ABSTRACT
There are many fruitful questions one can ask about practices. Philosophers typically ask how practices serve as conditions for the possibility of various kinds of complicated human comportments. Philosophers, for instance, who are interested in cognitive acts will show how shared habitual practices are crucial for the application of any rule. Anthropologists and sociologists interested in instituted aspects of human life such as gender or gift-giving tend to focus on showing that neither systems of belief, nor functional analyses, nor systems of structural difference can account for the improvisational character of such instituted forms of life.1 Others, frequently with some psychological training, are more likely to ask if practices are more like constantly developing skills or more like rigid habits. Are practices more like developing skills when they are actively deployed toward some particular end or more like stable habits when they ground the recognition of something? Historians, like Foucault, reveal how the same ethical maxims or the same social functions produce quite different forms of life as different kinds of practices, say, monarchical or disciplinary, Stoical or Christian, are in place for enacting the maxims or functions. All of these kinds of analysis are important (and I have only surveyed a small number of fruitful kinds of practice analysis). But I want to focus attention on an aspect of the way practices work which I believe is mostly overlooked and which has significant consequences for any ethics founded on practice. I shall spend the first part of this paper fleshing out the aspect of practices that I am interested in exploring. In the second and third parts of the paper, I shall describe how Derrida and Heidegger give two radically different accounts of this aspect of practice. And in a short fourth part I shall conclude by giving a consideration that suggests why I believe Heidegger’s account is preferable and how it could be altered to embed Derrida’s insights. My main goal, however, is to open consideration of general tendencies in the way practices work and point out the ethical consequences of identifying such tendencies.
