This piece is part of Letters on Pragmatic Hope, an essay series in which Wesleyan professors and administrators reflect on a daunting question: How can students act with purpose and efficacy amid an increasingly authoritarian environment? The series aims to gather responses from a diverse group of Wesleyan faculty, offering a vision for how students can turn despair into pragmatism and action.
Do you sweat when you speak to a group of people? Does your heart beat faster? Recently I was addressing a room full of refugee scholars who had come to Wesleyan as part of a retreat for the New University in Exile Consortium. Each one of them had fled a hostile environment at home and found refuge at a University in the US. Scholars had come to us from Sudan, Gaza, Ukraine, and many other places. With clammy palms, I tried to provide some perspective on the state of academic freedom in this country. The conversation was surprising. One Afghani scholar remarked that the stringent controls on speech in her home country had been easier to understand than ours. Under the Taliban, she explained, everyone knew what was allowed and what was forbidden; here, under Trump, it seemed to her much less clear what can be said and what cannot.
The perspiration on my skin that afternoon betrayed me: I was nervous to say the right thing. I know that I’m not alone, especially not right now. Sweat comes along with intense emotions, which are running high in our political climate and, more locally, in some of our interpersonal interactions on campus. What’s interesting about sweat is that both anxiety and passion can induce it. When we’re embarrassed or frustrated we sweat and breathe quickly; but these same corporeal responses also happen in moments of appreciation, desire, and love. All of this derives from the inner workings of our autonomic nervous system and its preparation of the body for the world.
So sweat is an outward symptom of our current dilemma. But it’s also a sign of the solution.
The last time I sweat that badly in front of a bunch of people, I was listening to Beethoven. Actually I was teaching Beethoven and trying to explain how his symphonic writing evokes a special kind of beauty. Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony doesn’t have any words to clam up over, only rhythms and textures and melodies. But still, it makes my palms sweat, and it raises my heartbeat. Have you listened to it recently? Maybe it does this for you too. If you take one of my classes, I’ll try to show you why. When I listen to that symphony, it makes me want to play it for other people.
Beautiful things, like Beethoven symphonies, compel their own replication. Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony leaves everyone humming the tune in their head, or out loud. Beautiful paintings or artworks drive us to photograph them, to capture them on our phones, even if we know that we can access the image elsewhere. We want our own copy. That’s because beauty is, by nature, contagious.
All of us have, at one time or another, insisted that a friend listen to our favorite artist’s new song. So much rides on that moment of shared evaluation! I do this to my poor husband, Nico, all the time, forcing him to listen to classical music. This is another aspect of beauty’s insistent replication: the impulse to share your positive evaluation of it with others. Of course I want Nico to confirm my appreciation of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony; I want him to love it just as much as I do. I want him to find it beautiful.
That moment of sharing shows us the perilous side of beauty: we might not agree on it. To call something beautiful is—as many philosophers since Kant have pointed out—a tricky act of language; it seems as though we are saying something objective (like “this thing is red”) but actually, when judging an object beautiful, we are really saying something about the social (like, “I find this thing beautiful, I think you will too”). Beauty is not just located in the object or artwork, then, but in the relationships that we form around it.
Beauty is other people. As the critic Sianne Ngai puts it, aesthetic experience is how we “think the social in abstract,” or how we sense our ties to one another through art. When we listen to something beautiful, we hear in that expression our connections to others. This explains why I sweat during Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. It’s not just the pitches and rhythms that move me, that increase my heartbeat and make my hands tremble; it’s the idea of the social that they invoke, the sense that this is an expression that has a shared, somewhat murky meaning that I want to share with others.
The sweat that comes from a beautiful artwork is the same sweat that accompanies a first date. We want to share something, but we are acutely aware of the perils of non-agreement. We do it anyway, because it’s worth it, sweat and all.
Beauty, then, and the quest for expressions of beauty, are ways of unlocking that most unknowable thing, the connection between human hearts. For this reason, artistic expression will continue to be one of the most vital tools we have in times of deep conflict, danger, and political instability. Beauty has always served this purpose. Beethoven hid messages about the Napoleonic wars in his symphonies, using military music and the “heroic style” to both flatter and to critique those in power. At last year’s Whitney Biennial, Demian DinéYazhi´ disguised the message “Free Palestine” in a neon-lettered installation that appeared to say something else. A spokesperson explained to CNN that the Whitney “did not know of this subtle detail when the work was installed.” I can just imagine the museum staff sweating on the other side of the phone call. Of course, political messages don’t always have to be this direct or obvious. They tend to work best when beauty really smuggles them in.
When words are tough, we turn to creative expression. Wesleyan students seem to have gotten this message a while ago. Over the past decade, majors in the arts have grown by 50%. The Studio Art major, in particular, has quadrupled in that time. Theater and Film majors have also grown by leaps and bounds. Enrollments in arts classes are also strong. The Music department has more enrollments than almost any other department on campus.
Beauty, like sweat, is an expression that comes with effort and vulnerability. Beauty is hard work. It’s not always comfortable. We can be wrong about beauty, we can get into disagreements about it. Admiration of beauty—the kind that makes us perspire—is sometimes mixed with frustration or fear. But it is the best and most reliable form of human connection available to us. I think that is why, in this moment, Wesleyan students are turning to the arts. They’ve got something to express, and they’re willing to sweat for it.
Roger Mathew Grant is a Deputy Provost and the Dean of Arts and Humanities and can be reached at rgrant01@wesleyan.edu.
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