Patrick Comerford
Walking up and down the hill between Piskopianó and Hersonissos in Crete in the sunshine last month, I was surprised how many places remained so familiar: the restaurants where I had enjoyed so many dinners, such as Lychnos and Metohi; the cafés and bars I had called into; the apartment blocks where other holidaymakers had stayed; and the shops where I had bought a daily newspaper 20-30 years ago.
There are few Irish tourists in Piskopianó or neighbouring Koutouloufári these days, although the signs still remain outside some of the once-popular Irish bars, such as Molly Malones. Today, the holidaymakers in Piskopianó seem to be mainly German and Dutch.
But there were other signs that were more important to notice when I was on holidays there so long away. I immediately recognised the bank where I once had to open an account hastily in the late 1990s. It was in the days when everyone used travellers’ cheques, there were few ATMs and most Greek shops and restaurants refused to accept ‘plastic cards.’
One year, I left my travellers cheques behind, and the bank in Dublin would only transfer funds to a bank account in my name in Greece. But without any money I could not open a new bank account in Greece. It was a condundrum that contributed to me labelling the Ulster Bank the Ulcer Bank. With quick thinking and help from Greek friends, I worked my away around this Catch-22 banking practice and managed to open an accountin Hersonissos within 24 hours, the funds were transferred, shops and restaurants could be paid with cash once again.
When I saw that bank on the street corner in Hersonissos a few weekends ago, I was grateful my children did not go hungry on that holiday due to my forgetfulness. It was all thanks to kindly bank staff in Crete and despite arcane banking practices back in Dublin. I was tempted even to go in and ask whether there was anything left in my old account – although all that was in the day of the Drachma, and if anything is left in the account it is probably not going to buy even a cup of coffee. On the other hand, I might have found I am still legally resident in Crete.
With young children on those holidays, it was also important to know where to find the nearest pharmacist’s shop and the nearest doctor’s practice. I smiled when I recognised that practice immediately that recent Saturday afternoon. But the change in tourism patterns is reflected in the sign outside the surgery: it says ‘Artz Praxis’ in German and ‘Doctor’s Office’ in English.
But the word Praxis is a perfectly good Greek word, Πρᾶξις.
The word praxis describes the process by which a theory, lesson, or skill is enacted, embodied, realised, applied, or put into practice. The word Praxis may also refer to the act of engaging, applying, exercising, realising, or practising ideas.
The word praxis comes from the Ancient Greek πρᾶξις, praxis, which referred to activity engaged in by free people. Aristotle held that there were three basic human activities: θεωρία (theoria, thinking), ποίησις (poiesis, making) and πρᾶξις (praxis, doing). Corresponding to these activities were three types of knowledge: theoretical, the end goal being truth; poietical, the end goal being production; and practical, the end goal being action.
Aristotle further divided the knowledge derived from praxis into ethics, economics and politics, and he distinguished between εὐπραξία (eupraxia, good praxis) and δυσπραξία (dyspraxia, ‘bad praxis, misfortune’).
The Greek word πρᾶξις is derived from the verb πράσσειν (prassein, to do, to act). It means ‘practice, action, doing.’ More particularly, it means either: practice as distinguished from theory, of an art, science, etc.; or practical application or exercise of a branch of learning; or habitual or established practice, custom.
Eastern Christian writers, especially in the Byzantine tradition, use the term ‘praxis’ to refer to what others, using an English rather than a Greek word, call ‘practice of the faith’, especially with regard to ascetic and liturgical life.
Praxis is a key to understanding the Orthodox or Byzantine tradition, in which praxis is the basis of understanding faith and works as conjoint, without separating the two. The importance of praxis, in the sense of action, is indicated in the dictum of Saint Maximus the Confessor: ‘Theology without action is the theology of demons.’
In Orthodox thinking, theory and practice complement each other. Indeed, praxis is seen as ‘living Orthodoxy.’
Some Orthodox theologians think Western Christianity has often been reduced ‘to intellectual, ethical or social categories, whereas right praxis is fundamentally important in a person’s relationship with God, requiring a symbiosis of worship and work.
Praxis is a recurrent topic in the field of philosophy, discussed by philosophers and theologians from Plato and Aristotle to Saint Augustine, Bacon, Kant, Kierkegaard, Mark, Gramsci, Heidegger, Sartre and Freire. It has meaning in the political, educational, spiritual and medical realms.
In English, the word "praxis" is more commonly used in the sense not of practice but with the meaning given to it by Immanuel Kant, namely application of a theory to cases encountered in experience or reasoning about what there should be as opposed to what there is. Karl Marx made this meaning central to his philosophical ideal of transforming the world through revolutionary activity.
Writers in Latin American liberation theology have used the word praxis with specific reference to human activity directed towards transforming the conditions and causes of poverty. For them, liberation theology consists then in applying the Gospel to that praxis to guide and govern it.
August Cieszkowski in 1838 was one of the earliest philosophers to use the term praxis to mean ‘action oriented towards changing society’. Marx uses the term ‘praxis’ to refer to the free, universal, creative and self-creative activity through which humans create and change our historical world and ourselves. For many writers, Marxism is the ‘philosophy of praxis.’
Educators use the word praxis to describe a recurring passage through a cyclical process of experiential learning. Praxis may be described as a form of critical thinking and comprises the combination of reflection and action.
We could say praxis is doing something, and then finding out afterwards why we did it: I left my travellers’ cheques behind, I realised this could be a catastrophe over the following three weeks, I opened a new bank account and transferred funds immediately, and I learned my lesson – I made sure I had plastic and access to cash on all subsequent holidays.
There was a follow-up lesson too. When I arrived back in Dublin, the travellers’ cheques were still on the kitchen table. But because travellers’ cheques needed to be signed in the bank where they were purchased, and then counter-signed to cash in, I had real problems bringing them back to the bank and getting their value credited back to my account. I had learned a costly lesson and I had put that learning into practice.
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