theory & practice
reading socrates has me thinking. if you were scheduled for surgery, who would be the expert, the philosopher who theorized about the procedure or the surgeon? "the surgeon" would be my immediate answer. this is all very "chicken and egg" however, because without the ideas that brought forth the schools of thought on medicine, the doctor would have had nothing to study.
my personality inhabits a world of ideas. while i am quick to take action on many of them, i have found more traction by being in community with people different from myself and vice-versa. case in point, there's a time to write poems about doing something and a time just to do that thing, whatever it might be.
take engineering, for example. there are designers and builders. sometimes the builder will look at the plans and say, "we don't want to have to bend this rebar, so we're going to build it differently" and it can work just fine. other times, however, the designers will say, "that is not going to work and this is why..." so, it seems to me you could drill a post effectively and not know why it works OR you could design plans but not know how to drill a post. could a person be proficient in both?
which led me down another road of inquiry in terms of knowlege and understanding. do i have to know why the baking soda works in a cake in order to bake one? no. might it be interesting to know? of course, especially if the recipe went awry or i needed to problem solve a creative solution in the kitchen. does the housewife sometimes have a better grasp on home remedies from helping sick chlidren than a nurse who has just graduated? yes. would it be ideal to have both the understanding and the experience? perhaps.
following the socratic method here, would mastering both theory and practice then entail a new level of acquired wisdom?
my personality inhabits a world of ideas. while i am quick to take action on many of them, i have found more traction by being in community with people different from myself and vice-versa. case in point, there's a time to write poems about doing something and a time just to do that thing, whatever it might be.
take engineering, for example. there are designers and builders. sometimes the builder will look at the plans and say, "we don't want to have to bend this rebar, so we're going to build it differently" and it can work just fine. other times, however, the designers will say, "that is not going to work and this is why..." so, it seems to me you could drill a post effectively and not know why it works OR you could design plans but not know how to drill a post. could a person be proficient in both?
which led me down another road of inquiry in terms of knowlege and understanding. do i have to know why the baking soda works in a cake in order to bake one? no. might it be interesting to know? of course, especially if the recipe went awry or i needed to problem solve a creative solution in the kitchen. does the housewife sometimes have a better grasp on home remedies from helping sick chlidren than a nurse who has just graduated? yes. would it be ideal to have both the understanding and the experience? perhaps.
following the socratic method here, would mastering both theory and practice then entail a new level of acquired wisdom?
wow, that is super deep stuff! who would have thought that socrates would get you thinking. . . ? :)
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