Of Pins and Angels

OF PINS AND ANGELS / Anita T. Sullivan JAMES THURBER HAD AN IMPISH compulsion to read all metaphors as if they were literally true. Those of us afflicted with the same tendency often find it difficult to begin a phUosophical discussion. I, for example, would like to begin this discussion by just the briefest mention of a pendulum-swing of the thinking between medieval and contemporary thought. But each time I try to lapse into the proper metaphorical frame of of mind I hear a shrill inner voice crying "Whee!" and there I am, swinging back and forth with my feet dangling in the air, appearing and disappearing in the long glass front of an imaginary clock. Yet that is exactly what I would like to ask you to do: abandon the twentieth century's sharp distinction between figurative and literal use of language, and take the long pendulumswing back to an age in which people argued seriously a question, for example, such as "How Many Angels Can Stand on the Head of a Pin?"* Do you remember that one? You may have run across it in a medieval philosophy course as an example of the utter fuddyduddyness of scholastic metaphysics. What is it, I wonder, that irritates and amuses and bores us about this question—about all such "metaphysical" questions—and why did we abandon them some centuries back and proceed, as the Little Prince says, to Matters of Consequence? How far indeed has the pendulum of how-peoplethink swung, if there were truly a time in history when intelligent thinkers considered "How much space do angels occupy?" more important than "How can we feed the peasants?" For a long time now we have debated questions of an entirely non-metaphysical sort in what passes for our public arena. We no longer have Church Fathers—an elite group of learned philosophertheologian -sociologist-economist-politicians who we know are "up there" in their hillside monasteries figuring out the nature of the universe for us—not the nature of the economy or the world political situation, but the universe. We do have astronomers and physicists There is a minority opinion which claims the question to have been: "How Many Angels Can Dance on the Head of a Pin?" Beyond observing that the words "stand" and "dance" contain the same number of letters, I cannot speak with authority on the question. I do think, however, that having the angels dancing would needlessly complicate the whole problem. The Missouri Review · 233 and mathematicians whose bailiwick is the stuff of which the stars are made, but we tend to think of the results of their work as having (we hope someday) a practical application. New thoughts per se are not considered much use. And the questions we debate are sharply relevant: How can we prevent nuclear war? Is AIDS going to be the next Bubonic Plague? How are we going to feed our peasants? These are certainly questions of magnitude; they affect huge numbers of people. And what is more important, even though we may not have immediate answers or solutions to them, we at least assume these questions can be answered. For us, a question is like an equation: one side balances the other. But I think it might be useful to take one more look at that long-forgotten riddle about angels and pins. Why? Well, because I think many of the problems we now struggle with actually make more sense when they are regarded as nonsense. Or perhaps I should go even further and say that many of them are nonsense, and we would be better able to deal with them if we could approach them on their own terms. Let me give two examples, one somewhat extended, and one very short. First, there is the tempered tuning system we use on our pianos. For something like 250 years the diatonic scale which is outlined on the white keys between C and C on the piano keyboard has been one of the most prevalent and influential scales in all the world's music. Although other scales exist, the music made with this one is what you generally hear in airports around the...