Praxis

Abstract

Praxis is an ancient Greek word (πρᾶξις) that equally stands for action and practice and was profoundly interrogated by Aristotle as one of the two modes of activity, Praxis (acting) and Poïesis (producing, making). He introduced this categorization to divide the concepts according to the nature of the activity represented by each. Poïesis (making) is an activity that gets completed with the arrival of its outcome, its Telos (end), while in the case of Praxis, the end and the activity that produces it are inseparable, because the activity’s purpose is the activity per se and not its result. Nevertheless, the transcendental quality of Praxis as an activity of understanding and thinking got lost through the division between pure (theoretical) and practical reason adopted by Immanuel Kant, who formed modern thought and defined the contemporary meaning of Praxis so as to be tautological to Poïesis. Since then, a number of theorists, having as a starting point G.W.F. Hegel and his effort to reunite theoretical and practical knowledge via his work The Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807/1977), have given a variety of interpretations to Praxis, the most outstanding ones coming from philosophers Martin Heidegger, Hans Georg Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt, Jean Paul Sartre, and Karl Marx.