Hellenic musings: A Commentary

Abstract

I once thought that I knew what it meant; I even wrote an entry about it in the Encyclopedia of Ethics.1 I said there that it had something to do, at least in a contemporary context, with attacking the prioritising of theoria that characterised Aristotle's and other classical Western philosophies. I linked Sartre's use of it in the Critique of Dialectical Reason with the so-called 'Praxis School' of Yugoslav philosophers a linkage that I had indeed made, mentally, when I first opened my new copy of Volume One of the Critique in 1961 and found Sartre writing 'praxis' on nearly every page. I also mentioned the use to which Antonio Gramsci, to whom Joseph Walsh refers in his paper, put the word, making 'the philosophy of praxis' his prisoner's code name for Marxism, and I referred to Habermas and Dussel as other contemporary thinkers in whose works praxis looms large. I am no longer sure that I know what it is. The word is used so universally now that it seems to me to be en route to losing all meaning. This is no one's fault in particular, but simply a function of ingrained philosophical hexis, no doubt. In his book, Kristian Klockars contrasts his hermeneutics of praxis with a hermeneutics of linguisticality. But logos is also a kind of praxis, and in feet Sartre himself, although his treatment of language in the 'Love, Language, and Masochism' section of Being and Nothingness is not his proudest moment in that book, at least makes it very clear there and elsewhere that it is a mistake to draw a rigid line of division between the different types of behaviours