Counsel

With the end fixed, the intellect turns to the road. Counsel is inquiry: an open, exploratory search for the means by which this end might actually be reached.

Aquinas notes that counsel is only about things that are within our power and uncertain. We do not deliberate about the weather, which we cannot affect, nor about the route to a room we know well, where nothing is in doubt. Deliberation is the specific labour of the region between impotence and obviousness — which is exactly the region where interesting work lives.

He also observes that counsel must end. The search for means could always be extended, another option always canvassed; and a will that waits for deliberation to exhaust itself will never act at all. Good counsel is therefore not the most thorough counsel but the counsel proportioned to the matter — thorough enough for what is at stake, and no more.

In Actus Humani

Counsel is what you are doing when you break an end into acts and are not yet sure the breakdown is right. It is worth doing deliberately and visibly: write the candidate acts down, including ones you expect to discard. The tag #counsel marks the acts whose whole purpose is to find out how.