Why people who really study the arts/humanities are not boring assholes

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Why people who really study the arts/humanities are not boring assholes Anonymous Wed Mar 25 22:51:32 2020 No.14952971 [DELETED]

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Do you know the difference, generally speaking, between people who have seriously spent time studying and digesting the humanities; the ideas, the artworks, the pieces of music, the literature?

Other people are boring. They have nothing interesting to say. Because they have no critical capacities of their own they repeat the same tiresome opinions that the media shovels into to them, and then they simply shuffle around these reconstituted opinions between themselves. Equally badly, all they can do is tell inane stories about the particularities of their lives: their holidays abroad, for example, their weekends, or stories about their families. And all these stories amount to is a series of one event after the other of varying degrees of spectacularity, garnished with some sort of pithy comment or moral by the teller because, again, the teller has no grasp of any particular depth on their emotions, on events, on things.

Am I saying I never talk about my weekend? Am I saying I never make small talk? Of course not. Am I saying that every conversation a person has must be some sort of heavy, fine-grained analysis? Of course not. But this is what I am saying: for many people what I just described is the absolute horizon of their capacity to talk about and appreciate things, it is consumption and excretion, there is no digestion, no reflection.

When I have a conversation with someone I truly want to have a conversation with, there is the capacity for moving beyond those things that constitute every other tedious, ends-driven conversation. There is small talk, but there is only small talk for the first little while of the conversation before we get down to talking about things that are of any significance. Or there is the capacity to reflect on something innocuous, something little, in a way that all the others would simply gloss over in the effort to get on to the next appropriately fascinating thing done or response given.

People who have never been seriously exposed to critical thinking via the humanities and arts are boring assholes, generally speaking, and in a semi-non-judgemental sense. Some of you know what I'm talking because you've spent time applying the thinking and appreciation learned in philosophy or through literature or cultural texts to your own lives, and you realize that you're not just stockpiling cultural information for the sake of impressing someone or for personal enjoyment, but you're actually using it to make you a better, well-developed and more interesting person.

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/lit/ - Literature