Practice (philosophy)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The word practice is of Greek origin ( Greek πρᾶξις prâxis or πρᾶγμα prâgma and means 'deed, action, performance', but also 'carrying out, completing, promoting'). It is used in different meanings in the context of philosophy .

One word meaning encompasses the entire life activity, another sees practice as an expert activity in the field of healing, law and business, but also in sorcery and religion, the concrete actions in contrast to the area of theory, which is understood as separate from it . With reference to the distinction between practical philosophy and theoretical philosophy , practice is often understood to be an explicitly moral act.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the concept of practice found its way into the philosophical systems of Immanuel Kant , Johann Gottlieb Fichtes , Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegels and Ludwig Feuerbach . Karl Marx further developed the concept of practice into a philosophical category with a precise content: practice as a sensual and objective work of humans , which includes the subjective , material transformation of objective reality and includes productive , political , experimental , artistic and other material activities . "Marx's claim to want to turn Hegel on his head on his feet hits exactly this aspect: In Marx's case, the divine absolute is replaced by the material-economic absolute of the production process or work as the all-grounding reality."

This results in the importance of practice in materialism as a criterion of reality in relation to any theories . Practice corrects and enriches human knowledge, prevents it from becoming rigid in dogmas and orientates it to the current tasks of human society in terms of time or place. In contrast to spirit, the spirit or thinking (also in the sense of “thinking out”, “thinking” or “imagining”), practice is based on what people can recognize and do. Lenin defined the practice in this sense as "the criterion of truth ". He meant above all the verification of theories and their compatibility with real reality (practice). This was one of the foundations of his further development of Marxism into what was later called Leninism , in which he tried to adapt Marx's theories to the Russian reality of the time.

In the 20th century, the practice category was also taken up by western, non-orthodox Marxism as the “philosophy of practice” or practice philosophy for short . Georg Lukács' philosophical practical thinking still relates essentially to the Marxist category “work” and the conception of the proletariat as a historical subject. After preliminary considerations by Antonio Labriola , Antonio Gramsci developed his “ filosofia della praxis ” as being beyond materialism and idealism : “For the philosophy of practice, being cannot be separated from thinking.” Ernst Bloch took up the practical thinking that Marx in the 11 Feuerbach theses and developed the category practice as a key concept for human and historical reality. Even Jean-Paul Sartre was referring to his practice understanding on Marx. Very different interpretations were given in the Frankfurt School . For example, while Max Horkheimer's understanding of practice was still close to the Marxist approach, Jürgen Habermas rejected the integral concept of practice, which was mainly taken up by the group of Yugoslav practice philosophers, as too "holistic". Instead, Habermas sees instrumental and communicative action separately and comes to the basic view: "Social practice is constituted by language." Habermas does not, however, go into what at the same time at the Frankfurt Philosophical Institute Alfred Schmidt adheres to in his practice article: the natural context can get through communicative action cannot simply be blown up, since "purposeful action can only assert itself in such a way that it is cunningly intertwined with the course of material laws", which has profound consequences for the communicative articulation of reality: "That such 'in itself' : exist independently of all practice (and its theoretical implications) can of course only be pronounced to the extent that the objective world [through human practice] has become one 'for us'. "

In the Latin American debate of critical Marxism, the concept of practice represents the decisive break with Soviet orthodoxy in the 1960s . The Spanish-Mexican philosopher Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez ( UNAM ) developed his philosophy of practice for the first time on the continent a non-mechanistic interpretation of society within philosophical Marxism.

Beyond the Marxist traditions of thought, Friedrich Nietzsche's focus on practice is the pragmatism of William James and John Dewey and the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead , in which practice, which is to be understood as work in the philosophical sense, mediates between thought and fact. With clearer references to Karl Marx, but also to Max Weber , Pierre Bourdieu developed his draft of a “theory of practice” in the second half of the 20th century, which, as a concept of a praxeological theory of knowledge and action, overlaps with ethnological and materialistic approaches.

literature

  • Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez: The philosophy of practice. Translated by Mike Gonzales. Humanities Press, Atlantic Highlands NJ 1977 and Merlin Press, London 1977. (Expanded and revised original edition: Filosofía de la praxis. 2nd edition. México, Grijalbo, 1980. Reprint: México, Siglo XXI Editores, 2003, ISBN 968-23- 2410-6 .)
  • Alfred Schmidt : Practice . (PDF) In: Hermann Krings, Hans Michael Baumgartner, Christoph Wild (Hrsg.): Handbuch Philosophischer Grundbegriffe. Study edition. Volume 4. Kösel, Munich 1973, pp. 1107-1138.
  • André Tosel, José Barata-Moura: Practice . In: Hans Jörg Sandkühler (Ed.): Encyclopedia Philosophy . Volume 2: O-Z. Meiner, Hamburg 1999, pp. 1310-1318.
  • Armin G. Wildfeuer: Practice. (PDF; 301 kB) In: Petra Kolmer, Armin G. Wildfeuer (ed.): New handbook of basic philosophical concepts. Volume 2, Verlag Karl Alber, Freiburg i. Br. 2011, pp. 1774-1804.

Web links

Wikiquote: Practice  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c André Tosel, José Barata-Moura: practice . In: Hans Jörg Sandkühler (Ed.): Encyclopedia Philosophy . Volume 2: O-Z. Meiner, Hamburg 1999, pp. 1310-1318, here p. 1310.
  2. ↑ Meyer's Lexicon in four volumes . Volume 3. 1st edition. VEB Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig 1979, p. 472.
  3. ^ Arno Anzenbacher: Introduction to Philosophy. Herder Verlag, Freiburg 2002, p. 170.
  4. ↑ Lexicon in two volumes. Volume 2. Volkseigener Verlag, Leipzig 1957, p. 396.
  5. ^ Antonio Gramsci: Prison Notebooks . P. 1457.
  6. ↑ Horst Müller: Practice (PDF) In: The Bloch Online Dictionary of the Ernst Bloch Association. As of December 30, 2002
  7. ↑ Jürgen Habermas: On the reconstruction of historical materialism. Frankfurt am Main 1976, p. 31.
  8. ↑ Jürgen Habermas: The philosophical discourse of modernity . Frankfurt am Main 1985, p. 389.
  9. ^ Alfred Schmidt: Practice . In: Hermann Krings, Hans Michael Baumgartner, Christoph Wild (eds.): Handbook of Basic Philosophical Concepts . Study edition. Vol. 4. Kösel, Munich 1973, pp. 1107–1138, here: p. 1117.
  10. ^ Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez: Filosofía de la praxis. Grijalbo, México, DF 1967. 2., revised. u. exp. Edition. México, Grijalbo, 1980. Reprint: México, Siglo XXI Editores, 2003, ISBN 968-23-2410-6 .
  11. ↑ For parallels and differences between Alfred Schmidts and Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez 'concept of practice see: Stefan Gandler : Materialismus heute. Alfred Schmidt and Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez. In: Journal of Critical Theory . Lüneburg, Zu Klampen, Vol. 19, No. 36/37, 2013, pp. 144–159, ISSN  0945-7313 .
  12. ↑ Pierre Bourdieu: Draft of a theory of practice on the ethnological basis of Kabyle society . Frankfurt am Main 1979, ISBN 3-518-07891-7 .