This study explores the role of practical wisdom, an ability that we know but cannot explicitly tell, in literary studies. We argue from philosophical, cognitive, and literary perspectives that we cannot articulate all the things that we know and are able to do in literary interpretation. From the philosophical perspective, we discuss Gadamer’s understanding of the originally Aristotelian concept, phronesis, which (1) always depends on the concrete situation, (2) cannot be formalized into rules, and (3) can only be learned by experience. From the cognitive perspective, we argue that, according to the emerging psychology of wisdom, the three features of practical wisdom may have empirical foundations. From the literary perspective, by critically examining Nussbaum’s argument that literature matters for ethics and revisiting the cognitive evidence mentioned before, we argue that, for an adequate understanding of ethics, we need the literary form to grasp the ambiguities of a concrete situation, which is required by practical wisdom for a responsible moral judgment. Overall, we advocate the idea of cognitive poetics, which is not, as its opponents often claim, necessarily about how literary studies one-sidedly learn from cognitive science, but can be a two-way street where the two parties contribute to each other.
