“Praxis: The Greek word meaning ‘doing’ is widely used for all purposeful human activity. In his later, Marxist-influenced work, Sartre, for instance, defines praxis as political action in the world, or as the practical transformation of the world in accordance with a desired end or formality (1960). Praxis is a specifically human activity; the dam-building of a beaver is not praxis because it is an instinctual and unchanging response to a natural environment, and because it implies neither the mastery of existing technology nor the development of new technical means. Beavers will always build dams in the same manner; human engineers will develop new ways of doing so. Although praxis is determined by a finality of goal, its outcome is not always predictable, and it may be reversed into a counter-finality that frustrates the original intention. The outcome or material development of praxis is referred to as the ‘practico-inert’; the relationship between the two is not dissimilar to that between the in-itself and the for-itself.
In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci (1971) uses the term “philosophy of praxis” as a synonym for Marxism.
Excerpted from: Macey, David. The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory. New York: Penguin, 2001.
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