Orthopraxis and living praxis

[john_b_cannon]

I used to follow some of the liberation theologians (particularly Segundo on this?) in upholding the idea of the primacy of orthopraxis (right action) to orthodoxy (right thinking).  It's important to recognize what a radical move this was within a Catholic context, and it was one which (at least as an explicit theological notion) got torpedoed

Comments

Hope this can be expanded...

[anonymous]

...into a longer post, engaging with the concept of living praxis some more. Not sure of the context in which you wrote this (is it for a class? reflections on reading?).

Nathaniel

Re: Hope this can be expanded...

[john_b_cannon]

I'm glad it seems interesting and worth expanding. There's no particular context, beyond procrastinating by writing something on my blog that other things have gotten me thinking about - which is the context for most of my blog entries. In this case, I am thinking about this question in part because of a "philosophies of praxis" course I'm going to teach next year. But more importantly, maybe, I was thinking about the affective function of criticism, what I feel like when I'm criticizing someone else's or my own political projects, and what I feel like when I'm just stuck. It felt to me like that being stuck was a part of the problem in the current moment. And if I thought about it in terms of orthopraxis - if orthopraxis involves a stringency, a rigor about praxis such as orthodoxy suggests about thinking - then I thought that maybe this is the wrong way to go. When faced with praxis, the wrong question might be, well, is it orthopraxis

Re: Hope this can be expanded...

[anonymous]

Your use of term 'living praxis' got me thinking about 'lebensphilosophie' and made me wonder how you intended the term. Of course adopting an abstract evaluative concept of 'life' is probably not what you intend... although there are those who are looking to revive something of the lebensphilosophie approach, one thinks of Deleuze & Guattari and following from them Hardt & Negri, (but I imagine you would be critical of them).
In fact you seem to be formulating the notion of life in terms of its negative, 'life = against death'. Does this mean that 'death' is the real master term here? How would we to avoid a transcendent and/or mystical notion of death, a sort of reversed lebensphilosophie?

Re: Hope this can be expanded...

[anonymous]

-Dave