Musings on The Value of The Arts in A University Culture Increasingly Dedicated to Seeking Answers in Science and Technology

August 2016

During a period framed by the creation of the first American college in 1638 and the second world war, it was expected and inevitable that as part of a complete education, students would be educated in the Arts. This typically included the making of as well as the study of the art.  It would also typically include a nuanced philosophical exploration into aesthetics and on beauty.    Given this, it is reasonable to ask why in the twentieth century the academy chose to break from this tradition and whether in the twenty first century, it is logical to reintroduce it.    I also want to use this opportunity to focus upon the broader epistemological and existential questions of why the arts and the question of “beauty” seems to vanish in the modern American academic discourse.

The instinct toward Beauty- the yearning for the pleasure it furnishes – is bound up with what we think beauty represents.  In the most general terms, this might be described as ‘the good’ or ‘the highest’.  It is not mere coincidence that in pre-modern thought less confusion and less discomfort accompanied the discourse on beauty, and yet the word’s use was less widespread.  Classical philosophy concerned itself with the issue as necessary, as did Renaissance intellectuals such as L.B. Alberti, Pico and Ficino. The Modern difficulty with beauty stems more from a philosophical redirection than from an apparent problem in creating it.  Nonetheless, even within our modern miasma regarding what the idea of beauty might be, we still sense that it maintains a connection with a vague notion of ‘the good,’ so that we are naturally fascinated with attempts to create this meaningful quality.

Beauty and its discourse have become associated with the past.  They (the state of artistic beauty and its discourse) have become historical conditions synonymous with a romance for the past.  As for the romance of the past, it may in part depend on assumptions that age confirms validity; that what endures deserves to, and what disappears doesn’t.  Yet it is more complicated than that, for we also experience a kind of superiority over many aspects of the past, treating it quaintly but ultimately with more tolerance or amusement than respect and appreciation.  Except with art.  It is not the  ‘oldness’ of Shakespeare’s plays that enthralls us. It is not the patina of the Mona Lisa that gives it value.  It is simply the undeniable quality of the work – its beauty.  Quality that was born with it.  It is a quality that we quietly fear even centuries of dirt may not simulate in the artistic work we are producing today. This quality, these temporal and ideological questions which are integral with the Arts and the various answers that our modern culture responds with are fundamentally different than those that exist in the sciences, medicine and engineering.  I dare so that it taken hubris to challenge the accepted presumption of constant improvement, progress, and advancement in the sciences, medicine and engineering. And yet in the Arts, the challenge has been a constant presence.  In this way, an honest exploration of the Arts represents a fissure in many of the cultural assumptions that are built from the historical fixation on progress, science and technology and which are still embedded in today’s STEM discourse.

The United States was born into modernity and by 1830 was already, as de Tocqueville observed, the womb of the future.  As such, an almost unconditional faith in modernity, science and technology is woven into our foundational DNA.  To be sure, this fact is an important contextual factor of the recent fervor for STEM as a route to salvation. America’s most recent conviction that science, technology, engineering and math will serve as the harbingers of deliverance should be seen – given our history – as both predictable and suspect.

The very idea of linear progress and endless advancement, while certainly part of the enlightenment story and part of the historiography of modernity and of America has already been called into question. Today, it is clear that natural resources are finite and will run out.  Science, Technology, and Engineering have delivered great gifts to the peoples of this planet and they have also inflicted what may be irreparable damage to the natural environment to the point that our own continued existence is now endangered.  Finally, we have witnessed with disquieting clarity that our century’s products of STEM progress can become destructive forces. The existence of nuclear and biological weapons is only the most obvious refutation that progress is inherent and that science and technology are history’s caring muses. The recognition of these realities (which represents science, technology and engineering’s late twentieth century fall from grace) along with the most recent apotheosis or resurrection in the form of this decade’s focus on STEM as the instruments of our salvation are worth interrogating if not approaching with a healthy bit of skepticism.

 As self-assured as we in the modern-age and of the new world have been of the efficacy of modern science and as certain as we have been of the linkages between technology and our economy, we have also always been unsure of ourselves culturally and artistically and these conflicting existential themes are – for better and for worse-essential characteristics of who we are as modern Americans.

Just as we have always been adamant – often suspiciously so – that the custodians of science and technology will be our saviors, When it came to the arts, the question of nostalgia always lurked in the shadows. The underlying motive for valorizing and studying previous periods of artistic production is profound at its core.  To do so is to introduce the suspicion that one’s own “modern” moment and its artistic and cultural production were somehow inferior and that the idea of constant improvement, progress, and advancement were not as integral to our DNA as perhaps we thought.

 In the modern age, this clearly represents a quiet crisis of ideology, which - though I am not a social historian – corresponds to the major re-organization of socio-political structures on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean in the 17th and 18th centuries.  If our forebears then were re-evaluating class structures and systems of governance and finding them wanting, they were also re-evaluating the artistic and cultural production that those structures and systems had produced and finding them enormously fertile.  Was it inevitable that political and scientific revolution should also sponsor artistic fissure?  The study of history is concerned with cause and effect, but since I am not armed with such expertise, I can only raise this point as a question.  Nevertheless, we all know that Western political and scientific structures changed radically. 

 But let us leave the past for future discussions. There is another aspect more central to my theme, which is the dualistic tension between the STEM initiative’s resurrection of the modern belief in progress and the Arts’ deep and longstanding underlying doubt of that belief in progress.

Frankly, one of the reasons every science, engineering, technology, math and medicine major should take an art history course is that having been schooled to believe in the march of scientific advancement, a journey into the arts would serve as an existential breach from the self-assured confidence in progress, science and technology and its identification with modernity. 

 As Americans (and I use this term to broadly designate those of us who inhabit the new world), this crisis I’ve described is particular to us.   Inevitably, children become curious about their parents when they begin to realize that to know them is to begin to know themselves.  And so, even if our collective artistic and cultural  “history” is more complex and involves many more histories than it once did- we nonetheless must understand that our continent is in a fundamental way the child of other places.  As multicultural as the Americas become, they will always have a most basic connection to Europe and particularly to Spain, Portugal, England and Italy.  When we return – even briefly in an art history class or on a study abroad program – we enact a reversal of the effort that was made in leaving what was known in order to begin something new and potentially better. So in this way, the arts - like STEM is perhaps marked by the drive for progress and advancement.  At a individual level, but also collectively; the founding of a new, and thus, potentially better life was a choice, not a fate. It was the ultimate act of believing in    the scientific method. The ultimate experiment; political, cultural and social.   It was the product of a plan for a society rather than the offshoot of an already established society.   Now I am not suggesting that this is the only reason we go back, or that we are even aware of this process but it occurs nonetheless.  This act happens at many levels of consciousness (or sub-consciousness), but whether we admit it or not, in revisiting life in the ‘old world’ or in looking again at that Botticelli or rereading that Shakespeare play, we seek to reconfirm the validity of having left those places and having moved on from those particular forms of artistic production; we are seeking a renewed belief in modernity.  Thus, this potentially poetic, potentially damaging act of returning is not merely a comparison of quality – though it is certainly that – it is also an ontological search. To know what we are, we establish what we started as and how far we have removed ourselves from it.  To know who we are, we establish in a certain sense, who we no longer are.  This is a condition peculiar to the nations of the new world and to colonies. It is a condition that Italians, for example, do not experience when they travel since they understand inherently what Italy is and what it always has been.  This may be merely a function of historic time, but I think it is more than our national youth alone that encourages this process of self-assessment and the condition of doubt that accompanies it.  I believe this condition is wrapped up in our foundational idea that to be of the new world (to be American) is to valorize the importance of beginning again.  In this sense it is precisely history that we don’t want (and why we have so quickly resurrected our belief in science and technology again. and which lends poignancy and consequence to our confrontation with it through the arts which have never been able to shed its baggage in the way that science and technology do.  But, no matter how alluring we find it, at bottom, I suspect that we are also deeply ambivalent about it, since to embrace it is to relinquish the alluring attempt to evade it.  To embrace it is also to permit the possibility that we might not be doing better.  That conclusion would surely lead to a deeper kind of existential crisis.

 Somehow – extraordinarily so – America has managed to erect a structure of naïveté as a philosophical construct, and we have had to maintain that structure continually in order to keep it from collapsing.  One of the principle pillars has been cultural production, including the arts.  But here is where the crisis is born, because the production of culture is by its very nature indivisible from time and from history.  All cultural production – whether based in renewal or in invention, are measured in relation to what has been produced previously.  Even the fundamentally anti-historical premise of modernism could never quite manage its own escape from history.

So there is this tension between our desire to emerge from the past represented – indeed manifested in the arts, and the impossibility of doing so within the parameters of art.  This opposition need not be only negative; yet it does demand a strategy for reconciliation.  And before we can attempt to formulate such a reconciliation, we must clarify what is being rejoined; the past and the liberation from it. This clarification may actually be assisted by our own displacement by a study of the past.  For, although familiarity breads intimacy, which is a certain kind of knowledge or expertise, it also hides many things.  Often visitors and guests teach us about our homes, allowing us to discover many things we hadn’t noticed, or had forgotten, or didn’t make the effort to learn. When we travel ourselves – literally and geographically or temporally through the magic of an art history class, we activate our sensory perception in a way that we don’t normally do within the routine of our everyday lives at home.  As well, there is great value to the perspective gained from distance, where the broader horizon envelops a much larger picture, giving understanding of things in relation to each other, rather than as separate entities or ideas.

This is what happens in studying the Arts. No matter how much students focus on the past, they unavoidably understand it in relation to who they are today. They understand it as Americans born out of modernity.  And by definition, they also see America and the condition of modernity a bit differently, perhaps more critically, perhaps with more appreciation for this experiment that is America and perhaps with a little forgiveness.  So in this way the Arts teach us about America and about STEM, So, while I do not wish to diminish the pedagogical value of simply learning about Botticelli and Shakespeare, 49% of it is in its ability to teach us about ourselves.   

Students of science, engineering, technology and medicine should not study the arts looking for answers to apply here and now as is so often the case in their technology and science coursework. It is my hope that instead, after taking coursework in the Arts, they will leave that study with few answers but many new and unanswered questions about history, about beauty and most importantly about the uncertainty of their own technologies, about the very idea of progress & modernity and what it means to be an enlightened global citizen-scientist of a very fragile and beautiful world in the twenty-first century.