Valuing the luxury of thought

In 1930, Spanish thinker Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote: "To wonder is to begin to understand. This is the luxury special to the intellectual man." Ortega y Gasset penned these words as a caution against the approach of mass politics and as an exhortation to the intelligentsia to use their lives of luxury for positive social purposes. He prided himself as an aristocrat and contrasted his duties with those of the humble "football fan."

It is an unfortunate truth that, on the whole, the conventional definitions of "luxury" for the intellectual man and for the college student fail to intersect. Indeed, for the average college student it probably comes closer to watching football than seeking intellectual "wonder."

Luxury isn't something we normally associate with scholarly toil. Etched into our minds are all-nighters and marathon study sessions.

But the fact remains: I don't do much around here, neither does anyone else, and most of our needs are patently catered to. I don't cook, I don't clean. I don't even have to work to pay for these services — my parents do. By any definition, my life here is one of luxury.

On-campus living doesn't require much in the way of physical expenditure. Our living space is sustained by a staff of nine-to-fivers, our food is prepared for us three times a day, and many students even outsource responsibility for their laundry.

What's left? If these otherwise commonplace functions of human life are eliminated, the student experience doesn't involve much beyond simple mobility and thought. And even these can be avoided by the supremely idle: Who hasn't desired a bike for the sake of saving five minutes? Who doesn't take the pre-made lecture notes distributed in ECO101?

If this isn't a life of luxury, I don't know what is.

The whole system can be summarized by realizing that some resilient soul rids Pyne courtyard of spent beer cans, purges trash bins of every variety of dormitory nastiness and wipes down the toilets every day, just so that you and I may have the luxury to think.

Aristotle recognized this tendency; he understood that the intellectuals, those ordained by nature to contemplate the Good, must lead lives of "luxury" in order to have adequate time to cogitate. To this end, he recommended that the caste of "natural slaves," those more apt to work with their bodies than their minds, should be set to work and "used for necessary tasks," i.e. cooking, cleaning, construction. Do you know the name of your janitor?

Of course, it's quite fitting that people of the mind should demand the mechanization of certain less academic aspects of life: Why waste our time scouring grout when we could be discussing the Crito? But is this the real reason, or are we just lazy? Something tells me that a morning's coffee isn't always necessitated by arduous intellectual exertion the night before so much as, well, other things.

As students at an institution of higher learning, we epitomize a society of individuals most capable of fulfilling the visions of Aristotle and Ortega y Gasset — of examining life, finding the Good and rejecting ignorance. Our luxury is of a singular sort and cannot be found anywhere else in the world. We constitute a rare aristocracy that is guaranteed economic and physical livelihood and whose sole task is, therefore, that of contemplation.

This is not a neo-Marxian appeal to the plight of the workingman, though we should certainly be more thoughtful to those who clean up after us. This is a reproach of the intellectual elite of this particular polis, the creatures of "mind" who spend their lives in a state of luxury often more aptly described as orgiastic than enlightening. Certainly it is unfair to generalize about the composition and activities of this highly diverse student body, but allow me to make the reasonable assumption that to a large extent revelry has replaced revelation as the collegiate telos.

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Seann William Scott's character from the movie Road Trip proclaims: "You're in college. The window of opportunity to drink and do drugs and take advantage of young girls is getting smaller by the day." If it's funny because we recognize the element of truth, scholars should demand a reexamination of the role of luxury in collegiate life. J.R. Delara '07 is a politics major from Ithaca, N.Y. He can be reached at jdelara@princeton.edu.