The following commentary will appear in this week’s issue of The Cowl, the student-run newspaper of Providence College. Once again, The Ennobler scoops the competition.
I used to believe our college to be plagued by a lack of intellectual seriousness. It seemed to me that, in the minds of many on this campus, study was an engagement to be hurried through and avoided if all possible. Intellectual tasks were chores that had to be done before the real fun could begin.
My assessment of the facts has not changed. These pernicious attitudes are still prevalent, but I have begun to question my erstwhile contention that they arise from a lack of seriousness. Indeed, in one sense excessive seriousness about academic work could lead one to equate education with hard labor. Perhaps what is truly lacking at our institution is a healthy measure of intellectual levity, or playfulness.
In the ancient conception of things, life is divided up into two categories: otium, usually rendered as “leisure,” and negotium, the opposite. Significantly, leisure is the primary thing, and “work” is defined as its negation, not as a thing in its own right. One performs the mundane duties of negotium solely for the sake of gaining time and resources for otium, the basis of culture and the true meaning of life.
Although this view is certainly foreign to much of American society, in which people define themselves by their employment to such an extent that they willingly work sixty or more hours per week, it may sound familiar and refreshing to us as youth. If, so to speak, everybody’s working for the weekend, does it not follow that everybody should do only enough to forestall a grade point average disaster?
Actually, it does not. In fact, grades have unquestionably helped bring about the catastrophic redefinition of the life of the mind as negotium. This category mistake is at the very heart of our problem. The otium toward which the Greeks and Romans directed their existence is the very pseudo-negotium which we shunt aside and perform perfunctorily. Intellectual levity, therefore, is the virtue of recognizing the tremendous privilege and blessing of being granted a liberal arts education.
We are given four years of our lives to spend, essentially, however we please. This liberty is intended to afford us the opportunity for intellectual exploration, as we move gradually from a general immersion in Western civilization toward a slightly more specialized area of study to which we become particularly devoted. The theological, philosophical, historical and literary treasures of almost three millennia are laid at our unworthy feet. Here is the best of what has been thought and said, we are told; what would you like to read? And we reply: Thank you, yes. I will have fourteen cans of Natural Ice.
Youthful exuberance and experimentation aside, those who repeatedly and consistently make such a choice declare themselves unworthy of being in college. Those who squander the chance to drink deeply at the bottomless well of truth by habitually drinking deeply at various off-campus establishments are tacitly but unequivocally registering a preference to be in a different environment. They deserve the coal mine. They deserve the steel mill. The treasures of Western culture are wasted on those who wish to dispense with them as quickly and painlessly as possible.
Of course, it is precisely because most of us wish to avoid a career in smelting or coal extraction that we tend to treat our studies solely as a means to another end. It is frequently alleged that the majority of students simply are not here in order to be swept off their feet by Renaissance poetry; they are here because the job market dictates they have a college degree, whether earned or otherwise, and they wish to comply. This fact leads many to major in one of the false disciplines which have crept into our undergraduate catalog and grown, like huge malignant tumors, to a position of dominance. The distinguishing characteristic of these disciplines, most of which have been conveniently consolidated into the new School of Business for easy reference, is that no one could possibly enjoy them on their own merits. Unlike reading Homer, which is an intrinsic good pleasurable to the well-adjusted soul regardless of any additional benefit or outcome, these disciplines are studied only instrumentally, for the purpose of making money.
Preeminent among these are the immensely popular troika of Marketing, Management and Finance, which devour fearful undergraduates like the three heads of Cerberus. These sophistic arts are among the biggest culprits in the destruction of intellectual playfulness. They play upon our fears of rejection in the marketplace, and whisper sweet nothings of financial security in our ears.
I say it's time to end the tyranny of pseudo-practicality. We all need jobs, of course, and it may well be that not everyone will experience a joyful awakening while studying the liberal arts. But there is no better preparation for any job than the skills which attend naturally with the study of a true discipline: reading perceptively, writing well, and having a sense of what life is really about. What need have we for Leadership Studies when Aeneas still leads his men to the Lavinian shore?
3 comments:
Well done, but one question plagues me: may I drink Natty if I'm reading Virgil too, or must my beverage always be of darker hue?
Of course you may. Indeed, might the most blessed existence be that of the man who has cultivated difficult pleasures but inexpensive tastes?
While I whole-heartedly agree that it is time for the end of pseudo-practicality in higher education, I think that there is equal if not greater value in moving towards actual practicality as there is in moving towards the classically abstract definition of the liberal arts. As someone who spends many of his weekends (and indeed some of his weeknights) in a Churchillian state of intoxicated curiosity, I can say with confidence there is room for intellectual playfulness within purposeful study. Unfortunately that purpose is not supported by a university still obsessed with forcing intellectual awakening in those who have been up for a while now. We (and by we I mean we fools who were duped into thinking that college would offer a haven for self-directed intellectualism in pursuit of answering the important questions of the modern world, as suggested by many an admissions viewbook) are trying to get up and do something, but we keep getting yelled at and hit with pillows like a standardless freshman writing seminar and a science core which not even professors take seriously. I agree that those who waste their collegiate life do not deserve the economic fruits of their degree, but I would submit that there are a good deal of undergraduates who seem to be squandering their opportunity at intellectual advancement who are merely sick of being told that the kind of intellectualism they're looking for is what come next, in grad school, if only they'd waste their time with busywork and pointless classes now. They heard that in high school. And some of them even heard in elementary school. For many, the life of the mind is a life of practical problem solving, and when the institution one inhabits won't recognize that I don't think it's such a bad use of time to do the minimum of busywork, do one's own reading and writing, and become drinking buddies with those who share those predilections. I suppose only time will tell whether we dispossessed drunkards of the academy will have the last laugh, but I truly believe that I am spending my four years of intellectual freedom better than those whose 4.0s will get them six figure salaries out of college. And that's a little sad for everyone involved.
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