In praise of the dilettante

Why, of all people, defend thedilettante? An amateur at best, a flighty rascal at worst: why take an interest in someone whose own interests are never more than a passing hobby? These are serious times – why take seriously someone for whom nothing is serious? Merriam-Webster defines the dilettante as ‘a person having a superficial interest in an art or a branch of knowledge’. Encyclopedia.com calls the dilettante someone who cultivates an interest ‘without real commitment or knowledge’. Cambridge settles for someone whose understanding ‘is not very deep or serious’. Collins gives us someone who ‘seems interested in a subject … but does not really know very much about it’. None of it is flattering. Clearly, the dilettante is no aspirational character. No university markets itself as training the next generation of dilettantes; no magazine runs a ‘dilettante of the year’ issue (except, perhaps, for the excellentIdlerpublication). He – for the dilettante is, historically and in popular imagination, so often a ‘he’ – is in essence an amateur, a role defined by wide interests and narrow expertise. Such is the reputation of the dilettante, assigned and maintained by a culture that treats a single-minded devotion to one pursuit as the only route to a meaningful life. Pick something and stick with it, we are told. It’s not so much an explicit campaign against dilettantism I’m challenging, but rather the diffuse yet relentless pressure to narrow one’s interests, to specialise, to gain expertise, to forgo breadth for the sake of depth. We hear it in the barrage of imperatives to follow your dreams or find your passion uttered at graduation speeches, in self-help guides, and similarly corporate-sounding pep talks. Under this scheme, the specialist is the hero and the dilettante is but a cautionary tale: the person who never committed, never finished, never got good enough at any one thing. But what if the scheme has it backwards? What if the dilettante’s perpetual movement from one thing to another is not a failure of nerve but a different and defensible way of being, one whose exploratory zeal turns out to be just what a hyper-specialised, over-optimised and all-too-seriousworld needs most? Then the dilettante would turn out to be not a capricious buffoon but a kind of modern anti-hero. That, I argue, is a dilettantism worth defending. First, let’s consider how ‘dilettante’ relates to some of its conceptual cousins: the amateur, the dabbler, the jack-of-all-trades, etc. First, the dilettante is by nature an amateur, ie, a non-expert, a non-professional. But amateurism is a necessary though not sufficient condition of dilettantism. Anyone can be an amateur at any particular thing: woodworking, birdwatching, astronomy, etc. The dilettante’s amateurism is wide-ranging over several interests, and tends to orient around the production and/or appreciation of art and beauty. Like the jack-of-all-trades, the dilettante is a multi-dimensional amateur. But the dilettante’s amateurism is typically of the aesthetic variety. Further, the dilettante is no dabbler. The dabbler scratches the surface of interests, whereas the dilettante, I argue, can and does go deep – without, however, anchoring a sense of self in any one interest. This also sets the dilettante apart fromtheflâneur, Charles Baudelaire’s urban wanderer strolling through the city’s offerings, sampling everything, invested in none of it. The dilettante is deeply engaged in interests, and more an active participant than a passive spectator. The term originally referred to someone who pursues an interest, particularly an artistic one, for the sake of ‘delight’ In this respect, the concept is closest in spirit to the ‘Renaissance man’, minus the gender specification and historical context. The dilettante is one who is moved by enjoyment rather than necessity, professional obligation or the pursuit of credentials, and who purposefully cultivates a plurality of distinct, often aesthetic interests beyond mere surface familiarity. One reason to defend the dilettante, then, is for lexicological justice. The term has been unfairly burdened with an overly negative connotation. It wasn’t always this way. From the Baroque-era Italiandilettante, the term originally referred to someone who pursues an interest, particularly an artistic one, for the sake of pleasure, or ‘delight’. Even as the term evolved, it stayed largely neutral, distinguishing enthusiasts from professionals in a given practice. The pejorative connotation familiar to us today is more recent, shaped by what I’ll call a ‘deficiency’ model, in which amateurism is viewed negatively as alackof something: skill, seriousness, focus, expertise. This is the meaning ascribed by cultural gatekeepers likeTheodor Adorno, who in 1929 dismissed the dilettante as one ‘unable to establish any standards’. The more important aim, however, is to show dilettantism as a way of living that offers more than we might think. It is a life liberated from specialisation, instrumentalisation and meritocratic bean-counting, as well as from a Protestant work ethic that is suspicious of pleasure for pleasure’s sake. Arguments denigrating specialisation in education and vocation are well known, as are those championing well-roundedness and the virtues of the liberal arts. Though similar in spirit, this defence of dilettantism is less about the purpose or outcomes of academic or professional life and more about making the mental switch away from the socially conditioned pressure to find your thing and stick with it to an open and exploratory pursuit of pluralistic interests. Reclaiming this sense of joyful experimentalism is intended to show dilettantism as a mode of abundancerather than deficiency. Agood place to start is the essay ‘On Dilettantism’ (1799) byJ W von Goetheand Friedrich Schiller. This fragmentary, never-completed project by the literary dream-team of Weimar-era Germany paints a deeply ambivalent portrait of dilettantism, praising the dilettante over here for ‘cultivat[ing] something serious in man’ and condemning him over there as a ‘plagiarist’ and a ‘bungler’. Viewed retrospectively, however, its almost scientific treatment of the ‘advantages’ (Nutzen) and ‘disadvantages’ or ‘harms’ (Schaden) of dilettantism helps give a clear-eyed view of the potential virtues and vices of dilettantism today. Crucially, Goethe and Schiller’s analysis is squarely situated in the cultural context of Weimar classicism. This means that, first, the question of the dilettante arises (as it does in its original Italian usage) exclusively in relation to the arts. They treat the dilettante as a distinctlyaestheticfigure, ‘a lover of the arts who wishes not only to contemplate and enjoy them, but also to participate in their production.’ This aesthetic dimension has (regrettably, I think) faded from the meaning of ‘dilettante’ over time. But nor does it need to be narrowly inscribed in 18th-century anxieties about who can and cannot properly be called an artist. Artistic engagement isn’t essential to dilettantism. But it is worth reasserting, maybe even foregrounding, the sense in which the ‘delight’ of dilettantism involves, to some extent, the experience of aesthetic pleasure, broadly understood. The dilettante, that is, pursues whatSøren Kierkegaardcalls an ‘aesthetic life’: the ongoing, everyday activity of observing, valuing, and participating in art and beauty. The dilettante is comfortable in the garb of an amateur. For the dilettante, every night is karaoke night Though rooted in classicist aestheticism, some of Goethe and Schiller’s criticism of the dilettante still resonates today. They worry, for example, that the dilettante ‘jumps over the steps’, gliding too glibly through the creative process and claiming victory too early. There’s something to this. Similar toOscar Wilde’s concern about the ‘sentimentalist’ in his 1897 epistolary essay,De Profundis,who ‘desires to have the luxury of