66b9uk5yPH
.pdfmotivated self-changing activity by those participating in the activity. Then the activity is a part of learning as a universal human act.
The change that takes place in learning in both senses is (re-)structuring something. The change builds up a (new) relationship between the elements of the subject matter, example: 1+1=2. This means that knowledge is the result of learning. Knowledge is the established structure of the elements of the subject matter and becomes a law/a rule. This covers tacit knowledge as well as articulated knowledge and gives meaning to the concept practical knowledge which is the scientific core of borderology. Understanding then becomes the insight in what has been structured. From we are born this formation process develops what becomes our inner ontology in the social interaction with what is there outside us.
When the students are working with their narratives, the expression Stay in the experience! means to saturate the story to gain insight in subject matters based on one’s own experience (inner ontology) before bringing in others’ experience (theory) to explain or articulate the knowledge. By this the material bases for abstraction is more solid and conscious and gives the students a better ground for the dialogic process, the interaction between the inner and the outer ontology, that take place during the study. Then the narrative becomes the well for creating new knowledge.
Bibliography
1.Enerstvedt, Regi Th. (2011) Spiller Gud terning likevel? Marxist Forlag A/S. Oslo.
2.Enerstvedt, Regi Th (1988) Barn, virksomhet og mening: utviklingen av læremotivasjon hos norske skolebarn. Falken forlag A/S, Oslo.
3.Enerstvedt, Regi Th. (1986) Hva er læring. Falken Forlag A/S, Oslo.
4.HBO-rapport 10/2005 Praktisk kunnskap – som erfaring og som forskningsfelt. Høgskolen i Bodø.
5.Krogtoft, Marit (2015) Et vitenskapsteoretisk blikk på praktiske arbeidsformer i ungdomsskolen. Ikke-publisert essay i vitenskapsteori. Nord universitet.
6.Methi, Jan Selmer (2015) Fortelling som erkjennelsesform i McGuirk/Methi (red): Praktisk kunnskap som profesjonsforskning. Fagbokforlaget Bergen.
7.Methi, Jan Selmer (2007) Psychagogi – fremmedgjøring eller frigjøring? En studie av lærernes yrkesidentitet og selvforståelse i perspektiv av virksomhetsteorien. Phd-avhandling. Århus Universitet.
8.Platon. (1933) Menon i Platons skrifter bind II. C. A. Reitzels Forlag,
København.
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9.Pierce, Charles S. (1998) The Essential Peirce. Selected Philosophical Writings (1893-1913) by Peirce Edition Project. Indiana University Press.
10.Vygotskij, Lev (2004) Problemstillinger i undervisningen og den intellektuelle udvikling i skolealderen i Gunilla Lindquist (red): Vygotskij om læring som utviklingsvilkår. Forlaget Klim, Århus.
11.Wackerhausen, Steen (2015) Erfaringsrom, handlingsbåren kunnskap og refleksjon i McGuirk/Methi (red): Praktisk kunnskap som profesjonsforskning. Fagbokforlaget, Bergen.
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УДК 821.161.1 ББК 84(2)
A.A. Sautkin
Murmansk Arctic State University Murmansk, Russia
THE CONCEPTUALIZATION OF PRAXIS IN THE WORKS OF THE
YUGOSLAV ‘PRAXIS’ GROUP
Abstract. The article is devoted to the consideration of some aspects of understanding praxis in the works of Yugoslav neo-Marxists, united around the journal ‘Praxis’.
Key words: praxis, theory, creativity, human activity.
А.А. Сауткин
ФГБОУ ВО «Мурманский арктический государственный университет» г. Мурманск, Россия
КОНЦЕПТУАЛИЗАЦИЯ ПРАКСИСА В РАБОТАХ ЮГОСЛАВСКОЙ ГРУППЫ «ПРАКСИС»
Аннотация. Статья посвящена рассмотрению некоторых аспектов понимания праксиса в работах югославских неомарксистов, объединившихся вокруг журнала «Праксис».
Ключевые слова: практика, теория, творчество, человеческая деятельность.
In the early 1960s, the neo-Marxist group ‘Praxis’ appeared in Socialist
Yugoslavia, criticizing the dogmatic version of Marxism and relying on Marx’s early works. The print organ of this “Praxis School” became the journal of the same name – ‘Praxis’, which was published in two versions: for Yugoslavia in Serbo-Croatian and the international format (multilingual edition). The first international issue was published in 1965. It is not surprising that this first issue was largely devoted to thinking on the category of praxis, and we can consider it as a kind of theoretical manifesto.
Of course, the Yugoslav neo-Marxists of the 1960s and 1970s solved their specific tasks, which were determined by the spirit of the time. But I think that some aspects of their theorizing about praxis may be interesting for our borderology research community after 54 years.
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***
Branko Bošnjak in the first article of this volume “Reflections on Praxis” (“Betrachtungen ueber die Praxis”) traces the history and even the pre-history of this concept, beginning with ancient Greek mythology.
The following fact seemed interesting to me: the word Praxis was used as one of the epithets of Aphrodite. As Pausanias writes, there was a large temple in honor of the goddess in the polis Megara, and the Megarians called her Aphrodite Praxis. According to researchers, Praxis, in this case, means "sexual intercourse", that is, it is related to the Eros’ area, it is associated with a sexual act, which is a doing conditioned by natural desire.
In other words, Praxis is that which binds different human beings. Initially, it is a carnal union, but after all, it lies at the heart of the family and tribal community. And then we move from a natural act to acts of civil and polis. Praxis thus expresses this essential linking of people at different levels.
***
In Aristotle, praxis is an action aimed at achieving a goal that follows from the essence of the being (das aus dem Wesen des Seienden hervorgeht). No action that has its end (i.e. limit, Grenze) is a goal in itself (τέλος ), but it (action) is aimed at the goal. These actions, Aristotle refers to the word κίνησις (movement) – in contrast to the actions as such, which he calls activity, that is
ἐνέργεια.
Therefore, praxis is an action in which the goal is present (Met. 1048b 1835). The realization of praxis has the character of ἐνέργεια.
Does praxis have limits? Yes. But not in the sense of completion in time, but because the limit is the endpoint of something beyond which it is impossible to continue. In other words, this is a complete and perfect disclosure of the essence of existing being. There is also a form of "being" (eidos) as the endpoint of each thing (telos). This endpoint is the endpoint for praxis.
***
Bošnjak writes: “There is no human action without an acting human.”
Praxis as an action is the same as free will (to proaireton). Thus, creative practice is associated with free will (Met.1025 b 20-25). / Die Praxis als Handeln ist dasselbe wie der freie Wille (to proaireton). So ist die schaffende Praxis an den freien Willen gebunden (Met. 1025b 20-25) ./
In Aristotle: to auto gar to prakton kai to proaireton
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***
In the well-known fragment of Metaphysics (1025b 20-25, beginning of the sixth book) it is clearly stated that every thought (dianoia) is either practical, or productive, or theoretical (ὥστε εἰ πᾶσα διάνοια ἢ πρακτικὴ ἢ ποιητικὴ ἢ θεωρητική). Consequently, the mental and spiritual activity of people may relate to:
1)human life actions;
2)creating something that there was not before (including works of art);
3)the primordial causes of all things (to the problems of physics, mathematics and the prima philosophia).
A human lives by performing an action: he does not do something (ergon) (does not manufacture something), he is in action. The product, the result, ergon here is the action itself, doing.
As we have already said, Aristotle calls this type of action, the goal of which is in the action itself, ἐνέργεια, that is, being in activity (or maybe, staying-in-doing).
Javier Zubiri writes that “for Aristotle, praxis, that is, practical, understood in this Greek sense, does not oppose the theoretical. On the contrary, the theory is the highest form of praxis – an activity that is self-sufficient, because it does not produce anything outside itself.”
Similarly, Branko Bošnjak concludes that there is a unity of human thinking, and the concept of Praxis is just a part of rational human actions related to the world of things (albeit with its specifics).
***
Is everything that is done a praxis? Not.
If praxis is an action in which the goal is included, following from the very existing being (Seiende), then this goal is the realization of the possibility (entelechy), i.e. each particular practice will depend on the content of the
“existing being”, on the essence of the thing itself.
Praxis will be the realization of what is not yet, but whose essence (being substance, Wesen der Substanz, hypokeimenon) must be realized.
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The dialectical connection between the possible and the real is a process of constant transition. Praxis is the end or limit (Grenze) of such a development of events. It means that praxis realizes content (opportunity), leading it to the realization of a goal, which follows from the essence of being. Only such actions are praxis in the proper sense of the word and not just any action.
Mental and spiritual activity (thinking) in whole can be called philosophy. Then it splits into three kinds of knowledge: theoretical, practical and poietical. Bošnjak writes that to understand as praxis only the ‘practical’ part of philosophy (in the narrow sense) is wrong. Human is the essence of trilateral activity, in the unity of these aspects, it is the integrity and wholeness of a human. It means that the energeian realization of man is possible only in the unity of these aspects.
Bošnjak concludes that Philosophy is a general expression for Praxis (Philosophie ist der allgemeine Ausdruck fiir Praxis.).
***
However, let us remember that I am talking about a Marxist school.
Accordingly, they were not going to keep Praxis only as a metaphysical concept. They introduce a socio-historical dimension into it since the energeian self-fulfillment of a human always takes place in a particular historical context. This is the context of social conditions, things, activities, games, labor, scientific research and everything else.
Another author of the ‘Praxis Group’, Predrag Vranicki, reflecting on praxis, writes: “For man is not just an individual being creating himself independently of the historical structures and processes of which he is a part. He is to just as great an extent created by all those relations which are historically given”.
Vranicki refuses to oppose praxis and theory. He uses traditional epistemological distinctions and says that praxis embraces empirical and theoretical life attitudes, which are mutually determined and indissoluble: “The defining of man as a practical being is only possible if the practice is understood as a unity of the sensuous and the theoretical activity”.
If practice is essentially conscious, to a greater or lesser extent free and planned, creation, transformation of a reality which is not only reality of thought, but above all reality of the medium of man's being, that is, natural historical reality then, we repeat, this concept embraces man in his totality: in his family, as a producer, in his political, artistic and scholarly work, etc.
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Human’s free and conscious action is synonymous with practice, which enables one to gain integrity, the totality of human. The fragmentation and crippling of the personality is, in a Marxist way, the result of social alienation, the alienation of labor as well.
***
Danko Grlić also believes that it is impossible to oppose the practice to the theory, and he asks the question: “can practice be determined at all simply on the basis of its relation (immanent or transcendent) to theory?” He tries to determine the scope and content of the concept of “praxis”, finding some counter-concepts, i.e. something which is not praxis, something which is opposed to praxis.
“We could … argue that human practice stands in opposition to all that is passive, merely meditative, non-creative, all that is an adaptation to the world, a yielding to the nature of the world and its particular social conditions. True human practice, consequently, is not an acceptance of the »facts«, of objective reality and its laws, of moral or ideological imperatives or accepted norms, of something heteronomous, in which man is always at a disadvantage and is the pawn of superior forces, spiritual or material. Human practice - as opposed to animal adaptation - could be defined as the true transformation of the world, a transformation which is historically relevant, as an active interference with the structure of reality.”
The Yugoslav philosophers kept in mind the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach by Karl Marx, but at the same time they interpreted the change of the world by philosophy as an anti-dogmatic strategy: any rigid ideas should also be changed and transformed.
Grlić wrote that ‘Human cannot, as a philosopher, have the ambition to transform the world if he does not at the same time transform his ideas and principles. It is, therefore, an inevitable pre-requisite for him - to constitute himself as human - to be actively, personally, ceaselessly engaged in fighting for possibilities of an invariably new, increasingly progressive, non-standard thought and action. Practice, thus, ceases to be an inert insistence con something existent, some status quo ante, or, again, a self-contented life in the past or present.’
‘Practice is thus opposed to everything established, dogmatic, rigid, static, once-for-all determined, fixed, standard; to everything that has become dug into the past and remained hypostatized.’
***
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Our joint master program is called “Practical Knowledge”. If translated it into Greek, you get πρακτικὴ ἐπιστήμη. But the essence of our program is not reduced to the search for practical skills (in the narrow sense), not to mention technical skills (in the Greek sense). The meaning of our work, as I see it, is to recreate the praxis zone in its integral form. Philosophy begins to work here as a tool that clarifies the essential foundations of the particular experience of each person (each student) and as a tool that returns the student's consciousness to certain integrity (or wholeness). This “theoretical praxis” allows one to overcome the alienation of consciousness caused, firstly, by a narrow professional specialization, and secondly, by a focus on performing many routine practical actions. Thus, consciousness and activity regain their energeian and humanistic character. Dialogue as a key Bakhtinian word, in this case, describes the operation mode of the tools mentioned above.
Without falling into Marxist pathos, I still want to emphasize that Borderology reflection creates the opportunity for creative transformation that opposes the passive-adaptive mode of action (modus operandi). We do not aim to accept adaptation programs, adjustment to the existing conditions. We are working to ensure that we and our actions productively change the structure of our mental and socio-cultural environment. But for this, we need, first of all. to change our consciousness. Once again I will quote Danko Grliс: “Human cannot have the ambition to transform the world if he does not at the same time transform his ideas and principles”.
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РАЗДЕЛ 2.
ПРАКСИС И ГРАНИЦЫ: СОПРЯЖЕНИЯ И РАЗДЕЛЕНИЯ
SECTION 2.
PRAXIS AND BORDERS: LINKING AND SEPARATION
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УДК 172
ББК 87.6
A. Barcz
Trinity College Dublin Dublin, Ireland
ZOÖPOLIS – REBORDERING THE CITY
Abstract. The article refers to Jennifer Wolch’s trans-species urban theory or what she alternatively called zoöpolis. The problem of the city-environment border lies in the centre of this approach, as well as the human-animal relations. However, the hostility towards undomesticated and feral animals in the urban space could not be thoroughly presented without emphasising that the border of the city is disappearing due to the global, accelerated urbanization, which absorbs not only wildlife habitats but affects wildlife and environment in more complex and indirect ways.
Key words: zoöpolis, zoocriticism, environmental urbanism, human-animal relations.
А. Барч
Тринити колледж г. Дублин, Ирландия
ЗООПОЛИС – ПЕРЕПРОЧЕРЧИВАЯ ГРАНИЦЫ ГОРОДА
Аннотация. В статье рассматривается теория транс-видового города Дженнифер Вулх, или то, что она альтернативно назвала «зоополис». В центре этого подхода находится проблема границы города и окружающей среды, равно как и проблема отношений между человеком и животными. Тем не менее, враждебность по отношению к неприрученным и диким животным в городском пространстве не может быть тщательно представлена без акцентирования внимания на том, что граница города исчезает из-за глобальной ускоренной урбанизации, которая поглощает не только места обитания диких животных, но и влияет на дикую природу и окружающую среду более сложными и косвенными путями.
Ключевые слова: зоополис, зоокритицизм, экологический урбанизм, отношения человека и животных.
A little boy had a cat that was all he had inherited from his father and through it became Lord Mayor of London. I What shall I become through my animal, my inheritance? Where does the huge city lie? (Kafka 1991, 9)
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