In Search of Primal Praxis

For the article Greig Mulberry and I are writing (tentatively titled “Praxis, Language, Meaning”) we need an account of what we are calling “primal praxis,” by which we mean the field of meaningful activity undertaken in the absence of language, at least language as we know it. We need this account to serve as a foil for two similarly praxis-oriented approaches to meaning that in different ways conceive language as intrinsic to meaning: hermeneutics as developed in the work of Gadamer and the later Heidegger and the “Pittsburgh Hegelian” school as exemplified by Sellars, Brandom, and Mark Lance. Our aim at this time is to draw resources from the early Heidegger and the later Wittgenstein to create a hybrid position that we suspect no prominent philosopher has ever actually held. Our goals in this endeavor are thus less historical than argumentative.

In his study of Dasein’s transparent coping in the workshop in Being and Time Heidegger sketches the contours of an analysis of primal praxis. Although Rede, which we can gloss here as language, is for early Heidegger an equiprimordial source of meaning, his examination of practical engagement shows how one could describe primal praxis in action. Words and other elements of language play no obvious role in that examination. Consequently, I will follow this post up shortly with an analysis of this section of Being and Time.

I will then complement this reading with a study of some of the many paragraphs in the Philosophical Investigations where Wittgenstein either argues or attempts to show that the meaning of units of language derives from their place in practices, either on analogy or else by simple comparison with the meaning that various pieces of equipment have in practices. By synthesizing and abstracting from these positions I will work out a rough and ready account of primal praxis.