Joy and the Humanities

by Rex Nielson

Image of Professor Rex Nielson

Joy can be surprisingly difficult to define. Psychologists often describe joy according to scales of intensity, informing us that it is a feeling of “extreme gladness, delight, or exultation” (1). If one feels these emotions acutely, they might be described as joy. Consequently, the degree to which one has developed a sense of well-being or accomplishment or the extent to which one feels happy or content or satisfied (which all variously serve as synonyms for joy) may be the qualifying dynamic as to whether a given experience passes the emotional threshold into joy. According to this logic, an individual need only eliminate negative feelings and amplify their participation in activities that produce happiness to enter a state of joy. Yet understanding and finding that threshold often remain elusive for most of us.

The metaphor of a threshold, however, may lead to a distorted or incomplete understanding of joy since it suggests that joy comes after one no longer feels some other emotion, that is, that one experiences joy after having worked through a series (sometimes long and painful) of other, ostensibly less-desirable emotions. The writer Ross Gay describes it this way: “Joy, the thinking goes, is that room at the top of a flight of stairs that, upon entering, washes you with clean air and glad music and comfy furniture and gentle warmth emanating from the white pine floors, suffused with light pouring in from enormous windows with a sweet window seat where you can read a happy book” (2). Yet Gay and many others rightfully argue that the spatial metaphor of joy as the reward for pressing through a staircase of other emotions frankly fails to express the real experience of joy. Joy does not exist in a room by itself. Joy nearly always bursts out alongside a host of other complex and even contradictory emotions. And in many ways, joy depends upon these other, sometimes unwanted, feelings of disappointment, heartache, and pain.

In a world of sorrow, it can be hard to contemplate joy; and given the multiple forms of tragedy that abound in the world, some might question the decision to focus on joy when we’re surrounded by so much injustice, oppression, and violence. Yet I believe that a yearning for joy, the search for and celebration of joy in all its complex forms, is what the world needs. Ross Gay states it better than me: “My hunch is that joy, emerging from our common sorrow—which does not necessarily mean we have the same sorrows, but that we, in common, sorrow—might draw us together. It might depolarize us and de-atomize us enough that we can consider what, in common, we love” (9).

This academic year, the BYU Humanities Center will explore through our programming forms of joy. Colleagues from BYU and beyond will help us answer a variety of questions related to the varied manifestations of joy: the joy that comes from academic discovery, the joy of spiritual experience, the joy of learning a language, the joy of reading, the joy that comes from curiosity, from finding, from connection. In doing so, I invite you to remember that as relevant and important as the skills of the Humanities may be (skills related to critical thinking, information literacy, cultural navigation, and communication), what drives interest in the humanities is actually something far less practical and much more visceral: it’s joy!

This is not to downplay the importance of acknowledging and explicitly teaching the skills of the Humanities to students. And I believe we must become better equipped not only at teaching those skills and helping our students articulate those skills to themselves and others, as well as at understanding how the capacities we develop through humanities education transfer to other disciplines and professions. Nevertheless, my concern here is that as we become adept at having that conversation, we must not lose sight of the joy that humanistic pursuits bring us. That is to say, to whatever degree we teach, emphasize, and even proselytize the transferrable skills of the humanities, let us remember and help others experience the deep joy of human connection and understanding comes through the Humanities.