Thinking from the balcony!

Romeo and Juliet’s famous balcony scene is not only moving. It epitomises the structure of thinking and a turning point in philosophy and science. As often before and since, art reveals deep science in a playful way. And, a day after the latest terrorist attack in London, when politicians score points over security, when society confronts major divisions and conflicts in itself and across the regions, the scene proposes a solution.

This is a post which considers exceedingly important practical questions from a different angle than the norm. It is relevant not only to macro social issues but how to think about leadership in an organisation.

The crux

Juliet’s conversation with herself while Romeo listens is one of the crux points in the canon of Western literature at a turning point in Western civilisation. “A rose”, she says, “by any other name would smell as sweet.”

In this lyrical and moving scene, Romeo looks up to Juliet on the balcony, two levels of converse (and sexes, genealogies and cultures).  In this way it is also a metaphor or symbol of what in systems thinking is called the ground and the meta-level.

Balcony and ground - two levels of thinking

The scene is established in Romeo’s first speech. He uses the mediaeval and pre-mediaeval conception of correspondences between the cosmos and the individual, the macrocosm and the microcosm. Her eyes twinkle in their spheres as the stars twinkle in the spheres of heaven. And in imagination he would like to be the gloves upon her hand that touch the cheek that shines to shame the stars.

Juliet meditates on Romeo. She says he is not a Montague. He is himself. What is a Montague? What is a Capulet? Merely names. But Romeo has his own essence, his own unique individuality.

Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?…

Thou art thyself though, not a Montague.

What’s Montague? It is not hand, nor foot,

Nor arm, no face, nor any other part

Belonging to a man. Oh, be some other name:

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose 

By any other name would smell as sweet;

So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,…

The shift and the pattern 

A modern audience follows this pretty well. And we could leave it at that. But there is more. What the educated Shakespearean audience would know and be more than alive to, because it was a fundamental turn taking place in their world, was the shift from the mediaeval mind to the modernist, from Plato and Aristotle to Bacon and Descartes. A major step in this took place with Bacon’s predecessor, Roger Bacon, the English post-Aristotelian who was one of the voices ushering in nominalism, a theory of words. 

Nominalism was the philosophy that the words we use for things are only words – Latin: nomen meant name. Words, they said, have no essential substance. They are just tags for convenience. Set against nominalism was millennia of Greek–Mediaeval philosophy and its idea: realism. This claimed that most words denoted real ideas, which have real essence (being). The nominalist says there is no table, only things we call tables. The realist says, there is a fertile idea of a table from which an infinity of possible tables may be designed and made. A Jungian would call this an archetype, a Platonist, the ideal form. Earlier I used epitome. A philosopher of science might call them paradigms.

A designer would see a pattern.

Such patterns are pretty important in organisations as well as society. A brand is essentially an idea of a generative pattern that produces organisational behaviours, products and services of a particular type. When leaders treat values as something for the organisation to live up to, they also see them as generative and inspirational. Sovereignty was a big deal in the referendum. So, ideas are seen as real in politics.

In fact, it is fair to say, wherever the philosophers might be today, the actual practice of society in politics and leadership is shifting back to the old idea that ideas are generative, they embody a generative potential for action (which one major philosopher called the virtual). We are voting in the forthcoming election not just for leaders but for their ideas and what those ideas would actually mean when played out in action. And when we listen to politicians and think that they are only giving us words that will not generate action, we mistrust them, and rightly so.

Juliet plays

I am playing, rather seriously, with names and meanings.

So did Juliet: in the intellectual heft of this lyrical romantic passage, there is a play in which the girl Juliet plays with nominalism to establish realism in a thoroughly post-modern way. Romeo is not to be confined by his name, it’s merely a name, yet at the same time he has an essence which is his own essential being, he is really Romeo not nominally Romeo. 

Romeo then speaks:

I take thee at thy word.

Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptiz’d;

Henceforth I never will be Romeo.

Transformation

In these two brief sentences, Romeo utters the language of Christian initiation: just as Saul became Paul through the baptismal power of spiritual love, the Word made flesh, so Romeo claims to be transformed and new-named, new-baptised, by love. This becomes the basis and frame for the ongoing conversation.

Such a religious context could be taken for granted at the time (about 10 years before work began on the first state-approved translation of the Bible in English, the King James' Bible). Of course, that is not always the case today. But very few people are likely to find it difficult to imagine love as a higher power, capable of transforming individuals and societies. (I am sorry for those who cannot.) It may seem doubtful in any particular situation, but as love requires compassion, empathy and warmth towards the other, turning in that direction inevitably means a change of the self and of the relationship.

In Shakespeare’s day there was both the type of tribal conflict dramatised in the play and also religious conflict. Protestants and Catholics were at each other’s throats and building towards the devastating 30 years War. Most readers will detect versions of both today as we ask questions about who belongs and is with us and who does not, who is valued and who is not.

Romeo's essential idea is that under the power of love, he is no longer Romeo - no longer seeing himself nor being seen as an outsider, alien, enemy or foreign person.

Using the metaphorical frame of the scene as a tool for thinking

In reflecting on this passage in these ideas, it is possible to see the play of feeling-thinking between people and with oneself, to observe oneself conceptually on the balcony and to make practical decisions on the ground, Juliet’s discourse becomes Romeo’s decision. We can be both Romeo and Juliet in ourself and as we consider society. We can examine the generative ideas that design our actions as leaders and think about ideas belonging to the community as leadership and design principles in their own right.

Every organisation (brand, culture, society) is a production of its own ideas.

What we call people and peoples generates consequences. This is not because of the name, one is like another. No, it is the idea coursing through that name and sometimes, soon after, coursing through the blood of passion, which may spill real blood. Or it may heal and generate hope.

Transcending difference: Thinking from the balcony

In the imagined drama between genetically and culturally opposed groups – which, frankly, remains a fundamental issue of contemporary society and politics – a question is asked. What is essentially human? What transcends all such difference, genetic, religious, social? And I think this paradigm scene offers insight into the force capable of such transcendence, namely love. 

Angus Jenkinson is the author of From Stress to Serenity: Gaining Strength in the Trials of Life and co-author of Liquidity: Flowing Forms in Water and Money. He is a Thinking Partner.