Praxis

Abstract

This essay provides a concise review of the meanings of praxis, emphasizing its complex evolution since Aristotle formulated it within a triad of concepts. While the transformation of the concept owes something to Hegel, Marx’s writings in 1844–6 (not fully published until the twentieth century) gave praxis a central role in Left philosophy. Yet this inheritance is complex and uncertain. Notwithstanding many profound elaborations on the philosophy of praxis, the concept remains at once fundamental yet vague, ostensibly materialist yet metaphysical, and therefore worthy of questioning.

Key Words:

• Antonio Gramsci
• Karl Marx
• Gajo Petrović
• Philosophy
• Praxis

1.

Praxis, a transliteration of an ancient Greek word for action (πρᾶξις), plays a curious role in the philosophy of the Left. It frequently appears at decisive points as what is essential for overcoming a problem: “What is needed is praxis.”¹ Yet the concept is often used vaguely. Many writers have sought to explain how we are to move “from theory to praxis,” a slogan that not only presupposes a distinction between theory and praxis, separating thinking and action, but that also implies the political priority of the latter. The distinction and positive valence are rarely explained. The gap between the ostensible importance of praxis and its lack of transparent usage has generated great confusion, as well as an impressive literature. Both the confusion and the literature are rooted in Aristotle and are too convoluted to fully detangle in one essay. My aim is more modest: to draw upon key texts discussing praxis, particularly since Marx, in order to clarify the complexities inherent to the concept.

Praxis refers to almost any sort of human activity, any doing. While this activity need not be concrete, praxis requires more than contemplation. Sleeping, resting, daydreaming—while these are all necessary for human life, they are generally seen as too inactive to constitute praxis. This introduces an obvious complication: praxis is commonly differentiated from theory, but all human activity is accompanied by thought and, ergo, by theoretical activity at some level. Moreover, elaborating such theory—whether in the formal scientific sense or in the quotidian sense whereby people try to come to a common understanding about some problem—always involves practical activity. The development of scientific theory, for instance, typically requires dedicated space, equipment, and the labor time of specialized laborers. And for the social activity of developing a common understanding, we must engage in collective abstraction and effective communication, activities that require labor time, attention, patience, and people whose basic needs have been met at a minimal level. The differences between the development of scientific theory and that of any sort of social reasoning, therefore, are a matter of degree: both entail the working out of shared understanding through language.

Yet if praxis is always informed by theory, and if the cultivation of theory is a form of praxis, then how to know where the one ends and the other begins? And if we cannot easily distinguish the two, then how did praxis apparently come to be valued over theory on the Left?

There are several standard ways to answer these questions that do not, in my view, adequately resolve these points of confusion. One is to treat thinking as essentially passive, a nonactivity. In this view, theory (or thought) is excluded from praxis by not being practical activity. This position is generally rejected by Marxists, who recognize that thought reflects the historical social relations that give rise to it, an argument closely associated with Marx and Engels’s ([1845] 2010) German Ideology. It would be difficult to contend that thought is bound up with concrete social practices yet somehow also inactive or impractical.

A second and more appealing resolution is to define praxis as the unity of theory and practical activity. In this view, praxis is found or realized only at instances of effective transcendence of the distinction between theory and practice.² Before this second solution is endorsed, we should consider exactly how praxis could transcend “practice” (often treated as a synonym).

A third possibility, frequently conflated with the second, is to treat praxis as a specific subset of the more general category of practical activity: praxis is that form of activity that, when executed within a particular conjuncture, proves capable of transforming its conditions of possibility. At the extreme, such praxis could be treated as revolutionary or revolutionizing practice. The origin of this concept lies in Marx’s ([1845] 1976, 7) third thesis on Feuerbach: “The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionizing practice [revolutionäre Praxis].”³ By my reading, most uses of the term praxis on the Left today take their implicit orientation from the second and third possibilities, but the two are often conflated and frequently omit the qualification revolutionäre.⁴

However the term is used, Marx’s third thesis generates more questions. Where did the ostensible theory-practice divide originate, and how might praxis overcome it (whether revolutionäre or not)? How would we ever know if a given praxis qualifies as revolutionary? Finally, if we grant that praxis somehow transcends theory, and if we further contend that revolutionary praxis is what the Left really needs today, how can we prevent praxis from becoming an alibi for the repression of questioning within the Left? This concern was once elegantly expressed by Raya Dunayevskaya ([1971] 2021): “We must expose the current reduction of Marx’s concept of praxis to the “practice,” i.e., the carrying-out, by the rank and file, of the ‘theory,’ i.e., the Party line that the leadership, the intellectuals, have elaborated for them.”

2.

The term πρᾶξις appears in pre-Socratic Greek myth and philosophy,⁵ but the foundation for modern use was laid in the Nicomachean Ethics where Aristotle (2000) categorizes human activity into three modes: praxis, poiēsis, and theōria, which can be interpreted as activity, production, and contemplation.⁶ For Aristotle, the first two modes each transform things directly, but poiēsis is defined by its end: production, the bringing of something into existence. Although praxis and poiēsis both entail human activity (which always involves engaging the world around us, the matter), Aristotle saw praxis as more distinct and virtuous than poiēsis, for praxis is always somewhat contingent, directed inward, and concerned with means, not solely directed toward ends. And theōria, which emerges through contemplation of that which exists (and these other modes of action upon it), is the highest mode of activity. Aristotle’s praxis thus forms one element within an implied hierarchy of concepts that define human beings (as against nonhuman animals), with praxis a middle term between theōria and poiēsis (by implication, placing thinking above producing).⁷

Each of Aristotle’s three modes of activity corresponded to an accompanying form of knowledge: practical, poietical, and theoretical. The poietical form was largely lost to us during the transmission of Aristotle’s concepts. The turning point came with a short treatise entitled Practica geometriae by Hugh of Saint Victor ([ca. 1130] 1991) who proposed a distinction between theoretical and practical geometry: his proposal “was immediately widely accepted, and the use of ‘praxis’ for the ‘application of a theory’ has survived until our own day” (Petrović 1988, 435). John Locke tried to revive a version of Aristotle’s tripartite distinction, using the terms fysikè, semeiotikè, and praktikè, the latter defined by “the skill of rightly applying our own powers and actions, for the attainment of things good and useful” (Locke [1690] 1989, 461). Locke’s formulae did not catch on; Saint Victor’s dyad was victorious.

Locke’s text roughly corresponds to the period when praxis assumed its place in the English language. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) records the oldest meaning of “praxis” as practical doing: “The practice or exercise of a technical subject or art, as distinct from the theory … habitual practice” (emphasis added). The OED notes that “praxis” comes into the English language via postclassical Latin (with origins in Greek), offering the following definitions (among others):

[1.a.] Action, practice (frequently c1250–1684 in British sources), handiwork (1345 in a British source), medical practice (c1450, c1580 in British sources), model, exemplification (1610 in a British source) and its etymon ancient Greek πρᾶξις doing, action, practice … Compare German Praxis (17th cent. or earlier). Praxis is recorded in classical Latin as a Greek word, denoting an act, deed.

So, for around five centuries, “praxis” in English simply meant action, practice, handiwork. This meaning remains primary, yet a second connotation—concerning political transformation—arrived in the mid-nineteenth century. The OED:

[1.b.] After German Praxis, used by A. von Cieszkowski in Prolegomena zur Historiosophie (1838) 129, then adopted by Karl Marx in Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie, Einleitung in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (1844) … Conscious, willed action, esp. (in Marxist and neo-Marxist thought) that through which theory or philosophy is transformed into practical social activity; the synthesis of theory and practice seen as a basis for or condition of political and economic change. Also: an instance of this; the application of a theory or philosophy to a practical political, social, etc., activity or programme. The term has been increasingly used [in English] since the 1960s, following the translation into English of Marx’s early writings.

The record of the English language shows the effects of the early Marx’s writings, which introduced a new meaning of praxis as practical doing and historical transformation: “The synthesis of theory and practice seen as a basis for or condition of political and economic change.”⁸ In putting it this way—defining praxis as a synthesis—the OED accurately captures the language of the Left.⁹

Marx read ancient Greek fluently, and to claim that he changed the meaning of praxis is to say that he derived something that was already potentially in existence. If the OED’s definitions, 1.a. as well as 1.b., differ from Aristotle’s, the greater novelty lies with 1.b., which derives from Marx’s texts of the 1840s (as rightly noted by the OED). Yet the concept of praxis is by no means central to Marx’s writings. Indeed, it is only fundamental to three texts—his critique of Hegel, the “Theses on Feuerbach,” and The German Ideology—written in 1844–6 and only published posthumously (see, respectively, Marx [1844] 1972, [1845] 1976; Marx and Engels [1845] 2010).

Praxis is the central concept of Marx’s ([1845] 1976) “Theses on Feuerbach,” used in seven of the eleven.¹⁰ Consider theses 1, 2, and 8:

I. The chief defect of all previous materialism … is that things, reality, sensuousness are conceived only in the form of the object, or of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice [Praxis], not subjectively.

II. The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-worldliness of his thinking in practice [Praxis]. … 

VIII. All mysteries which mislead theory into mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice [Praxis].

We can summarize Marx’s distinctive use of praxis here in two claims. First, following Aristotle, Marx treats praxis as practical activity. Marx laments that prior materialist philosophers failed to grasp that “human sensuous activity,” not objects, provides the basis of our knowledge. Marx, however, extends the classical usage here with one further step. He claims that those who seek to explain social relations (as he does) must therefore examine “human practice” as well as “the comprehension of this practice” (dem Begreifen dieser Praxis; see thesis 8). The object of analysis becomes both practice and its understanding, its Begreifen.

This opens the way toward a second claim: only by grasping “practice and … the comprehension of this practice” can philosophy transform social circumstances and thereby realize itself. In the first thesis, Marx criticizes Feuerbach for failing to recognize the “significance of ‘revolutionary,’ of ‘practical-critical,’ activity.” Marx thus equates practical-critical activity (i.e., praxis) with revolutionary politics. And the third thesis concludes: “The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.” I take this to mean that practices are revolutionary to the extent that the transformation of social relations coincides with the transformation of the circumstances that produce these social relations. For Marx, writing in 1844–6, social and economic relations shape consciousness. Through revolutionary activity, people may come to understand themselves differently and transform these economic conditions. Revolutionary praxis would characterize such “coincidence” of “changing circumstances” and social “self-changing.” Thus, for Marx, the critique of society must aim to explain actual social practices—to bring about the comprehension of practice—through practice. Where achieved, praxis would comprise the realization and overcoming (Aufheben) of philosophy.¹¹ One imagines that in a communist society the activity of philosophy would be reconstituted in some as yet unimaginable form.

3.

From whom or from where did Marx obtain this concept of praxis? The standard answer is Hegel. In this view, Marx’s conception of praxis is the result of his transposition of Hegel’s logical categories into an ontology of social life. Here, praxis reflects Marx’s adequation of conscious action, practical social activity, and the movement of history.¹² This holds some truth—see Lobkowicz (1967) and Bernstein (1971)—but also three serious complications.

First, as we have already seen, is the lengthy genealogy of discussions of praxis and the theory-practice distinction prior to Hegel. I have already mentioned Aristotle, Hugh of Saint Victor, Locke, and others, but the list goes on. Kant’s ([1793] 1991) essay “On the Common Saying, ‘That May Be True in Theory, but Not in Practice [Praxis],’” which Marx would likely have read as a philosophy student, deserves mention. In this essay, Kant on one hand refutes those who would deny the potential, practical consequences of theoretical writings and, on the other, shows that “the validity of a theory did not depend upon its revolutionary consequences” (Reiss 1991, 274).

It is not clear that Hegel broke with this tradition in any fundamental respect, nor that praxis was a critical concept for his system.¹³ I think it is more precise to say that Marx transposed Aristotle’s conception of praxis into a Hegelian key, but this generates a second complication. Marx’s “Hegelian” conception of praxis appeared chronologically after—and via the mediation of—that of August von Cieszkowski (1814–94): the first writer, you may recall, cited in the OED for the modern post-Hegelian meaning of praxis. In a concise philology, Stepelevich (1987, 267) argues that Cieszkowski introduced the concept of praxis into Hegelian interpretations in his 1838 Prolegomena zur Historiosophie, a work that influenced Marx in the early 1840s: “Praxis was not, for Cieszkowski, a revolutionary act but a new way of approaching social reality … there are grounds for arguing that the Marxian conception of ‘praxis’ finds its principal source in Cieszkowski’s reading of Hegel and that this reading afforded a model of how philosophy could play a direct role in the formation of a reasonable future.” Yet Marx’s thinking about Hegel in this period was deeply influenced by Moses Hess,¹⁴ who decisively modified Cieszkowski’s reading to emphasize praxis qua revolutionary action. As Stepelevich concludes, “Cieszkowski’s evolutionary praxis became, through Hess’s ‘Philosophy of the Deed,’ Marx’s critical-revolutionary praxis” (265). Kubat (1961) and Petrović (1988) arrive at similar conclusions. Nevertheless Marx’s debt to Cieszkowski has been largely ignored or repressed by the Marxist tradition—perhaps because Cieszkowski was Christian, liberal, and bourgeois.

This raises a third complication, another reason that Marx’s conception of praxis should not be read as Hegelian or Cieszkowskian. As we have seen, Marx’s use of praxis carries us back to Aristotle (2000), who examined praxis (a term he adopted from Plato, thence the pre-Socratics) principally in his Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle’s concern apropos praxis lies with elaborating a theory of how to live well: eudaimonia (flourishing). As noted above, for Aristotle theōria is superior to praxis since contemplation of the act always follows from activity: theōria arises from praxis. Yet Aristotle’s reasoning here is more complex than this.¹⁵ For one thing, he saw theōria as a specific kind of activity, one that he distinguished from but also included within praxis. What distinguishes theōria ultimately is its end, or telos: the correct grasping of existence (something he implies is only possible for the gods). Theōria could then be seen as human praxis reflecting a drive to become consistent with the praxis of the gods. In sum, while Aristotle could be said to have inaugurated the theory-practice divide, it was not divided for him in the way we tend to presume.¹⁶

The virtuous resonances of praxis in contemporary theory are thus ancient. Yet the tie between praxis and eudaimonia was cut by Marx in 1844–6. Marx did not seek individual flourishing but the transformation of an unjust social formation.

As they were translated, published, and circulated during the 1920s and 1930s, Marx’s texts from 1844–6 had a shattering influence on Marxist philosophy.¹⁷ Given the importance of praxis to these texts, the concept became central to debates among Marxists about philosophy and revolution playing out in the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. Hence, the uptake of these concepts is impossible to separate from several rounds of debate on the meaning of the revolution, on Marxism-Leninism, and the rise of Stalinism. These debates about praxis were partially suspended during World War II and then replayed in an existential key in its aftermath.

It is impossible to do justice to the full story here, which would require historicizing the positions taken by figures as important and divergent as Vladimir Lenin ([1909] 2014), Rosa Luxemburg ([1910] 1972), György Lukács ([1923] 1971), and Mao Tse-Tung ([1937] 2020).¹⁸ Moreover, these thinkers inspired a second wave of critical writings by postwar Parisian philosophers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty ([1948] 1964), Jean-Paul Sartre (1960), Louis Althusser ([1963] 2005), and Jacques Derrida ([1976–7] 2018); not to mention the Frankfurt School (see Feenberg 2014); elaborations across Latin America by, for example, Paulo Freire ([1968] 1970), Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, and Bolívar Echeverría (see Gandler 2016); and the “philosophy of liberation” movement generally (see Mendieta 2020). During the 1960s, a conception of “Third World praxis” became popular,¹⁹ and Marxist philosophers in the USSR cultivated an “activity approach”—in contradistinction to the orthodoxy of dialectical materialism—that shared similarities to Western interpretations of praxis (Oittinen and Maidansky 2015). By the mid-1970s, praxis was taken up by many feminist theorists—Faye Weldon’s (1978) novel, Praxis, is emblematic²⁰—and it remains vital to many reflections within the feminist movement (see Ali 2009; Swarr and Nagar 2012; Stanley 2013).

Such a wide variety of treatments suggests that the concept of praxis has long served as both a touchstone and a point of debate on the Left (albeit with less intensity today than in the 1920s or 1960s). A robust study of these manifold interpretations of praxis would require a lengthy monograph. Rather than attempt to sketch such a text in miniature, which would be of dubious value, I will instead offer concise remarks on two sources that remain crucial for reflections upon praxis, before drawing out some concluding arguments.

4.

The first source is Antonio Gramsci, arguably the greatest political theorist of the twentieth century, whose prison notebooks offer a powerful reexamination of Marxism. Gramsci’s (1971, 1992) notebooks methodically investigate the rise of fascism as a consequence of the failure of the Left—of the Communist Party—to win hegemony. In essence, Gramsci claims that the Italian communists failed because they did not have a strategy adequate to the task of building a Left-led proletarian-peasant alliance and because the mainstream of Italian life—as organized by the Church, state and civil society, intellectuals, and so on—actively pulled the masses toward fascism. Many peasants and proletarians, whose interests and desires should have led them to communism, came to actively consent to Mussolini’s political leadership. The masses consented to the rise of fascism because the dominant political, religious, and social institutions—organized in defense of the class relations of a capitalist society—generated a conception of the world amenable to its rise. Such an organization of social relations was enabled by the bourgeoisie, which had devoted itself to defeating communism, not fascism. For Gramsci, it follows that communists must root out those institutions, class relations, and the hegemony they engender, in toto, and replace them with a new hegemony rooted in a communist conception of the world: a program for a philosophy of praxis.²¹

Arriving at such a position required Gramsci to return to Marx, particularly his early writings, which feature prominently in the prison notebooks. In Marx’s conception of praxis Gramsci found a powerful lever with which to push against the crude forms of determinist, positivist, and materialist dogma that had encrusted Marxism since the Second International. That explains why Gramsci renamed Marxism “the philosophy of praxis.” Many readers of the prison notebooks have interpreted Gramsci’s use of this term as a code word to avoid the prison censor; however, this hypothesis has been decisively disproven.²² Gramsci’s appellation was an argument for interpreting Marxism as a unique approach to philosophy that could be transcended at a point when the potential had come for subaltern social groups to think and act in new, radical ways; philosophy would then be realized through a communist praxis and conception of the world (which echoes Marx’s third thesis on Feuerbach). Gramsci emphasized Marxism’s rootedness in social practices and the necessity of transforming conceptions of the world that ground social practices. It follows that the “philosophy of praxis is absolute ‘historicism,’ the absolute secularization and earthiness of thought, an absolute humanism of history. It is along this line that one must trace the thread of the new conception of the world” (Q11 §27, Gramsci 1971, 465).²³

Gramsci (Q16 §9, 1971, 390) credited the Italian philosopher Antonio Labriola (1843–1904) with the expression “philosophy of praxis”: “Labriola distinguishes himself,” he wrote, with a conception of the philosophy of praxis as “an independent and original philosophy which contains in itself the elements for a further development, so as to become, from an interpretation of history, a general philosophy. This is the direction one must work, developing Antonio Labriola’s position.” Labriola ([1897] 1907) defined Marxism as the “philosophy of practice” in a 14 May 1897 letter written to George Sorel (1999), who had recently gained prominence for penning essays on the violence that foreshadowed some of the spirit of fascism. Labriola ([1897] 1907, 60) recognized the importance of Sorel’s emphasis on human activity and the violence of social transformation but sought to provide a Marxist critique, writing that “every act of thinking is an effort, that is to say, new labor. In order to perform it, we need above all the material of mature experience and the methodical instruments, made familiar and effective by long handling.” In a word, pace Sorel, who celebrated the will and the act, Labriola contended that critical philosophical thought, inseparable from praxis, deserves our highest regard: “So here we have arrived once more at the philosophy of practice, which is the path of historical materialism. It is the immanent philosophy of things about which people philosophize. The realistic process leads first from life to thought, not from thought to life. It leads from work, from the labor of cognition, to understanding as an abstract theory, not from theory to cognition” (60). Labriola then defined historical materialism as “the philosophy of practice,” an approach that “takes account of” humanity as “social and historical being” (60; emphasis added).

In his prison notebooks, Gramsci elaborates Labriola’s line of thinking to its fullest implications. Gramsci’s conception of the philosophy of praxis as a critique of bourgeois hegemony extends Labriola’s argument interpreting historical materialism as a “philosophy of practice”. The Sorelian view remained set against this perspective, helping to define Italian fascism (Mussolini was a great admirer of Sorel) with its extreme nationalist myths celebrating heroic acts—that is, praxis as violent action that cuts through the lassitude of inactivity and contemplation.

5.

A second source for reflecting upon praxis emerged in the 1960s, renewed through debates over Marx’s early writings and Gramsci’s prison notebooks. This is the so-called Praxis School of Marxism—the praksisovci—associated with Gajo Petrović (1927–93), Mihailo Marković (1923–2010), and others. This group, centered upon the philosophy program at Zagreb University, founded the journal Praxis in 1965 to advocate for a humanist Marxism, drawing a powerful critique of Stalinism from the writings of the young Marx and his conception of praxis.²⁴ Alongside the journal, from 1964 to 1974, the praksisovci organized an annual international conference, the Korčula Summer School (named for the island town in the Adriatic where they would gather).²⁵ The conferences and journal are unique, so far as I am aware, in facilitating regular transnational exchanges between Marxist philosophers of Europe and the USSR during the Cold War. After 1974, the conferences were made impossible (“canceled,” we might say today) by Soviet authorities who declared the group’s activities products of “revisionism and anti-Marxism” (Supek [1977] 2021).²⁶

Petrović’s 1964 essay in the inaugural issue of Praxis explained the choice of the journal’s title (on the cover, in Greek, πρᾶξις):

The title “Praxis” is chosen because “praxis,” that central notion of Marx’s thought, expresses most adequately the conception of philosophy we have sketched. The use of the Greek form of the word doesn’t mean that we understand this notion in the way as it is understood somewhere in the Greek philosophy. We do that because we want to detach ourselves from the pragmatist and vulgar-Marxist understanding of praxis and to state that we are oriented to the original Marx. (Petrović [1964] 2021).

We should appreciate the political context of Petrović’s argument, which was to fend for Marxist humanism amid Stalinism and the value of an appeal to praxis toward that end. But to claim that praxis was Marx’s “central notion” or that Marxism is the philosophy of praxis requires more of an argument (again, praxis is only prominent in Marx’s 1844–6 texts).

In fairness, the purpose of this introduction to Praxis was not exegetical. Let us therefore consider Petrović’s (1967, 77–8) argument in an earlier essay where he elaborates on the centrality of praxis for Marx, for whom “neither reason nor political activity, neither production of tools nor any other special activity or property can be man’s essence,” who considers that people are human because of their “whole way of Being, the general structure of … relationship toward the world” and to themselves. Such a “way of Being,” which is “peculiar to” humanity, is that which “Marx designates by the word ‘praxis.’” The human being “for Marx is the being of ‘praxis.’” Herein lies Petrović’s central claim: in Marxist ontology, human beings are Homo praxis. Recall that Petrović defined praxis as “human activity.” This is clearly tautological. To say that the essence of the human being is that the human is a being of human activity is circular.

To work his way through this circle, Petrović posed two questions. First, querying Aristotle, Petrović asked: “What is it that distinguishes praxis as human activity from animal activity?” This is the question of the human as more-than-animal, resolved by the concept of praxis as activity. Second: “Is it possible to give an interpretation of praxis that would determine its general structure and also contain its determination as a conscious and free activity?” This question (marked by a definite Heideggerian sensibility) would form the basis for Petrović’s subsequent attempt to square the praxis circle.²⁷ His answer: “Such is the interpretation of praxis as a universal-creative self-creative activity, activity by which man transforms and creates his world and himself. Exactly such an interpretation prevails in Karl Marx … The interpretation of praxis as a universal-creative self-creative activity contains its determination as a free, conscious activity.”

In this understanding, the human “essence” is praxis; ontology is historical. This conclusion brings us back to Gramsci’s conception of Marxism as the philosophy of praxis, an absolute historicism. Yet, unlike Gramsci, Petrović’s conception of praxis—universal, free, creative, self-creative activity—draws its coordinates from postwar readings of Marx and Heidegger, as if the Marxist existentialism of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, conceived in Paris after the war, was realized in 1960s Zagreb. However, it would not be entirely fair to define Petrović’s approach as Heideggerian or existentialist. A further motivation for his project was to compel fresh reflection on the politics of Yugoslavia during the Stalinist era, when the appeal to free and collective creative activity would not have been misunderstood. Petrović’s philosophy of praxis, pace Dews (1995), argued for overcoming capitalism and Stalinism in a direction that would transcend the Yugoslav state’s conception of socialist self-management.²⁸ Ultimately, the praksisovci failed along with the other Left communists who sought to clear new pathways toward democratic-socialist futures. Indeed, after the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1989, some former members of the praksisovci moved to the Right.²⁹ Still, like Gramsci’s prison notebooks, the journal Praxis attests to their creative, collective attempt to revive Marxism as a philosophy of praxis.

6.

Doing < = > practice. Yet nothing is less simple and less evident.

—Theory and Practice, “First Session,” Jacques Derrida

To end at this point would imply that texts by Gramsci and the praksisovci stand as achievements that demonstrate the possibility, if not the necessity, of realizing Marxism as the philosophy of praxis. And, in some measure, I would like to leave it at that. Yet such a conclusion would be facile. For one thing, unlike Gramsci, who wrote his notebooks in a prison cell, and the praksisovci, who worked out their positions on the margins of Stalinism, I am writing this at my desk in the United States in 2021. The implication is that I am contemplating praxis under relatively comfortable circumstances, but also, to put it more negatively, I am writing within a political horizon where revolutionary aspirations are rare and Marxism scarcely exists. Under such circumstances, it is especially important to try to reignite radical thought. This would seem to imply some form of return to an Aristotelian treatment of contemplation over praxis; the question remains how to grasp this relation. At any rate, to be credible, we should seek such a return without making facile gestures to the immanence of revolutionary praxis. It is not happening, at least not right here and right now.

Moreover, the reader has good reason to be skeptical of any one-sided conceptions about praxis (whether revolutionary or not). Consider, briefly, Weldon’s (1978) Praxis. Early in this feminist novel, the narrator explains the meaning of the protagonist’s name: “Praxis, meaning turning point, culmination, action; orgasm; some said the Goddess herself” (12). Recall that Aristotle distinguished poiēsis from praxis by their relation to telos: production ends with an external object, but praxis always remains partly “within” the act, a process. Assuming then that we do not wish to dismiss the definition provided by Weldon’s character (as I, at least, do not wish to do), then this conception—like the novel as a whole—could be read as a feminist reinterpretation of Marx’s revision of Aristotle. Much of the activity in her novel concerns sex, generally bad sex riven by markedly uneven experiences: men have orgasms; women (including Praxis) must deal with the practical consequences. On this basis, the equation praxis = turning point = orgasm would not seem something to celebrate, at least not for any reader with a feminist sensibility. Like many appeals to praxis from feminists of the era of its writing, Weldon’s novel challenges the boundaries of our imagination, reminding us of the inherent complexities of our relations, drives, and desires. While a close reading of the novel would be required to elaborate,³⁰ I think a claim can be made that Weldon’s Praxis does not ask us to take a definite positive or negative view of the concept of praxis but rather encourages us to confront the multiple valences within it.

If this is granted, questions arise. How is it that one concept (praxis) can seemingly transpose so many levels of human experience? And what might its recurrence tell us about the Left’s political imagination?

While I cannot fully answer these questions here, I hope it will suffice to clarify why I think we must continue to dwell upon praxis, and critically—without presupposing, that is, its affirmation. Thus, as much as I wish to celebrate the radicalism of their thought, I think we should take the writings of Gramsci and the praksisovci not as blueprints for a future philosophy of praxis but as waypoints on a journey that requires a continued confrontation with Western metaphysics.

Praxis reflects an element of a humanist metaphysics. However much the concept has evolved since Aristotle defined it as one of three forms of human activity, praxis remains an ontological concept to delineate humans from nonhuman animals.³¹ As Petrović made explicit, a philosophy of praxis implicitly takes as its subject the human qua Homo praxis: beings defined essentially by our practical activity. This has several consequences. At a minimum, it requires us to acknowledge that, although Karl Marx’s writings of the 1840s provided the foundation for the philosophy of praxis during the twentieth century, that philosophy was built upon a term inherited from the metaphysics of the ancient Greeks. And while we may not wish for the distinctions that defined praxis for Aristotle or Marx to structure our thinking about life today, historicizing and destructuring these concepts may help us to think through complications around praxis: What qualifies as praxis and why? What is not praxis? Could any human activity be antipraxis?

It would appear, then, that praxis is one of a handful of inherited concepts—like “culture”—that is at once all-encompassing, ostensibly universal, yet practically undefinable.³² In praxis or in culture, we glimpse an apparently structural element of Western metaphysics in which the positive valuation of presence is carried into our grasping of humans as beings of practical activity. The presence of the present is experienced practically. Do we have good reason to believe that the Left’s core values—collective liberation, equality, peace—thrive within such a structure of being and thinking? Although I believe that Marx remains an essential thinker, we have reason for skepticism about any humanism defined by praxis.³³

A philosophical basis for such skepticism has been established today by Giorgio Agamben (2013, 2018), who invites us to imagine a world where being is released from operativity and where, for instance, dance, poetry, and playful being can be affirmed without being grasped as praxis. This implies refusing Homo praxis in favor of a metaphysics that affirms gesture as a middle term between praxis and poiēsis. As Agamben (2013; emphasis added) concedes at the conclusion of a public lecture in Athens,³⁴ to think such a way of being “is not an easy task”:

Benjamin wrote once that nothing is so anarchical as the bourgeois order … I think that a praxis which would succeed in exposing clearly the anarchy and the anomy captured in the governmental security technologies could act as a purely destituent power. A really new political dimension becomes possible only when we grasp and depose the anarchy and the anomy of power. But this is not only a theoretical task: it means first of all the rediscovery of a form of life, the access to a new figure of that political life whose memory the security state tries to cancel at any price.

I find this argument persuasive. It implies, I think, something like a strike or boycott (two forms of nonactivity: do not sell labor power; do not buy commodities) yet applied to the political. However, there is also something odd in the twofold nature of Agamben’s characterization of the means through which we could arrive at a purely destituent power: first as “a praxis” and then as “the rediscovery of a form of life.” The latter is more faithful to Agamben’s philosophical commitments, for, if I understand his argument, a purely destituent power would not be a praxis at all, at least not as this term is typically understood on the Left. Agamben is aware of this problem but would, I suspect, attribute it to the aporia that addressing the Left today (as he was doing in Greece) requires us to use language that may contradict our own principles.

Fortunately, Agamben (2018) provides a more rigorous and consistent argument in Karman, a genealogy of praxis/action in the metaphysics of the West. Although the study remains resolutely focused on philosophical and theological texts,³⁵ the political implications of his critique are clear. He rejects state- and party-centered revolutionary strategies, avowing instead a “politics of pure means” (85). Such a politics would be expressed through gestures that aim at releasing humans from every apparatus that constitutes them as subjects of praxis and sovereignty. Against the revolutionary praxis of a Robespierre or Lenin, which justify terror (means) to constitute a new order (ends), Agamben concludes his book by appealing to the Buddha and Benjamin for their conceptions of “pure mediality” and “inoperativity,” and this “inoperativity is not another action alongside and in addition to all other actions,” not a praxis that transcends all others, but “it is the space … that is opened when the apparatuses that link human actions in the connection of means and ends, of imputation and fault, of merit and demerit, are rendered inoperative” (85). As a minimal program, this requires that “the primacy of the concept of action,” or praxis, must be “radically called into question” (60). We can therefore give up the search for the elusive conditions of revolutionary praxis. In Agamben’s view, this search was always looking in the wrong place, if it was not actually part of the problem.

While Agamben’s critique of praxis is undoubtedly radical (and his scholarship brilliant), Marxists may well ask if it remains amenable to the critique of capitalism as a historically specific form of society. Agamben is ambiguous here, but I think he would say that a metaphysics of communism would be more coherent if it were not organized on our action-centered inheritance from Aristotle (with its Christian refinements). Moreover, it seems possible to read his remarks on mediality and inoperativity as grounds for a general strike (refusing to sell the labor-power commodity; see Spivak 2014) and boycott (not buying commodities), which are necessary to any possible release from capital.

I think these points should be granted; even still, I find it impossible to imagine undoing an action-centered existence within a society organized along capitalist lines. Are we stuck within this aporia? Regardless, how could we live in a fashion consistent with Agamben’s philosophy without making refusal, gesture, and so forth into a new form of praxis? For, as Derrida ([1976–7] 2018, 86) astutely notes, “You can be sure that each time you try to cross over the edge of the opposition theory/practice you’ll be doing it with a gesture that will sometimes be analogous to a practice, sometimes to a theory, sometimes to both at once.”

To confront this challenge, it may be helpful to revisit the conflation of distinct meanings of praxis in Marx’s 1844–6 writings. Recall that Marx posits praxis as historical social being (an ontology of practical doing) in order to pose the question of how philosophy could be transcended through the transformation of political and economic life.³⁶ But a second and entirely distinct conception of praxis, essentially epistemological in nature, was produced in 1886, a decade after Marx’s death, by his close friend and coauthor Friedrich Engels. In Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, in which the “Theses on Feuerbach” were first published (and named as such), Engels ([1886] 1941) narrated the history of philosophy as an epic battle between two armies—materialism versus idealism—in which the former is defined by the claim that matter is all that exists. Placing Marx on this side, Engels asserted that knowledge can only be ultimately verified practically and actively. He thus transposed Marx’s writings on praxis from the ontological to the epistemological key, converting praxis from a means of grasping social being into the sole valid criterion of truth. Engels explicitly aimed to provide an absolute refutation of idealism, particularly of Immanuel Kant.³⁷ Engels’s position was subsequently taken up in Lenin’s ([1909] 2014) philosophical study, Materialism and Empirico-Criticism, which in the section “The Criterion of Practice in the Theory of Knowledge” refers to Marx’s 1845 thesis in order to ground a critique of Mach.³⁸ There, Lenin argued that the “standpoint of life, of practice, should be first and fundamental in the theory of knowledge. And it inevitably leads to materialism” (161). Lenin conceded that “the criterion of practice can never … either confirm or refute any human idea completely.” Nevertheless, he contended that the criterion “is sufficiently definite to wage a ruthless fight on all varieties of idealism and agnosticism. If what our practice confirms is the sole, ultimate and objective truth, then from this must follow the recognition that the only path to this truth is the path of science, which holds the materialist point of view” (161).

The persistent confusion and aporias surrounding the concept of praxis reflect a genuine philosophical problem for Marxism but not the problem that it appears to be (namely, the ostensible need to differentiate practice from theory in order to unify them through revolution). Rather, I am led to conclude that praxis is an effect of the repression of idealism by forms of historical materialism that aim to explain political economy through the analysis of a prevailing mode of production. Praxis persists because it operates as a metaphysical lever within the Left’s political thought, appearing to resolve the limits of materialism without either substituting for or correcting them. Praxis thus serves, paradoxically, at once as cause and effect of the differentiation between materialism and idealism. It can generate this distinction when, following Engels, praxis is employed as an alibi for materialism. It appears as an effect when presented as the code name for the transcendence of activity and reflection. This muddle appears to be unavoidable so long as Marxism is defined by forms of historical materialism rooted in positivism or empiricism, for there will remain a place for a concept like praxis that allows Marxists to try to escape from crude determinism and materialism. Yet, at least for Derrida ([1976–7] 2018) and Agamben (2018), such an escape will not provide an adequate basis for a radical rethinking of capitalist modernity.

Hence, I conclude that we would only be able to affirm a philosophy of praxis that has—at a minimum—abandoned the tie to materialist epistemology established by Engels in the 1880s. Here I find myself in agreement with Fredric Jameson (1988, 69–70):

“Materialism” as a term and as a concept is booby-trapped by its functional association with the eighteenth-century bourgeois Enlightenment and with nineteenth-century positivism … It would be better to grasp Marxism and the dialectic as an attempt to overcome not idealism by itself, but that very ideological opposition between idealism and materialism in the first place. The work of Sartre and Gramsci is there to argue for some position “beyond idealism and materialism,” and if one does not like the projected new solution—called “praxis”—then at least it would be desirable to search for something more adequate.

Our search for “something more adequate” continues. I suspect this search will continue for a while. Until found, we Marxists continue to look for means to achieve collective liberation and justice while speaking of this search in terms of praxis, a term derived from Aristotle and an inheritance that is poorly suited to the task. This may not seem the greatest challenge facing the Left today, yet it is linked to all the others, fundamental to them, and therefore worthy of further contemplation.

Acknowledgements

For criticisms of earlier drafts, the author thanks Kenan Erçel, Jim Glassman, Marcus Green, Will Jones, Anjali Kapoor, Kristin Mercer, Richa Nagar, Jacinda Swanson, Amanda Swarr, Camille Wainwright, and Bryan Weaver.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 See, e.g., Vodovnik (2012, 449).

2 See Petrović (1988), Wolfe (2009), and Yu (2009).

3 Derrida ([1976–7] 2018, 8–12) raises compelling questions on the naming and reading of this text.

4 To prevent such a misunderstanding, Sartre (1960, 163–377), in his “De la ‘praxis’ individuelle au pratico-inerte,” distinguishes between revolutionary praxis and the “practico-inert.” This could be glossed as a distinction between two modalities of social activity, where the latter is enacted without ever being experienced as existential: life lived in the mode of not-living, just going through the motions. By this distinction, Sartre explicitly politicized an ontological distinction drawn from Heidegger ([1927] 2010); cf. Wainwright (2015).

5 According to an excerpt from the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, the Greek goddess Praxidice (Praxidikê) would enact justice or “[watch] that justice is done.” See “Praxidike,” Theoi Project, accessed 1 October 2020, https://www.theoi.com/Daimon/Praxidike.html.

6 On Aristotle’s conception of praxis, see Derrida ([1976–7] 2018), Adkins (1978), Dehart (1995), and Knight (2007).

7 As Meilaender (2009) notes, the modern emphasis on the theory-praxis distinction elides a political implication of Aristotle’s thought that is clarified when poiēsis is included: “The distinction between theoria and praxis is familiar, but … that between praxis and poiesis, action and production, is equally important for understanding Aristotle’s political views. Because poiesis is undertaken not for its own sake but in order to create some other object, Aristotle regards it as an inferior form of activity, subservient to an external end, that of the product’s consumer rather than its producer. Praxis, on the other hand, designates virtuous political and ethical action that contributes directly to the actor’s own happiness (eudaimonia), rather than serving ends determined by others.” See Derrida ([1976–7] 2018, eighth session) and Karatani (2017).

8 Elements of this conception are implied by two other OED entries: 1.d., an “action entailed, required, or produced by a theory,” and 1.e., as “the performance of … purposive movement.”

9 However, “synthesis” is not a word Marx used to characterize praxis, so far as I am aware.

10 “Praxis” and its cognate (praktisch) are used fourteen times.

11 I have drawn an ambiguity concerning the relationship between the two meanings of praxis from the “Theses.” If these two meanings are indeed found in the “Theses” (as I believe they are) the ambiguity results from the distance between “sensuous practice” as the substance of Marx’s analysis, on one hand, and his conception of praxis qua revolutionary activity, on the other. The former is the basis of Marxist materialism; the latter defines a Marxist political aim. Notably, both are valorized. Although the two conceptions of praxis may be distinct in the “Theses,” for Marx both are good.

12 On the Hegelian conception of praxis, see Bernstein (1971). Feenberg (2014, 7) writes that Marx’s philosophy of praxis hinges upon “the idea that history, properly understood, has ontological significance. As a philosopher of praxis, Marx did not choose between an ontological and a historical interpretation of the social categories; he chose both.”

13 Stepelevich (1987, 266) claims that Hegel never used the term. While I have not read all of Hegel’s works, I have not found any instances.

14 On Hess’s interpretation of Hegel and his influence on Marx, see Kouvelakis (2018, chap. 3). Marx broke with Hess in the 1840s. After the failed revolutions of 1848, Marx turned Hegel on his head to produce a critique of capitalist political economy. Hess dredged up the most teleological interpretations of Hegel to help produce Zionism.

15 Dehart’s (1995, 8) explanation is helpful: “Aristotle uses the pair theoria/praxis as a transcategorical metaphysical principle that transcends its local and oppositional use in the realm of an ethics of fundamental lifestyle choice. As such, it can apply more broadly to disciplines such as physics, theology, and politics, among others. In this broader sense the pair theoria/praxis is paralleled by other analogous metaphysical pairs such as energeia/dynamis, immobility/mobility, and even leisure/occupation. These cannot be conceived of as modal oppositions; they are functional pairs which have homologous but differing application in differing ontological strata and disciplines.”

16 Some Marxists equate praxis with production, but for Aristotle production = poiēsis.

17 On the translation and dissemination of these texts, see Carver and Blank (2014) and Musto (2015).

18 On Lukács’s conception of praxis, see Feenberg (2014, chap. 5). On Maoist conceptions of practice, see Smith (2019) and Karl (2020, chap. 4).

19 Some still fend for it (e.g., Havlin 2015). By contrast, Dhar and Chakrabarti (2019) propose a “praxis in World of the Third.”

20 The protagonist of Weldon’s novel is named Praxis. The nature of the novel’s feminism remains a matter of debate among literary critics. See Wilde (1988), Foley (2007), and Akdoğan (2021).

21 The literature on Gramsci’s conception of praxis and the philosophy of praxis is vast. Excellent starting points are the entries on “Filosofia della praxis” and “Unità di teoria-pratica” in the Dizionario Gramsciano (Liguori and Voza 2009, 312–15, 872–4); also see Haug (2001) and Green (2018).

22 See Liguori and Voza (2009), Haug (2001), and Green (2018).

23 Earlier in the notebooks, Gramsci reasons that Marxism could become an all-encompassing and unifying conception that could, in turn, provide “conditions for the revolutionizing of praxis” (Q8 §182, 1971, 366).

24 For their conceptions of praxis, see Petrović (1967) and Marković (1974, chap. 1–2).

25 The journal published multilingual issues (mainly in French, German, and English) throughout this period. An almost complete digital collection of the journal is accessible at “Praxis International: 1965–1973,” Marxists Internet Archive, accessed 7 December 2021, https://marxists.org/subject/praxis/praxis-international/index.htm.

26 The praksisovci survived various forms of persecution and relaunched the journal Praxis in 1981 under the name Praxis International: A Philosophical Journal. It persisted until 1994, ceasing publication after the breakup of Yugoslavia and the passing of Petrović.

27 The implicit reference is Heidegger’s ([1927] 2010) Being and Time, a text I discuss in another essay in this journal (Wainwright 2015). On praxis in Heidegger, see Taminiaux (1987) and Derrida ([1976–7] 2018, eighth session). In his seminar Derrida comments: “To my knowledge there has never been any effective, rigorous, and to mind my satisfactory Marxist reading of Heidegger … I am not appealing to a reading that would simply adhere to Heidegger but to a potentially deconstructive reading of him and of the questions he poses to Marxism … and what he considers to be the meaning of Marxism. For Heidegger undertakes an overflowing of Marxist discourse [on praxis, among other matters] and its metaphysical space, and that counter-overflow is the place I wanted to get to” (73).

28 Dews (1995, 17): “The Marxism of the Praxis School was in fact a counterpart to the philosophical current known in the other half of Europe as ‘Western Marxism.’ But whereas in Western Europe the thought of Lukács, of Gramsci, of Adorno or Lefebvre could scarcely be taken to represent anything other than an oppositional and critical stance, the specific difficulty faced by the Praxis School was that their ‘humanist’ version of Marxism, inspired by the 1844 manuscripts of Marx, became—albeit unwittingly—supportive of the dominant ideology of the Yugoslavian regime, namely the representation of the Yugoslav social and economic system as a form of ‘self-managing socialism.’”

29 In Yugoslavia’s final years, Marković (1986) became a Serbian nationalist, coauthoring the controversial “Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts” and later supporting Slobodan Milošević.

30 See Wilde (1988), Foley (2007), and Akdoğan (2021).

31 While I emphasize ontology here, praxis can also serve as an epistemological and aesthetic concept.

32 On culture, see Grossberg (2013) and Ismail (2015). To be sure, “culture” can be defined, but definitions tend to be so all-encompassing (e.g., “a way of living”) as to be effectively boundless.

33 The claims in this paragraph provide a gloss on Derrida’s ([1976–7] 2018) seminar analyzing theory and practice, which moves from Marx’s texts to those of Althusser (via a detour on Gramsci) and then to Heidegger. As Derrida remarks: the “anthropological space of the concepts of labor and praxis is … quite clear, and if, as Heidegger says, every metaphysics is fundamentally humanist, then so, to that extent, is the theory/practice opposition” (85).

34 Agamben’s lecture was coinvited by the Nicos Poulantzas Institute and the youth arm of the Coalition of the Radical Left–Progressive Alliance, better known as SYRIZA.

35 The two are shown to be inseparable, and Agamben makes a compelling argument that Christian theologians like Augustine were decisive in the transfer of praxis into its central position in modern political thought.

36 See also Lobkowicz (1967), Yu (2009), and Azeri (2019).

37 See Engels ([1886] 1941, 21–4). Oittinen (2015) provides a persuasive critique of Engels. On Kant’s critique of practice as the sole criterion of truth, see Kant ([1793] 1991) and Wayne (2012). On Kant’s and Marx’s readings of praxis, see Derrida ([1976–7] 2018, second session). On Marx’s relation to Kant generally, see Karatani (2003).

38 Ernst Mach (1838–1916), physicist and positivist philosopher, was criticized by Lenin ([1909] 2014).