Phronetic science: a Nietzschean moment?

Abstract

The social sciences have long been facing the challenge of establishing their own status.One solution to this challenge has been the use of the natural sciences as a ‘model of modernization’. This has led to various critical reactions within social sciences. Two have been particularly relevant recently. The rhetorical angle that Skinner, McCloskey, and Klamer, among others, suggest in their respective disciplines, and the rescue of phronesis by Flyvbjerg, who tries to account for absent realities in the mathematical models as for example power. My hypothesis is that both (the rhetoric angle and the phronetic science) assume and complement each other in a propaedeutic way and can be interpreted as a narratological tendency that corresponds to a Nietzschean moment.

Keywords:

• phronetic science
• power
• rhetoric
• Nietzsche
• economics

Notes

1. Luhmann borrows ideas regarding differentiation and meaning from literary critic Kenneth Burke, addressing rhetoric in two dimensions. Differentiation, according to him, is when an ‘Alter’ tries to persuade an ‘Ego’, i.e., rhetoric as a first-order observation. However, rhetoric can also be a second-order observation when we consider it part of a system’s self-reflection regarding its operations. Rhetoric then takes the form of an analysis of the conditions under which a particular discourse is generated. This allows rhetoric to be understood as more than ‘speaking well’. As a second-order observation, rhetoric takes the form of a deep analysis of the conditions and semantics permitting particular kinds of discourses. This leads to new ways of thinking about the relation between social systems, rhetoric, and phronesis. From the sheer amount of space that communication occupies in system theory, along with his level of deontologicization, it is possible to treat the social sciences, including economics, as a more meaningful text in the sense of Burke.

2. Following the interpretation of Finley and Meikle (DATE) of this concept.

3. I am reading Nietzsche according to Foucault. See Foucault (1977). ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’. In Language, Counter-Memory. Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited by D.F. Bouchard.

4. This distinction is relevant given the influence of Machiavelli on Gramsci’s idea of ‘ideologies’’ modus operandi (see Fontana 1993).