You know the famous Engel quote:
An ounce of action is worth a tonne of theory.
Well that's bollocks, at least for the average Ph.D. student... I propose instead that an ounce of theory is worth a tonne of action.
You spend weeks of source/data analysis, thinking, reading etc (in other words 'action'), just to come up with one idea, one key, one way into the issue at hand. Each idea is worth so much more than the individual facts. That's why writting a Ph.D. is so difficult - it not about collating facts and drawing nice parallels - it's challenging theories, and/or inventing new ones to explain the facts, to explain ideas. If it was about action I would have finished my Ph.D. months ago - instead it's about theory and thought - and these, sadly for the doctoral candidate, are so much more elusive.
I'm feeling low today, not being able to express the wordless, shapeless, embryonic inklings that are stirring in my head. I'm beginning to think that Margaret Atwood was wrong too when she intimated, in works like The Handmaid's Tale, that all thought is connected to language - that without language, the concepts cannot exist. What nonsense.
Thought is much more nebulous that language - I believe that all thought lives in the spaces between words, and language is our very inadequate way of trying to share ideas. If concepts were impossible without language then no-one would have ever struggled to write anything. Most people have tonnes of ideas, but no way to express themselves. Of course language is important, and common discourse crucial in understanding each other. But I've come to regard thought as preceding all this.
Well - these are my rambling two cents today.
Best, fellow travellers.