Active thinking—a paradox?

The essential tension between theory and practice is exemplified in a scene from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s ballad, “The Lady of Shalott,” written in the 1800s.

A lady sits in a tower, beside a spinning wheel, watching a mirror. She never looks out the window. The town life that parades beneath her window is reflected, shadow‑like, onto her mirror, and she spins the scenes she observes into a tapestry. The villagers, who don’t know who she is, call her the “Lady of Shalott.”

The Lady of Shalott is an artist, but more importantly, she is an observer. In order to reflect and contemplate, she has to distance herself from the action, from the present tense. Yet midway through the poem, the slumber is broken and she suddenly cries out, “I am half‑sick of shadows.”

That is the cry that students let out, in slightly less poetic words, upon plunking their Contemporary Civilization reading down onto the table. The sentiment of that cry lurks behind academia at large—for classics and philosophy majors who do not know what to do with their majors, for social science majors who become frustrated with the gap between jargon‑intensive theories and real‑life phenomena, and so forth. Except, perhaps, for premedical students, the academic journey taken by most students in college is fraught with questions of purpose. 

Last Friday, Michele Moody‑Adams, dean of Columbia College, attempted to bridge the gap between academic theory and practice. One of her major points was that “in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is.” In other words, if the theory is well‑supported with evidence from reality, it should naturally have relevant implications for practice.

But Moody‑Adams pointed out a subtler undercurrent of student attitudes towards academic texts like those read as part of the Core. The attitude, which I argue changes over time, goes something like this:

We enter into college, or for some of us, high school, excited about discovering truth and enriching our minds. We soon discover that we can’t agree amongst ourselves on interpretations of texts, let alone on fundamental concepts. Does “thou shalt not kill” apply to acts of self‑defense? To animals? What about capital punishment?

Frustrated with the ambiguity and dissonance, we throw our hands up, sighing, “It’s all relative. It’s all the same. Who cares?”

Moody‑Adams pointed out that this disillusioned response is due to a previous presumption that there must be one coherent theory that contains all truth. With this presumption framing our minds, the conflicting plurality of theories bowls us over—we swing over, deflated, to the other end, denying all truth. But to maintain this presumption would be to reject Newtonian mechanics simply because they do not work on the atomic level. It would be to deny what each idea and person has to offer. At its worst, this attitude becomes an ear‑closed arrogance, but a polite one at that—a kind that often takes a variation of the response, “Oh that’s interesting. Well, that’s just what you believe.”

So reading and thinking about theory does inevitably translate into an attitude and, consequently, a practice—the question is, what sort of attitude? A retreat into cynicism can become, I argue, a thinly veiled intellectual laziness that does not actively engage ideas different from one’s own. An active engagement means a critical assessment of ideas to judge whether or not one would subscribe to them and often involves a revaluation of one’s ideas. Such a mental exercise of reflecting, judging, and even imagining is useful in its own right. It trains the mind’s faculties and the heart’s toleration of difference—“mental gymnastics,” as my geometry teacher once said.

Theory may enlighten our understanding, but it ultimately trains our way of thinking. It is left to us to strike the right balance between contemplation and action and to translate the mode of thinking into practical action—a frustrating and ambiguous responsibility, certainly, but ours, and only ours, nevertheless.

The author is a Columbia College sophomore. She is the president of the Veritas Forum and the ideas editor of The Eye.