Praxis

RELATED TERMS: Poeisis; Reflexivity and Reflection

The term praxis is one of Aristotle’s three main categories action, alongside poiesis and theoria. Praxis is taken to mean doing or acting, rather than making (poiesis) or thinking (theoria), although ‘thinking’ here is restricted to thinking about ‘universals’. Each form of action is associated with a characteristic form of knowing: theoria with episteme (knowledge of universals); poiesis with techne (technical knowledge, knowing how to make); and praxis with phronesis (practical wisdom, knowing what to do).

For Marx and later Marxist writers, praxis is contrasted with wage labour. Praxis is free, conscious, creative human activity, which alone is capable of generating knowledge and creating change in the social order.

Interesting contributions to the concept of praxis have been made by Jurgen Habermas and, particularly, Hannah Arendt, who revises Aristotle’s and Marx’s categorisations in her discussion of labour, work and action.

The questions that arise here for design practices concern whether design is considered a form of praxis, in the Marxian sense, and what acts designs, once in the world, may be said to perform. This extends the Arendtian sense of praxis beyond doing through words and deeds to doing through designs. Further questions arise in the context of whether such conceptions of praxis are humanist, which may limit the understanding of action and agency, or as fields of actantiality in which human ‘agency’, human bodily acts and discurive acts, are understood in the context of interaction in and with the built, constructed world and the natural world.

Further reading

Dunne, J. (1997). Back to the rough ground: practical judgment and the lure of technique. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Melaney, W. D. (2006), Arendt’s Revision of Praxis: On Plurality and Narrative Experience. Analecta Husserliana, 90, pp. 465-479.

Pilario, D.F. (2005). The Adventures of praxis: a critical encounter of three traditions. In: Back to the rough grounds of praxis: exploring theological method with Pierre Bourdieu. Leuven, Belgium: University of Leuven Press, 1–97.