In the preceding articles, I evoked how the fundamental distinction between what is first for us and what is actually first in reality made it possible to account for the genesis of our experiences
In this way, I was able to situate every possible experience as having a historical, social and material dimension: namely, its dependence on the various practices constituted in a given society. This constitutive dependence of every human society can, in my view, be reconstructed at a general level through the category of praxis. This accounts for the always situated relation between human subjectivities and their world through their practical relations with each other, with their own nature, as well as with the nature that is external to them.
This fundamental distinction between the intentional constitution of our experience, already active through sensibility, and its production, opens up the possibility of understanding praxis as precisely this process in which subjectivities and a social world mutually produce each other within a milieu that is always already, from the outset, historical and social: a living environment that is not “in general”, but already historical and determined flesh.
Thus, we were able to account for what in my immediate experience first appeared, following Merleau-Ponty’s term, as flesh or as milieu, that is to say, this co-constitution through which I recognized that there are not two distinct substances, such as a thinking thing and a bodily thing, but rather that my subjectivity and the world merge into one another. Moreover, this co-constitution situates my existence as from the outset fleshy, bodily and socialized: indeed, the milieu is not purely natural, but already human, rich in meaning and in possibilities for relations with other living beings.
The purpose of this blog post is to develop the category of praxis in its various dimensions, where it had only been proposed in the first one, and then to explain its relation to care, that is, to redefine care as a quality of practice. Finally, I would like to show that this redefinition is consistent with the now classical definition of Tronto and Fisher, by situating care no longer primarily in relations, but in practices which, among other things, are always already relational: this is what the category of praxis makes intelligible.
First, I have to recall that we are always engaged in particular practices, such as studying, cooking for ourselves, eating, reading and writing, inhabiting, helping and helping each other, resting, maintaining bonds of love or friendship with chosen people, practicing leisure activities or a specific profession, or even militating to transform these practices themselves, and also reflecting on these practices. However, these elementary practices would not be intelligible without referring them to what they have in common, that is, the fact that they define us all as beings of practice, and through which we can affirm that we reproduce the conditions of our material existence, conditions which, at the scale of society as a whole, are those of a historical period and of determined social relations.
We can then see that the object of every praxis is the production, reproduction and transformation of the particular practices from which we cannot escape, as we are always “caught” and shaped by them, while at the same time, it is true that none of them alone exhausts our being. These practices are as many means through which we ensure the satisfaction and rich development of our needs. Even when, for example, we think that we are “doing nothing”, we are in reality still aiming at a practice, even if this practice is simply reflecting or resting. It is therefore the practical relation, the doing, that is first: praxis.
The productive character, however, is not by itself sufficient to characterize praxis. A practice does not only bring something new into being; it also maintains an already existing world. Human beings must constantly reproduce the material, social and historical conditions of their existence, otherwise no new production could be sustained. Production, reproduction and transformation are therefore not three separate moments, but three dimensions of the same practical process.
It must also be said that this praxis is not transparent in itself, because it constitutes a process from which we cannot extract ourselves in order to observe it, as one would observe oneself acting from a window, as an impartial spectator. The meaning of our actions is therefore not first given a priori, but constructed in situation, in the very time in which we act. On the other hand, the new possibilities that constantly emerge from practical relations tend to go beyond the immediate goals of an activity, making it something that, by passing through us, tends to exceed our immediate relation to things, in the same way that, in the first article, I argued that my body exceeded me.
This is precisely because the result of my activities tends not only to realize intentional acts, but also to constantly open up new possibilities. In this way, I can say that praxis is the milieu through which I become by socializing myself, just as my embodiment constitutes me as flesh open to practices, and therefore takes me outside myself: there is never pure mastery, but an encounter with the world, the result of which is the making of the milieu and of myself through this very process.
I want to clarify that, for the moment, I am not trying to produce a particular anthropology that would describe historically determined practices, but rather a general anthropology that can then allow studies that start again from our empirical experience to unfold. More precisely, we will see how a certain anthropology institutes a modern subject who is the owner of himself, which we will have to criticize later. Thus, the concept of praxis that I construct and that serves as my argument is itself not a determined practice, as I have already said, but rather what makes every practice intelligible as a practice, without thereby reconstructing a “first philosophy” of a metaphysical order.
It is precisely about our human condition, the historical production of our existence, always dependent on determinations that we did not first produce and that we inherited from the history of the generations that preceded us. It is always within this history that we act, and thus we continue it in relation to all other human beings, themselves engaged like us in a world made of practices: thus, the product of all our engagements in the world is the making of our own historical humanity. At this scale, we can say that praxis is both origin, in other words presupposition, and result. This result becomes in turn the new origin, a new opening towards new possibilities for the whole of our human, social and historical activities.