In theory

[boyofbadgers]

Is praxis just an fancy synonym for practice? Or is it a bit more complicated than that?

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[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

Three dimensions of human existence (in Aristotle, reaffirmed in e.g. Arendt, The Human Condition where poesis becomes the more modern 'work'): praxis is action (spontaneous and inventive, e.g. characteristic of a statesman or warrior), theoria is detached contemplation (e.g. characteristic of a philosopher), poesis is making (according to a plan e.g. characteristic of a craftsman). Generates questions such as 'should politics derive from action or from making. Theoria cannot 'generate' anything.

To be distinguished from modern worldview' which tends to re-arrange things: the idea of theoria is lost, or dismissed to religious or mythic thinking, as 'theory' becomes something like a merely relatively-abstract guide to action or poesis. Obviously this would abolish the character of action as spontaneity (leading to the attack on modern philosophy as calculative rationality). Modern thinking often reverses the characteristics of praxis and poesis (or confuses them) since art / making is supposed to be original, creative and spontaneous. All of this is roughly premised on the complimentary assumptions that the natural world and human history are either a) convertible into each other, since man can change his own nature, and the natural world [radical or debased enlightenment view i.e. science] or b) convertible into each other since man is part of nature and the force of nature acts through man [i.e. inverted enlightenment view i.e. romanticism].

There is something equivocal about the relationship between theory and praxis in this way of thinking: theoria is the highest contemplation of the good; theory by contrast is merely a deduction from praxis, and therefore secondary to practice but sometimes accrues kudos by seeming to be more rigorous and methodical than mere action.

The 11th thesis on Feuerbach is the classic statement of modern philosophy as the desire to reconcile theory and praxis i.e. in contrast to the Young Hegelian claim that we can change the way men act, and therefore the world itself, by changing the way they think, Marx suggests that only changing the way they act upon the world (praxis as work i.e the production of the history of man) will change the way they think.