I dwell in Possibility—
A fairer House than Prose—
More numerous of Windows—
Superior—for Doors——Emily Dickinson, “I dwell in Possibility—”11xExcerpt from “I dwell in Possibility—” by Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, ed. Ralph W. Franklin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1998, 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955, by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1914, 1918, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1935, 1937, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright © 1952, 1957, 1958, 1963, 1965 by Mary L. Hampson.
Emily Dickinson never fails to inspire. What does it mean to “dwell in Possibility”? Given what we know of Dickinson’s life and wide-ranging mind, I think her words allude to the moral imagination, the capacity that philosopher John Kekes describes as the one through which we picture the good life and then strive to make ours resemble it.22xJohn Kekes, “What Makes Life Good?,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 48, no. 4 (June 1988): 655–68, https://doi.org/10.2307/2108013. To dwell in possibility is to resist the temptation to stay within the narrow course of life drawn out for us: to go to school and make good grades so that you can get the job that pays for the affluent lifestyle everyone else aspires to. Certainly, there is nothing inherently wrong with this picture. But is that all there is? Is there no larger vision of life for which we might be willing to sacrifice some comfort and security? The pursuit of any such larger vision requires, I submit, the moral imagination.
Although the imagined is often contrasted with the real, there is nothing unreal or fictional about the imagination and how it shapes our lives. Theologian James K.A. Smith puts it this way: We as human beings are “desiring, imaginative animals” who “are what we love.” We tend to define what we love on the basis of fashionable images of what seems to be the good life that are beamed at us from our media-saturated culture. Everyone seems beautiful and smart. Our social media feeds show us an endless cornucopia of success. And success too often boils down to financial achievement.
I teach a first-year seminar to students just starting college, and they readily—if sheepishly—admit that while they would rather be studying English, philosophy, or history, they are pursuing business or engineering because they believe that is where the money is. Their choices are in line with a mass movement of the young away from the liberal arts. A recent New Yorker essay is titled “The End of the English Major,” while an article in The Hechinger Report relates that there have been eight straight years of decline in the number of students graduating with a humanities degree. In English and history alone, there have been 30 percent drops in the number of students majoring in each of these subjects.33xNathan Heller, “The End of the English Major,” The New Yorker, February 27, 2023, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-end-of-the-english-major; Jill Barshay, “Proof Points: The Number of College Graduates in the Humanities Drops for the Eighth Consecutive Year,” Hechinger Report, November 22, 2021, https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-the-number-of-college-graduates-in-the-humanities-drops-for-the-eighth-consecutive-year/.
In our seminar, we read about Thoreau’s bold experiment at Walden and reflect on his often-cited insight that the “mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” in pursuit of wealth and possessions. I ask my students to engage in a thought experiment: If you knew for certain that your every need would be taken care of in exchange for a modest amount of daily work, where and how would you live? Their answers are breathtaking in their simplicity and beauty: a peaceful life in the countryside in Provence, a cottage in Maine, a life devoted to books and good food.
While thought experiments are not real life, and there are practical constraints (student loans, for example) that truly make it difficult to achieve a quiet life of beauty in Provence, there are often more options available than conventional wisdom would lead us to think. According to Forbes, Goldman Sachs, the Harvard Business Review, and many other sources, business leaders are looking for liberal arts majors and are happy to hire them.44x“Ask the Recruiter: Liberal Arts Edition,” Goldman Sachs, December 2, 2016, https://www.goldmansachs.com/careers/blog/posts/ask-the-recruiter-liberal-arts-edition.html; Lynne Pasquerella, “Yes, Employers Do Value Liberal Arts Degrees,” Harvard Business Review, September 19, 2019, https://hbr.org/2019/09/yes-employers-do-value-liberal-arts-degrees; David Kalt, “Why I Was Wrong About Liberal-Arts Majors,” Wall Street Journal, June 1, 2016, https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-i-was-wrong-about-liberal-arts-majors-1464792588. But that is not the message filtering down to many of our students.
It is not just my undergraduate students who feel hemmed in by barriers real and imagined. Young graduate students at the beginning of their careers come to me with questions about what they can expect from academic life. They want to know what the real possibilities are for intellectual flourishing in the twenty-first-century university. They are often idealistic, with dreams of a better world and the role education might play in getting us there. But they also see the many obstacles that modern life has placed before them, including an ever-shrinking academic job market and higher expectations for publication at earlier and earlier stages of doctoral study. In turn, such hurdles make it harder to innovate and more necessary to specialize early on. How, these beginning graduate students wonder, do they pursue fulfillment of their intellectual ideals while also advancing in today’s competitive academic system, with its often narrow definition of success?
In her wonderful book Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life, Zena Hitz writes of the clash between the seemingly opposing forces of academic excellence (at least as defined by the research university) and the intellectual life. At a certain point, the pursuit of accolades, prestige, and publications overwhelmed the simpler love of learning that had initially attracted her to academia.55xZena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).
The Risk of the Iron Cage
I imagine that it was some version of the existential struggled described by Hitz that motivated the graduate students of Max Weber’s day to request the lecture that has come to be known as “Science as a Vocation.” As the substance of Weber’s 1918 talk makes clear, these students wondered what the intellectual life was all about, and how they might find meaning in scholarship. Weber begins the lecture by laying out the hard facts of the university system of his day. These included the financial incentives that led many professors to put on a dazzling show in the lecture hall or seminar room in order to attract fee-paying students. Do not, Weber admonished, be led astray by lecturers who claim to provide simple, seductive answers to complex questions about how to live and what to live for. Such facile answers do not exist; nor can they be found in philosophy or theology, Weber held, because we now live in a “disenchanted world” where science can clarify what is possible but cannot point us toward what is beautiful or good.66xMax Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1946): 129–56. Retrieved December 12, 2023, https://sociology.sas.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/Weber-Science-as-a-Vocation.pdf. First published 1918.
While I agree with Weber about the value of science in helping us make sense of a complex world, I disagree with his belief that we live in a disenchanted world. The moral imagination is all about enchantment. In its most literal, etymological sense, the word enchantment comes from the Latin incantare, meaning “to draw (in) by song (cantare).” As Smith notes, we are “desiring imaginative animals,” and we are drawn into—enraptured by—what we find to be beautiful. This allure can be for good or ill, depending on its source. This is why Augustine defined virtue as the proper ordering of our loves or affections. We give ourselves in full to the vision of life that we desire most and find most attractive, and often what draws us is inchoate, unspoken, but no less powerful for how it directs our lives.
Weber himself saw the dangers before us. While he may have been wrong about the disenchantment of the world, he was quite right about the growing influence of a scientistic and rationalized view of the world, which he believed would eventually colonize much of our thinking and living. He cautioned that we are at risk of being bound by the very forces we ourselves have put into motion. As we grow more sophisticated in harnessing the technical marvels science makes available to us, as we increasingly give ourselves to our self-assigned task of creating an ever more efficient and rational social order, we are at risk of creating, in Weber’s famous phrase, an “iron cage” from which we may find it difficult to escape.77xMax Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons and Anthony Giddens (London, England: Routledge, 1992). First published 1930.
Hannah Arendt continued in a similar vein in her 1958 book The Human Condition, which could be read as a prophetic statement on where we are today. As she observed,
The trouble [with science’s great triumphs] concerns the fact that the “truths” of the modern scientific world view…will no longer lend themselves to normal expression in speech and thought…. It would be as though our brain…were unable to follow what we do, so that from now on we would indeed need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking. If it should turn out to be true that knowledge (in the modern sense of know-how) and thought have parted company for good, then we would indeed become the helpless slaves, not so much of our machines as of our know-how, thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technologically possible, no matter how murderous it is.88xHannah Arendt, The Human Condition, foreword by Danielle Allen (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 3. First published in 1958. (emphasis added)
As I consider my students—nearly all of whom have committed to study STEM or business fields—the words of Weber and Arendt ring out even more alarmingly. Discussing Arendt’s analysis in relation to current conversations around artificial intelligence and the increased reach of automation, many of my students assert that we must not allow Arendt’s dark prediction to become reality. How, I ask, can we be sure it won’t? They themselves admit that while they plan to commit their lives to contributing to advances in science, technology, and finance, they have so far given little thought to the kind of world they might be creating.
Stories—But Not Just Any Stories
So how do we “dwell in Possibility,” both living in the real world with all its challenges, trials, and constraints, and reaching for a larger vision of life beyond the narrow confines of what we’ve been taught to desire? We do this, I think, by immersing ourselves in stories that cultivate the moral imagination. In the face of the quite tangible challenges of technological change that threaten to eliminate millions of jobs, a shrinking middle class, and increased political polarization, this focus on story may seem odd. How could something as intangible as “story” make a concrete difference in these seemingly unmovable obstacles to a more just world? The sensible thing to do, it would seem, is to bring more and better data to bear on such issues and to engage in more effective political mobilization for change. And certainly doing so would help. But we are complex creatures. We respond only so much to data and political argument. The poetic plays a special and crucial role in moral formation, and it is often overlooked in analytical accounts of what has gone wrong in our society and politics. This is why Martha Nussbaum, in her book Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, insists on the importance of having her law students read novels in addition to legal tomes. Literature gets at the center of questions about the good life and the good society in ways that can be difficult to access otherwise.
In his book, The Ethics of Beauty, Timothy Patisas makes a similar argument that by taking a “truth first” approach to justice, we in the West tend to relegate the importance of beauty to second-class status. But it is the beauty of certain stories that is likely to defuse our assumptions and defenses and open us up to different ways of seeing the world around us. These can be stories, whether factual or fictional, of people who have dreamed and lived greatly, stories of people who have faced unbelievable tragedies or challenges and gone on not only to survive but to flourish, to the benefit of themselves and the larger world. It is by seeing and contemplating lives well lived—whether in fiction, biography, or history—that we reflect, imagine, and aspire to create something of worth and beauty in an often unlovely world.
This is why the stories we surround ourselves with and immerse ourselves in matter. Socrates, at least as he is portrayed in Plato’s Republic, had no doubt of this when he came down hard on the poets, aiming to ensure—in his rather autocratic way—that children would not be corrupted by frivolous stories that would lead them astray. We continue to be immersed in all kinds of stories, many of which Socrates would no doubt find problematic. They come to us in music, through advertisements, in film—highly produced, expensively burnished, and vying for our attention and emulation, seeking to separate us from our hard-earned cash. But these are not the only stories. We can look to and find other stories that spin out different possibilities.
The people and stories that have spurred my imagination have changed across the span of my life. When I was a young girl, the tales of the Brothers Grimm wrapped me in a thickly forested world of enchantment, teaching me to discern good from evil, and to make the better choice. In my adolescence, Emily Dickinson’s mordant reflections on life and death, on meaning and our connection to the spiritual, brought me through the inevitably difficult, brooding days of teenage life. And now, as I engage in the beautiful but agonizing work of raising children in an often senseless world, it is voices from the expansive black intellectual tradition that give me succor—those of Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, Toni Morrison, and so many others.
Nourishing the Soul and Imagination
The critic Alan Jacobs urges us to “break bread with the dead,”99xAlan Jacobs, Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind (New York, NY: Penguin, 2020). The phrase “break bread with the dead” originated with the poet W.H. Auden, who frequently used it in his lectures and other works. to seek out and dwell in old books whose writers beckon us to venture beyond the bounds that hem in our lives. With Anna Julia Cooper, I visit the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, sitting at her feet as she recounts what it was like to come out of slavery, through Jim Crow, and end up at the Sorbonne earning a doctoral degree with a dissertation written in French. It is Cooper’s example that I turn to when reflecting on the countercultural choices I’ve made over a twenty-year career in academia. It is her life and work that spur me on when frustration and fatigue threaten my equilibrium and make me question taking the harder road. As I have spent more and more time with Cooper over the years, I have found myself—sometimes uncannily—feeling that I am walking paths she walked and smoothed long before me. She was a scholar, a public speaker, a teacher of the common folk, and in all of this a visionary who saw beyond the narrow limits put in place around her.
More than one hundred years ago, just a generation after emancipation, Cooper fought to provide the sons and daughters of former slaves with a classical liberal arts education. In this she had much in common with W.E.B. Du Bois, who argued against the industrial approach to education embraced by Booker T. Washington. But unlike Du Bois, who saw such learning as being limited to a “talented tenth,” Cooper wanted this kind of soul-stirring education for everyone. Even more, she lived out her vision by becoming president of Frelinghuysen University, a historically black school in Washington, DC, that offered evening courses to working men and women seeking a liberal arts education.
What I admire in Cooper is her ability both to work at the heights of academia—upon completing her graduate work at the Sorbonne, she became the fourth black woman in US history to receive a PhD—and to sustain the energy and passion for the work she did with the seamstress, the laborer, and the blacksmith at Frelinghuysen. Her vision of the intellectual life not only fires my imagination but also sustains me in my work as an academic and as a director of the Nyansa Classical Community. A friend and I cofounded this educational nonprofit eight years ago in New Orleans with the objective of making a classical liberal arts education available to young people from under-resourced neighborhoods who would not otherwise have such an opportunity. Our students came to our afterschool program from public schools across the city, overwhelmingly from the same low-income community in which I lived, one where most families were struggling against the demoralization of poverty and the trauma of community violence. Our students arrived with weak reading skills and the sense that school was too often a place of defeat.
What to do with such a river of need? The many practical responses include more social workers, food assistance, affordable housing, and of course all of these are needed. But lives are made of much more than this. This is why Cooper’s insistence on nourishing the soul and the imagination of her working-class students served as a steady inspiration —as indeed did W.E.B. Du Bois’s similar determination to establish a school in the hardscrabble Tennessee countryside when he was a student at Fisk University. Describing that work in The Souls of Black Folk, he recounts the struggles and joys of teaching young people with little exposure to literacy and heavy demands for their labor on the family farm. He approached this challenge by providing a vision of possibility that helped the families of his students see things in a new way:
When the Lawrences stopped [coming to school], I knew that the doubts of the old folks about book-learning had conquered again, and so, toiling up the hill, and getting as far into the cabin as possible, I put Cicero “pro Archia Poeta” into the simplest English with local applications, and usually convinced them—for a week or so.1010xW.E.B. Du Bois, “Of the Meaning of Progress,” chapter 4, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago, IL: A.C. McClurg, 1903). Retrieved December 12, 2023, https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/203/the-souls-of-black-folk/4436/chapter-4-of-the-meaning-of-progress/.
Cicero’s speech for Archias was a paean to the virtues and joys of learning. At Nyansa, we did our best to do this work of putting great art and literature “into the simplest English with local applications.” We read Homer and studied Egyptian hieroglyphics. We wrote poetry and emulated the art of Romare Bearden’s Black Odyssey (1977), a sequence of collages based on episodes from Homer’s epic poem. We sang songs and played games and celebrated together over meals. In the midst of a struggling community, we strove to cultivate and appreciate beauty.
While Nyansa’s service to the young people of New Orleans has come to an end, the work and vision have spread through the establishment of Nyansa programs in several other cities. It is difficult to express how exhilarating it is to hear the stories of young people learning and growing through our work, and what a pleasure and privilege it is to touch their lives in some small way. The examples of Cooper, Du Bois, and—closer to our own time—the innovative educator Marva Collins resonate in my mind as we reach out to more communities to continue this work.
How, many ask, is it possible to develop and direct Nyansa while also working full-time in a conventional academic position? Certainly, there is little in the structure of the contemporary research university that makes such a path an easy one. Much has changed about academic life since Cooper and Du Bois were at their height. The capacious vision they had for a vocation that weaves together the life of the mind with rootedness in community-engaged work has become increasingly difficult to live out in the era of hyperspecialization and the quantification of research “output.”
Yet what draws so many young graduate students to academia—especially those in justice-oriented fields such as sociology—is a vision that looks much more like that of Anna Julia Cooper and W.E.B. Du Bois than what we find in the university today. Graduate students come to me knowing that I strive to craft an intellectual life that is both serious about scholarly research and rooted in work that has a community focus. They crave both but do not see how to do both. I have no easy answers. I tell them that taking such a path is sure to be filled with as much difficulty and sacrifice as intrinsic reward—that they must first do the necessary and painstaking work of securing a position in the hypercompetitive academy. If they want to do more than this, if they are driven by a large vision that cannot be easily sustained, given the strictures and demands of today’s university, they will have to be ready to work on the edges, on their own time, and without the expectation of reward. This is not to say that their extra work will never be recognized or appreciated, only that they cannot set out expecting it to be. Theirs must be a true labor of love.
This is where the moral imagination takes root. This is where we make those pictures of the good life that John Kekes describes, and how we go about making our own lives resemble them. This is where we “dwell in Possibility,” however daunting this may seem.