By Connell Fanning and Assumpta O’Kane
Everyday encounters with the news provide us with practical opportunities for exploring how we select and use concepts in our daily thinking.
Take, for example, the ‘marriage’ of Meghan and Harry. (We have placed the word in quotes to draw attention to the fact that we are referring to is a concept, the content of which requires attention as we will see.)
We are not concerned here with the character of these two people. Our purpose in examining their public conduct is simply to provide us with material for thinking about concept using and, ultimately, about our own selection and use of concepts.
In other words, we are not so much concerned about what we think as we are about how we think about the unfolding story of Meghan and Harry. Specifically, we must ask ourselves what concepts are we using to make meaning of what we are observing, how have we chosen, voluntarily or otherwise, those concepts, and how we are using them in relating to others?
Attending to our thinking
This kind of exercise is central to becoming self-aware of ourselves as concept and theory users. In working through it here we will be guided by what the philosopher and psychotherapist Jonathan Lear has written about the couple’s marriage. Specifically, Lear asks the question, “When did Meghan and Harry marry?”
At the outset, this question may raise the need for us remove an obstacle to our thinking.
This obstacle comes in the shape of thinking that “this question might seem silly or even unintelligible” (68). But Lear counters by noting that it is important and that those who dismiss it are, in effect, careless or uncaring about the concepts they use every day.
Meghan’s Concept of ‘Marriage’
Most of us will answer the question with a vague recollection of a public ceremony at St George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle some years ago. Lear, however, challenges us to think about our thinking by referring to what Meghan said in that famous interview with Oprah Winfrey, thereby revealing how Meghan was thinking with her own concept of marriage.
When asked by Oprah what most excited her in her new life, Meghan replied, “I think just being able to live authentically” and cited the example of her wedding:
“I was thinking about it – even at our wedding, you know, three days before our wedding, we got married… we called the Archbishop, and we just said, ‘Look, this thing, this spectacle is for the world, but we want our union between us. So, like, the vows we have framed in our room are just the two of us in our backyard with the Archbishop of Canterbury… Just the three of us’.” (65-66)
Clearly for Meghan, her ‘marriage’ actually took place privately in their backyard with the Archbishop of Canterbury officiating three days before the public event. This was because, using her conception of ‘marriage’, she wanted her marriage to be a “union between us”, not the “spectacle… for the world”.
We can see here that Meghan was using a concept of ‘marriage’ that put an entirely different and more thoughtful connotation on that event than we may have considered in our own thinking, on the basis of which we may have made judgments and formed opinions.
Lear elaborates to characterise Meghan’s use of the concept of ‘marriage’ as follows:
Meghan wanted to have a real wedding, not a sham. Her sense of her life as having meaning nudged her in the direction of doing something different than the planned public event. Looking back on it, she takes her doings to have been efficacious. She brought about a scene in the garden with Harry and the Archbishop of Canterbury that both she and Harry thought was adequate to their conception of marriage. She takes pleasure in their success. She called it living authentically and said that was what she was most excited about in her new life (66-67).
This poses the question for those of us who watched the interview as to whether we paid attention to Meghan at that point, whether we missed its significance (as even Oprah, a careful listener, did when she continued to focus on the public spectacle), or if we dismissed it as ‘Meghan-nonsense’, as many probably did.
One reason we may have missed the significance is because our habit of thought is to see ‘marriage’ as a ceremony in a public space like a church, contrary to Meghan’s conception of her marriage as a personal and private union between the couple themselves.
Relating to concepts
Lear continues to ask what ‘conceptual resources’ Meghan had available to her to question what a ‘marriage’ should mean? Clearly, as he says, “she earned celebrity, wealth, and personal prestige on her own; she was able, along with her husband, to structure a marriage as she saw fit” (pg. 72). He poses the question, “What freedom did she have with the concepts themselves?”
“At this point, we arrive at an important question about the availability of conceptual resources. In the case of Meghan, she clearly has the concepts of marriage and authenticity with which she wants to understand herself and have others understand her. It is with these in mind that she sought to break free of oppressive cultural norms and expectations.
The issue is whether she gets trapped one level up: trying to escape a phony ritual on the basis of concepts that are themselves clichéd or distorted. She subverts the ritual only to be snagged by the concept. This is a problem that confronts us all.” (71-72)
What Lear is pointing to is how we use concepts: either as (simplified) descriptions of the world or as tools of thought. In the former, concepts have us, we live in them, so to speak, as the reality in which we live, while in the latter we have them and consciously use them to organise our experiences and construct our realities while taking responsibility for the outcomes.
In referring to the possibility of Meghan becoming “snagged by the concept”, Lear is raising the question of how she came to acquire her concept of marriage. Did she take it in an unquestioning way from external authorities as she grew up, or is it something she worked out for herself, even if it was much the same as previously?
We don’t have enough information about Meghan to go further than this. But that is not important.
It is not about what we think of Meghan herself but rather how we use her concept of ‘marriage’ to reflect on our own thinking. Everyday events such as this provide an opportunity for us to develop by looking at others through the lens of being concept users and then turning it on ourselves.
We ask of ourselves the developmental question: what are the implications for how I think? That raises a crucial question for developing how we think: what is our preferred best working attitude to concept selection, using, and the responsibility for results?
Recognising that we are constantly using concepts for how we relate to others, to ourselves, and to the world in is crucial to developing self-awareness.
Thus, there are two big questions we must ask ourselves routinely. Are we working with outmoded concepts that are no longer fit for purpose? And, can we let go of old ideas?
Assurance: The Keynes Centre does not use any large language pattern modelling (so-called ‘Artificial Intelligence’) software or similar Information Technologies in the research and writing of our articles because we wish our readers to know that we are relating to them directly through our thinking and writing.
