Learning Is A Luxury, Not A Chore
I always love those moments when a book suddenly grips me with no precedence, no necessity and no one looking over my shoulder, judging what I'm reading. This happened a few days ago when I darted into a bookshop during a break from thesis writing. I was mad at the page and my dull mind for giving me that agony on par with constipation, so I looked for a book, any book for that matter, that would break me out of that slumber with a fresh idea.
A few weeks ago my friend Hannah experienced what she called a religious conversion after reading Kierkegaard's The Lily of The Field and The Bird of The Air and has been preaching his works like a sermon:
"You would f**k with his writing he's just quirky and different like that."
"It will change your life like it changed mine."
"When in doubt one must read Quirkegaard."
So I bent under her religious reverence for his works and picked up a copy of Either/Or, only to discover, only after a few pages, that I was either dealing with a madman or a genius. The first part of the book: Either started with an extended gushing about Mozart's Don Giovanni as Kirkegaard crowned the opera as a work that has "[entered] the ranks of the immortals" while "[ranking] as the highest among them (Kierkegaard 65)."
On the subject of music, Kierkegaard rightly observed that it is a sensual medium, unlike language which religious zealots consider as the spirit's proper medium (83). He continued:
"Music, as we know, has always been subject to suspicion on the part of religious zealots... The stronger the religiosity, the more one renounces music and stresses the word (82)1."
Without knowing it, this was the insight that broke me out of my slumber. I started thinking about our culture's current connection with the idea of reading and realized that the book has once again acquired a neo-religious status. The undertone is urgent as the 21st-century readers stage themselves as the dialectical opposites of people wrapped up in sensual mediums like TikTok scrolls, movie binges and Netflix marathons. Reading nowadays almost sounds like a task of moral reform and it slowly becomes a necessity. Some of us secretly feel bad that we're not quote-unquote readers while those who have a taste in reading tend to get on a moral high horse.
But time and time again, I find this necessity approach to learning and knowledge counterproductive. Whenever I get adamant about getting the most out of a book, I find myself projecting onto the text out of the neurotic need to know. Instead of allowing the book to change my worldview or offer the pleasure of spontaneous insights, my zealous mind only sees parts of the book while learning turns into a treasure hunt for stagnant factoids and self-serving erudition. On top of that, this ascetic approach to learning seems to have penetrated our entire education system, turning the learned into stiff bureaucrats while leaving students in unbearable boredom. In the words of Nietzsche, this fundamental view of education makes pleasure and luxury something that humiliates the learned man because fine learning and education presuppose pain, toil and drudgery.
To rekindle the joy of learning is to escape this paradigm of associating learning with necessity, righteousness and boredom. We have to start associating learning with the idea of luxury. In one of my favourite books: Good Entertainment, Byung-Chul Han described culture, learning and art as luxation of necessity because [their] intention is not merely to redirect necessity (Han 33)2. In other words, learning (especially in the humanities) isn’t effective if we have an adamant goal in mind. Reading a book for the sake of having read it or out of the need to write a paper on it usually results in the most tedious reading experience. Whereas a more favourable approach is to learn from a place of relaxation, curiosity and wonder.
Walter Benjamin's figure of the flâneur comes to mind. The figure "makes use of the capacity not to act (11)3". This capacity opens up unexpected observations and insights that allow the wanderer to see "the magnetism of the street corner, of a distant square in the fog, of the back of a woman walking before him (Benjamin 880)4. Similarly, a reader without learning goals is a flâneur who wanders among the pages. They make unexpected detours and relish in the joy of expanding their worldviews and as a result, they'll never grow tired of learning because it is not a chore.
On the idea of luxurious learning, Byung-Chul Han continued and asserted that there is no need to assert an existential divide between the man of luxury and the man of knowledge. Using Kant's idea of "acumen", Han argued that the mechanism that allows people to appreciate music, film, fashion, perfume, etc is the same mechanism that allows scholars to make fine distinctions when they pour over thick tomes. Hence, learning is just like choosing beautiful blinds for a new apartment, seeking perfume before a date and buying a new cravat for a cocktail night. It populates our mental scape with the tapestry of intellectual luxury.
So next time, when we find ourselves loathing learning, remember that the finest learning is usually the result of a goalless wander. Had I remained at my desk and kept struggling with my thesis writing, I would’ve missed the chance to read Kierkegaard's wonderful books. If we could once again view learning as a luxury instead of a chore, we would set the sail of learning in the direction of that curious wind. And now, it's up to us to preserve the flame of learning and the goalless goal of defending our curiosity.
Notes/References
1Kierkegaard, Søren. Either/or : a fragment of life. Edited by Søren Kierkegaard, et al., translated by Alastair Hannay, Penguin Publishing Group, 1992.
2Han, Byung-Chul. Good Entertainment: A Deconstruction of the Western Passion Narrative. Translated by Adrian Nathan West, MIT Press, 2019.
3Han, Byung-Chul. Vita Contemplativa: In Praise of Inactivity. Translated by Daniel Steuer, Polity Press, 2023.
4Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Belknap Press, 2002.
