WORKING WITH CONCEPTS
Connell Fanning, Assumpta O’Kane, and Marija Laugalyte
Recently we considered the observation of the London Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley (here), rejecting the central finding of a report by Dame Louise Casey that his organisation is “institutionally racist, misogynist and homophobic”. Although it would clearly appear that he understood the argument being made on an intellectual level, he seemed to have resistance from ‘within’ to changing his thinking.
This raises the question: how can we understand the thinking underlying the conduct of an intelligent, experienced person, such as Mark Rowley, in the context of a demand being made to think differently and for this demand to be rejected? The purpose in asking this is to help us direct our attention to our own reaction when there is a demand on us to change how we think.
To explore further how to think about how other people think and then attend to the how of our own thinking, we must, first, decide how to go about the task of thinking about thinking – that is, to understand the method we can use to observe fruitfully the thinking of others and then of our own thinking.
The theme of this article is, therefore, necessarily more explicitly methodological than others in the series, albeit as we shall see with direct implications for our own habits of thought.
How can we observe thinking?
We must think in examples, or models. The subject matter we are interested in here is what we may regard as the ordinary, normal person, thinking in their daily living, and not a person whose psychological make-up is shaped by any pathology (this characterisation is sufficient for our purposes and any further personal details, such as gender, height, or occupation would destroy its generality and role as a mode of thinking).
Further, to avoid misunderstanding, we clarify that we are concerned in our method here only with the public persona of the subjects and their public statements as manifestations of how they think. We are not concerned in any way about the private person, about which we know nothing. Finally, we are not concerned with the merits or otherwise of the particularities of the Casey Report.
Thus, we take as our starting point the factual observation that thinking is an embodied mental activity, that is, it is invisible and is therefore unobservable externally. Other persons can only observe what is revealed of thinking in the public realm, that is, expressed in some way through words or deeds by a person. Accordingly, when we observe someone thinking, we observe the whole person as the entity being considered; there is only the whole person.
What does that mean practically for our understanding of how they think?
When thinking, a person expresses that thinking as ‘thought objects’ – for example, in the form of oral or written statements or, perhaps, works of art. Thought objects are what we can observe. But what is happening ‘inside’ for the ‘whole person’?
In effect, we are confronted with a ‘black box’. Thus, we need to open this ‘black box’ to look inside. But how can we usefully do this to aid our understanding of the other person as an aid to better understanding ourselves? This is unavoidably a question of method about which we must take a position explicitly or otherwise do so by default.
Opening the ‘black box’
For this purpose, we turn to Keynes’s principle of analysis for our way forward. Keynes explains that:
[w]hen one is separating for purposes of analysis elements which are seldom or never discoverable in isolation in the real world, there is an arbitrary element, and one must be governed by what seems most instructive and helpful in understanding the substantial issue.
The key methodological idea here is that we as analysts are operating as if ‘bits’ of ‘the whole person’ can be separated out for examination to aid reaching an understanding and explanation of how they are thinking. There is no formula for doing this separating out. We can only make distinctions on the basis of experience and judgment in the context of the particular issue at hand. The division of mind into elements is arbitrary from any absolute standpoint. It draws on what we believe will advance our understanding based on what has worked for us or others in the past. It is always important to keep this methodological qualification in mind, not just here, but also when we are reading or listening to others analysing our mental activities.
This raises the next question as to what concepts we can use as tools of thought to further our understanding of the process of thinking as a ‘whole person’ mental activity?
Using Keynes’s principle of analysis, we can select, for example, the useful idea of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) that we have four faculties or powers: intellect, reason, emotion, and feeling. (Other thinkers work with different ideas about the ‘mind’; for example, Sigmund Freud, famously analysed the mind into three elements, the ego, id, and superego, for therapeutic purposes.)
Thus, to help us understand how the whole person thinks, we can break up the person into these Kantian elements to consider the implications of their possible interactions on how a person thinks. We use these elements as lenses through which to observe what is happening within the person. In other words, for our purpose here, when we open the ‘black box’ we get Kant’s faculties. In this way we can consider what happens when a demand, such as that facing the Met Commissioner, is made on someone. And we can turn this lens on ourselves to better understand how we think.
The logic of arguments and an intellectual understanding will not, as Irvin Yalom warns us, “penetrate deep enough to effect any change” as only “when one feels an insight in one’s bones does one own it. Only then will one act on it and change.” This is what we may call the ‘Yalom problem’, that is,
…the problem …is always how to move from an ineffectual intellectual appreciation of a truth about oneself to some emotional experience of it. It is only when a [method] enlists deep emotions that it becomes a powerful force for change.
While Yalom is talking about psychotherapy (Love’s Executioner, 1989: 35), his point applies to any change in thinking, therapy being just one method of bringing about a more satisfactory state of affairs in place of a less satisfactory one.
One of the general principles of The Keynes Centre developmental approach is that understanding in terms of intellect provides a way ‘into’ the whole person, so to speak, which is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a voluntary and deliberate developmental movement. When we refer to ‘intellect’ we are isolating, as we have said, an aspect of the whole person for our conceptual thinking, done for purposes of organising and structuring our approach to understanding a person’s thinking.
Common line of reaction
We put ourselves in the position of the Commissioner and observe how we might respond to a demand to think anew, that is, to add a new concept (‘institutionally racist’) to our portfolio of concepts with which we think.
What are we doing? How are we likely to respond? Specifically, what might bring us to rejecting this demand?
For example, when we are reading a report, such as the Met Commissioner was, we may feel something stirring in us which on reflection, no matter how instantaneous, we may express to ourselves as ‘anxiety’, ‘fear’, ‘uncertainty’, or ‘confusion’. On such basis, we may use our imagination to judge the source of the feeling to be undesirable. If so, and consequently, using our reason, we often organise such an experience into a meaning and truth that works for us, that gives us some assurance and perhaps even comfort. This construction we make guides our conduct, including further using our intellect to examine the issue more. Then, on the basis of emotion, as we possibly think and reflect on the matter, we may exercise our will to reject the demand to change how we think.
In practice, of course, none of this will happen in such a fragmented way, which arises from the separation we have made to aid our understanding. Rather everything may be tumbling around ‘within us’ as an integrative process ‘inside’ the ‘whole person’.
A line of reaction such as this is quite typical. Consequently, it would be no surprise that we would resist the demand to incorporate a new concept into our apparatus of mind.
Turning to our own development
This line of thought indicates where the obstacle to changing our mind, to taking on new concepts, enters our daily living. What can we do about this kind of obstacle? How can we continue our development throughout adulthood?
We can use the above Kantian schema, on the basis of Keynes’s principle of analysis, as a tool for reflective thinking about ourselves, that is, as a personal developmental practice for attending to our openness to taking on new conceptual resources when such a demand is made on us.
Thinking in terms of the ‘Yalom Problem’ reminds us that we must bring these elements together, that we must ensure that our understanding through the faculty of intellect and the faculty of reason connects with ‘understanding’ through the faculty of emotion and the faculty of feeling.
It is a tall order, to meet the ‘Yalom Problem’, with its two aspects: one, in terms of faculties of intellect and reason, the other in terms of faculties of emotion and feeling. Both are aspects of the one whole and indivisible person. They are, as Yalom implies, connected and intertwined.
As Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey say in their seminal book, undertaking development in adulthood is “messy work, …it draws on head and heart, on thinking and feeling” (54).
We can achieve this integration by ‘rotating’ or ‘working around’ the four separated-out elements of our mind (as in figure here). By playing with each element and making connections between them we create the dynamic for absorbing and, in effect, combining the implications into ourselves as whole persons. With practice, we will become increasingly adept at working with this schema we are using as an example for reflective thinking, or another schema like it. Making this method of thinking a habit of thought is a key to continuing personal development throughout adulthood.
It is hard to do this alone. This raises the question of how best to do the messy work of drawing on ‘the head and the heart’, on thinking and feeling? One of the best-established answers is through undertaking a developmental conversation such as provided by the new ‘Reading The Leadership Mind Experience’ from The Keynes Centre. See here bit.ly/3kX3IxX
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.
