Philosophy Science Psychology Society Culture Essays Videos Popular About DONATE NEWSLETTER MENU / / Aeon DONATE / NEWSLETTER / SIGN IN / i In praise of the dilettante A wayfaring cosmopolitan who never gets stuck, the dilettante is the right anti-hero for our hyper-specialised age by Jay Miller + BIO
Jean Cocteau, poet, artist, filmmaker, photographed in 1948 by Philippe Halsman. Courtesy Magnum Photos
is associate professor of philosophy at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina.
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Why, of all people, defend the dilettante ? 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 excellent Idler publication). 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- serious world 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.
F irst, 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 from the flâneur , 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’