Conclusion: Disability and Social Theory

Abstract

Why theory? It is a question the Greeks would probably not have asked. Theoria for our classical cousins was about ‘contemplation’, reflecting on observation and experience, in other words, ways of making sense of the world, reaching out through reason to the juicy fruit of truth. It was built in to what they did and how they approached the world. A gymnasium was both a place for getting naked and for philosophical speculation, a combination of the intellectual and the physical, incongruous in the modern academy where thinking is wrapped in robes and gowns. Nietzsche, in marked contrast to his fellow philosophers down the ages, taught that while our ideas did not serve the untouchable tribunal of truth, theory was a psychological necessity, an outcome of the need for human actors to impose intellectual order on a chaotic world. ‘The categories are “truths”’, he wrote, ‘only in the sense that they are conditions of life for us’ (Nietzsche, 1968: 516). Foucault summed up this insight with his aphorism, ‘the will to truth’. We do not discover truth; we work it up into an episteme — a collection of ideas that makes most of us nod with approval. Theory has a reputation for being esoteric but as it settles into everyday discourse, into habit, it transforms into common sense. Nietzsche’s perspectivism might debunk truth, but it does not question the need for theory. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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