Theory and practice

In a previous posting (The critical task of universities) I wrote about, among other things, the society-critical task of universities, as well as the place of teaching and research at such institutions. Unsurprisingly, it has elicited a negative comment aimed at exposing what my critic saw as the hollowness of “theory” — no doubt not only because theory is implicated in the practice of university teaching and research, but also (mainly, I suspect) because of the theoretical register in which the piece was written.

It is nothing unusual for people who don’t understand the relation between theory and practice to trash the former.

As a matter of fact, however, every person who has a view or an opinion on something participates in “theorising” of some kind — albeit at a low, everyday level. My critic is no exception. What he had to say about theory and about teaching as opposed to “doing” — a spurious distinction if ever there was one; one distinguishes easily between good and bad teachers because of the different ways they “do” it — itself amounts to a theory of sorts, and a bad one at that.

But “good” theories are recognisable by the fact that they “explain” things, relations and events in social and natural reality in a persuasive manner. So, for example, Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity, although “counter-intuitive” (as a master’s student of ours has described it), and more difficult to test than Newton’s theory (which seems to confirm common sense experience of events in the physical world), have been tested and confirmed — in the case of the latter theory, on the occasion of a solar eclipse that provided the opportunity to measure whether light is indeed, as Einstein’s general theory predicted, “bent” around the sun, that is, subject to the force of gravity (absurd as it may have seemed).

In the social realm, too, theories are formulated and tested, although — given the relatively greater complexity of human beings’ behaviour compared to natural processes — it is not as straightforwardly confirmed or falsified as in the case of “measurable” events and occurrences in nature.

One of the reasons for this is that humans act on the basis of specific interpretations of their situations, and not simply on the basis of a straightforward, predictable “cause”, unlike natural occurrences (except at a sub-nuclear level, where, difficult as it seems to accept in common-sense terms, physicists report the occurrence of “uncaused” events).

Another way of saying this is that human beings’ actions are “overdetermined” — there is more than one “causal” way to explain them.

A case in point concerns what the sociologist Durkheim called the principle or law (or theory) of “anomie” (“normlessness”), according to which people who, because of the division of labour, moved from the social cohesiveness of small communities to the comparable openness and lack of social cohesion of large cities, experienced a kind of social alienation and isolatedness, which — depending on whether such a person was in a position to call upon some sort of social support group or not — could lead to suicide on the part of the person concerned. (Durkheim remarked on the increase in the number of suicides in the late 19th century.)

This gives one the opportunity to predict or hypothesise, long after Durkheim’s formulation of the conditions for the functioning of anomie, that under conditions characterised by it, some people are more likely to commit suicide than others —it is not easy to “stand alone”. (From this perspective, the counselling service known as Lifeline plays an important role in counteracting the effects of anomie in big cities, even today.)

Hence, “theory” does play an important role in understanding social and natural reality, depending on whether it brings together a number of things in an explanatory manner.

The etymology of the word “theory” is illuminating in this regard. It is derived from the ancient Greek word, theoros, which meant a spectator at the performance of a drama (a comedy or a tragedy), which was anything but a frivolous activity for the Greeks.

Although the theoros looked on from a distance, the dramatic events that unfolded on the stage were not incidental or irrelevant to his or her life — instead, because these actions were the portrayal of events in the human realms that were subject to universal cosmic laws, the theoros participated in them by being a spectator.

The “distance”, in other words, was a condition for gaining understanding of the relation between humans and cosmic laws. In an analogous manner, any “theory” that deserves to be called that may seem — to people like my critic, who does not know the difference between a “good” and a “bad” theory (including their own) — to be hopelessly removed from the concrete world of “doing”, and even more so from moral action, but in fact theory, when properly constructed, puts things in an intelligible perspective to a greater or a lesser extent, and often illuminates matters in a way that enables one to take a moral stand that may otherwise have eluded one.

In other words, there is a connection between theory and practice, even when the theory, or way of understanding social reality, is not explicitly articulated by the person concerned.

Every person’s social practice or behaviour is therefore guided by an understanding (right or wrong) of other people, of the world, and so on. Broadly speaking, such an understanding may be called “low-level theory”. Needless to say, some such “theories” are woefully inadequate, especially because we live in an increasingly complex world, with the result that a lot of people resort to “theories” that hardly have a purchase on this multicultural, post-modern world. But that is a topic for another time.