I’ve been in long-term “discussions” (a euphemism for “arguments”) with some people who claim that the humanities—in particular art, music, and literature—constitute “ways of knowing” that tell us facts about the universe either unattainable by science, unverifiable by science, or truths first revealed by literature and later verifiable by science. Often these arguments are made by theists whose ultimate goal is to show that religion is a “way of knowing.”

Over the several years of these discussions, I haven’t been convinced that humanities are indeed “ways of knowing” distinct from science. History and archaeology are ways of knowing, but only insofar as they adopt the scientific practices of verification, replication, and as they withstand doubt and alternative hypotheses. That is, I consider disciplines that use the practices of science to establish facts as “science broadly construed.” People like Massimo Pigliucci object vehemently to that term, but it’s just a semantic issue, so I’ll not pursue it here. All I can say is that I haven’t seen a truth set forth in literature that could stand as a truth without independent empirical verification.

As I’ve always said, I don’t say this to disparage the humanities—I’m a big fan of the arts and literature—but only to say that there’s really only one way of establishing truth, and that is to adopt the practices of science. I see music, art, and literature as ways of feeling, not ways of knowing. That is, they give us emotional experiences inaccessible to us in other ways. Literature enables us to see what it might feel like to be in somebody else’s shoes, activating emotions that we didn’t know we had.

I say “might” because when you read, say, The Sun Also Rises, you don’t know what you’d feel like if you were in Jake’s shoes. What you read about is what Jake feels like, a man in love but unable to consummate it. You may empathize with him or you may not. But, more likely than not, your emotions will turn one way or another: you’ll feel something you wouldn’t have felt otherwise.

I thought about this when I was pondering one of my favorite books, Out of Africa by Isak Dinisen (a pseudonym for Karen Blixen). As a portrait of colonialist Africa and a specimen of wonderful prose, it’s incomparable. After her coffee farm in Kenya fails, and her lover Denys Finch Hatton dies in a plane crash, she takes her sad farewell from Africa. The following clip from the end of the movie gives us three emotional scenes:

1. She is bought a drink by her fellow Brits at the club; this was previously forbidden because the bar had a “no women allowed” policy, which they violated to honor her presence as she leaves. It is a sign that she was respected, but accepted only at the end.
2. She says goodbye to her beloved head servant Farah at the train station, giving him the compass that Denys Finch Hatton had given her. She then asks him to say her name. This is of a piece with her famous soliloquy, “If I know a song of Africa. . .does Africa know a song of me?” In other words, she doesn’t want her presence as a person in that vast uncaring continent, a place that meant so much to her, to have gone unnoticed.
3. She recounts a story of lions resting on Finch Hatton’s grave (she always inserts an incorrect apostrophe in his name), a story told her by a friend via a local official. This part, unfinished in the clip below, evokes strong emotions in me, always making me tear up. The combination of her love for the man, his death, and his association with the lions is an incomparable image and ineffably sad.

Here’s the clip. By the way, Meryl Streep has sometimes been denigrated as an actress for only being “good with an accent”, but I think you’ll see from this short video that her acting abilities, evinced in the slightest changes of facial expression, are superb. I’m a big fan.

The lion-on-grave clip ends prematurely above, but you can see whole bit here.

And here’s the relevant passage from Out of Africa.  The whole thing is wonderful, but it’s made immortal by that last sentence:

After I had left Africa, Gustav Mohr wrote to me of a strange thing that had happened by Denys’ grave, the like of which I have never heard. “The Masai,” he wrote, “have reported to the District Commissioner at Ngong, that many times, at sunrise and sunset, they have seen lions on Finch-Hatton’s grave in the Hills. A lion and a lioness have come there, and stood, or lain, on the grave for a long time. Some of the Indians who have passed the place in their lorries on the way to Kajado have also seen them. After you went away, the ground round the grave was levelled out, into a sort of big terrace, I suppose that the level place makes a good site for the lions, from there they can have a view over the plain, and the cattle and game on it.”

It was fit and decorous that the lions should come to Denys’s grave and make him an African monument. “And renowned be thy grave.” Lord Nelson himself, I have reflected, in Trafalgar Square, has his lions made only out of stone.

Remember that Blixen was Danish and wrote the book in her second language, which makes it even more remarkable.

Now, what “way of knowing” do we have here? What we learn is the events of Blixen’s life, and how she told us she felt about them. This is a sort of history, although to ensure that what she says is true you’d need more empirical verification. After all, lots of people embroider their autobiographies.

But the facts of her life are not what’s important in the film and in the book. What is important is how she reacts to them, and how we react to her reaction. If you’re sufficiently empathic (and it doesn’t take much), you’ll feel her carefully concealed joy at being bought a drink by people who used to exclude her; you’ll feel her gratitude as she hears Farah say her name for the first time, knowing he’ll remember her; and, especially, you’ll feel the stir of her soul as the lions on Finch Hatton’s grave bring his memory back to her.

To me, this is all a way of feeling, an activation of emotions in situations we’d never experience. As Emily Dickinson wrote, “There is no Frigate like a book. . .” What have we learned from the passage? Not much, really, and what we did learn needs verification if we’re to take it as true. But that’s all beside the point. What stays with us is the image of Finch Hatton, loved and now gone, whose memorial is made of flesh and fur rather than marble.