Page 188 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

PRAXIS

towards justification as the giving of reasons. This reason-giving is a social practice
so that to justify a belief is to give reasons in the context of a tradition and a
community. Here, reasons have an intersubjective base in the community norms for
reason-giving and tend towards agreement on claims that have been merited by 165
practice. Thus, justification is a part of an ongoing ‘conversation’ of humanity and
however we characterize ‘truth’ we have no reliable source for it other than our
ongoing conversation with each other.
Richard Rorty, the main contemporary exponent of pragmatism, has often been
called a postmodern philosopher though he has on occasion tried to distance
himself from this nomination. However, like postmodernism, pragmatism is against
‘grand theory’, being in sympathy with Lyotard’s ‘incredulity towards
metanarratives’. However, this does not mean that all theory is to be jettisoned, but
rather that local theory becomes a way of re-describing the world in normative
ways.
Since pragmatism understands the universe as always ‘in the making’, the future
has ethical significance so that we can, it is argued, make a difference and create
new ‘better’ futures. Here pragmatism embraces a form of ‘ethical naturalism’ by
which ethics do not need metaphysical foundations to be justified, that is, ethics
do not require to be grounded in anything outside or beyond our beliefs and desires.
In this sense, pragmatism insists on the irreducibility of human agency even as it
recognizes the causal stories of the past. Pragmatism shares with poststructuralism
and post-Marxism the idea that social and cultural change is a matter of ‘politics
without guarantees’. That is, politics is centred on small-scale experimentalism,
value-commitment and practical action and not on any claimed universal ‘laws’ of
history or human conduct.
As a philosophy, pragmatism is not necessarily supportive of any particular
political stance. However, Rorty’s politics are those of ‘Liberalism’ in a broad sense
while in its particulars he has repeatedly described himself as of ‘the Left’. The hope
of Liberalism for Rorty is to find ways for human beings to be freer, less cruel, more
leisured and richer in goods and experiences while trying to maximize people’s
opportunities to live their lives as they see fit. That is, to pursue a private project
founded on their own values and beliefs while not causing suffering to others. Since
liberal democracy and cultural pluralism work imperfectly, it is entirely acceptable
to Rortian Liberals to critique those aspects of our societies and cultures that restrict
freedoms and cause suffering.
Links Epistemology, foundationalism, irony, language-game, Liberalism, representation,
truth

Praxis We commonly think of a practice as a way of doing things, an action,
application or performance that is contrasted to theory or abstract thinking. This
counterpoising of theory to the practical is a legacy of Aristotle’s classification of
disciplines as theoretical, productive or practical. However, Aristotle also introduced
the idea of ‘praxis’, which is not merely a mechanical making but a conceptually
inspired ‘creative doing’. Thus the concept of praxis, which derives from the Greek