On the Good Life

Nobody with intellectual pretensions, even the slightest, wants to be called a dilettante. It is the very assassin-word of character and motive. Related social roles such as those of the dandy and the flâneur seem, for all their solitary hauteur, to evade social censure; not so the dilettante, with his snobbish patina of privilege. Dilettante is the sound of the upper classes braying for its rights. But could it be that one man’s dilettante is another man’s dabbler? G.K. Chesterton, author of the essay “On Lying in Bed” (the Oblomovian title of which seems to suggest that he himself was one of the species), went to some lengths to avoid any association with the term. His late father, he writes, “was in a hundred happy and fruitful ways an amateur; but in no way at all a dilettante”. He describes one of the characters in his Father Brown novels as a “great dabbler” and “great amateur”, though he is quick to add that “there was in him none of that antiquarian frivolity that we convey by the word ‘dilettante’”.

Antiquarian frivolity is perhaps what did for dilettantes. As Bruce Redford observes in his 2008 book Dilettanti: The Antic and the Antique in Eighteenth-Century England: “from the early nineteenth century to the present, ‘dilettante’ has been a deprecatory … term, connoting the sloppy, the second-rate, the superficial”. It wasn’t always so.

The Society of Dilettanti, founded in 1732 in London, was a dining club established by gentlemen who had been to Italy and were “desirous of encouraging, at home, a taste for those objects which had contributed so much to their entertainment abroad”. Modelled on earlier societies like the notorious Hellfire Club and the Virtuosi of St Luke, the Dilettanti—motto: seria ludo—were nostalgists for the Grand Tour, that early anticipation of the gap-year. If they couldn’t stay on in Italy, it ought to be possible to introduce good taste to the burgeoning mercantile society of the British Isles. Two of the society’s more successful campaigns were to introduce Italian opera into the United Kingdom and establish the Royal Academy. Meetings were a mix of connoisseurship and carousing, offering a potent brew of “the Bacchic, the sexual, the classical and the sacriligeous”.

The Society’s licentiousness repelled some figures who might otherwise seem to be obvious dilettantes: Horace Walpole (1717–91), fourth Earl of Orford—now remembered chiefly for having invented the word serendipity as well as for his volumes of vivid and gossipy letters and the famous Gothic pile he owned at Strawberry Hill—kept his distance. “The nominal qualification [of membership],” he advanced, “is having been in Italy, and the real one being drunk.” Others such as Sir William Hamilton, envoy to the Bourbon court in Naples and the Two Sicilies, collected and studied as many antiquities as he could lay his hands on, addressing letters to other members in London on phallus worship and recent archaeological findings in Greece. His distant cousin Gavin Hamilton became famous in Rome for his archaeological digs and recreations of antiquity, often under licence to the Pope. Bequeathed to the nation (or the Papal state), such personal holdings were to enhance the collections of many public institutions, not least the British Museum. Contemplating the last days of Pompeii is dilettantism at its finest. It is Hazlitt on the Elgin Marbles.

Dilettantism would acquire its current association with effeteness only as the nineteenth century wore on: dilettantes (and all those related social types who stole the show in the more theatrical eighteenth century) patently lacked the moral high seriousness of the Victorian legislator, social reformer or plain businessman. Their origins were too redolent of the libertinism of the eighteenth century, and their adulation of the virtù of the republican tradition—the presiding officer wore a scarlet toga and occupied the Roman consul’s traditional seat of office—suggested they were not quite patriotic enough at a time when that ambitious Corsican, Napoleon Bonaparte, was threatening to invade the British Isles and install one of his cousins as the new ruling monarch. The rise of the middle classes made the life of a gentleman-loiterer mightily suspect. Ex omnibus aliquid, or just doing something for the sheer pleasure of it—which is the sense of the Latin verb dilectare from which the Dilettanti took their name—were dubious activities when being moral was beginning to be seen as a strenuous business. This attitude had already surfaced at an earlier period in British history: Thomas Hobbes, remembering his puritan origins, insisted in his tract On the Citizen that “anything that has no purpose is Vain”.

Like Hobbes, the Scots were never very keen on dilettantes, although they did quite a good imitation of that related social type, “the man of feeling”. Work had been embraced by sixteenth-century culture as an escape from the terror of not knowing whether one’s soul was redeemed, while the peasants of an earlier culture had flocked to festivities as an escape from the very same work. Pleasure was deeply suspect. Perhaps the only writer to emancipate himself from the grudgingly puritan culture in which he was brought up was Robert Louis Stevenson, who even had the temerity to write a manifesto against the work ethic called An Apology for Idlers. Stevenson makes it shockingly clear that loafing and dawdling are synonymous with an increased perception of being in the world:

Extreme busyness … is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity. There is a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation.

He observes that the industrious deeply resent the presence of “cool persons in the meadows by the wayside, lying with a handkerchief over their ears and a glass at their elbow”. Compare that to the lines written earlier by that other product of northern Calvinism, Thomas Carlyle: “Fundamentally speaking, all genuine work is religion, and every religion that is not work can go and live with the Brahmins, the Antinomians, and the Whirling Dervishes.” Whose, we might ask, is the true religious attitude? By the end of the nineteenth century, Eastern religions were being imported lock, stock and barrel to overthrow the dominant Christian view of things. In 1890 Oscar Wilde criticised the society of his day in his article “The Critic as Artist (With some Remarks upon the Importance of Doing Nothing)”, in which he referred admiringly to Chuang Tsu (Zhuangzi) and claimed his ancient teachings were proof that “well meaning and offensive busy-bodies have destroyed the simple and spontaneous virtue that is in man”.

Dilettantism had some other philosophical supporters. Although he was a contemporary of Carlyle, Arthur Schopenhauer was very clear about what he saw as a vulgarly exaggerated respect for the “professional”: he believed most city-dwellers were unable to conceive of working other than for gain. He defends the dilettante as a person of true moral seriousness:

The truth, however, is that to the dilettante the thing is the end, while to the professional as such it is the means; and only he who is directly interested in a thing, and occupies himself with it from love of it, will pursue it with entire seriousness.

We acknowledge this implicitly when we call the fine arts the “pure” arts. They have no social utility: they are gratuitous in the sense defined by Schopenhauer, and after him, by Friedrich Nietzsche.

One reason we still have a very Victorian respect for professionalism is that puritan values spawned our culture, and are so deeply ingrained that few even realise their principles are something functional—the kind of moral calculus that appealed to Hobbes. One reason for the reluctance to acknowledge these puritan values may be the 1960s’ spirited attempt to redeem dilettantism—we have only to think of the ironic career of the “bricoleur”, first spotted in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind and ever since an all-purpose imaginary hero for people in the humanities.

W.H. Auden insisted in his jottings The Poet & The City that “among the half dozen things for which a man of honour should be prepared, if necessary, to die, the right to play, the right to frivolity, is not the least”; and Michael Oakeshott—who in many ways provides the philosophical accessory to Auden’s poetry—wrote in his essay “On Being Conservative” that what we value most in life are essentially purposeless activities. That is their higher ethic. They are pursuits engaged in for their own sake. The concept of play was not a frivolous idea for Oakeshott; it was the very possibility of an outlook that refused to treat things (and people) in manipulative or instrumental terms. It is only the puritan who needs frivolity to have some hidden didactic purpose, an attitude still common to earnest British politicians and the nabobs of the American film industry.

What Schopenhauer had identified as the deep seriousness of the dilettante is accompanied by a perfect disinterest about outcome. In every case, his mindset is hardly likely to be congruent with that of the rational economic actor always acting with an eye on how his actions are likely to benefit him. “One thinks with a watch in the hand, even as one eats lunch while reading the latest bulletin on the stockmarket,” wrote Nietzsche; “one lives as if one always ‘might miss out on something’”. Indeed, the word activity is wrong-footed, because it suggests an active appropriation, an effort—the assumption that was drummed into philosophy by that northern Protestant Immanuel Kant. He saw philosophy as a “Herculean labour”; it ought to be strenuous. Yet true contemplation, grasping the essential nature of things, was to be inspired. And the fact that inspiration was so often effortless made Kant suspicious. Goethe, who knew a bit about creative vision and didn’t care too much for makers of moral laws, asserted that “absolute activity” of the Kantian type makes people hard-hearted, and unable to receive—it “makes one bankrupt in the end”.

The ancients Greeks had only a negative term to describe what they were doing when they were not at leisure. Being at leisure, educating yourself (in the sense which is still present, albeit vestigially, in the German idea of “Bildung”), was the very basis of their culture. It could even be said that for the Greeks leisure was an obligatory activity for anyone trying to live the good life. That distinction was absorbed into Latin: neg-otium became the term to describe the hustle and bustle of doing business. So it was actually a perverse turn for the English language to take the positive term, otium, and make an adjective out of it, otiose, which means nugatory or useless.

In Leisure: The Basis of Culture, his famous 1948 tract on the topic, the Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper insisted on reminding his readers that leisure is the foundation of any culture. It is work restored to its formative, sense-bestowing role. For Pieper, leisure is a kind of worship. It is an affirmation of life.

Yet the issue refuses to settle, at least in my mind. Ours is a highly technical civilisation, one which has exceeded all others in terms of the useful gadgets and contrivances it has invented; and we want to be helped, when in need, by people who are not just knowledgeable in their interests, but technically competent too. If you’re facing coronary bypass surgery you want it done by a cardiac surgeon who has done thousands of venous grafts, not a venal surgeon with a merely general interest in the dynamics of the heart. But while becoming a cardiac surgeon requires thousands of hours of technical training, knowledge of the other kind of heart, the figurative one we are all supposed to possess, can be acquired by anybody, though it is sometimes very painfully won. The general fear (as in the long-standing debate about “the two cultures”) is that the amateur is already hopelessly disconnected from the specialised technical language of doing things, and lost in an idiom that is either untranslatable into anything concrete or, worse, has no bearing on reality at all.

Schopenhauer’s is an instructive case. Being able to rely on a substantial inherited fortune (like so many middle-class German intellectuals who were to make a cult of their inner need for freedom, including Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels), he was ultimately defending his own position. He was not obliged to work. And he was an outspoken defender of the autonomy of individual reason, the political program for establishing which had first been set out by Kant. Indeed, Schopenhauer became celebrated (in the wrong sense) for having decided in 1820 to set himself up as a university lecturer in Berlin and deliver a syllabus which coincided exactly with the schedule of Hegel’s principal course. Hegel was by then the most famous philosopher in town, and Schopenhauer ended up lecturing to an empty amphitheatre; shortly afterwards he threw over his entire ambition of becoming a lecturer and returned to his study.

While the privately wealthy Schopenhauer was right to identify the (nineteenth-century German) university as a place where dilettantism could flourish, the ideal of the university as a community of scholars pursuing and passing on learning for its own sake is one that barely survives in our day. Vocational training is inimical to education, which is what a dilettante is after. Indeed, perhaps the current institution which best corresponds to the old definition of the university is the Collège de France, which offers public lectures by some of the world’s most distinguished minds but has no student body at all and confers no degrees.

So perhaps the economic argument is a charge that can be levelled against dilettantism. However delightful its pleasures and unselfserving its ends, it encourages us to live off the capital in the manner of unreconstructed and superbly sensitive grands bourgeois—and not just the proceeds of our own trust fund but the accumulated delights and riches of the entire globe itself. It is as if we were called to consume the fruits of other people’s efforts all day long while concealing from ourselves the social importance of production. Hobbes took some relish in mocking the aspirations of those who seek to own and enjoy things prior to the contracts of civil society:

We would have our Security against all the World, upon Right of Property, without Paying for it … We may as well Expect that Fish, and Fowl should Boil, Rost, and Dish themselves, and come to the Table, and that Grapes should squeeze themselves into our Mouths, and have all other Contentments and ease which some pleasant Men have Related of the Land of Coquany.

He was describing that ancient fantasy of living in Cockaigne, the land of plenty relished by the tide of beggars and vagabonds who were our medieval ancestors, and who so often had to chew on stale, ergot-tainted bread and mouldy bran-mash if they wanted to eat at all. Piero Camporesi’s Bread of Dreams relates all the Pantagruelesque wretchedness of an age in which thousands went hungry. Words were the only surrogates for food.

That empirical check on the dreams of uninterrupted consumption was something which Hegel, who had read his Hobbes (and Smith) closely, absorbed into his philosophy of right, and his meditations on the mutual dependency of statehood and selfhood. If the essence of politics is not primarily to administer a given society but to represent its members to themselves individually and as a whole, then it is difficult indeed to imagine a polity and social ethics for a club of self-pleasers. The effect of the global market—a shorthand way of saying that we have entered a dispensation where in order to consume we need to make or produce (and it was already well under way in the rapidly industrialising Germany of Schopenhauer’s day)—is not to introduce us to the upholstered solidity of Weltbürgertum but, as Marx said, to proletarianise us. Being proletarian means being bound to the work process. That ugly verb can be interpreted as the abrupt realisation that even if we don’t ever have to get down and dirty our material lives depend on vast impersonal structures relating us to the labour of tens of thousands of (mostly Chinese) people we are never likely to meet.

Yet if our society persists in moving further into the total world of work—giving life a rigorously economic explanation, making ultimate meaning a question solely of productivity and audit, and failing to see that the genuine desire to perfect a thing for its own sake is actually the mark of a true craftsman—then the only socially accredited dilettantes are the retired. And the present legions of retirees, at least in my part of the world, are the generation that made common cause with the members of the Situationist International in 1968, who insisted economic and social forces would merely allow citizens to recuperate in commodity form what the system needed as its raw material. And what did they intend to do about it? Go on strike, of course, for the sake of indolence and spiritual beauty.

It was the sweet life they wanted, not the good one. The terms are practically antonyms, though it (presumably) takes a dilettante to wonder why they should be.

Iain Bamforth is a poet, translator and physician who lives in Strasbourg.