Phronesis Advisory is part of Seeking Wisdom, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research, education, and organizing institute dedicated to exploring fundamental questions of meaning and value, helping humanity find its way materially and spiritually through the challenges of the present period, and to charting the next steps in the human civilizational project. Our work is rooted in the following principles

First, we believe that human life and indeed the universe as a whole is ultimately meaningful and is ordered to the cultivation of complex organization, life, intelligence, and sapience —and beyond that to ends purposes wondrous beyond our comprehension. There are many different ways of being human and many different potentially fruitful pathways of human development, spiritual and civilizational. While cultivating our own way centered on seeking wisdom, doing justice, and ripening being, we are also committed to the development of a metatheology which allows us to distinguish between ways which are fruitful and ways which lead to or legitimate oppression.

Second, we believe that the industrial capitalist regime which has been in place for more than 200 years is inhergently destructive. Breaking down existing organization —physical, biological, and social— in order to do work and accumulate capital, it undermines the conditions for authentic growth and development and alienates human beings from nature, from each other, and from our own humanity. We need a new technological regime focused on hortic technologies which tap into and cultivate the potential latent in matter for complex organization, and leverage that to further develop and enrich what humanity can accomplish. And we need a economic structure which does not force the vast majority of people to sell their labor power in order to survive. We reject, however, the historic socialist model of postcapitalist society, centered on achieving state power and on nationalization of the means of production and propose instead a social liberal and communitarian transition focused on using public investment and income transfers, gradually reducing market pressures on workers and creating a living social wage, while people work to create new communitarian ways of organizing production. We also reject the decisionist political theology currently dominant on both Right and Left –the idea that the political authority is founded in violence, be it revolutionary or repressive. We understand democracy as a deliberation around the ends as of human life as well as the means to those ends, something which requires a sapientially literate laos and the cultivation of deliberative fora at every level, from the village, neighborhood, or workplace to the planet as a whole. Political authorities do not so much make laws as interpret the natural law –the imperative that we act in such as way as to conserve the integrity of the ecosystem and the social fabric and promote the full, free development of human capacities and of complex organization generally. We reject the idea of absolute and unconditional sovereignty –understood as the total control of a territory and its people– in favor of an organic model of authority with complex, divided, overlapping and even competing authorities.

Third, we believe that human beings need community in order to grow and develop. We are committed to conserving and rebuilding, nurturing and challenging communities and institutions which cultivate human capacities and support human beings in their search for meaning. Communities are strongest when then have an historically rooted but continuously developing understanding of the ends of human life —and the means to those ends— and when rational autonomy is respected, so that people can choose which communities they want to be part of, and feel safe enough dissenting that they can also listen and learn. While Seeing Wisdom engages the question of the ends of human life, individual and collective Phronesis helps grow build and grow communities as they find their way, build power, and create the material conditions they need in order to flourish.