In case you missed it, catch up with last week’s post: Robert Frost and the Sound of Sense
It is difficult to shock the modern mind. Our eyes are trained by outrageous videos and our ears are accustomed to politicians shouting platitudes in all directions. One statement, however, will certainly shock and baffle the modern interlocutor: “I am getting a graduate degree in English.”
In the collective imagination, the English graduate student studies grammar for five hours a day, has a weird affection for Shakespeare, and is endowed with the civic role of scolding students. By confessing to an English degree, you invoke a wide range of associations, but the prominent response is genuine, kind-hearted bewilderment.
As you adamantly deny a proclivity to correct people’s grammar, you search for the language that can give a defense. You want to affirm your commitment to clutch civilization by the lapels and plead with it to resist the idolatrous machine. You want to speak of beauty and truth and goodness, to trace the outline of the same inextinguishable torch that has been carried from the Library of Alexandria into the modern classroom. You want to sketch the Emersonian vision of the scholar: “He is the world’s eye. He is the world’s heart. He is to resist the vulgar prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbarism, by preserving and communicating heroic sentiments, noble biographies, melodies verse, and the conclusions of history.”1
But alas. This is Greek. Instead, you offer a paltry, “I’d like to teach college literature.” They nod. You nod. Language has failed to bridge the gap.
If you substitute an English degree with a degree in any of the arts, you will likely encounter similar good-intentioned confusion.
We no longer understand what art does in the world.
This is a basic question without a basic answer. Instead, we discover rich philosophical, theological, and complex responses. But in an instrumental culture, dominated by scientism and economism, the answer must be translated into a discrete function. And this function must be quantifiable; otherwise, it cannot be calculated, traded, and produced.
When our acquaintance asks what one “does” with an English degree, he quite plausibly asks an entirely different question: “how do you plan to make money?” This is certainly an important question. I enjoy roof, bread, and wine. However, the latter question has swallowed the original question. The degree is only understood within material and economic parameters.
And so the function of the arts is quickly disfigured. Let’s examine the process.
When function demands that an artwork justify itself, it hears only silence. Puzzled, it supposes that the answer must locked in the secret halls of personal use. It assumes that art must exist for cathartic expression. Art balances mental health so that the world can get on with the real work, and the artist might even become a productive citizen.
Soon, the arts are reduced to outlets for a nebulous conception of self. A work’s aesthetic qualities become subservient to the authenticity of the expression. The humanities become a type of therapy session, useless navel-gazing, or a megaphone to shout private language in public: “Look, over here. It’s me! Don’t you see me!”
But, after a while, we begin to sicken at the smell of dirty laundry. We lurch from justifying art as private expression to defending art along the axes of social or political change. Now the quality of art is measured by the effectiveness of its didacticism. It must condemn or condone.
In both iterations, we are separated from the art and artist. If a work is merely an ethereal personal expression, it’s trapped behind a veil. It comes to us from afar, from a foreign land that only the creator can truly access. I am here. You are there. We can mutter or yell, but our voices are distant. Likewise, when art becomes ubiquitous with non-artistic objects, it loses its luster and aura. Art is reduced to a collection of assets or propaganda, neither of which calls to us.
While we must acknowledge that art does express our subjectivity and can influence political transformation, these are partial, truncated answers. On their own, they alienate us from lived experience.
John Dewey articulated this failed approach:
“But, to my mind, the trouble with existing theories is that they start from a ready-made compartmentalization, or from a conception of art that ‘spiritualizes’ it out of connection with the objects of concrete experience. The alternative, however, to such spiritualization is not a degrading and Philistinish materialization of works of fine art, but a conception that discloses the way in which these works idealize qualities in common experience.”2
In place of incomplete definitions, Dewey offers a tertium quid, a third something. He goes on to describe aesthetics as “clarified and intensified development of traits that belong to every normally complete experience.”3
Rather than adopting the instrumental understanding, we can recognize that the arts speak to us from our human experience. Art allows us to encounter the world not through the filter of the world’s functions, but as the thing we experience. It presents our world qua world as experience, not as an abstracted instrumental version of experience.
Dewey’s insight has any number of excellent artistic representations. One that has recently spoken to me is from William Carlos Williams. In his poem Asphodel, That Greeny Flower, he writes:
“It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.”
Poems lack the directness and practicality of information. Yet, to pretend that information is all that we need is foolish. Man does not live by bread alone. To acknowledge this is to recognize that our lives consist of values that are beyond the stunted horizon of utility.
One does not marry for the tax break or go on a hike for cardiovascular exercise. While both consequences are useful, the reasons why we love and spend time outdoors lie far, far beyond utility. The usefulness, moreover, is well downstream from the values that propel our actions. You could marry for the money, but surely we recognize this as a truncated and abused relationship.
Every day we are faced with the Lebenswelt, a life-world that is saturated with values. The arts allow us to encounter this rich kosmos as we wrestle with our human-ness and engage issues of beauty, goodness, and truth.
So what will you do with an English degree?
You will insist that we are still human and still need to ask human questions. You will forge and examine excellent art, and it will help carry us back from the dehumanizing arid plains. You will be surprised, overwhelmed, and moved by the reciprocity of a work, intensified to the point of impingement. And you will attempt to live your life attuned to the world which lies beyond utility. Among other things…
If you know someone who might also enjoy Dwelling, please share. Word-of-mouth is one of the best sources for growth on Substack. I would deeply appreciate it. Thanks!
“The American Scholar”
Art as Experience, 11.
Ibid, 46.
A delightful piece of writing that speaks to my heart! In a world where language and literature is continuing to be demolished and diminished, it is so important to value the artistry and power of the written word.