Primacy of action

Since philosophy's sole object is to live well, and living well is a matter of conduct, physics, logic and learned disputation are wasted time: one does not become temperate by defining temperance. Hence the Cynic rejection of theory, which is not lack of culture but consistency with the primacy of praxis. A thesis is refuted by an act as much as by an argument: hearing motion denied, Diogenes, for all reply, stood up and walked. The gesture serves as demonstration, and the sage's life, exposed in public, stands in for a treatise.

Diogenes Laertius, Lives, VI, 39 · Diogenes Laertius, Lives, VI, 70-71

Marxism resolutely privileges praxis: the truth of a thought is proven in practice, and philosophy is worth only what it does as a force of transformation. The eleventh thesis on Feuerbach disqualifies contemplative interpretation in favor of collective action directed at social change.

Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, II and XI (1845)

Since philosophy's sole object is to live well, and living well is a matter of conduct, physics, logic and learned disputation are wasted time: one does not become temperate by defining temperance. Hence the primacy of praxis over theory, which is not lack of culture but consistency. A thesis is refuted by an act as much as by an argument: hearing motion denied, Diogenes, for all reply, stood up and walked. The gesture serves as demonstration, and the sage's life, exposed in public, stands in for a treatise.

Diogenes Laertius, Lives, VI, 39 and 70-71

So long as consciousness is held to be the place where man relates to himself, Feuerbach's materialism stays contemplative: it grasps the real as an object to be internalised, never as an activity to be exercised. Marx overturns this primacy: it is in praxis, the sensuous activity that transforms world and man in a single gesture, that what I am is enacted and proved, not in a reflexive turn upon oneself. Inner examination cut off from action is but one more ideology, and the philosophy that shuts itself within it misses its task: hence a resolute primacy of action over introspection.

Theses on Feuerbach, XI · Theses on Feuerbach, II (truth as a practical question)

Self-examination is treated here as a cause of unhappiness rather than a road to wisdom: whoever watches himself without pause — the sinner counting his faults, the narcissist checking his effect, the megalomaniac measuring his power — stays shut inside an object too small and too familiar to nourish him. Russell therefore recommends turning attention outward, not out of contempt for the inner life, but because he takes interest to be the only available source of energy. His own work is nonetheless a continuous intellectual self-examination: what he condemns is brooding over oneself, not vigilance over one's beliefs.

The Conquest of Happiness (1930), ch. I and XV

To Socratic self-examination he opposes that philosophy is charming in a young man but makes the grown man who lingers over it ridiculous and helpless, ignorant of the laws and of affairs, exposed to being slapped with no recourse. Life lies in action, reputation and power; he presses Socrates to give up such trifles for "the music of affairs".

Plato, Gorgias, 484c-486d (the praise then the critique of philosophy)

Odysseus's life is first of all action, enterprise and engagement with the world, more than contemplative withdrawal: he acts, sails, negotiates, governs. His worth lies in intelligence thrown into the ordeal, not in self-examination; yet his soliloquies, his narratives and his tears show he is not, for all that, without an inner life, and that in him the opposition is never clear-cut.

Odyssey, IX-XII (the narration of his exploits to the Phaeacians) · Odyssey, XIII-XXII (the patient action of the return)