“When Am I Ever Going to Use This?” And The Problem of Cognitive Diarrhea

As perhaps stands to reason, I’m asked this question more often than most. After all, I teach two subjects here at WRA, the one a reputedly “dead” language, the other a discipline some wit once referred to as “the most interesting path to poverty.” Indeed, a few years ago one of the students in my philosophy class remarked, “So, Mr. Namiotka, it would appear you teach not one but two entirely useless subjects.”  Ouch!  By virtue of my status as “purveyor of the useless,” therefore, I’m uniquely suited to (or at least I have a most vested interest in) answering this classic rhetorical question, a question that stands, for good or ill, as an increasingly compelling objection to the value of liberal arts education in general.

Back in my undergraduate days, I took a course in Ethics. On the very first day, the professor entered the room, put his books down on the desk, and said, “This is the most useless class you will ever take.”  How’s that for a hook? He certainly had our attention. After giving us a moment to take in what he had just said, he continued, “It’s also the most important class you will ever take.”  I don’t recall exactly what I thought upon hearing this, although I imagine I found it appropriately paradoxical, coming as it did from a philosophy professor.  What I do know is that it took me some time to sort out the distinction he was evidently making between what is useful on the one hand, and what is important on the other. Aren’t the two concepts more or less synonymous?

Maybe not. Perhaps the reason that the question – When am I ever going to use this? – is such a familiar one is simply that there is little or nothing that one learns in high school for which one will find a direct application – or use. I like to tell my Latin students that they’ll be very grateful of my services one day when they are confronted in some dark alley by a crazed gunman giving them the choice between death and declining puella. All joking aside, however, the fact is that no matter how beneficial a background in Latin might be for those pursuing careers in medicine or law, no matter how well students of Latin traditionally perform on the verbal section of the SAT, the reason to study Latin – or philosophy or just about any subject one might encounter at the high school level – is not its practical or utilitarian yield.

Now, please don’t misunderstand me: I am certainly not suggesting that no benefits accrue from the study of Latin, or philosophy, or calculus, history, literature, biology, etc. What I am suggesting is that the discovery of such benefits would require one to dig beneath the surface a bit. This sounds easy enough, not to mention quite logical; indeed, as Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote, “Honest things, like honest men, do not carry their reasons exposed in this fashion. It is indecent to display all one’s goods.”

And now we come to what I would contend is the true source of the problem: ours is a fast food culture.  Consider for a moment the tremendous success of books like The Idiot’s Guide to the Iliad or The Bible for Dummies or (my personal favorite) Heidegger in 90 Minutes. Consider the tremendous success of Wikipedia.  Indeed, why should we spend years of our lives laboring over works like the Iliad, the Bible, and Being and Time, when the fast-food versions of these highly sophisticated and highly difficult texts are readily available to us?  (I’m reminded as well of an infomercial I saw years ago during one of my many bouts with insomnia. The company that produced it was trying to sell a secret speed-reading technique, and the fellow flipping through various books in the manner of Good Will Hunting was held up as proof positive of the efficacy of this dazzling new technique. After all, he was quite capable of answering any and all questions raised by his trusty interlocutor. He swore that he hadn’t prepared answer to these questions in advance, so...

But that’s beside the point. My first thought upon seeing this was how much fun it would be to hand this speed-reader a copy of Heidegger’s Being and Time or Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, assuming that he himself actually believed in the product he was selling, and either watch him get stuck on the first page or wait until he had finished and then pose a question like “To what extent does Heidegger’s analysis of mood in Dasein inform and/or enhance his phenomenological hermeneutics of the question of the meaning of being?” 

My second thought was, why on earth would anyone want to read a book that quickly? Isn’t it precisely the process of reading that we voracious readers find so gratifying? Well, I suppose that if one reads books to impress potential love-interests at cocktail parties, or potential employers at job interviews, then speed-reading might be the way to go. Such contexts demand little more – indeed, allow for little more – than surface details. Believe you me, the fellow who wishes to delve into the ramifications of the antinomies in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is seldom (and by seldom I mean never) the life of the party. So why not invest in such manuals of popularity as The Iliad for Idiots or The Bible for Boneheads? Why not take that speed-reading course?

Well, one good reason, to return to the fast food metaphor, is that should we partake of such fare, we would thereby run the risk of bringing upon ourselves what one might call ‘intellectual indigestion,’ or, if you like, on the other end, ‘cognitive diarrhea.’

Now, I’m not trying to be slick or clever; I am in deadly earnest. The situation is dire. At stake are our very souls.

Yes, our souls. The fact that many if not most doubt the existence of souls is itself symptomatic of the problem I’m addressing. Though it should be noted that when I use the word ‘soul’ I do not intend it in the sense of a Christian immortal soul; I mean it more in the sense of the ancient Greek notion of that star stuff imbuing our bodies with life. But I digress… Well, I do and I don’t…

But what am I saying, in more concrete terms? A liberal arts education, as I understand it, is one that puts us in touch with the works of truly great human beings. And the driving force behind such an education is an endeavor to set the student free. I know how hokey and trite that sounds, but bear with me a moment. It used to be the case that one might pursue a liberal arts education – a true liberal arts education – at the college level, and this may even still be the case in certain isolated pockets of the country.  But those days are numbered.  hese days one goes to college to learn a trade, and the rare individual who does have aspirations of studying the “liberal arts” is more often than not halted before she’s started, halted by the omnipresent voice of our culture assuring her that utility is the be-all end-all, not just of education but of life itself. That voice doesn’t tell her to what end such utility is directed, but it speaks so vociferously and so interminably that it hardly matters. And the reason it refuses to speak of ends, this ubiquitous voice of our culture, is that it believes the whole notion of “ends” is obsolete and outmoded. There is no end save utility itself, which I scarcely need to tell you is, as an end, utterly and completely vacuous.  One might just as well assert that the end of life is living.

But that’s ok, because we educators still have an opportunity to reach them in secondary school. Right?  Well…  What I find truly frightening – and this not just as it pertains to my own job security – is the fact that this mad drive toward utility for utility’s sake has already begun infecting high schools. It used to be quite common for a student to arrive at college with very little notion of what major she wished to declare. Now, whenever such a student is bold enough to admit that she really doesn’t know what major she will declare, she is usually met with that knowing stare, the one that says, “Do you really think it’s alright to waste so much money on something so flighty as ‘finding yourself’?” And so that same student is frightened into a proper career, like engineering, or medicine, or law, and quite possibly looks back upon her life at the age of forty-five or fifty and wonders what the hell it’s all been for.

We need the liberal arts, in all their glorious uselessness, because they provide the only means of freeing ourselves from the ever-present banality of our culture, a banality that signals the very real threat that one day – perhaps sooner, perhaps later – convention will swallow every last one of us. And that will be the day when the light of our souls is extinguished once and for all.

I’d like to end with one of my favorite quotations. At the beginning of his book called An Introduction to Metaphysics, Martin Heidegger speaks precisely of the questionable utility of philosophy, but I would suggest that what he says of philosophy applies equally well to Latin, and history, and art; in short, all those useless subjects with which we engage in high school.  He writes:

“It is absolutely correct and proper to say that ‘You can’t do anything with philosophy’. It is only wrong to suppose that this is the last word on philosophy. For the rejoinder imposes itself: Granted that we cannot do anything with philosophy, might not philosophy, if we concern ourselves with it, do something with us?”