Cleverness is, as Gwendolin Kirchhoff describes the everyday sense of the German word Klugheit, the ability to look after your own interest intelligently within the wider context. In her 2026 conversation with Elisa Gratias for Manova she says: “We say that someone is clever who is able to protect their self-interest in an intelligent way within the wider context.” (Kirchhoff, 2026, Manova, 00:05:35) Her counter-question follows in the same breath: “That is clever. But is it also wise?” (Kirchhoff, 2026, Manova, 00:05:43) Aristotle counts phronesis among the virtues; Kant and Schelling describe Klugheit as a skill in choosing means. Kirchhoff’s own definition reads: cleverness is the applied art of self-interest and extraction.
#What does it mean to be clever?
Being clever, in everyday use, means protecting your own interest intelligently within the wider context; that is how Gwendolin Kirchhoff describes it.
Arthur Schopenhauer describes in The World as Will and Representation an acuteness of the understanding that grasps causal relations. In natural science it is better called acuteness, in practical life cleverness, and strictly speaking cleverness means only the understanding that stands in the service of the will (cf. Schopenhauer, 1859, § 6). The boundaries between these terms, he adds, can never be drawn sharply, because it is always one and the same function of the understanding.
#Is prudence a virtue?
In Aristotle, prudence is a virtue. In the Nicomachean Ethics it is called phronesis: the ability “to deliberate well about what is good and expedient for himself,” not in some particular respect but about what conduces “to the good life in general”; it is “a virtue and not an art” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics VI 5, transl. Ross). English translations render the word as practical wisdom (W. D. Ross) or as Prudence (H. Rackham). This is the sense in which leadership ethics speaks of practical wisdom; more on the thinker himself is in the entry on Aristotle.
Immanuel Kant defines the word differently in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). He calls skill in choosing the means to one’s own greatest well-being Klugheit, prudence in the narrowest sense (cf. Kant, 1785, AA IV 416). Its precepts remain hypothetical: they command an action only as a means to some other purpose, and they are counsels of prudence, not commands of morality.
For Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, in the Philosophy of Revelation (lectures of 1841/42), cleverness is not bound to moral ends: it is compatible even with ends that are not really ends at all, since the immoral can never be a true end (cf. Schelling, 1841, Lecture 10). Schelling does not dismiss it altogether. Cleverness is already ascribed to whoever knows how to guard against harm, and it belongs to all human affairs and to philosophy above all: it takes a true serpent’s cunning to guard against error. To that extent, however, it has the mere meaning of a means.
#Why does Gwendolin Kirchhoff call cleverness an art of extraction?
For Gwendolin Kirchhoff, extraction means tearing things out of their natural context for your own advantage, without recognising the context in which you stand. That is how she explains, in the Manova conversation, her formula of cleverness as the applied art of self-interest and extraction, which the entry on wisdom quotes in full: at some point people began to extract at the expense of others and to tear things out of their natural context for their own advantage, without recognising the natural context in which they stand (cf. Kirchhoff, 2026, Manova, 00:09:14–00:09:31).
Her example is gold. We hoard it, lock it away in vaults, expect it to protect us against inflation, and “it is also clever to own gold” (Kirchhoff, 2026, Manova, 00:09:44). The further question, for her, is what office gold holds in the whole context of nature (cf. Kirchhoff, 2026, Manova, 00:09:47–00:09:55). She points to the Kogi, whose highest status is wisdom, “not cleverness, not technology” (Kirchhoff, 2026, Manova, 00:10:02). As she tells it, the Kogi see that the veins of gold beneath the earth must stay extended because they hold the form-information of everything alive; animals, plants and people lose strength when the gold is taken out. We need gold, Kirchhoff says, only because of particular contexts: “And so cleverness always exists in a context of contexts.” (Kirchhoff, 2026, Manova, 00:10:44)
For Kirchhoff, cleverness also includes the constant multiplication of indicators and figures, in a culture that must keep multiplying numbers torn out of their context (cf. Kirchhoff, 2026, Manova, 00:11:31). Her second example, a reinsurer that profits from hurricane damage, is told in the entry on wisdom.
#Did cleverness take the place of wisdom?
According to the Waldorf teacher Ernst Bindel (1890–1974), an old current of wisdom began to dry up, gradually making way for a new current that led to cleverness. Gwendolin Kirchhoff reads from his book Die ägyptischen Pyramiden als Zeugen vergangener Mysterienweisheit (The Egyptian Pyramids as Witnesses to Past Mystery Wisdom) in the Manova conversation: there was once an old current of wisdom that ran beyond all cleverness; from the end of the Egyptian cultural period, from the building of the first pyramids, it began to dry up, making way for a new current that ran beyond all wisdom and led to cleverness (cf. Bindel, read aloud in Kirchhoff, 2026, Manova, 00:06:17–00:06:54). Kirchhoff calls this “a peculiar statement” (Kirchhoff, 2026, Manova, 00:06:55) and sums it up: “Here cleverness appears as a substitute for wisdom.” (Kirchhoff, 2026, Manova, 00:06:57)
Later in the conversation she comes back to the beginning, with a caveat: what has to do with the theme of cleverness seems to have begun somewhere, and that beginning is mostly assigned to Egypt. There, she says, a power-shaped culture arose, pharaonic, with castes of priests, a worldview that brought power-shaped developments of civilisation in its wake across the world (cf. Kirchhoff, 2026, Manova, 00:11:57–00:12:22).
#What separates a clever ruler from a wise one?
Humaneness separates the clever ruler from the wise one. That is how Gwendolin Kirchhoff puts it in her lecture on political wisdom in Chinese philosophy (2025): taking into account the development of the human being as a human being, and recognising the pitfalls of human nature, is the main difference between the wise and the merely clever king (cf. Kirchhoff, 2025, Political Wisdom, 00:06:04–00:06:24). A ruler driven without conscience by the will to power would be called sly or cunning; one who takes the requirements of power into account we call, in her words, at most clever, but not wise (cf. Kirchhoff, 2025, Political Wisdom, 00:03:34–00:03:52).
Mencius put the distance between the useful and the good into an image: whoever rises at cockcrow and thinks of nothing but his own profit is a companion of the robber Zhi. The difference from the sage Shun, he says, lies in the distance between good and useful (cf. Mengzi, transl. Wilhelm, 1916, VII A 25).
#What does Athena stand for?
For Gwendolin Kirchhoff, Athena stands for strategic intelligence: a cleverness that masters unbridled emotions and chooses a longer-term path so that one’s own will prevails. In Greek mythology Athena is the goddess of wisdom, strategy and battle. In a conversation with Elisa Gratias for TransitionTV (2026), Kirchhoff reads her as the figure of this one form of cleverness. Her starting point is the question of whose spirit Odysseus is the child of: “Odysseus is Athena’s child.” (Kirchhoff, 2026, TransitionTV, 00:30:29) Athena, she says, is the goddess who guides him (cf. ibid., 00:30:31).
“As a goddess, Athena is born from a head.” (Kirchhoff, 2026, TransitionTV, 00:30:52) This is how Kirchhoff tells her origin: Zeus swallows the Titaness Metis, the goddess of cunning, and carries their daughter inside his skull; Hephaestus splits his head open, and the goddess leaps out fully grown, with sword and armour (cf. Kirchhoff, 2026, TransitionTV, 00:31:07–00:31:49). Because the goddess of cunning has been swallowed, Athena can say she has only a father (cf. ibid., 00:31:52). A woman who understands herself as coming solely from the father is, for Kirchhoff, a particular spirit (cf. ibid., 00:34:19): “And this spirit is the spirit of strategic intelligence.” (Kirchhoff, 2026, TransitionTV, 00:34:30)
Where Athena intervenes or her power takes effect, people master themselves, master even unbridled emotions, and choose a strategically longer-term path instead; that is how Kirchhoff describes it, noting that the Iliad depicts this too (cf. Kirchhoff, 2026, TransitionTV, 00:34:41–00:34:58). Her follow-up question concerns the kind of strategy this is: it rests on cleverly helping one’s own will to prevail over the longer term (cf. ibid., 00:35:00). “That doesn’t mean it is entirely without compassion, but it is still oriented towards the will.” (Kirchhoff, 2026, TransitionTV, 00:35:09) Against this she sets another direction for thought: “I could just as well relate my thinking and my intelligence to the meaning of the earth, to which I want to stay true and which I serve.” (Kirchhoff, 2026, TransitionTV, 00:35:15) She calls Athena’s strategic intelligence “a cleverness, you could say, an instinctive cleverness” (Kirchhoff, 2026, TransitionTV, 00:35:35).
#Cold cunning and the second question
Schelling counts cleverness among all human affairs. Kirchhoff’s question aims at something else. In the film Geistige Krise unserer Zeit (The Spiritual Crisis of Our Time, 2025), Kirchhoff describes how a rational turn towards the world can become a cold cunning that eventually only taps the world for leverage points in order to achieve something short-term; that, she says, is not wisdom in this sense (cf. Kirchhoff, 2025, Geistige Krise unserer Zeit, 00:41:12–00:41:28). Wisdom, by contrast, would be a context perceived in space and born of feeling, one that informs our actions, as Kirchhoff says in the same film (cf. ibid., 00:41:28–00:42:02).
Kirchhoff asks: “That is clever. But is it also wise?” (Kirchhoff, 2026, Manova, 00:05:43) The entry on judgement describes recognising, in a concrete case, what no schema covers; the entry on the Promethean impulse distinguishes technical capability from the question of whether it should be used.
#Sources
- Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, ch. 5. Transl. W. D. Ross. https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.6.vi.html
- Bindel, E. Die ägyptischen Pyramiden als Zeugen vergangener Mysterienweisheit. Read aloud by Gwendolin Kirchhoff in the Manova conversation (2026), 00:06:17–00:06:54.
- Kant, I. (1785). Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals). Akademie-Ausgabe vol. IV, p. 416.
- Kirchhoff, G. & Gratias, E. (2026). Die gefährlichste Form von Intelligenz (The Most Dangerous Form of Intelligence) [Video]. Manova, YouTube, 14 August 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI43E5jdQQw
- Kirchhoff, G. & Gratias, E. (2026). «Wie frei sind wir wirklich?» Gwendolin Kirchhoff über Fremdbestimmung, Wut & die Macht der Gedanken (How Free Are We Really?) [Video]. TransitionTV, YouTube, 10 October 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTW7B162RPs
- Kirchhoff, G. (2025). Lao-Tsu, Konfuzius & Menzius – Politische Weisheit in der Chinesischen Philosophie (Political Wisdom in Chinese Philosophy) [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRhjoVeim_8
- Kirchhoff, G. (2025). Geistige Krise unserer Zeit (The Spiritual Crisis of Our Time) [Film by Victoria Film, with Eugen Drewermann and Iain McGilchrist]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed5FLWuM9cM
- Mengzi (1916). Mong Dsï: Die Lehrgespräche des Meisters Meng K’o. Transl. Richard Wilhelm. Book VII A, 25.
- Schelling, F. W. J. Philosophie der Offenbarung (Philosophy of Revelation; lectures of 1841/42), Lecture 10.
- Schopenhauer, A. (1859). Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation), vol. 1, 3rd edition, § 6. Quoted from the zeno.org text.
