Sandro Botticelli, St. Augustine in His Study. Photo Credit: Wikipedia Commons
There exists a constant pressure in our contemporary age for the academy to divert resources to vocationalist programs. This, in turn, induces a movement towards hyper-specialization and fragmentation between the disciplines, as only “necessary” procedural skills are to be learned and perfected for hyper-specific vocational ends. Any learning, research, or skill development outside of an unreflective ability to accomplish such ends, relative to a certain career path, is increasingly viewed as gratuitous, and there is a constant conversation about whether such aspects of academic tracks ought to be cut.
This environment begs the question of the merit and perhaps even the worthiness of research that does not admit of obvious application. Research as such seems to be a paradigm of the type of academic endeavor justifiably viewed as gratuitous, and it often is prima facie difficult to defend funding such research to the exclusion of research which explicitly might, for instance, reveal a solution to a standing optimization problem in biomedical engineering or in economic planning. This problem is at least as old as Aristophanes’ Clouds, in which Socrates’ Athenian school suffers a poor reputation, in part because of it not being clear why pieces of knowledge devoid of application ought to be pursued at all. I will briefly make the case for research that does not admit of obvious application, and in doing so hopefully encourage students at Columbia who are considering this kind of research, but who are hesitant to follow through because of its apparent intrinsic or vocational “uselessness,” to take concrete steps forward in the research process.
Firstly, while “uselessness” is often a derogatory term with a connotation of negative valence, it is also reserved for those things we find most sacred, and it is the latter sense rather than the former sense that is often applicable to research that does not admit of obvious application. For instance, “useful” as a qualifier for a particular human person is highly pejorative, since it indicates the admissibility of such a person being instrumentalized or treated as a mere means towards some further end. In such a sense, its contrary, “uselessness,” denotes something (or someone) being an end a se – an end in itself. It is precisely these kinds of useless ends, and only these kinds of useless ends, that are candidates for what brings most meaning to life, since by definition no further end can be posited to justify our pursuit of them. As C.S. Lewis would put it, “useless” research, even if it does not contribute obvious survival value, uniquely contributes value to survival. As such, even if the research project you are considering will not increase your job prospects or especially complement a practically-oriented resume, it might be the kind of thing that one ought, throughout one’s life, to pursue as an end a se. If it is, there is no better time to pursue it than now.
The first horn of the argument assumed that your potential research project truly neither has nor will have obvious application, but this is almost never the case. First and foremost, like the Core, the sublimity that one can encounter in “pure” disciplines is exactly and exclusively the kind of sublimity that has informed and motivated the greatest, most enterprising leaders in history – consider Abraham Lincoln and Corie Ten Boom’s views of inscrutable Providence, Ghandi’s association with the virtues found in the Beatitudes, or Alexander the Great’s idolization of Homer’s Achilles. Often, seemingly useless research is just the kind of formation that constitutes a necessary condition to live a good and fulfilling life and to act with perseverance in accordance with duty, even and especially in practical domains.
Apart from personal practical upshots, the greatest technological and scientific revolutions in history have come through the appropriation and application of areas of inquiry that initially no one found applicable. Riemann’s radical modification of analytic geometry, initially viewed almost exclusively through the lens of pure mathematical interest, ultimately provided the main mathematical formalism through which Einstein made rigorous his Special and General Theories of relativity. It was through the work of philosophers and logicians like Frege, Turing, and Church, attempting to axiomatize and determine whether all mathematical statements were decidable (the Entscheidungsproblem) that the foundations of computer science were laid. Hero of Alexandria’s square roots of negative numbers eventually provided a necessary piece of perhaps the most important functions in quantum mechanics: the wave function. In general, one can never rule out the possibility of one’s “useless” research eventually constituting the key to momentous scientific, technological, or theoretical advancement.
Do not dismiss the possibility of conducting research that interests you, whether in literature, philosophy, pure mathematics, classics, history, etc., on the basis of it being “inapplicable” or “useless.” Like Socrates’ school in Aristophanes’ Clouds, it is just these kinds of projects for which the academy exists. It is just these kinds of projects that have revolutionized our understanding of the world.