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.
First, 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.
In this respect, the concept is closest in spirit to the ‘Renaissance man’, minus the gender specification and historical context. The dilettante is one who is moved by enjoyment rather than necessity, professional obligation or the pursuit of credentials, and who purposefully cultivates a plurality of distinct, often aesthetic interests beyond mere surface familiarity.
One reason to defend the dilettante, then, is for lexicological justice. The term has been unfairly burdened with an overly negative connotation. It wasn’t always this way. From the Baroque-era Italian _dilettante_, the term originally referred to someone who pursues an interest, particularly an artistic one, for the sake of pleasure, or ‘delight’. Even as the term evolved, it stayed largely neutral, distinguishing enthusiasts from professionals in a given practice. The pejorative connotation familiar to us today is more recent, shaped by what I’ll call a ‘deficiency’ model, in which amateurism is viewed negatively as a _lack_ of something: skill, seriousness, focus, expertise. This is the meaning ascribed by cultural gatekeepers like Theodor Adorno, who in 1929 dismissed the dilettante as one ‘unable to establish any standards’.
The more important aim, however, is to show dilettantism as a way of living that offers more than we might think. It is a life liberated from specialisation, instrumentalisation and meritocratic bean-counting, as well as from a Protestant work ethic that is suspicious of pleasure for pleasure’s sake. Arguments denigrating specialisation in education and vocation are well known, as are those championing well-roundedness and the virtues of the liberal arts. Though similar in spirit, this defence of dilettantism is less about the purpose or outcomes of academic or professional life and more about making the mental switch away from the socially conditioned pressure to find your thing and stick with it to an open and exploratory pursuit of pluralistic interests. Reclaiming this sense of joyful experimentalism is intended to show dilettantism as a mode of abundance rather than deficiency.
A good place to start is the essay ‘On Dilettantism’ (1799) by J W von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. This fragmentary, never-completed project by the literary dream-team of Weimar-era Germany paints a deeply ambivalent portrait of dilettantism, praising the dilettante over here for ‘cultivat\[ing\] something serious in man’ and condemning him over there as a ‘plagiarist’ and a ‘bungler’. Viewed retrospectively, however, its almost scientific treatment of the ‘advantages’ (_Nutzen_) and ‘disadvantages’ or ‘harms’ (_Schaden_) of dilettantism helps give a clear-eyed view of the potential virtues and vices of dilettantism today.
Crucially, Goethe and Schiller’s analysis is squarely situated in the cultural context of Weimar classicism. This means that, first, the question of the dilettante arises (as it does in its original Italian usage) exclusively in relation to the arts. They treat the dilettante as a distinctly _aesthetic_ figure, ‘a lover of the arts who wishes not only to contemplate and enjoy them, but also to participate in their production.’ This aesthetic dimension has (regrettably, I think) faded from the meaning of ‘dilettante’ over time. But nor does it need to be narrowly inscribed in 18th-century anxieties about who can and cannot properly be called an artist. Artistic engagement isn’t essential to dilettantism. But it is worth reasserting, maybe even foregrounding, the sense in which the ‘delight’ of dilettantism involves, to some extent, the experience of aesthetic pleasure, broadly understood. The dilettante, that is, pursues what Søren Kierkegaard calls an ‘aesthetic life’: the ongoing, everyday activity of observing, valuing, and participating in art and beauty.
The dilettante is comfortable in the garb of an amateur. For the dilettante, every night is karaoke night
Though rooted in classicist aestheticism, some of Goethe and Schiller’s criticism of the dilettante still resonates today. They worry, for example, that the dilettante ‘jumps over the steps’, gliding too glibly through the creative process and claiming victory too early. There’s something to this. Similar to Oscar Wilde’s concern about the ‘sentimentalist’ in his 1897 epistolary essay, _De Profundis_, who ‘desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it’, the authors voice a reasonable objection to those willing to cut the line in chasing laurels. Progress is earned through practice, and those of us who have put in the work are right to protect it, as any trained therapist, frustrated with the quackery that passes for therapy on YouTube and TikTok, will gladly testify.
_Studies of Søren Kierkegaard_ (_c_1850) by Vilhelm Pedersen. Courtesy the SMK/Copenhagen
But due to their idealisation of the ‘true artist’ as a manifester of Truth and Beauty, Goethe and Schiller cannot help but view the dilettante as lacking in both aim and ability. To be fair, no practice is a total free-for-all, and some practices are less permissive of dilettantism than others (who wants to live in a house built by a dilettante architect?). But the notion that the dilettante tries and fails to follow the ‘true objective rules’ of art and beauty the way legit artists do rests on outdated and Eurocentric assumptions about what both artists and dilettantes are actually up to. In other words, take away the neo-classicist presumption, and suddenly the dilettante appears less like an imitator and more like a liberated creator. It’s not that the dilettante falls short in any given practice but, rather, has a different orientation toward it. Indeed, an overly goal-oriented attitude, especially in the realm of pastimes and pleasures, cuts against the very spirit of dilettantism. Part of its appeal is its ethos of open-endedness, its willingness to do something for the sake of delight rather than achievement. The dilettante is comfortable in the garb of an amateur. For the dilettante, every night is karaoke night.
From our Germans, we glean a sense of where the dilettante goes wrong. But they can also help us make the corrective mental switch from seeing the dilettante as a wannabe practitioner to someone who chooses a more experimental, exploratory orientation toward a given practice.
_Goethe in the Roman Campagna_ (1787) by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein. Courtesy the Städel Museum
The key to perceiving dilettantism as abundance instead of deficiency is to appreciate the sense of freedom it affords. It is, in the first place, a _negative_ freedom, a freedom from the constraints that otherwise bind professional practitioners. More precisely, it is a freedom of mobility within a practice.
First, the dilettante has greater freedom to engage in a given practice. For Goethe and Schiller, one of the most important ‘advantages’ of dilettantism is that it ‘stimulates a certain taste for art, and extends it to where the artist would not be able to reach’. Generalising a bit, the point holds well beyond art: the dilettante can act as a liaison between expert and layperson, closing the gap between high practice and everyday curiosity, introducing otherwise cloistered practitioners to wider audiences and extending an invitation to anyone who might otherwise feel shut out.
A personal example. A few years ago, I joined Mountain Haulers, a cycling group that meets on Tuesday evenings for a ride through Asheville, North Carolina. It is a ‘no drop’ ride: cyclists wait at points along the way for everyone to catch up, however slow or struggling, and the first ride of the month is always a chill ride along the river. This openness sets the group apart from a cycling culture of notorious cliques of devotees clamouring to outdo each other’s worship of the sport. Welcoming the less-experienced and the less-committed seems a more genuine way of loving the thing you claim to love. If biking is your thing, surely you want more butts on bike seats. The dilettante cyclists who show up for Tuesday-night rides make cycling better.
The modern admonition to ‘stay in your lane’ stems from assumptions about the commitment required to claim an interest as one’s own
The further sense of the dilettante’s freedom involves mobility _between_ different practices – a freedom from the barriers dividing them. The dilettante maintains a certain _detachment_, or intentional separation, between who one is and what one does, to live the life of a cultural itinerant. Painting, gardening, MIG welding, beekeeping, language learning, comic-book collecting, dancing, swimming, printmaking, powerlifting, pickleballing, sourdough baking, accordion playing, brisket barbecuing – all exciting destinations to travel and explore without seeking citizenship or even permanent residence in any one. The dilettante is a wayfaring cosmopolitan whose sense of freedom is found in never being stuck in one place.
And yet, this mobility is also part of a positive freedom to satisfy the basic human need to explore and make one’s mark on the world. Goethe and Schiller credit the dilettante for activating this natural impulse toward curiosity and creativity, a drive they compare with children’s innate desire to playfully imitate their surroundings. Going further, I would say that dilettantism offers not only the satisfaction of scratching the _Homo faber_ itch; making and exploring for the simple sake of joy and curiosity is a freedom that is every bit as valuable to self-discovery as any commitment or singular pursuit.
However, from the outside, mobility may look like mere lack of commitment. No doubt this drives some of the allegations of superficiality commonly lodged against the dilettante. Pulling up anchors and moving on from an interest gets flagged as surface-skimming. I’m speculating here, but such criticism seems rooted in a work ethic that tells us that investment in certain interests ought to yield dividends: authority, credibility, permission to enter culturally guarded spaces, etc. Just as the neo-classicist wants to set the ‘true artist’ apart from the poseurs, the modern admonition to ‘pick a lane’, or (more aggressive) ‘stay in your lane’, stems from assumptions about the level and length of commitment required to claim an interest as one’s own.
Dilettantism rejects this quasi-capitalist mindset. The petty territorialism common to social, academic and cultural spaces (think record stores, cocktail bars, art galleries, philosophy classes, etc) is unnecessary but, more importantly, at odds with a genuine interest in the thing itself. A crucial part of the switch from deficiency to abundance is learning to see the dilettante as an asset to a given practice rather than a threat to it. Even Adorno, snob par excellence, allows a version of this, arguing that the expert critic needs the dilettante around ‘in order to prove to himself that he isn’t one’.
More than simply escaping sickness, the dilettante’s movement is a headlong rush at vitality and vigour
Also crucial to making this mental switch is seeing the dilettante’s curiosity as equal in intensity to the expert’s, but different. Picture the dilettante as the love-child of two very different philosophical figures: Kierkegaard’s aesthete in _Either/Or_ (1843) who finds and cultivates interests with an intensity that is abandoned before it hardens into obligation, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘free spirit’, the fiercely curious, light-footed nomad whose restless pursuit of intellectual and artistic treasures provides a profound, if rootless, freedom. From Kierkegaard, the dilettante acquires an innate aversion to boredom (‘the root of all evil’) which is achieved by what he calls ‘rotation of crops’: perpetually changing ‘the method of cultivation and the kinds of crops’. From Nietzsche, the dilettante inherits a rejection of convention coupled with perpetual motion, a sense of permanent ‘homelessness’ that propels an unfettered perusal of interests. Passionate enough to go deep, detached enough to eventually leave, such a figure shows the possibility of being intensely invested in various ways of knowing, doing and making, but never content to let a sense of self form too firmly around them.
In a memorable scene from the Spike Jonze film _Adaptation_ (2002), the journalist Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep), who is writing a book about the orchid thief John Laroche (Chris Cooper), is at once intrigued by his hunt for a rare hallucinogenic ‘ghost orchid’ and baffled to learn that it is only the latest in a lifetime of obsessions: turtles, prehistoric fossils, 19th-century Dutch mirrors, etc. How can he detach so abruptly from something in which he’s invested so much? He can only offer an anecdote. A profound and consuming love for tropical fish ended suddenly with the realisation that the passion had simply run its course. ‘Fuck fish,’ he tells her, disrupting her assumption that loving something means sticking with it forever.
The difference is that, unlike Kierkegaard’s aesthete, the dilettante doesn’t rotate crops out of despair. Dynamism, detachment and insatiable curiosity are constitutive of the dilettante’s free and full subjectivity, rather than a stage on the way to achieving selfhood. The dilettante chooses aesthetic life over the life of commitment that Kierkegaard’s ‘either/or’ dichotomy presents, and fully owns that choice. Nor is the dilettante simply recovering from existential illness, as Nietzsche’s free spirit seems to be. Rather than running the risk of relapse – or worse, the ‘cankerous vice’ of pessimism – dilettantism is a healthy embrace of this freedom; more than simply escaping sickness, the dilettante’s movement is a headlong rush at vitality and vigour.
In the dilettante’s genes is a compulsion to pursue passions, deeply coupled with a refusal to shape a life or identity permanently around any one of them. The dilettante possesses a unique capacity to dive deep into an interest, then surface and plunge into the depths of the next, each one an exploration, an adventure, but not a lifelong, life-defining project. It is precisely to hold open the possibility of the next reconnaissance mission that the dilettante rejects any dogmatic principle of stick-to-itiveness. Sometimes, the dilettante is a devout hobbyist parked on one interest for years at a stretch; sometimes, a juggler of several overlapping projects at once; and sometimes, a serial enthusiast on the hunt for the next novelty – what holds these modes together isn’t any fixed duration or rhythm of arrival and departure, but a disposition toward perpetual motion. The dilettante’s talent, energy and passion are constantly rechannelled through new outlets. Far from deficiency, dilettantism is a constant quest for abundance.
The life of the dilettante, so described, is not an especially easy one. It is a life of perpetual searching and fleeting satisfaction, in which accomplishment often arrives without accolades. Until breadth of interest is held in higher esteem, today’s dilettante will largely have to forgo public recognition and settle for a private life of pursuits and pleasures. Rarely is the dilettante widely celebrated as such. Consider someone like Susan Sontag, a novelist, critic and political activist whose wide-ranging work has earned both praise for its unconventional contributions to the intellectual life of 1960s New York and criticism for lacking rigour, for lacking substance. A ‘Win’ in the dilettante’s column, in other words, often comes with an asterisk – a conditional victory at best.
Further, the dilettante is also no pack animal; however much a part of a group one may feel, the dilettante will likely always be something of a tourist within it. The dilettante has to be comfortable travelling as a lone wolf at the margins of any community organised around a shared interest.
No, dilettantism is not for everyone. For anyone whom the universe has called to pursue a single passion – congratulations! Stay the course! But for those of us compelled by something closer to FOMO for the sheer variety and abundance the world has to offer, the dilettante’s path can lead to a genuine quality-of-life upgrade. If courage means overcoming the fear of new beginnings, without the reassurance of a title or a track record to show for it, then dilettantism may have much to offer. After all, not every crop is a monoculture, sowed and tilled to maximise output. Some of us need to cultivate our gardens through crop rotation. A defence of the dilettante is thus a call to follow the forked path of varying interests to a life made meaningful through abundance rather than acclaim.