Work as a theoretical and practical activity in Kant

active power of synthesis

Abstract

The question of un travail qui forme is still open and very topical.  Although it must be done, it is not on the ground of the critique of the educational practice of societies that we wish to found a relevant theorization to support the formative role of work. It is in the very conceptualization of work and in the experience of it in our contemporary societies that we can find a fertile ground to reinterrogate this question. For us, if there is a "pedagogy of work" at work, it must be inscribed in the very idea of work as an element of the process of hominization, humanization and individuation in the future of man. This question imposes us to denote, in some philosophical passages, although in the contributions of other disciplines that study the work, some categorical complexes around the terms praxis-poièsis and as they unfold in the contemporary debates around the conceptual par action-activity. And it is indeed in this theoretical core that we can meet the elements for a theory of the formation of the man that interests us for the theorization of a "pedagogy of the activity".In this article, we will problematize the notional praxis-poiesis complex, before breaking through some passages in Kant's works around the notion of activity [Tätigkeit], the center of our current reflections.