In defense of dilettantism

When I was young, I aspired to be a dilettante, a designation that, I believed, meant what its derivation from Latin “delectare” (“to delight”) implies: someone who takes pleasure in doing a wide range of things, and with a decent level of confidence and ability. I believed wrongly. Originally “one who cultivates [the fine arts] for the love of them rather than professionally, and so = ‘amateur’ ... as opposed to ‘professional’ ” (to quote from the Oxford English Dictionary, which received a big online facelift just last month), the word has for well over a century had largely negative connotations. You will see this clearly if you google “dilettante definition,” which yields as its first hit none other than the entry in Princeton’s own influential lexical database, WordNet: “an amateur who engages in an activity without serious intentions and who pretends to have knowledge.” I prefer my definition, and while I do not have the authority single-handedly to roll back semantic change, I hope you will take some time in the year 2011 to help restore dignity to dilettantism and amateurship.

The pejorative sense of these words is in part the result of professionalization — indeed, over-professionalization. I do not dispute that to be a top professional, whether marine biologist or soccer goalie, takes a lot of hard and narrowly focused work and that this generally leaves scant time for other pursuits. But (if you will forgive a return to the theme of my last column) a one-sided life is a boring life, and the best way to stave off boredom — your own in yourself and others’ in you — may be to gain a broad base of knowledge early on and to cultivate hobbies and multiple interests. Of course knowing more than one thing propels interdisciplinarity, the academic buzzword that explains why Princeton is building a “natural sciences neighborhood” on south campus: There are good professional reasons why physicists and neuroscientists benefit from talking to each other; the same goes, to be sure, for scholars of medieval English and French.

Much more than interdisciplinarity, however, is lost — I’ll risk incurring the wrath of some by calling it culture — when students of physics and literature consider each other to be fools because the former don’t care what century Chaucer lived in and the latter have never heard of Boyle’s law. It seems worth noting that the best conversations I have had at Princeton take place at the monthly meetings of the Editorial Board of our University Press, where some of my admirable colleagues — among them a Marx-quoting physicist and a historian who understands Markov chains — argue long, hard and with serious but generally non-professional knowledge about the merits and flaws of dossiers for proposed books on subjects from Aesop to “zombie economics.”

All Princeton students should be able to participate in such conversations since you “achieve a truly liberal education” thanks to the distribution requirements. But do these “general education requirements,” as they are officially known, work? Do they do the best possible job of providing a general education that encourages the happy dilettantism that I believe is so personally and societally valuable? Maybe they do, but I imagine that Valerie Smith, when she assumes the deanship of the college next July, will want to take a good look at the curriculum and think, for example, about why we currently require two “Social Analysis” courses of A.B. students but only one in the area “Historical Analysis” — and whether designations such as HA and SA are in fact the most appropriate ones.

I close with two proposals. First, while I do not believe that freshman seminars should be required, I do think that incoming students should be more strongly encouraged to apply for these quirky classes, which in my experience are diversely populated by people — budding economists and clarinetists, sculptors and astronomers — who are enthusiastic about conversing with and learning from one other. And second, in view of the increasing prominence of the Lewis Center, would it perhaps make sense to require all students to take a hands-on class in the creative arts? I doubt that this would lead to many more professional sculptors among the alumni, but it should engender dilettantish delight.

Joshua Katz is a professor in the Department of Classics. He can be reached at jtkatz@princeton.edu.