The Committed Life

by Dr. Jan Garrett

This page revised 1/23/2012

The term "commit" comes from Latin by way of Middle English and French. The Latin original meant to connect or entrust, from which we get the meanings "to put into charge or trust," or "entrust."

From this we get the meaning "to place in a prison or mental institution." It's fair to say that this particular meaning of the word "commitment" is not very near the center of our concerns in this course.

Some other meanings are closer: to carry into action deliberately, though the meaning of the common phrase "commit a crime," which is based on this, goes off on a tangent. It seems we can commit good or indifferent deeds as well as bad. To commit in this sense refers to a deliberate, one can hope rationally justifiable, act.

The most central meaning for our purposes is what Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary lists under the third main meaning, "a to obligate or bind, b to pledge or assign to some particular course or use."

In fact, the title of the course seems to refer to commitments that we make consciously, on our own responsibility, in which we pledge or bind ourselves to follow certain promises or a certain course of action. We can commit, for instance, to a particular major or minor, which means at least that we intend to fulfill the requirements of that major or minor.

I cannot assume that everyone who has signed up for a course like this is committed to the course. If you attend regularly, participate in discussion, and start handing in the assignments, I will gradually form the impression that you are committed to this course. I committed to it when I agreed to teach it, but a teacher's commitment and a student's commitment are somewhat different.

We sometimes say of people who are engaged to marry—or even to be romantically involved with each other exclusively—that they have committed to each other.

You can also commit to a religion, like Buddhism or Islam or one or another type of Christianity, and within the framework of the religion, to a particular highly defined way of life, for instance, the way of life of the Buddhist monk or the Catholic priest. If there are multiple orders of priests, you probably cannot commit to more than one of them at any given time. Similarly you can commit to a political philosophy or political or social change movement.

The idea of the Committed Life is that the interesting commitments are the ones that tend to last for an extended period of time, not necessarily for an entire life but for a fairly long period of time. If you drop out or get kicked out of the monastery after a month, you were probably not committed to that.

In a less obvious sense, we can be committed to a set of values that are central to democracy, for instance, willingness to tolerate religious or political beliefs that differ from your own, even to defend people's rights to hold wrong beliefs (beliefs you believe wrong), or you can be committed to all or most of the human rights listed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which means you are willing to expend resources to ensure that others enjoy those rights as well as you do.

So we get to the idea that commitment costs us something. When you commit to something, you affirm your willingness to give up something else--time, money, freedom from effort, whatever approximation of perfect security you might be able to attain if you focused on something else other than your commitment. It might cost you popularity in certain circles. A committed socialist will not be invited to banquets for members of the Tea Party. A committed anti-racist might be called nasty names by members of the KKK.

But if commitments have costs, why do they interest people? There are individual benefits associated with having made commitment-you can easily think of examples, but I want to float the idea that the chief benefit that many people get from general commitments is the way that they provide a meaning-ful framework to our lives. People are hungry for meaning. And I'll share with you a life lesson: it's easier to make friends with people who share your general commitments than with those who do not.

Life frameworks take the form of shared stories. These can get pretty elaborate. The most interesting seem to be associated with notions of human nature, the kinds of difficulties humans face, and ideas of how these difficulties might best be addressed.

That's why I decided to organize our discussion of this topic around the theories of human nature discussed in Haberman and Stevenson's Ten Theories of Human Nature. Their book discusses a traditional philosophical topic, philosophy of human nature, which overlaps with other traditional philosophical topics—metaphysics, theory of mind and body, ethics, and political philosophy.

But how did we get from the idea of a committed life to philosophy? Is this connection just an accident, or worse, just a sneaky way of transitioning into a general education study that some university committee decided you needed imposed on you as part of an education in citizenship?

Let me remind you about what was said earlier about commitments costing us something. They can in fact cost you a lot. Doesn't it make sense to be aware of the basic details before you commit? And not just of one alternative, but of a range of alternatives, since if you are familiar with only one and choose that you may have deprived yourself of something better. It makes good sense to compare the pluses and minuses of the options, not only in terms of self-interest but also in terms of our lives in society and as residents of earth? To do that we have to survey available philosophies of life, examine their stories, their assumptions, their self-justifications, and the more intelligent criticisms that have been raised about them.

What I have just described is what Socrates 2400 years ago called "the examined life." When you engage it in you are practicing philosophy, which from one perspective might be considered the intelligent study of basic life choices.