In praise of dilettantism
The honeybee mind
This fleeting thought hit me while reading Nicholas Carr's "Against Compression". As I made my way through the article, Carr quotes the British theologian Andrew Louth on the purpose of medieval universities and how they evolved:
The medieval university was a place that made possible a life of thought, of contemplation. It emerged in the 12th century from the monastic and cathedral schools of the early Middle Ages where the purpose of learning was to allow monks to fulfil their vocation, which fundamentally meant to come to know God. Although knowledge of God might be useful in various ways, it was sought as an end in itself. Such knowledge was called contemplation, a kind of prayerful attention.
The evolution of the university took the pattern of learning that characterised monastic life – reading, meditation, prayer and contemplation – out of the immediate context of the monastery. But it did not fundamentally alter it. At its heart was the search for knowledge for its own sake. It was an exercise of freedom on the part of human beings, and the disciplines involved were to enable one to think freely and creatively. These were the liberal arts, or free arts, as opposed to the servile arts to which a man is bound if he has in mind a limited task.
The theologian explained that the original purpose of medieval universities was contemplation. This immediately set my mind racing because I was writing another post on the loss of contemplative spaces, and it instantly created an association between two ideas.
For some reason, the word "dilettante" popped into my head. I had read a post on Substack with a similar title—"Are you a polymath, a dilettante, or a multipotentialite?" by Nevo (Ananya). Though she ultimately settles on "multipotentialite" as a more positive term, the article was wrestling with the same tension I felt about reclaiming dilettantism.
Dilettante (noun): A person who cultivates an area of interest, art, or field of knowledge for personal enjoyment and intellectual satisfaction rather than professional necessity or monetary gain. Someone who pursues learning driven by curiosity and delight rather than obligation.
Etymology: From Italian dilettante, literally "one who delights," derived from dilettare "to delight" (from Latin delectare). The Latin roots trace back to de- (intensive prefix meaning "thoroughly") + lacere "to entice, attract, or allure." The word originally described Renaissance-era gentleman scholars and art patrons who pursued knowledge and beauty for pure enjoyment. The term carried entirely positive connotations until the mid-to-late 19th century (roughly 1850s-1880s), when industrial culture's emphasis on specialization and professional expertise caused it to acquire negative implications of superficial engagement—amateur dabbling rather than serious, professional study. — By Claude
Being a dilettante has become something of a pejorative term—mildly pejorative, I assume. It's used to refer to somebody who's like a butterfly or honeybee, jumping from flower to flower without seriously engaging with any topic, just accumulating shallow knowledge about many things.
But I beg to differ. I think to be a serious thinker, you need to be a dilettante—unless your life's purpose is to go down one rabbit hole and make it your life's work, which doesn't apply to most people. For most of us, life is much more wonderful and beautiful if we're like honeybees wandering the fields, sampling the delightful nectar of many flowers, assembling a reasonable sketch of the map. Once we have that sketch, we can dive deeper and get to know one specific aspect of the territory.
This is probably the best way to live an intellectually curious life for most people. Without first sampling the menu, you'll never really know what you like. This is a fundamental belief I've held for a long time—there's phenomenal joy and beauty in ceaseless, goalless, boundless exploration. These are biological instincts that have been muffled by modernity, the relentless march of technology into our lives, and the unconscious flattening of everything through deliberate choices we've made with technology.
This has somehow polluted and corrupted our information and knowledge systems. Our innate instinct is to know more, to seek out new things, explore, and be curious. I don't know if evolutionary biologists and psychologists agree, but I think this ability to know more—this outward orientation toward life—is probably what kept us alive long enough to survive and what allowed the human race to flourish while other competitors perished in this evolutionary race on our pale blue dot.
Even for somebody to become a specialist, they first need to know the depth and breadth of things. Only then can they find something they're truly passionate about and dive deeper into it. In that sense, being a dilettante is the right way to live an intellectually curious and stimulating life.
Building on this, I want to explore another angle. Many people have pointed out that human beings are pattern-matching creatures. I don't want to get into the debate over whether the human mind is a computer, a machine, or if consciousness can be reduced to a technological metaphor. But nonetheless, it's true that we do see patterns.
To see more patterns, you need to train—like large language models do—and accumulate a large enough corpus to match a variety of distinct patterns. If your initial corpus within your brain is small, you'll never be able to recognize all the patterns out there. So in that sense, I think there's a certain usefulness in the technological metaphor: the only way you'll be able to recognize a wide variety of patterns is to be a dilettante, to be like a honeybee and sample all the flowers in the wild.
The pattern-recognition capacity of the mind depends on having encountered enough diverse examples to form meaningful connections. This isn't just about accumulating facts—it's about building a rich enough foundation that when you encounter something new, you can see how it relates to what you already know. The dilettante's wandering isn't aimless; it's systematic corpus-building for the mind.
Implicit in the judgment that surrounds the word "dilettante" is the idea of achievement, completion, mastery. But I don't get it. Who says that all those things are always necessary or always good? Sometimes, why can't you just have the fun of exploring random things? Why can't you discover the menu of things that can fill you with awe, wonder, and reverence? This weird achievement culture, this reification of completion, is not always a good thing.
So yeah, I want to be a better dilettante.
I think economically speaking, we still inhabit in a Smithian world. Being a multipotentiale is fine so long you have enough depth in one of those vocations to help you pay your bills.