The use of the useless

The tree nobody cut down

In a story from the Zhuangzi, a carpenter named Shi is traveling with his apprentice when they pass a huge oak that stands as the shrine tree of a village. In James Legge’s 1891 translation it “measured a hundred spans round, and rose up eighty cubits.” A crowd has come to admire it. The carpenter does not even look. The apprentice runs after him and asks why. Because it is good for nothing, Shi says: “A boat made from its wood would sink; a coffin or shell would quickly rot; an article of furniture would soon go to pieces; a door would be covered with the exuding sap; a pillar would be riddled by insects.”

That night the oak appears to him in a dream and answers. It has, it says in effect, spent a long time trying to be of no use and nearly died of the effort, and now it has succeeded, and being useless is of great use to it. If it had been useful, would it have grown so large? Everything useful gets cut down: the fruit trees are stripped and their branches broken, and they die before their time.

The sentence at the heart of this lesson comes from the same chapter, “In the World of Men,” though not from the oak story. It is the last line of the chapter, in a song that a madman of the southern state of Chu sings to Confucius as a warning: the trees of the mountain bring on their own felling; the lamp oil burns itself up; the cinnamon can be eaten, and so is cut down; the lacquer tree is useful, and so is slashed. Then comes the line: 人皆知有用之用，而莫知无用之用也. In Legge’s words: “All men know the advantage of being useful, but no one knows the advantage of being useless.”

The first chapter of the book has a gentler version. The philosopher Huizi complains that he has a huge tree no carpenter will look at, with a gnarled trunk and twisted branches, and that Zhuangzi’s words are as useless as it is. Zhuangzi answers that he should plant it in the Village of Not-Even-Anything and wander idly beside it or sleep under it: no axe will shorten its life, and nothing will harm it. Uselessness, here, is a place to rest.

A manifesto from Italy

In 2013 an Italian scholar of the Renaissance, Nuccio Ordine (1958–2023) of the University of Calabria, a specialist on Giordano Bruno, published a short book with a title that sounds like Zhuangzi’s sentence turned into a slogan: L’utilità dell’inutile, in English The Usefulness of the Useless (translated by Alastair McEwen, 2017). It is a manifesto built from quotations: Ordine gathers what poets, philosophers, and novelists from Plato onward have said about the worth of things that make no money. His argument is that a world that measures everything by profit starves what makes life worth living: the classics, art, music, curiosity, disinterested learning. He warns that an education reduced to job training turns out people who have skills and no purpose. He ends on the claim that tending the “useless” helps us keep a thread of hope and walk in dignity.

Ordine’s English edition also reprints the essay that gives this lesson its second scene.

An institute with no students

In October 1939 Harper’s Magazine published “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge” by Abraham Flexner. Flexner was an American educator, famous for a 1910 report that had reformed the training of doctors. In 1930 he had become the first director of a new kind of institution in Princeton, New Jersey, the Institute for Advanced Study. Its money came from a brother and sister, Louis Bamberger and Caroline Bamberger Fuld, who had sold their Newark department store to Macy’s shortly before the crash of 1929 and had meant to build a medical school with part of the proceeds. Flexner talked them into something stranger: an institute with no undergraduates, no degrees, and almost no rules, where a few scholars were given a salary, a library, and freedom. It was chartered in May 1930 and opened its doors in October 1933.

The essay is often called the Institute’s manifesto, but it was not its founding document. Flexner first gave it as a lecture in 1937, seven years after the charter, and it was printed in the year he left the directorship. Its opening is a story. Flexner had asked George Eastman, the founder of Kodak, which scientist in the world had done the most for useful things. Eastman answered at once: “Marconi.” Flexner’s reply was that Marconi was inevitable. The useful work, he said, had been done earlier by two men who never thought of use: the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who in 1865 worked out on paper that electricity and magnetism could travel as waves, and Heinrich Hertz, who in 1887 and 1888 made the waves in a laboratory. Neither had a practical aim. A radio, said Flexner, was the harvest of work done for no reason except curiosity.

He piled up more examples: Michael Faraday, a bookbinder’s apprentice; the mathematics of curved space, without which relativity could not have been written; the young Paul Ehrlich, who in his student days fooled around with stains and went on to a cure for syphilis. But he was careful. He wrote that he was not for a moment suggesting that everything would turn out useful. He listed dynamite, poison gas, and the airplane among the things that science made and people used for harm. And he ended by refusing the very ground on which his examples stood. In his closing lines he says the Institute makes no promises about results, though he hopes the unobstructed pursuit of useless knowledge will bear fruit as it has before. “Not for a moment, however, do we defend the Institute on that ground.” It exists, he says, as “a paradise for scholars” who, like poets and musicians, have won the right to do as they please.

In the Institute’s first years its faculty included the refugee physicist Albert Einstein, who arrived in October 1933. It is tempting to imagine that Einstein signed on because Flexner pitched him the idea of useless knowledge. The records show nothing of the kind. Einstein had agreed in 1932, before Hitler took power, because the Institute offered pure research with no duties; Flexner later put the principle in a line, “You have no duties, only opportunities.” After January 1933 Einstein could not return to Germany.

Chains that ran for decades

Flexner’s argument made a promise he disclaimed: that the useless pays off. Here is a sample of the cases that are usually told. Click each one to see the pure idea and the first big use, and how long the wait was.

There is a good example in the GPS in your phone. A satellite clock runs, thanks to the physics of gravity and speed, about 38 microseconds a day faster than a clock on the ground; left uncorrected, that would throw a position off by something like 10 kilometers a day. The correction comes from relativity: gravity speeds the satellite clock up, its speed slows it down, and the net is about 38 microseconds a day. General relativity, in turn, used a geometry of curved space that Bernhard Riemann had lectured on in 1854 as pure mathematics.

Breath, not escape

The book by Ordine and the essay by Flexner make two different arguments, and it is worth separating them. One is the argument from payoff: the useless may turn out to be useful later. The other is the argument from value: some things are worth having for their own sake. Flexner’s examples are mostly physics, mathematics, and medicine, and they carry the first argument. For music, art, and scholarship he says the satisfaction they give is all the justification they need.

This course takes from Ordine’s book an image: imagination and creation are needed as breathing is needed, and breathing is not an escape from life but life itself. In this reading, what we call superfluous is a way of respecting life: a surplus that never comes to anything but lets us imagine a better world, and so bear the injustices of this one. We cannot always say what it does, as we cannot say what each breath does. We would notice only when it was gone.

Then the course adds a thesis of its own, about creativity. In this reading, new ideas live in the gaps of usefulness. If all your answers come from bestsellers, from online opinion, and from what your circle already thinks, then they sit at the same level as the question and are worth little. A fresh idea usually comes from finding a different way into what everyone takes for granted, and a person who steps out of the race from one useful thing to the next is the one likely to find one. It is a hypothesis, and the next section says where it is weak.