October’s poem

Chinua Achebe, “NON-commitment” (1970):

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Hurrah! to them who do nothing

see nothing feel nothing whose

hearts are fitted with prudence

like a diaphragm across

womb’s beckoning doorway to bar

the scandal of seminal rage. I’m

told the owl too wears wisdom

in a ring of defense round

each vulnerable eye securing it fast

against the darts of sight. Long ago

in the Middle East Pontius Pilate

openly washed involvement off his

white hands and became famous. (Of all

the Roman officials before him and after

who else is talked about

every Sunday in the Apostles’ Creed?) And

talking of apostles that other fellow

Judas wasn’t such a fool

either; though much maligned by

succeeding generations the fact remains

he alone in that motley crowd

had sense enough to tell a doomed

movement when he saw one

and get out quick, a nice little

packet bulging his coat pocket

into the bargain – sensible fellow.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Dante puts Judas near the bottom of Hell, with the traitors. Pilate is not brought down so low: he is with the self-centered opportunists (that is, if lines 55–57 of canto III refer to Pilate, which is controversial).

So: is “noncommitment” more like malicious treachery? Or is it more like opportunistic indifference to the good?

Or is “noncommitment” not a single and genuine kind of sin but an artificial, gerrymandered sin?

Or does Achebe (or Dante) simply get the exemplars wrong and accuse Judas, or Pilate, or both of them, of the wrong kind of sin?

I wish I could say these sorts of philosophical questions are slowing down my reading of the Inferno, but, the truth is, I’m mostly ignoring them and plowing on ahead.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

In a recent interview, Michael Huemer says:

In the first day of one history class in elementary school, I thought that I liked history, but I later learned that I’d been tricked. The teacher (Mrs. Denison) had started a discussion of the question, “Who discovered America?” It was traditionally said that Columbus discovered it. But wait, there were already Indians (that’s what people called the Native Americans then!) living in America when Columbus arrived. Also, there was evidence that Leif Erikson had traveled to America hundreds of years before Columbus. Etc. I thought this was a great discussion. But as I was later to learn, that wasn’t typical of history classes, that was really more like a philosophy discussion, and I actually hated what history classes were normally like.

In another elementary school class, the teacher read a story in which a king had promised some big prize to any hero who could save his daughter from, well, something bad that had taken her captive. I don’t remember the details, except that basically three people wound up all contributing to saving the princess. Each one (as I would now describe it) provided a causally necessary but insufficient condition on the rescue. We then had a discussion of the question: Who gets the prize? Again, I thought that was a great discussion. As I much later recognized, that was also a philosophical discussion.

And it continued like that throughout all my years of schooling. All the really good classes that I ever had were discussions about questions that I would later recognize as philosophical questions, or at least philosophy-adjacent. But there was never enough of it. Not until college, when I could have whole classes on philosophy.

I’ve spent a lot of time wondering what the point is of studying literature and history apart from mining ideas (philosophy) from them. It’s a hard question. My inability to answer it was one big reason why I ended up just studying philosophy.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

C.S. Lewis suggests that the point of reading literature, at least, is to mine experiences:

Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, therefore I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes cannot write books. …

Historians, though, tend to eschew this sort of justification of their craft. I’ve heard them talk of “locating” the self in a larger temporal context (or of “busting myths” that misplace the self in some false context – the historian’s version of Lewis’s quip that “good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered”). I’ve not heard them talk much of “enlarging” the self through partaking in the experiences of others. This sort of aspiration, they regard as suspect. Whereas Lewis says, “My own eyes are not enough for me,” historians say, “I insist on setting the evidence in front of my own eyes” (which, in practice, amounts to setting just a few links of an unavoidably long and complex evidentiary chain in front of their own eyes).

But perhaps historians don’t generally say this. Perhaps I have been listening to unrepresentative historians. But I doubt it.