Philosophies of Praxis vs. the Philosophers' Philosophies: Choose Your Interlocutors Carefully
I've been thinking lately about the differences between the philosophy of praxis (or, as I prefer, philosophies of praxis, since I think in the present moment a number of strands could be identified, including from outside the Marxist tradition) and philosophy or even theory as professional, academic enterprises. Of late for applications I've been presenting the philosophy of praxis as if it were a potential branch of philosophy nestled somewhere between political philosophy, ethics, and the philosophy of action, which it is & isn't.
One sense in which this is a lie, and the philosophy of praxis to be anything meaningful must have other dimensions: for the philosophers' philosophy, or the theorists' theory, almost the entirety of contemporary interlocutors are located within academia, and even historic interlocutors are located within an academically defined canon, even if some of the figures involved are not themselves academics. I'll make the perhaps ugly claim that this is true even of academic radicals who attack the traditional (white, male, Eurocentric, Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian) canon, but tend not to escape fully the logic of canonicity, ending up creating more or less successful counter-canons.
For the philosophy of praxis, all of these interlocutors are like the proverbial tip of the iceberg, and here the metaphor is not entirely a throwaway. The academic conversations tend to be of a superstructural nature which are useful to the extent that they can be brought into relationship with other kinds of philosophy: those which are implicit or explicit in popular culture, common sense, mass media, and the political action of social groups. The webs of relationships between theory and these more embedded forms of philosophy tend to be what makes the former interesting. (This should be obvious, but I'm barely reworking Gramsci here.)
This year, I'm making a perhaps paradoxical effort to make it as a professional academic, foraying into the job market, applying for postdocs, all of this jazz. I'm trying to finish the dissertation, go to conferences, do these applications, and prepare a couple of articles for peer reviewed journals, all things I haven't prioritized terribly highly up until now. (The dissertation was always a high priority, but I've taken my sweet time with it, and conferences and peer reviewed publication I've let slide.) I'm less involved with any kind of organizing this year than has been the case for years. I guess my first year of grad school, I wasn't terribly involved; there was also a personal lull for me after my first wave of union activism died down and before the student movement really got going, so let's say Fall 2007-Spring 2009. But even then, I always went to meetings and strategized with people, whereas now, I'm not really attending movement meetings at all, just coming out for actions sometimes. I'm still involved in my socialist group, but mainly on a national level, much of which is kind of abstract too.
The result is that I feel terribly untethered. I have no idea whether I'm going to get anything this year application wise. But I'm not sure whether my thinking can stand another year of being so disconnected and still be in any meaningful sense "a philosophy of praxis." Instead it will be so much storm and stress going by the name "philosophy of praxis," in reality just another all-too-cute armchair radicalism.
Perhaps I'm being too hard on myself, to the extent that my teaching this quarter has been fairly energizing and fairly instantiated. But somehow, the misgiving still stands, since teaching about other people's instantiated organizing doesn't feel like the same thing as organizing oneself, and building a philosophy for which conversations happening in the movement are explicitly or implicitly amongst the interlocutors.
Postscript: The first two or three paragraphs belong on the new, non-pseudonymous blog, which I have been ignoring ever since posting one thing on it. Paradoxically creating it seems to have reinvigorated my attachment to the tumbleweeds over here. Maybe I should in fact rework and expand those paragraphs and put them over there, without the personal-professional gut-check.
One sense in which this is a lie, and the philosophy of praxis to be anything meaningful must have other dimensions: for the philosophers' philosophy, or the theorists' theory, almost the entirety of contemporary interlocutors are located within academia, and even historic interlocutors are located within an academically defined canon, even if some of the figures involved are not themselves academics. I'll make the perhaps ugly claim that this is true even of academic radicals who attack the traditional (white, male, Eurocentric, Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian) canon, but tend not to escape fully the logic of canonicity, ending up creating more or less successful counter-canons.
For the philosophy of praxis, all of these interlocutors are like the proverbial tip of the iceberg, and here the metaphor is not entirely a throwaway. The academic conversations tend to be of a superstructural nature which are useful to the extent that they can be brought into relationship with other kinds of philosophy: those which are implicit or explicit in popular culture, common sense, mass media, and the political action of social groups. The webs of relationships between theory and these more embedded forms of philosophy tend to be what makes the former interesting. (This should be obvious, but I'm barely reworking Gramsci here.)
This year, I'm making a perhaps paradoxical effort to make it as a professional academic, foraying into the job market, applying for postdocs, all of this jazz. I'm trying to finish the dissertation, go to conferences, do these applications, and prepare a couple of articles for peer reviewed journals, all things I haven't prioritized terribly highly up until now. (The dissertation was always a high priority, but I've taken my sweet time with it, and conferences and peer reviewed publication I've let slide.) I'm less involved with any kind of organizing this year than has been the case for years. I guess my first year of grad school, I wasn't terribly involved; there was also a personal lull for me after my first wave of union activism died down and before the student movement really got going, so let's say Fall 2007-Spring 2009. But even then, I always went to meetings and strategized with people, whereas now, I'm not really attending movement meetings at all, just coming out for actions sometimes. I'm still involved in my socialist group, but mainly on a national level, much of which is kind of abstract too.
The result is that I feel terribly untethered. I have no idea whether I'm going to get anything this year application wise. But I'm not sure whether my thinking can stand another year of being so disconnected and still be in any meaningful sense "a philosophy of praxis." Instead it will be so much storm and stress going by the name "philosophy of praxis," in reality just another all-too-cute armchair radicalism.
Perhaps I'm being too hard on myself, to the extent that my teaching this quarter has been fairly energizing and fairly instantiated. But somehow, the misgiving still stands, since teaching about other people's instantiated organizing doesn't feel like the same thing as organizing oneself, and building a philosophy for which conversations happening in the movement are explicitly or implicitly amongst the interlocutors.
Postscript: The first two or three paragraphs belong on the new, non-pseudonymous blog, which I have been ignoring ever since posting one thing on it. Paradoxically creating it seems to have reinvigorated my attachment to the tumbleweeds over here. Maybe I should in fact rework and expand those paragraphs and put them over there, without the personal-professional gut-check.