developed ethos RIGHT NOW. When I first read Siddartha, I swooned, because here was a hero trying his best to attain goodness. There he was, out in the real world and doing his very best. I was then devastated when Siddartha had an authentic experience of the real world and surrendered his ascetic life to the mundane trappings of wealth and sex. I was furious at what I deemed to be his selfish abandonment of everyone who loved him. I was ultimately pleased by his journey and resolution, but I was upset with him for a long time after I finished the book. I was disappointed in him for abandoning his ideals in the middle of his life. Middle age seemed a gaping pitfall in lots of books I love:

“Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself
                        In dark woods, the right road lost.”4 (Canto I, 3)

Ugh, et tu Dante? I vowed that I’d never be that dumb as to toss aside my ideals. Then again, when I first read these books, I was an arrogant teenager working strictly off of theoretical wisdom and in a vacuum of phronesis. Experience teaches us that life is hard and confusing and high stakes. It is rarely ever reduced to the moronically simple two-prong plan I formed as a child. Step one on the path to ethos—phronesis—is a pretty big one and one that likely bruises along the way. Experience can be like that. The truly heroic thing about Siddartha is that he kept trying. He kept making mistakes and he kept learning from them how to be better until he attained his enlightenment.

This isn’t to say that ethos is impossible until phronesis is mastered. The key here is to keep trying to do better. Keep learning. Wisdom is an evolution, not a stasis. In the service of developing something as large as a national ethos, it’s no wonder that as Joseph Campbell said, “in America…There is no ethos.”5 On the world stage, we’re arrogant teenagers and we’re going to make mistakes. That’s the nature of the human condition. We can and should look back as a nation and collectively cringe at the atrocity we committed in slavery and McCarthyism and Japanese internment camps. But in order for us to decide who we are and create a national ethos, we must grapple with and learn from the mistakes we’ve made so we can move forward and do better.  Character—ethos—is built on the back of mistakes. So here’s the critical part: we have to actually learn. We must hold ourselves to a higher standard and we must also hold each other to account. When we witness racism and systemic oppression and leave it for someone else to clean up, that’s on us. When we as a people content ourselves with greed, salaciousness, and excess, we must remember where those choices lead us. When our lawmakers fail us, we must rise up. T.S. Eliot wrote,

“The general ethos of the people they have to govern determines the behavior of politicians.”6

Our politicians aren’t an accident, they’re a manifestation of our ethos. Ethos is created bottom-up by the people; not top-down by our government. We must strive to be a nation of integrity; and if we are to demand such integrity, you, I, and every last one of us is responsible for cultivating it. It’s not enough to throw our hands up in disgust at our political landscape. We created this landscape, all of us together. It’s on each of us to roll up our sleeves to cultivate and create the landscape we want to live in. But as we get to that work, take comfort in the culmination of Siddartha’s journey and the great Truth that his toil rendered:

“…love is the most important thing in the world. It may be important to great thinkers to examine the world, to explain and despise it. But I think it is only important to love the world, not to despise it, not for us to hate each other, but to be able to regard the world and ourselves and all beings with love, admiration and respect.” (119)

Please share your thoughts on phronesis—and your ongoing thoughts on ethos—in the comments below.

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Notes:

Artwork: “Cranium” by Gordon Johnson is licensed under CC0 Creative Commons.

1.      Aristotle. “Book VI” Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin, 2nd ed., Hackett Publishing Company, 1999.
2.      Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by H. Rackham, Harvard Univ. Press, 2003. 1142a
3.      Hesse, Hermann. Siddartha. MJF Books, 1951.
4.      Alighieri, Dante. The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation. Translated by Robert Pinsky, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994.
5.      Campbell, Joseph and Bill Moyers. The Power of Myth. Doubleday, 1988. 9
6.      Eliot, T. S. The Idea of a Christian Society. Faber and Faber, 1940. 25