Chapter 5/7

Philosopher Alfred Whitehead called it “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” He was talking about the difference between our ideas and the world of concrete reality.

Concrete reality is the world as it is apart from our understanding of it, our idea of it. It is the world as it actually is—actual individuals, communities, love affairs, wars, businesses, grass, automobiles, clouds, and trombones. It is actual, specific instances of events and things, not our idea of family, of children dying of starvation, or of hurricanes. It is your family, this child named Ndondo that is dying, Hurricane “Katrina.”

The mistake—the fallacy, as Whitehead called it—is mistaking our ideas for actualities. Ideas exist only in our minds. Ideas are mental actualities. They do exist, but only in the world of our thought. The idea of marriage has no concrete reality, there are only actual marriages. The fallacy of misplaced concreteness is to believe we will find our actual marriage to be just like our idea of it. It is to misplace the concrete with the mental.


Barry and Rachel fell in love with each other, so it seemed to them, but more likely than not, they have fallen in love with their idea of each other. “Love is blind” to many concrete realities that the rest of us see. They, however, have composed an idea-lized image of their beloved, based on their dreams and their experience. In the illusory world of courtship, they see in each other only the idea-l.

Then they marry. The honeymoon ends when they find their marriage partner fails to conform to the idea. Marriage—this actual marriage of Rachel and Barry—is, at many points, not like they supposed it would be. Marital problems, at heart, arise from a refusal to accept and adjust to the concrete character of life together.

“You are not the man I married. You have changed.” These words are common in the early years of marriage. But no, neither the husband nor the wife has changed. What has happened is that they have become dis-illusioned. Quite often, our ideas of each other, and of the nature of marriage, are illusions. Yet we allow ourselves to believe the reality will match the illusion. We have made the mistake of misplacing the concrete with a dreamy idea.

Ideas are necessary guides, suggestive of life’s road, of its speed limit, its potholes, curves … but the ideas are not the road any more than a map is the territory it symbolizes.

No matter how good we become as thinkers, we must always remember the distinction between what we think and what actually is, was, or will come to be. This applies to the teacher’s idea of what she will do in the classroom today, the painter’s idea of the picture she is about to paint, our idea of what a church or minister is, or how the boss will respond to any one of our requests.

On the one hand, think, but on the other, remember there are always more “other hands” than we can wrap our minds around. Expect the unexpected.


Consider other perspectives. For some of us, that means we first must realize there are perspectives other than our own. Bill Hendricks, a theologian, was one of the finest men I have known, one of the most brilliant and learned—some believed he even thought in Latin. Some would also say he was rather arrogant. Everyone looked up to him. No one challenged him.

One fall, there came on the faculty a scroungy-looking little Dutchman, also a theologian, named Jan Kiwiet. He was, as someone who knew him said, “a Dutchman in whom there is no guile.” A modest man, he was a published scholar. At a faculty get-together before school started in the fall, Hendricks was pontificating about some doctrinal issue when, to the shock of everyone, Kiwiet, our new man, innocently, but without hesitation, said, “Bill, that’s just what you think. Other theologians, they think different.” Yes, Doctor Hendricks, there are perspectives other than your own, many of which are worthy of consideration.

I have written about considerate thinking and its part in the making of my long, rich, and satisfying marriage. Carol and I entered marriage after thinking, romantically, that we had talked through everything that could be considered. We had done this for more than four years before marriage. We thought we agreed on everything. But, we brought two widely divergent family perspectives to the actual marriage. I was not a considerate thinker at the time of our wedding.

It took years of obstinate and persistent challenges before I, rather than coming down to her level, realized that in reality I was not up to her level. She had a hard time convincing me, against my heritage, that she was a person as much as I was, with the same rights, with a mind of her own. And a sharp mind it was, sometimes coupled with a sharp tongue. I was a slow and highly resistant learner. She was not about to leave me, nor was she about to leave me with my obsolete mindset. I loved her and she persisted. She prevailed. And I became a better man.

She changed my views on sex, money, raising children, television, in-laws, and who knows what all else. I moderated her views on money, religion, housekeeping, and perhaps another thing or two. For long years now, we have thought through almost everything together and arrived at comfortable, practical consensus. Our minds complement each other. We have found that neither of us thinks clearly nor productively unless we depend on mutual input, checks and balances.