The Socratic Plumber

        We're back home now and, for some reason, while we were gone, the plumbing in our bathroom, in various ways, failed. The bath won't drain (I suspect that the 2 year old has been sending toilet paper down it); the water pressure is completely off in the shower, so you have to manuever things to get something other than a trickle; and the sink clogs easily. You can imagine how the morning routine becomes frustrating very quickly.
     Now, in some houses, these would be minor problems: just a few adjustments, probably involving a snake and a wrench, and possibly (but hopefully not) some Drano. Not in this house. With all due respect, the husband is probably the least handy man in the entire world. The thing is, he isn't clumsy, he's just...overly thorough. He actually needs to have a complete understanding of what needs to be done before he does it. So, for instance, when we bought the (requisite) minivan, he sat down in an armchair one evening to read the manual. I actually found some parts highlighted. I'm not kidding.
        You can imagine how this approach works (or doesn't work) with ordinary household jobs. One time we bought an infant chair, in need of reassembly, at a yard sale. Because it didn't come with an instruction manual, it turned into a kind of working experiment, and after about 20 minutes, he was staring at a twisted peice of metal with a thin sheen of sweat on his upper lip. We also have a doll stroller that he "assembled" . When my sister sees it she always says, "that stroller is soooo funny", because he somehow  managed to connect all of the pieces into something that does not at all resemble a stroller. It actually looks like one of those deep shopping carts you can buy for your own personal use.
     So, in the case of the bathroom, the plumbing problems are going to result in one of two things: a day-long project that ends with his detailed description of the inner workings of the bathroom; or an expensive plumbing bill that most households wouldn't have to shoulder. I prefer the latter, because chances are it's inevitable anyway. (I actually have a pretty nice roster of handymen of various types, should those of you who know me need anyone).
     The thing is, in the grand scheme of things (read: philosophical), this all makes sense. At least from Plato's perspective. In Plato's Apology, after Socrates is told by the oracle at Delphi that he is the wisest man in Athens, one of the groups of people that he interrogates is the craftsmen. They, of course, quickly reveal  ignorance of their craft, in the sense that they don't really understand what they are doing.  This is part of Plato's theory of knowledge: the man who (merely) knows how to fix a sink does not really understand what a sink is or how all the parts work together, because when Plato talks about understanding he really means understanding. He would, in this case, require an understanding of the Platonic Form of the Sink, in which all sinks that exist "participate"; it's literally the ideal sink, and once you understand it, you would understand all individual sinks. And it's this Platonic Form that serves to distinguish between the type of knowledge the plumber/techinician has, and that which the philosopher has.
       So, what's really going on is that the husband, being a philosopher, is not satisfied with understanding at the technical level; rather, he strives for the philosophical level. Fat lot of good that does our household, though! And, it should be mentioned that as a philosopher, myself, I've become pretty handy with a drill and skimming through instruction manuals...