Sensibility
In a biological sense, people may be said to be equal, a fact that is the basis for further claims about human equality, such as every adult being entitled to a vote. In their assertive, one-size-fits-all fairness, notions of political equality have tended to downplay the differences among people. To focus on differences may seem to raise the specter of inferiority and superiority, all the miserable baggage of caste, hierarchy, and prejudice. But sensibility—differences in tastes, attitudes, opinions, and feelings—is, at once, something much milder and something quite crucial, that distinct array of discernment that marks someone as an individual and speaks to the individual’s engagement with life. Sensibility, even when it recoils from an item on a dinner plate or piece of music or another person, makes life worth living. As Yogi Berra might have put it, for something that seems shallow it runs deep.
The maddening subjectivity of sensibility, so often expressed in “I like it” or “I don’t like it,” has been downplayed in modern times as a human value. At first glance, this downplaying may seem to be the last thing that has occurred. It certainly isn’t downplayed in the marketing of x or y product where companies want to know how the consumer feels. What I am thinking of here, however, goes far beyond which cola to buy, yet it informs the day to day. When I think of a favorite painting such as John Singer Sargent’s My Dining Room (circa 1885) what delights me is the portrayal of a table and a room but also of a sensibility. The painting, as it shows a sideboard, a chair or two, a table covered with a white cloth, various plates and napkins, makes me feel the beauty of someone’s specific taste. There is no need to ratchet up the adjectives. What is lovely is that someone lives there. Looking at the painting, you feel the effects of sensibility.
To cultivate sensibility one has to believe in its worth, not as something with a price tag but something that makes life more compelling. To believe in that worth, one has to experience the activity that accompanies sensibility. It is there that education can be of enormous importance since it can enshrine the principle of meaningful choice. When a child (or an adult, for that matter) prefers one thing to another, the why of that choice wants to be heard. For the more one consults one’s taste, the more open one can be to the richness and range of matters such as literature, music, philosophies, and cuisines—to pick four areas that can keep a person well occupied for a lifetime. The more a person can speak about a feeling, the more articulate a person can become. To be sure, we can answer “we just do,” but whenever we say even one sentence more we open a fascinating door. The felt connection may be deliberate or whimsical but, in all cases, is particular.
The failure of too many schools at all levels lies in their distrust of sensibility, a failure that plays out in anti-intellectualism, disparagement of art, indifference to history, and, worst of all, sheer despair. Young people who have not been asked to think, feel, and choose (and respond to their choices) are not much more than automatons providing answers—and they know that. Some, who have the right advantages, go along with the mindlessness. Many, who do not have the advantages, fall into doubt about themselves and their prospects. Many fall into violence. The sad reliance on the quantifiable, the handing over of education to corporate forces, the mania for accountability and standardized testing, as if education were a yardstick, all these are a direct assault on the value of sensibility. They are also—since human beings are not quantifiable—assaults on the notion of human worth. Every unquestioning instruction is a small death. Each school day consists of many small deaths. Such, the child learns, is life.
Cultivation is an aspiration. It is easy to mock aspirations and point to the aspirant’s clay feet. It is easy to holler “hypocrite” and let the word reverberate in all its rankness. The routine exposures of human falseness along with the deep disconnections between hearts and minds left many people in the twentieth century practicing a soulless realism: there must be something better but it is not likely. Whether apocryphal or not, the tale of the concentration camp commander who went home after a day’s Arbeit and listened to Mozart is bound to haunt us. Beauty is indifferent to ethics, we say and throw up our grieving hands; but that is only half the story. The sensibility that encounters beauty faces the ethical demand to not relegate it to the narrowness of art-for-the-sake-of-art. Beauty speaks to harmony and harmony is a great hinge of feeling that shows we belong in this world.
Sensibility is of small worth if it is considered a badge or a haven from the connections of conscience. The plight of sensibility in modern times lay in its being secondary to some ideological, commercial, or nationalist product even when, as a living feeling, it came first. Peasants had their traditional sensibilities; aristocrats had their luxurious ones, but millions of modern men and women had little more than the desperation of dispossession, political rage, and the goad of material striving. Despite what was on his record player, the camp commander preferred unfeeling to feeling. He was not alone. His Führer, twice rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, was a stymied artist.
More phenomena, both earthly and man-made, present themselves each day than any one human being can possibly take in. This abundance perplexes us. Rather than accepting the banquet, we dine on bread and water. (Hitler, a striving, dispossessed young man in Vienna, went starving in the winter of 1909-1910. Were this not a fact, it would seem a parable.) The heterogeneity of modern times, one person from a different place on earth encountering another person, presents a crucible of cultivation. One has to believe that it is a good crucible because tribalism, since it excludes others, creates scapegoats and enemies. To propose the value of cultivating sensibility is not to turn people into snobs but rather to make appreciation a reality rather than a platitude. Liking is an active force. The more human beings can honor that force, the more they can enjoy being on earth and grasp others’ responses to being here.
Appreciation is often ridiculed as somehow insipid when compared to criticism and theory, yet without appreciation nothing truly matters. The desperate thrust of modern times, which is to see through everything, reduces the great palette of intuition to mere behaviorism. Sensibility is rooted in openness. Often young people enact this openness spontaneously—the sheer zest for life and experience. To distrust its cultivation is to cast a large shadow on the human endeavor. Sensibility is quicksilver but such lightness recommends it. At the heart of each human day there is that liking, a frank smile amid the perils.
Baron, I always have so much to say in response to your pieces that I wind up saying nothing instead, but thought I'd give it a shot today.
I was reminded of an incident in 10th grade when the teacher, for some reason I no longer recall, played the Chambers Brothers, "Time Has Come Today." I said I didn't like it. She replied, "That's a value judgment" and shut me down. And, indeed, it was a value judgment. I'm not sure I could have articulated what I didn't like about it then, I could now, but heck.
Love your point about tribalism. One of the reasons I so enjoy doing the ALTE stuff is because my co-conspirators, however different we may be in some ways, have a shared sensibility. These are my people, it's comforting not to feel alone out there.
And, you're right, we don't pay enough attention to sensibility.
Thanks for writing these!
Jessica
This essay is so very provocative and stimulating, Baron. The cultivation of sensibility has not struck me as so very critical and necessary until reading this essay. I particularly like your ideas about education's role in cultivating sensibility. And this line is gold to me: "To propose the value of cultivating sensibility is not to turn people into snobs but rather to make appreciation a reality rather than a platitude." Thank you! I'm off to think about why.