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Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life
While many forms of leisure meet these needs, Zena Hitz writes, few experiences are so fulfilling as the inner life, whether that of a bookworm, an amateur astronomer, a birdwatcher, or someone who takes a deep interest in one of countless other subjects. Drawing on inspiring examples, from Socrates and Augustine to Malcolm X and Elena Ferrante, and from films to Hitz's own experiences as someone who walked away from elite university life in search of greater fulfillment, Lost in Thought is a passionate and timely reminder that a rich life is a life rich in thought.
Today, when even the humanities are often defended only for their economic or political usefulness, Hitz says our intellectual lives are valuable not despite but because of their practical uselessness. And while anyone can have an intellectual life, she encourages academics in particular to get back in touch with the desire to learn for its own sake, and calls on universities to return to the person-to-person transmission of the habits of mind and heart that bring out the best in us.
Today, when even the humanities are often defended only for their economic or political usefulness, Hitz says our intellectual lives are valuable not despite but because of their practical uselessness. And while anyone can have an intellectual life, she encourages academics in particular to get back in touch with the desire to learn for its own sake, and calls on universities to return to the person-to-person transmission of the habits of mind and heart that bring out the best in us.
240 pages, ebook
First published January 1, 2020
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December 28, 2023
Bourgeois Mysticism
Zena Hitz, according to her memoir, has enjoyed a life of wide-ranging opportunities for personal choice. As a child she could choose what to talk about among her family. And they listened. As a teenager she could choose where she wanted to go to university. And she did. She chose an institution that allowed students a wide choice of ways to study in a leafy Maryland suburb. And, given her non-denominational background, she also had a choice in religion. She chose Catholicism. Hitz considered a number of career alternatives from social work to the pursuit of international justice. She chose academia. Within academia she chose, and then re-chose, several locations and topics of study. And, in an academic job market somewhat more buoyant than it is now, she could choose a place of employment in a large Southern University. I think it’s fair to say that Zena’s life has been blessed… or, perhaps more descriptively, privileged.
For all this freedom of choice, Hitz gives few reasons for the choices she actually made. Her decision to go to college on the East coast seems to have been based on the fact that it wasn’t the West coast. Her decision to become a Catholic was vaguely determined by its intriguing unfamiliarity rather than spiritual conviction. Her pursuit of an academic career in philosophy appears more like a controlled drift than a decision. She gives no reasons at all for her decisions to attend Cambridge for her graduate work, nor her transfers to Chicago and ultimately Princeton. Her reasons for taking up a position at Auburn University are simply undisclosed. In short, Hitz, like many other upper middle-class people in America, had more a trajectory than a direction in her life. She had been shot out of a cocooned economic and social niche without any real concern that she would land on her feet, wherever that might be.
And indeed she became successful. A new position at the University of Maryland, professional standing as a fellow at Princeton, grants, travel, contacts all come her way. This success offers even more choice - of interests, of volunteer work, of political associations. But she finds her academic career increasingly shallow in light of the poverty and suffering she sees around her. She suffers herself with growing disillusionment in her profession and feels little personal connection with her students. It seems that all her choices have somehow been misguided. Some might call this a mid-life crisis, a bit early perhaps for a woman in her thirties but not unheard of. She has a serious bout of existential angst which, of course, provokes more choices for a person of her ilk.
Through her increasingly intense involvement in Catholicism, Hitz stumbles upon the idea of “discerning a vocation.” Essentially this involves ostensibly allowing God to make one’s life choices and therefore listening very attentively for the necessary divine signals. She considers various alternatives - marriage to a like-minded bloke, or a Dorothea Day existence of subversive worker support, or even a life in a cloistered convent. Once again, even in her existential crisis, Hitz has choices in abundance. But at this point she realises that it is the reasons for her decision that matter, not the decision itself. And it is this inspiration she awaits and responds to… well sort of.
Hitz’s “discernment” leads her to a clear idea of her past mistakes. She’s using the wrong criterion of choice. She had put intellectual life above communal life: “I had had things the wrong way around. I had to love my neighbors and find a mode of intellectual life that expressed that. To do that, I had to put above everything the form of love that goes under the rather cold English name of ‘charity.’ I burst into tears.” So she sells her car and takes up residence in a small lay religious community in rural Canada. Apparently Baltimore hadn’t enough people (or misery) among which to practice love of neighbour.
But then God apparently changes his mind and provides some new reasons to pursue other choices: “So I discerned that it was time to leave the community, and in a nearly miraculous set of coincidences, the job I wanted, along with a house and a car, fell into my lap.” How about that? ‘Seek and ye shall find’ verified yet again. But it is interesting that God doesn’t give the reasons for re-location. So, like Jonah and Moses before her, Hitz dutifully re-directs her life without much clarity as to why.
Hitz then goes on to explain at length the recovery of her childhood experience of learning for its own sake. Not learning to get ahead, or learning to produce something, even something beneficial for humanity or the planet. Hitz wants us to experience what she does - the aesthetic beauty of what there is to know, not what we might end up doing with what we know. More than that, she clearly wants us to know that learning can be a spiritual experience, that learning without a practical purpose essentially is a religious event. It brings us closer to God. Such learning is quite literally a “refuge from the world.” Hitz, it seems, wants to re-state the Stoic philosophy of Marcus Aurelius. And more power to her if that is her intention.
But I don’t think that’s what she wants to do. The Stoics recognised that learning had to be for some purpose even if that purpose was the sanctification of oneself. Christianity calls this salvation and considers it, like the Stoics, a communal affair. The self-centredness of Hitz’s memoir is disguised behind her claim to be pursuing a life of communal charity. ‘Learning for its own sake’ is code for consummate self-indulgence. There is no such thing as inquiry without a purpose. There is no such thing as isolated learning, an individual hidden away in the bosom of Abraham, for example, learning how to be holy (or saved) through the sacred texts of religion or the ancient thoughts of Aristotle and Plato.
So let’s be serious, this is a book written by and for that class of privileged folk who can literally afford to engage in its intellectual fantasies. These are people with a similar plethora of choices that are available to Hitz. These are people who have a substantial economic and social cushion which allows them to enjoy these fantasies and to even act on them with impunity. Hitz is pushing the idea that we can get beyond the self-absorption of modern life by emulating her, that is, by increasing our self-absorption, our inner life, to the maximum extent possible. We can, if we choose, hide from the world and take refuge in the sea of divine knowledge. This sort of mysticism will no doubt sell well, especially in places like California where there is an established market for this mode of thinking. But it is bunk, essentially another self-help guide for those who use self-help guides to justify their positions of privilege and power.
Zena Hitz, according to her memoir, has enjoyed a life of wide-ranging opportunities for personal choice. As a child she could choose what to talk about among her family. And they listened. As a teenager she could choose where she wanted to go to university. And she did. She chose an institution that allowed students a wide choice of ways to study in a leafy Maryland suburb. And, given her non-denominational background, she also had a choice in religion. She chose Catholicism. Hitz considered a number of career alternatives from social work to the pursuit of international justice. She chose academia. Within academia she chose, and then re-chose, several locations and topics of study. And, in an academic job market somewhat more buoyant than it is now, she could choose a place of employment in a large Southern University. I think it’s fair to say that Zena’s life has been blessed… or, perhaps more descriptively, privileged.
For all this freedom of choice, Hitz gives few reasons for the choices she actually made. Her decision to go to college on the East coast seems to have been based on the fact that it wasn’t the West coast. Her decision to become a Catholic was vaguely determined by its intriguing unfamiliarity rather than spiritual conviction. Her pursuit of an academic career in philosophy appears more like a controlled drift than a decision. She gives no reasons at all for her decisions to attend Cambridge for her graduate work, nor her transfers to Chicago and ultimately Princeton. Her reasons for taking up a position at Auburn University are simply undisclosed. In short, Hitz, like many other upper middle-class people in America, had more a trajectory than a direction in her life. She had been shot out of a cocooned economic and social niche without any real concern that she would land on her feet, wherever that might be.
And indeed she became successful. A new position at the University of Maryland, professional standing as a fellow at Princeton, grants, travel, contacts all come her way. This success offers even more choice - of interests, of volunteer work, of political associations. But she finds her academic career increasingly shallow in light of the poverty and suffering she sees around her. She suffers herself with growing disillusionment in her profession and feels little personal connection with her students. It seems that all her choices have somehow been misguided. Some might call this a mid-life crisis, a bit early perhaps for a woman in her thirties but not unheard of. She has a serious bout of existential angst which, of course, provokes more choices for a person of her ilk.
Through her increasingly intense involvement in Catholicism, Hitz stumbles upon the idea of “discerning a vocation.” Essentially this involves ostensibly allowing God to make one’s life choices and therefore listening very attentively for the necessary divine signals. She considers various alternatives - marriage to a like-minded bloke, or a Dorothea Day existence of subversive worker support, or even a life in a cloistered convent. Once again, even in her existential crisis, Hitz has choices in abundance. But at this point she realises that it is the reasons for her decision that matter, not the decision itself. And it is this inspiration she awaits and responds to… well sort of.
Hitz’s “discernment” leads her to a clear idea of her past mistakes. She’s using the wrong criterion of choice. She had put intellectual life above communal life: “I had had things the wrong way around. I had to love my neighbors and find a mode of intellectual life that expressed that. To do that, I had to put above everything the form of love that goes under the rather cold English name of ‘charity.’ I burst into tears.” So she sells her car and takes up residence in a small lay religious community in rural Canada. Apparently Baltimore hadn’t enough people (or misery) among which to practice love of neighbour.
But then God apparently changes his mind and provides some new reasons to pursue other choices: “So I discerned that it was time to leave the community, and in a nearly miraculous set of coincidences, the job I wanted, along with a house and a car, fell into my lap.” How about that? ‘Seek and ye shall find’ verified yet again. But it is interesting that God doesn’t give the reasons for re-location. So, like Jonah and Moses before her, Hitz dutifully re-directs her life without much clarity as to why.
Hitz then goes on to explain at length the recovery of her childhood experience of learning for its own sake. Not learning to get ahead, or learning to produce something, even something beneficial for humanity or the planet. Hitz wants us to experience what she does - the aesthetic beauty of what there is to know, not what we might end up doing with what we know. More than that, she clearly wants us to know that learning can be a spiritual experience, that learning without a practical purpose essentially is a religious event. It brings us closer to God. Such learning is quite literally a “refuge from the world.” Hitz, it seems, wants to re-state the Stoic philosophy of Marcus Aurelius. And more power to her if that is her intention.
But I don’t think that’s what she wants to do. The Stoics recognised that learning had to be for some purpose even if that purpose was the sanctification of oneself. Christianity calls this salvation and considers it, like the Stoics, a communal affair. The self-centredness of Hitz’s memoir is disguised behind her claim to be pursuing a life of communal charity. ‘Learning for its own sake’ is code for consummate self-indulgence. There is no such thing as inquiry without a purpose. There is no such thing as isolated learning, an individual hidden away in the bosom of Abraham, for example, learning how to be holy (or saved) through the sacred texts of religion or the ancient thoughts of Aristotle and Plato.
So let’s be serious, this is a book written by and for that class of privileged folk who can literally afford to engage in its intellectual fantasies. These are people with a similar plethora of choices that are available to Hitz. These are people who have a substantial economic and social cushion which allows them to enjoy these fantasies and to even act on them with impunity. Hitz is pushing the idea that we can get beyond the self-absorption of modern life by emulating her, that is, by increasing our self-absorption, our inner life, to the maximum extent possible. We can, if we choose, hide from the world and take refuge in the sea of divine knowledge. This sort of mysticism will no doubt sell well, especially in places like California where there is an established market for this mode of thinking. But it is bunk, essentially another self-help guide for those who use self-help guides to justify their positions of privilege and power.
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January 10, 2022
One of the great joys in life - the simple pleasure of reading and reflecting and learning for its own sake.
But how much time and space does our modern world provide women and men to engage in such practice?
More dramatically, what happens when many within a society view careful thinking and contemplation, imagination and poetic flights of fancy as useless, freakish or even threatening?
These are among the questions Zena Hitz considers in her recently published book, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life.
What a timely book on a critically important topic: thinking, specifically cultivating the philosophic side of our mind as an end in itself, thus empowering us to lead a deeper, richer life for ourselves, our loved ones, our community and the world.
Good news: Lost in Thought is NOT an abstract treatise; quite the contrary, Zena Hitz repeatedly cites specific individuals throughout history, from St. John of the Cross to Steve Martin, from Neapolitan novelist Elena Ferrante to Malcolm X, to underscore how the process of philosophic inquiry is foundational and vital in all aspects of our lives, in all our endeavors.
The author begins with her own background: she had the good fortune to be raised by parents, not themselves academics, who pursued the study of philosophy in its various forms. Along with her older brother, her parents engendered a love of books and encouraged the reading of books. Thus, starting from an early age, learning became a joy.
Joy in learning continued throughout her undergraduate years at a liberal arts college with a focus on small group interaction. Zena Hitz’s abiding experience of intellectual honesty and spontaneity propelled her to continue her studies in graduate school.
However, as she quickly grasped, graduate school can have its nasty, competitive side: graduate students vie for approval and status, using learning and academic accomplishment as a way to humiliate and put down others within their field, frequently resorting to methods most cruel. The life of the mind begins to take on the cast of a bloodsport.
And so it continued when Zena became a college instructor - interlaced with learning in the classroom, such pettiness and superficiality: "I remember going ot one academic dinner party among many and suddenly feeling queasy as we suggested that the central values in our lives were fine wines and trips to Europe."
As Zena moved through her thirties, she felt the need to deepen her life by religion and neighborhood participation which lead her at age thirty-eight to leave academia and become a lay member of Madonna House, a Catholic religious community in Canada.
After three years, Zena returned to college life, having the good fortune to be offered a position teaching in the Great Books curriculum at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland.
Zena then discusses the love of learning in more depth, its influence on our ultimate goals and the ways it colors our leisure time. As she makes abundantly clear, the thinking and learning she's alluding to here goes deeper than a graduate student's use of ideas to score points or an academic's publishing a paper to secure tenure. By way of example, here are direct quotes from the text along with my modest comments:
“We see the love of learning in children collecting and cataloging dead bugs, or in bookworms as they huddle in closets and corners, hiding from their public lives as shop owners, politicians, or housewives.” The intellectual life is an extension of a child’s natural curiosity and sense of wonder at the world around us. And since many Goodreads members are bookworms, I especially enjoyed including this quote. And one thing is clear: everyone on this internet site reading books, writing about books, commenting on book reviews are doing so for the sheer love and joy of it – in no way is money part of the equation. There’s a certain rightness and integrity when ideas are shared and exchanged in such an environment.
“For Aristotle, only contemplation – the activity of seeing and understanding and savoring the world as it is – could be the ultimately satisfying use of leisure.” On the topic of leisure, I hear echoes of The Culture Industry by Theodor W. Adorno: leisure has become toxic, leisure time as prime time for those in power to manipulate, to create artificial needs and push false values – today in 2020, the opium of the people takes many forms: TV stupor, cell phone addiction, liquor and tobacco, prescription drugs and recreational drugs, pop music and muzak, all to keep the population numb, spiritually and intellectually shallow. No complaining, thinking or questioning, thank you. Simply keep showing up at your crap job with little or no personal fulfillment beyond receiving a paycheck – after all, you can get your highs and kicks and numb yourself up after hours.
“Plato and Aristotle and many after them sought something they called the highest good – the best human activity, pursued for its own sake – for which we have a natural affinity above all others.” “Natural affinity” is the key phrase here: asking questions is at the very heart of what it means to be human. What’s happening when many adults in our modern society judge asking questions of a philosophic nature as a kind of abnormality or perversion? This section of Zena's book reminded me of prominent social psychologist Erich Fromm and his Escape From Freedom and The Sane Society.
“The freedom of a leisurely activity is the freedom from results or outcomes beyond it; not the freedom of rest or recreation. . . . The difference between leisure and recreation will be subtle, but clear, in how we choose these different kinds of ends. Any minimally happy life much include recreation, but what really matters is far more demanding.” We all need recreation now and again, things like card playing, watching sports or a day at the beach. But surely there must be times when we devote our energies to matters of the head and heart. What would you want to do, to think, to feel, if this were the last day of your life?
“The idea that real and serious learning is something practiced only by a small elite is stubborn and hard to displace. But it is false.” Back in the 1940s, Mortimer Adler had a vision for his Great Books Discussion Groups: adult members of the community – carpenters, house painters, accountants, sales clerks, nurses – would meet to discuss classical works such as Plato’s Republic, Michel de Montaigne’s Essays, and the Declaration of Independence. Fortunately, the Great Books program is still alive; unfortunately, only a minute sliver of the US population has attended over the years or would ever wish to attend.
Perhaps our current COVID-19 crisis will serve as a time for us to rethink our values, for ourselves, for our institutions of higher learning, for our entire society. I’ll let Zena Hitz have the final word here: “The love of learning has emerged as something profoundly serious, something that can change a life, a source of our highest aspirations – to know, to love, to flourish in our full humanity.”
Zena Hitz, American scholar, philosopher, teacher
October 1, 2021
This is going to be one of those boring "I wanted to like this book, I was supposed to like this book, but..." reviews. The book begins well enough. Hitz recounts her own experience in academia - how her fascination for learning and its pursuit as an activity of leisure warped into another ugly step to ascend over in the social order of academia.
It did not help that the academic world is famously, and truly, insular. Events and ideas from outside it enter through a narrow and peculiarly shaped gate, so that the experience of them always feels predigested. I longed for a broader experience, to gain my own traction over events in some way.
Sadly, this quickly turns into another book full of academic jargon (the very thing Hitz shuns) and reeks of elitism. She even goes so far as to question if the solitary nature of poverty, imprisonment and oppression give way to some sort of maximization of our intellectual capabilities and cites the examples of some key figures who flourished intellectually under debilitating circumstances. Listen, by this sort of reductionist argument you might just stumble upon a twisted justification for suppression and exploitation of the human populace, and then you have to question if human dignity is a price you are willing to pay for intellectual development. I, for one, am not.
She does later condone poverty and suffering and makes a case for intellectual pursuit being a form of escapism. So believe me when I say that this book is self-contradictory in many places.
While she does make a very good case for intellectual pursuits simply for the pleasure of learning (which is of course a noble endeavor that needs to be normalized and brought back from the time of antiquity into the modern world), she also constantly undermines the need for application of our accumulated knowledge into practical human endeavors. I simply fail to understand how they can be kept entirely separate.
Political talk builds an exterior wall of words, a set of opinions built and reinforced by competitive passions: “I am this sort of person and not that.” It is a way to avoid the encounter with the difficult and humiliating social reality to which one belongs or for which one is responsible. Further on, I call this process “opinionization,” by which I mean the reduction of thinking and perception to simple slogans or prefabricated positions, a reduction motivated by fear, competition, and laziness.
I do understand that labels often place limits on our perception of the world, but definitions simply offer us an orientation in which to pursue higher goals, in which to construct our moral compass. Definitions keep us from losing ourselves in the hegemonic chaos of this world. After all ideas like justice, liberty, truth and freedom cannot be plainly theoretical concepts, their actual value lies in their application in the world of human affairs where they were originally conceived. Without these definitions, we just encounter an impasse when trying to differentiate right from wrong.
In her last chapter she makes a case for educational institutions (particularly universities) being kept entirely separate from political ideologies. I don't know about the West, but we have accomplished a lot and are still fighting to gain some progressive grounds through the mighty fire of student protests in the East. When democracy is simply bestowed upon you, perhaps you can afford to take it for granted. That is not the case in many countries.
One of the things about this book that irked me is a wider problem that I frequently encounter in the books of the 21st century Western philosophers, that of writing which could easily be interpreted as written for a world completely erased of the East. In the numerous examples from history and literature she cites, only a single eastern figure (an Assyrian emperor) makes a fleeting appearance, despite the existence of several records across various Eastern cultures of immersion in learning for its own sake.
I am just going to quote from The Book of Tea to express my general frustration:
When will the West understand, or try to understand, the East? We Asiatics are often appalled by the curious web of facts and fancies which has been woven concerning us. We are pictured as living on the perfume of the lotus, if not on mice and cockroaches. It is either impotent fanaticism or else abject voluptuousness. Indian spirituality has been derided as ignorance, Chinese sobriety as stupidity, Japanese patriotism as the result of fatalism. It has been said that we are less sensible to pain and wounds on account of the callousness of our nervous organisation!
Why not amuse yourselves at our expense? Asia returns the compliment.
It did not help that the academic world is famously, and truly, insular. Events and ideas from outside it enter through a narrow and peculiarly shaped gate, so that the experience of them always feels predigested. I longed for a broader experience, to gain my own traction over events in some way.
Sadly, this quickly turns into another book full of academic jargon (the very thing Hitz shuns) and reeks of elitism. She even goes so far as to question if the solitary nature of poverty, imprisonment and oppression give way to some sort of maximization of our intellectual capabilities and cites the examples of some key figures who flourished intellectually under debilitating circumstances. Listen, by this sort of reductionist argument you might just stumble upon a twisted justification for suppression and exploitation of the human populace, and then you have to question if human dignity is a price you are willing to pay for intellectual development. I, for one, am not.
She does later condone poverty and suffering and makes a case for intellectual pursuit being a form of escapism. So believe me when I say that this book is self-contradictory in many places.
While she does make a very good case for intellectual pursuits simply for the pleasure of learning (which is of course a noble endeavor that needs to be normalized and brought back from the time of antiquity into the modern world), she also constantly undermines the need for application of our accumulated knowledge into practical human endeavors. I simply fail to understand how they can be kept entirely separate.
Political talk builds an exterior wall of words, a set of opinions built and reinforced by competitive passions: “I am this sort of person and not that.” It is a way to avoid the encounter with the difficult and humiliating social reality to which one belongs or for which one is responsible. Further on, I call this process “opinionization,” by which I mean the reduction of thinking and perception to simple slogans or prefabricated positions, a reduction motivated by fear, competition, and laziness.
I do understand that labels often place limits on our perception of the world, but definitions simply offer us an orientation in which to pursue higher goals, in which to construct our moral compass. Definitions keep us from losing ourselves in the hegemonic chaos of this world. After all ideas like justice, liberty, truth and freedom cannot be plainly theoretical concepts, their actual value lies in their application in the world of human affairs where they were originally conceived. Without these definitions, we just encounter an impasse when trying to differentiate right from wrong.
In her last chapter she makes a case for educational institutions (particularly universities) being kept entirely separate from political ideologies. I don't know about the West, but we have accomplished a lot and are still fighting to gain some progressive grounds through the mighty fire of student protests in the East. When democracy is simply bestowed upon you, perhaps you can afford to take it for granted. That is not the case in many countries.
One of the things about this book that irked me is a wider problem that I frequently encounter in the books of the 21st century Western philosophers, that of writing which could easily be interpreted as written for a world completely erased of the East. In the numerous examples from history and literature she cites, only a single eastern figure (an Assyrian emperor) makes a fleeting appearance, despite the existence of several records across various Eastern cultures of immersion in learning for its own sake.
I am just going to quote from The Book of Tea to express my general frustration:
When will the West understand, or try to understand, the East? We Asiatics are often appalled by the curious web of facts and fancies which has been woven concerning us. We are pictured as living on the perfume of the lotus, if not on mice and cockroaches. It is either impotent fanaticism or else abject voluptuousness. Indian spirituality has been derided as ignorance, Chinese sobriety as stupidity, Japanese patriotism as the result of fatalism. It has been said that we are less sensible to pain and wounds on account of the callousness of our nervous organisation!
Why not amuse yourselves at our expense? Asia returns the compliment.
June 29, 2021
"Man is but a reed, the weakest thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this. A thinking reed.—It is not from space that I must seek my dignity, but from the government of my thought. I shall have no more if I possess worlds. By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world.
Pascal, Pensées
'When we cultivate an inner life, we set aside concerns for social ease or advancement. We forget...the anxious press of necessities...Or we may seek out a mountain retreat, a monastery, or a college campus removed from the city, a place that seems a world unto itself.'
'Intellectual development requires a chosen asceticism, a conscious rejection of available luxury. It marks out a way between rustic simplicity and the decadence of wealth.'
"As youngsters we gazed, inclined to giggle; then came a moment of silent awe as awareness of 'night clad in the beauty of a thousand inauspicious stars—the vast of night and its void'—seeped into consciousness."
Alice Foley
"Great is the power of memory, exceedingly great, O my god, a spreading limitless room within me. Who can reach its uttermost depth? Yet it is a faculty of soul and belongs to my nature. In fact I cannot totally grasp all that I am. Thus the mind is not large enough to contain itself; but where can that part of it be that does not contain itself?...As this question struck me, I was overcome with wonder and almost stupor. Here are men going afar to marvel at the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the long courses of great rivers, the vastness of the ocean, the movements of the stars, yet leaving themselves unnoticed and not seeing it as marvelous that when I spoke of all these things, I did not see them with my eyes, yet I could not have spoken of them unless these mountains and waves and rivers and stars which I have seen, and the ocean of which I have heard, had been inwardly present to my sight; in my memory, and yet with the same vast spaces between them as if I saw them outside of me.'
Augustine (I did not realize Augustine was capable of a thought that does not irritate me. I am pleasantly surprised. Perhaps Augustine is more than just Moaning Myrtle, as I have frequently described him...alas, nevermind, there is still something unbearable about him, which I cannot overcome.)
"The inward focus shown by Mary's studiousness is also part of the meaning of Mary's perpetual virginity. She does not submit to the common purpose that her community established for women...the social world is a realm of suspicion: the locus of ambition and competitive striving, the engine of using and instrumentalizing, the dissipation of energy into anxiety and petty spites. Only in withdrawing from it can the fundamentals of human and divine life become clear."
"Our humanity is not a profession to be left to the accomplished few."
Pascal, Pensées
'When we cultivate an inner life, we set aside concerns for social ease or advancement. We forget...the anxious press of necessities...Or we may seek out a mountain retreat, a monastery, or a college campus removed from the city, a place that seems a world unto itself.'
'Intellectual development requires a chosen asceticism, a conscious rejection of available luxury. It marks out a way between rustic simplicity and the decadence of wealth.'
"As youngsters we gazed, inclined to giggle; then came a moment of silent awe as awareness of 'night clad in the beauty of a thousand inauspicious stars—the vast of night and its void'—seeped into consciousness."
Alice Foley
"Great is the power of memory, exceedingly great, O my god, a spreading limitless room within me. Who can reach its uttermost depth? Yet it is a faculty of soul and belongs to my nature. In fact I cannot totally grasp all that I am. Thus the mind is not large enough to contain itself; but where can that part of it be that does not contain itself?...As this question struck me, I was overcome with wonder and almost stupor. Here are men going afar to marvel at the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the long courses of great rivers, the vastness of the ocean, the movements of the stars, yet leaving themselves unnoticed and not seeing it as marvelous that when I spoke of all these things, I did not see them with my eyes, yet I could not have spoken of them unless these mountains and waves and rivers and stars which I have seen, and the ocean of which I have heard, had been inwardly present to my sight; in my memory, and yet with the same vast spaces between them as if I saw them outside of me.'
Augustine (I did not realize Augustine was capable of a thought that does not irritate me. I am pleasantly surprised. Perhaps Augustine is more than just Moaning Myrtle, as I have frequently described him...alas, nevermind, there is still something unbearable about him, which I cannot overcome.)
"The inward focus shown by Mary's studiousness is also part of the meaning of Mary's perpetual virginity. She does not submit to the common purpose that her community established for women...the social world is a realm of suspicion: the locus of ambition and competitive striving, the engine of using and instrumentalizing, the dissipation of energy into anxiety and petty spites. Only in withdrawing from it can the fundamentals of human and divine life become clear."
"Our humanity is not a profession to be left to the accomplished few."
June 12, 2020
There are some things to enjoy in this book, but I take issue with most of it, beginning with the elitist premise, the supposed necessary «uselessness» of living an «intellectual life». Poverty here always seems like a temporary state or something to be visited, only to return to one’s «proper place» as a middle-class intellectual. The idea that the inner space of reflection Zena Hitz sees as the locus of learning is a place detached from the concerns of «the world», politics and projected results, seems to me not only, again, elitist, but deeply concerning. She asks for political agendas to be kept out of «free thought», which is in itself a political agenda (she’s also Catholic whose research focuses on Plato and Aristotle, and uses references almost exclusively from the Western «canon»). To make this short, I think her analysis is missing that learning and the pursuit of knowledge (a concept she dismisses as the cultivation of «correct opinions») is a socially situated process of co-construction and conversation that is always engaged with real-world circumstances, not just a sentiment of connecting with our «universal humanity». (Also, imagine lauding Malcolm X for speaking not «for the sake of social results or legislative outcomes».) Looking to «make a difference» cannot be just dismissed as looking for money, power and status in order to force a conceptual difference to «person-to-person service» that is never properly developed.
October 15, 2020
This book seems tailor made for me, with so much of my days filled with learning for its own sake as opposed to increasing my wealth or status. It is natural that, at some point, one will question what's the point of it? Why bother reading, say, a history of the 2,500 year old Peloponnesian War or a detailed history of the Chinese revolution in the years 1945-1957. I can honestly say that nothing from either of them has ever come up at any point in my life.
Zena Hitz's book alleges that it will not just explore the question but mount a defense of learning for its own sake.
Here is where I must admit that I gave up on the book after reading just over one-third of it. At that point I felt that I had given Zena Hitz enough time and space to try to convince me of, well, anything but I honestly still couldn't even tell what points she was trying to make because she was just all over the place.
At one point she seems to suggest that the key thing this kind of intellectual life provides is precisely that it is a-social.
Yet then she gives as an example Goethe whose intellectual life was anything but a-social. Hitz writes that "Goethe, by contrast, was embedded in a community of like-minded intellectuals, famous and celebrated."
At another point Hitz suggests that it allows us a kind of dignity that we can not achieve.
Yet then she gives the example of William and Caroline Herschel, groundbreaking astronomers in the late 1700s...and it isn't remotely clear what "dignity" they were lacking or that their solitary astronomy work provided them.
A constant refrain are bare statements with little or no supporting argument for them. We are just supposed to nod our head and agree.
And interacting with other people doesn't take on the awesome responsibility of allowing oneself to be changed?
Likewise, she makes clear that "learning" doesn't mean just sitting around reading books. There are all kinds of deep pursuits. She gives an example of John Baker who spent decades following peregrine falcons. But then we quickly run into questions about what we're even talking about anymore. What about following sports or playing video games?
But this is an unsatisfying answer and opens the same can of worms as in Roger Ebert's famous, and much disputed, claim that video games can't be art.
By this point in the book I really wasn't clear on what Hitz meant by "intellectual life" or what unique things it even brought to the table. Yes, there is a thread in there about pursuing things for non-market and non-social-status reasons. But then there is also something a bit unsettling about how she follows the crowd in her intellectual pursuits. Quoting Aristotle and St. Augustine is just another kind of following the crowd and trying to fit in, isn't it?
(Other reviewers have pointed out she has essentially no reference outside of the typical Western Canon. Apparently being able to chase intellectual pursuits without goals or constraints never meant she would read Asian or African or Arabic or South American philosophers, authors, or artists.)
There is also something hard to square with a devout Catholic telling us that the intellectual life is all about seeking truth at all costs and not just swallowing the stories the people around us tell us.
Eventually I just became too frustrated to continue. I had come to this book expecting it to be more of a developed argument in favor of the intellectual life but it isn't really that. Early on we are presented with Aristotle's philosophy about "ultimate ends" in life and basically just have to accept that as The Truth, ignoring that there have been 2,000 years of rebuttals and actual science since then that have changed the landscape of the argument.
But I see now that this isn't that kind of book. It is much more of a preaching to the choir slash motivational anecdotes kind of book which just didn't work for me.
As a final note: the prologue and introduction alone take up 25% of this already brief (240 page) book. The prologue in particular is especially grating as it amounts to a mini-biography of the author and is the 1,000th trite retelling of a privileged middle class person's existential crisis whose entire relevance to the book can be summed up in one or two paragraphs.
Skip the first 50 pages and go straight to Chapter 1 if you're going to read this book.
Zena Hitz's book alleges that it will not just explore the question but mount a defense of learning for its own sake.
What does it mean to pursue learning for its own sake? Is it even possible? Is the joy of learning itself selfish? If not, how could the strands of selfishness in it, the rush for achievement, the thrill of competition, be unwound from its heart?
And yet, without visible results, why should intellectual life matter, especially in a world so suffused with suffering? What role could it or should it play in repairing the broken fragments of our communities or in pushing back the darkness at their margins? These questions, along with a host of others that arise from them, shape the chapters that follow.
Here is where I must admit that I gave up on the book after reading just over one-third of it. At that point I felt that I had given Zena Hitz enough time and space to try to convince me of, well, anything but I honestly still couldn't even tell what points she was trying to make because she was just all over the place.
At one point she seems to suggest that the key thing this kind of intellectual life provides is precisely that it is a-social.
When we cultivate an inner life, we set aside concerns for social ease or advancement. We forget, if only temporarily, the anxious press of necessities.
Yet then she gives as an example Goethe whose intellectual life was anything but a-social. Hitz writes that "Goethe, by contrast, was embedded in a community of like-minded intellectuals, famous and celebrated."
At another point Hitz suggests that it allows us a kind of dignity that we can not achieve.
The inwardness of the mind at leisure unlocks the dignity that is so often denied or diminished by social life and social circumstances. [...] Intellectual life is a way to recover one’s real value when it is denied recognition by the power plays and careless judgments of social life. That is why it is a source of dignity.
Yet then she gives the example of William and Caroline Herschel, groundbreaking astronomers in the late 1700s...and it isn't remotely clear what "dignity" they were lacking or that their solitary astronomy work provided them.
A constant refrain are bare statements with little or no supporting argument for them. We are just supposed to nod our head and agree.
To read and inquire as a free adult is to take on the awesome responsibility of allowing oneself to be changed.
And interacting with other people doesn't take on the awesome responsibility of allowing oneself to be changed?
Likewise, she makes clear that "learning" doesn't mean just sitting around reading books. There are all kinds of deep pursuits. She gives an example of John Baker who spent decades following peregrine falcons. But then we quickly run into questions about what we're even talking about anymore. What about following sports or playing video games?
Can one play video games in a contemplative spirit? The answer, of course, is yes—but the activities are not quite fitting to their contemplative goal.
But this is an unsatisfying answer and opens the same can of worms as in Roger Ebert's famous, and much disputed, claim that video games can't be art.
By this point in the book I really wasn't clear on what Hitz meant by "intellectual life" or what unique things it even brought to the table. Yes, there is a thread in there about pursuing things for non-market and non-social-status reasons. But then there is also something a bit unsettling about how she follows the crowd in her intellectual pursuits. Quoting Aristotle and St. Augustine is just another kind of following the crowd and trying to fit in, isn't it?
(Other reviewers have pointed out she has essentially no reference outside of the typical Western Canon. Apparently being able to chase intellectual pursuits without goals or constraints never meant she would read Asian or African or Arabic or South American philosophers, authors, or artists.)
There is also something hard to square with a devout Catholic telling us that the intellectual life is all about seeking truth at all costs and not just swallowing the stories the people around us tell us.
A lie in the service of lower ends denies the dignity of the human capacity for rational belief; by contrast, seeking the truth at all costs recovers that dignity, reminds us of surer footing.
Eventually I just became too frustrated to continue. I had come to this book expecting it to be more of a developed argument in favor of the intellectual life but it isn't really that. Early on we are presented with Aristotle's philosophy about "ultimate ends" in life and basically just have to accept that as The Truth, ignoring that there have been 2,000 years of rebuttals and actual science since then that have changed the landscape of the argument.
But I see now that this isn't that kind of book. It is much more of a preaching to the choir slash motivational anecdotes kind of book which just didn't work for me.
As a final note: the prologue and introduction alone take up 25% of this already brief (240 page) book. The prologue in particular is especially grating as it amounts to a mini-biography of the author and is the 1,000th trite retelling of a privileged middle class person's existential crisis whose entire relevance to the book can be summed up in one or two paragraphs.
Skip the first 50 pages and go straight to Chapter 1 if you're going to read this book.
October 24, 2021
The love of learning has emerged as something profoundly serious, something that can change a life, a source of our highest aspirations - to know, to love, to flourish in our full humanity.
***
The social use of intellectual life lies in its cultivation of broader and richer ways of being human, in shaping our aspirations and our hopes for ourselves... literature provides a broadening of our perspective: we sympathize in our imaginations with human beings different from us - people of different races, genders, religions, times, and spaces.
***
Let us remind ourselves of the broad scope of human enterprise as well as the depths available to anyone with a bit of time yo think. Let us give free play to the human intellect and the human imagination, in an attempt to ground all that is in our hearts in what matters most.
***
The social use of intellectual life lies in its cultivation of broader and richer ways of being human, in shaping our aspirations and our hopes for ourselves... literature provides a broadening of our perspective: we sympathize in our imaginations with human beings different from us - people of different races, genders, religions, times, and spaces.
***
Let us remind ourselves of the broad scope of human enterprise as well as the depths available to anyone with a bit of time yo think. Let us give free play to the human intellect and the human imagination, in an attempt to ground all that is in our hearts in what matters most.
March 13, 2021
Memórias desencantadas sobre a academia, em que se procuram pistas para continuar a acreditar no valor da reflexão, da edificação da vida interior. A questão que move Zena Hitz em "Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life" (2020) é: para que serve uma vida intelectual? O que a leva a questionar o valor da dedicação à construção do pensar. E mais iminente ainda, se o pensamento é o fim ou é apenas um meio? Hitz não dá lições do alto da cátedra, à lá Séneca. Ela subiu todos os degraus académicos, chegou ao topo, numa universidade de elite americana, e depois resolveu abandonar tudo.
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continuar a ler no blog Virtual Illusion em:
https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com...
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continuar a ler no blog Virtual Illusion em:
https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com...
July 18, 2020
On one of my arms is a pair of tattoos, each depicting a labyrinth. At the center of one is a precious stone representing intellectual life and in the other is a flower representing the spiritual life. Separately there are several paths to the center symbolic of the many paths available to one pursuing either individually. But when overlaid there is only one long and difficult path, symbolizing the difficulty of pursuing both at the same time.
This is prologue to say that going into this book my expectation was that I was a member of the choir this book is preaching too. So it is strange that I found myself rebelling so strongly from the text. The binary approach where it seems any contact between the real world as lived by humans inevitable corrupts the intellectual life requiring its pursuit as an ascetic retreat left me cold from its cynicism. The sterility of separation of intellectual pursuits from issues such as the pursuit of social justice or the alleviation of human suffering, despite suggestions that later it can all be tied back to “service to humanity” was abrasive to me in its sterility.
My difficulty in attaching to this work, despite my strong initial enthusiasm, was compounded by its structure. With both a prologue and an introduction we are 50 pages into (~25% of the total length) before we even get to the start of the actual text and the laying out of the book’s central thesis.
This is prologue to say that going into this book my expectation was that I was a member of the choir this book is preaching too. So it is strange that I found myself rebelling so strongly from the text. The binary approach where it seems any contact between the real world as lived by humans inevitable corrupts the intellectual life requiring its pursuit as an ascetic retreat left me cold from its cynicism. The sterility of separation of intellectual pursuits from issues such as the pursuit of social justice or the alleviation of human suffering, despite suggestions that later it can all be tied back to “service to humanity” was abrasive to me in its sterility.
My difficulty in attaching to this work, despite my strong initial enthusiasm, was compounded by its structure. With both a prologue and an introduction we are 50 pages into (~25% of the total length) before we even get to the start of the actual text and the laying out of the book’s central thesis.
January 8, 2023
sturdy Aristotelian defense of the intellectual life - first half is legitimately excellent. dragged down a bit in the second half by some long literary case studies
April 21, 2021
I read Zena Hitz’s Lost in Thought in concert with Martha Nussbaum’s Not for Profit - two books addressing the same issues, yet drawing completely different conclusions. Whereas Nussbaum’s work attempts to deliver ideas about educational reform within the framework of a democratic manifesto, Hitz does everything she can to divorce the intellectual life from the socio-economic and political realms. In so doing, Hitz only reveals her own sense of entitlement, privilege, and elitism.
Like Nussbaum, Hitz defends the intellectual life as intrinsically valuable. My alarm bells start ringing every time I see this deontological argument. I’m never sure exactly what is meant by the assertion that something is good in-and-of-itself, and I don’t think Hitz is very clear on this point, either. She seems to mean something along the lines of intellectual activity as an internal reflexive activity, involving a withdrawal from the world and its materialistic trappings. “If it is for its own sake”, she writes, “we mean that we pursue it not because of external results but because of what it does for the learner”. I fail to see exactly how this amounts to intrinsic value without any form of secondary gain. The so-called “splendid uselessness” of the humanities is a kind of pleasure itself, which at least serves the purpose of leisurely enjoyment. On this point, Hitz would have to agree, but this would betray her deontological argument and support a more consequentialist one.
There are additional, deeper problems with Hitz’s conceptualization of the intellectual life as a solitary pursuit. Indeed, the retreat into the mind that Hitz posits here seems to be something more akin to a withdrawal from – and renunciation of – external reality itself. Her neo-Platonic rational essentialism is on full display in the following passage: “I have argued that intellectual life properly understood cultivates a space of retreat within a human being, a place where real reflection takes place [my emphasis]. We step back from concerns of practical benefit, personal or public”. For Hitz, philosophy should be seen as a strictly apolitical “ascetic practice”, separate and above and beyond political and social activity. Solitary, inward-facing philosophical reflection is the ‘real’ business of the intellectual; the assumption being here that everything else is somehow ‘less real’.
The matter of dignity also comes into question. “Intellectual life is a source of human dignity exactly because it is something beyond politics and social life”. Again, if we look closely at what Hitz is saying here, we can see a direct connection between the intellectual life and dignity, and that this value-judgment is logically predicated on its very separateness from the social and the political. I’m left with the impression that the social and political efforts of academics are inferior, undignified, and less real.
Her curious views take her to some pretty ridiculous places, ideologically speaking. For instance, at one point she says, “[p]olitics on campus should be rare, and almost always extracurricular”. How can any morally responsible academic say that? Elsewhere, she makes the idiotic claim that “Augustine’s Confessions is perhaps the only autobiography in history written as a philosophical inquiry”. This is baffling, especially considering that Hitz talks about Malcolm X’s Autobiography in her book, praising his ability to write philosophically about his life while incarcerated.
Although I am in no way devaluing the centrality of individual quiet reflection, I am saying that nothing occurs in a vacuum. You cannot think or act as if you don’t exist in the world. As global citizens, we all live highly interconnected lives, woven together in an intricate tapestry of complex factors. The book you hold in your hands is itself a social product – the result of a series of labour relations, environmental forces, power dynamics, personal biases, gendered perspectives, racial backgrounds, class distinctions, and so forth. Nothing is neutral – everything is imbued with the social and the political.
It is for those reasons that I have such tremendous respect for public-facing intellectuals, like Cornel West, who recognize that we cannot separate ourselves from the broader historical contexts we find ourselves in. They are not “watered-down” intellectuals; they are confronting ‘real’ philosophical questions and performing ‘real’ work. Social and political discourses are vital to keeping our academic institutions accountable to the interests of all sentient beings. To think otherwise is to bury your head in the sand.
Like Nussbaum, Hitz defends the intellectual life as intrinsically valuable. My alarm bells start ringing every time I see this deontological argument. I’m never sure exactly what is meant by the assertion that something is good in-and-of-itself, and I don’t think Hitz is very clear on this point, either. She seems to mean something along the lines of intellectual activity as an internal reflexive activity, involving a withdrawal from the world and its materialistic trappings. “If it is for its own sake”, she writes, “we mean that we pursue it not because of external results but because of what it does for the learner”. I fail to see exactly how this amounts to intrinsic value without any form of secondary gain. The so-called “splendid uselessness” of the humanities is a kind of pleasure itself, which at least serves the purpose of leisurely enjoyment. On this point, Hitz would have to agree, but this would betray her deontological argument and support a more consequentialist one.
There are additional, deeper problems with Hitz’s conceptualization of the intellectual life as a solitary pursuit. Indeed, the retreat into the mind that Hitz posits here seems to be something more akin to a withdrawal from – and renunciation of – external reality itself. Her neo-Platonic rational essentialism is on full display in the following passage: “I have argued that intellectual life properly understood cultivates a space of retreat within a human being, a place where real reflection takes place [my emphasis]. We step back from concerns of practical benefit, personal or public”. For Hitz, philosophy should be seen as a strictly apolitical “ascetic practice”, separate and above and beyond political and social activity. Solitary, inward-facing philosophical reflection is the ‘real’ business of the intellectual; the assumption being here that everything else is somehow ‘less real’.
The matter of dignity also comes into question. “Intellectual life is a source of human dignity exactly because it is something beyond politics and social life”. Again, if we look closely at what Hitz is saying here, we can see a direct connection between the intellectual life and dignity, and that this value-judgment is logically predicated on its very separateness from the social and the political. I’m left with the impression that the social and political efforts of academics are inferior, undignified, and less real.
Her curious views take her to some pretty ridiculous places, ideologically speaking. For instance, at one point she says, “[p]olitics on campus should be rare, and almost always extracurricular”. How can any morally responsible academic say that? Elsewhere, she makes the idiotic claim that “Augustine’s Confessions is perhaps the only autobiography in history written as a philosophical inquiry”. This is baffling, especially considering that Hitz talks about Malcolm X’s Autobiography in her book, praising his ability to write philosophically about his life while incarcerated.
Although I am in no way devaluing the centrality of individual quiet reflection, I am saying that nothing occurs in a vacuum. You cannot think or act as if you don’t exist in the world. As global citizens, we all live highly interconnected lives, woven together in an intricate tapestry of complex factors. The book you hold in your hands is itself a social product – the result of a series of labour relations, environmental forces, power dynamics, personal biases, gendered perspectives, racial backgrounds, class distinctions, and so forth. Nothing is neutral – everything is imbued with the social and the political.
It is for those reasons that I have such tremendous respect for public-facing intellectuals, like Cornel West, who recognize that we cannot separate ourselves from the broader historical contexts we find ourselves in. They are not “watered-down” intellectuals; they are confronting ‘real’ philosophical questions and performing ‘real’ work. Social and political discourses are vital to keeping our academic institutions accountable to the interests of all sentient beings. To think otherwise is to bury your head in the sand.
August 12, 2020
An essential read for anyone who desires an intellectual life. Lively and engaging, Zena Hitz persuasively argues for the value of intellectual inquiry and learning for its own sake. Rather than floating by on the surface of things, inebriated by Netflix and Facebook, she challenges us to go deeper into reflection on human nature, the natural world and spiritual reality.
The intellectual life is not merely for the student and the professor (or the childless), but something that each of us can engage in. I was challenged to go deeper into areas that interest me, and put aside time to dedicate to my intellectual interests.
The intellectual life is not merely for the student and the professor (or the childless), but something that each of us can engage in. I was challenged to go deeper into areas that interest me, and put aside time to dedicate to my intellectual interests.
November 20, 2020
If this book was a dish, I would say it needs some lemon juice. All the ingredients are there. Sweet, savoury, richness, but no acid. It lacks a certain 'oomff', a spark that brings it all together.
I had looked forward to this book for a while, but I found the actual text somewhat disappointing. It's less a rallying call for intellectual life for its own sake, and more for the value it can bring in terms of service to other values and other people. I may be over-reading the authors own biography - as told to us in the first chapter - but it feels like an attempt by an academic to become an activist while still validating that new approach as equally intellectual. That one can still serve the world out there without losing the previously validating connection to the world in here.
Lost in Thought starts well, but becomes somewhat lost in its own way. "The value of intellectual life lies in its broadening and deepening of our humanity" we are told. Without seriousness, "intellectual life risks superficiality, conformity and complicity with evil". These may be important values, but I am not sure how they reflect the intellectual life. The need for connection seems deep within the purpose of this book, but as Hitz rightly notes elsewhere, many like the intellectual life precisely because of the capacity to gain separation. Is there anything wrong with that?
And what of evil? Why cannot evil and intellectual life co-exist? Intellect is not morality or character or justice, and while those relationships are entangled, is not the intellect the place to deeply engage with what evil is? Those who questioned religion (Nietzsche), who questioned slavery (Douglass), who question capitalism (Marx), who question power (Foucault), who question family (Socrates) have all been viewed as evil, and some of them (Marx) indirectly contributed to great evil. But as intellectual endeavours they have all fundamentally succeeded and we are the richer for it.
There are real elements that I liked about the book. Hitz rightly critiques what academia has become. Not least the profoundly distortive status-seeking which feeds all the problems of cost, citations, awards, rankings, guilds and all the other bullshit that gets between a scholar sitting down and trying to figure something out. Academia has real, serious problems, and at the core of it is that so much of what is produced is simply designed to impress other people. The occasional dash of acid you find here - the snark against 'high prestige academics' who 'produce reams of research, much of it completely disconnected from any recognizable human question' often only serve to make me wish there was more - and used to build a stronger justification of the intellectual life in light of those problems.
I can't help but wonder what such a book in the hands of a Robert Hughes or Germain Greer (to choose two Australians) might look like. Both intellectuals knew the power of acid, and while at times applied too much, their work sparkles as a result. At its best, the work of those two authors gives the reader a fundamental insight "what does it feel like to be an intellectual". But in Lost in Thought so much of the argument is an outsight. Rather than drawing you in to validate on its own terms - consequences be damned - it seems much more about how to validate it in light of the troubled external world. Such as swapping status for service, for reasons that seem unrelated to the intellect.
I didn't really embrace it, but as a Youtube Chef I like rightly says, "you do you". That seems to me a comprehensive defence of the intellectual life in just three words.
I had looked forward to this book for a while, but I found the actual text somewhat disappointing. It's less a rallying call for intellectual life for its own sake, and more for the value it can bring in terms of service to other values and other people. I may be over-reading the authors own biography - as told to us in the first chapter - but it feels like an attempt by an academic to become an activist while still validating that new approach as equally intellectual. That one can still serve the world out there without losing the previously validating connection to the world in here.
Lost in Thought starts well, but becomes somewhat lost in its own way. "The value of intellectual life lies in its broadening and deepening of our humanity" we are told. Without seriousness, "intellectual life risks superficiality, conformity and complicity with evil". These may be important values, but I am not sure how they reflect the intellectual life. The need for connection seems deep within the purpose of this book, but as Hitz rightly notes elsewhere, many like the intellectual life precisely because of the capacity to gain separation. Is there anything wrong with that?
And what of evil? Why cannot evil and intellectual life co-exist? Intellect is not morality or character or justice, and while those relationships are entangled, is not the intellect the place to deeply engage with what evil is? Those who questioned religion (Nietzsche), who questioned slavery (Douglass), who question capitalism (Marx), who question power (Foucault), who question family (Socrates) have all been viewed as evil, and some of them (Marx) indirectly contributed to great evil. But as intellectual endeavours they have all fundamentally succeeded and we are the richer for it.
There are real elements that I liked about the book. Hitz rightly critiques what academia has become. Not least the profoundly distortive status-seeking which feeds all the problems of cost, citations, awards, rankings, guilds and all the other bullshit that gets between a scholar sitting down and trying to figure something out. Academia has real, serious problems, and at the core of it is that so much of what is produced is simply designed to impress other people. The occasional dash of acid you find here - the snark against 'high prestige academics' who 'produce reams of research, much of it completely disconnected from any recognizable human question' often only serve to make me wish there was more - and used to build a stronger justification of the intellectual life in light of those problems.
I can't help but wonder what such a book in the hands of a Robert Hughes or Germain Greer (to choose two Australians) might look like. Both intellectuals knew the power of acid, and while at times applied too much, their work sparkles as a result. At its best, the work of those two authors gives the reader a fundamental insight "what does it feel like to be an intellectual". But in Lost in Thought so much of the argument is an outsight. Rather than drawing you in to validate on its own terms - consequences be damned - it seems much more about how to validate it in light of the troubled external world. Such as swapping status for service, for reasons that seem unrelated to the intellect.
I didn't really embrace it, but as a Youtube Chef I like rightly says, "you do you". That seems to me a comprehensive defence of the intellectual life in just three words.
June 2, 2020
I got the chance to chat with the amiable, learned, careful, and nuanced author viz Zoom and then extended the conversation in written form. She's a great thinker, don't always necessarily agree with her all the time, but her writing and conversation are a tonic of rational and learned perspective in a world gone fucking mad.
Enjoy: https://artsfuse.org/203793/book-inte...
June 20, 2023
Lost in Thought is about the move from learning for the purpose of status seeking to learning for its own sake. It’s a philosophical examination of finding meaning in an intellectual life, not from racing to publish the next paper or prove one’s intellectual dominance or superiority, but to quietly live a life of constant learning, exploration, reflection. Zena Hitz shares her own background in academia, which I related to more than I expected, and her search for purpose and satisfaction in her work. Her passion for knowledge and deep learning is obvious. She spent time searching for a stimulating, vibrant intellectual culture like what she experienced as an undergrad but never could find again.
After 9/11 she reflected on the futility of her academic existence and wanted to make a difference, helping the poor and living without luxury. She became Catholic and lived for a time in Madonna House, a primitive Catholic commune. This, like many of her prior experiences, shaped her impression of the importance of an intellectual life separated from status, from social performance, from the disingenuous urge to please others or the self. Her book is a study of the contemplative life based not only on her experience, but the experiences of philosophers and scientists and thinkers, the worlds of novels, and characters from other forms of fiction.
She distinguishes between instrumental uses of the intellect — motivated by results and outcomes, like a spy gathering intel, a Wall Street quant maximizing profit, a political activist supporting their cause, and the intrinsic value of learning, not as a means to an end but as something worth pursuing, what she calls hidden learning, withdrawn from the pressure to produce economic, social, or political outcomes. She points to mathematics, science, philosophy, and literature as examples, all of which have instrumental uses but like anything else can be enjoyed purely on their own merits, as a fulfilling thing to study and find beauty in. She aims to answer the question she anticipates many might ask: what good is it to learn if it is hidden, and not used for good or healing?
Aristotle argued our ultimate end has to be for its own sake or our actions will be empty and vain. Hitz seeks the ongoing development of a rich inner life, through books and understanding and learning. Living to work is a futile existence, she argues. A redundant and unsatisfying life. Leisure must be used and not merely as rest to prepare us for more work. She discusses how we can use our leisure time to pursue intellectual life, even if we are short on time, or do not think of ourselves as intellectuals. Reading and contemplating for ninety minutes a week, for example, or setting aside 30 minutes a day. Manual labor is in fact quite fruitful to this, leaving the mind free to ruminate in ways other vocations may not.
Contemplation in the form of learning is worthy for its own sake and worthy of time and resources. In cultivating an inner life, we set aside concerns for social ease or advancement, we instead follow self development without concern for how it appears to others. Inwardness and withdrawal manifest as thoughts and imaginings that are unspoken and invisible.
Many examples of common humanity are shared through her study: an instructor teaching prisoners Shakespeare dissolves barriers between teacher and student due to the substance of material; WEB Du Bois finds in books a world without a color line division. Something beyond community produced by work is offered in the realm of the intellect. Bonds transcend time and space, to those dead or foreign or vastly different and removed from our familiar world.
She addresses the perceived uselessness of intellectual life, in Thales and Socrates and others, addressing its popular perception as childish and empty. It is distorted by ideas of civic and economic and political usefulness. We do not see intellectual life clearly because of our devotion to lifestyles rich in material comfort and a sense of social superiority. We are fixated on the superficial and mundane and hollow.
We are petty and shallow and infantile-we want the benefits of an intellectual life without the devotion to it or the sacrifices needed, like obscurity or poverty or lack of material wealth. She raises valid points about the sacrifices that should be made for true intellectual life. She looks at the self-serving wishful thinking of watered down, instrumental forms of intellectual life. Social justice and think tanks and entrepreneurship and economics and politics, and ways to flex a pseudo-intellectual muscle but never for the sake of intellectual pursuits, as means to an end.
Hitz reflects on the self deception of social advancement. She evaluates Aristophanes’s play Clouds as a critique of wealth and empire and disdain for true knowledge. Its main character Strepsiades is a bundle of incoherent impulses. In her view, the Athenians were blind and self deceived if they took this as an attack on Socrates, which they did. Strepsiades represents the shortsighted simplistic man whose distorted view is that only things of practical value are of any worth. Wealth, Hitz remarks, should be seen as a tool, not a goal.
The theme of redemption of the mind through philosophical discipline is visited over and over, primarily through Augustine’s Confessions, examining his journey of learning and questioning, his egoism, sexual preoccupation. Hitz contrasts the transformative discipline of philosophical search for truth with the love of spectacle and the news media and social media preferring outrage, shock, horror and unpleasant falsehoods over agreeable truths. Untrue sensationalist things spread fast and garner mountains of attention and become ingrained in the public subconscious. But the corrections go barely noticed, and don’t attract the same attention. “Love of spectacle wallows in novelty and negativity.” Our culture prefers the horror or thrill of shock and revelation rather than the quiet truthful correction.
We also want to become the spectacle, and this gives rise to legions of bored, vapid addicts to outrage performing for each other on the internet, an endless theater of pretend people having pretend reactions to manufactured scenarios and piles of lonely outraged people clicking their approval and spreading this sentiment, to the detriment of reasonable discourse or creativity or usefulness. All our worst minds and natures are wrapped up in news media and social media, especially Twitter and TikTok and tumblr.
She recognizes the necessity of creativity and producing art for flourishing. Experience itself is not a meaningful end or purpose, it must feed something deeper in us. “Unless we treasure something beyond our own bare experience, we cannot distinguish gazing at a mighty river from gazing at the TV channels changing one to the other, over and over again.” One who dwells at the surface of things is a mere spectator of spectacle.
She takes us through the corruption of learning by the love of money or social success, and by politics. “When we attempt to produce just outcomes from the top down we shortcut the communion of the reader with the author, and so suppress the egalitarian community of learning… Worse, the longing for justice is reduced to a set of rules for the use of language or for which opinions can be expressed. The correct justice-promoting words become tools for gatekeepers, protecting a hierarchy in the end not obviously different from the one that prompted the revolution. Social justice becomes not only trivialized, but also emptied of content, used for purposes counter to its professed aims.” It is the emptiness of political speech and activist language games that have sucked dry any thoughtful project for justice.
In her broader discussion of how knowledge is often treated as the learning and recitation of the correct opinions, she reflects on this practice within her own institutions, the church and the university. In universities, she argues, much of what is called education in the contemporary humanities is the cultivation of the correct opinions. The education supported by progressive activists, for example, seeks social and political results instead of the cultivation of free, thoughtful human beings. And the conservative mirror image of progressive activism, promotion of the correct opinions about free markets or economic liberty, also with aims for political results.
Politics is in many cases a means of social advancement, and the recitation of learned platitudes aids this. Hitz calls this “opinionization”, “the reduction of thinking and perception to simple slogans or prefabricated positions, a reduction motivated by fear, competition, and laziness.” Those participating in this ritual show they belong to a tribe by parroting approved phrases and words.
She offers what I think are compelling counterpoints to the diversity of opinion, often championed today in response to the rising illiberalism of progressives. As important as the diversity of opinion can be in certain areas, she argues, I think rightly, that opinions are often superficial and devoid of real inquiry. To engage in meaningful intellectual activity requires challenging opinions, having a stronger and more defensible basis for believing what we do. We often engage in debates with the intent to only further affirm what we believe rather than engaging in dialectic to have discussions that get at the fundamental substance of ideas and work out what is true. As Harlan Ellison said, “You don’t have a right to your opinion. You have a right to your informed opinion.” In true learning, we are not merely throwing around competing opinions. We develop discipline and seriousness, and discover why most opinions are without merit.
Again and again she aims to convince the reader that the goals of intellectual life should be as separate from spectacle as possible. I think she succeeds in this. She contrasts the differences made in society by people like trash collectors who aren’t brought onto TV for their tireless and consistent efforts, and those who are glamorized and celebrated for making what amount to be much less significant or impactful differences, but that are flashy and attention grabbing. Often our notions of “making a difference” are superficial and disconnected from real human need.
The ultimate use of the “useless” intellectual life is the self transformation into a reflective person, connected deeply with life and meaning and one’s relation to others, I would argue not only human but transcending species. It informs the way one thinks and operates and behaves day to day, in some ways small in other ways big and immediately impactful. The virtue of seriousness, as she puts it, requires our dedication to what is important and what is meaningful, an appreciation for the deeper substance and significance behind seemingly mundane ideas or observations or events, not that which is merely self-serving or fleeting, and provides the clarity to act in ways that promote the flourishing we want to ultimately understand.
The more we read and learn and study and immerse ourselves in learning for its own sake the less self-congratulatory we may become, as our awareness opens up to the complexity of other lives and experiences and problems and ideas, the less tribal and pompous, the less vapid our interactions with others, the less self-involved we become. Paradoxically, the more we read and the more we experience through other eyes and ages, the less special we feel about our own erudition, and we become attuned to the obscure ways in which knowledge matters and is shared, recognizing it even in those who are inarticulate, uneducated, or as alien to us as possible. It may make us more sensitive to the forms of emptiness that reside within us and destroy any sense of smug superiority that we were once tempted to feel, while also filling some of that emptiness and changing its character.
We learn to examine our own motives for what we do, as we try to untangle the truth from what we tell ourselves is the truth of our actions. The intellect, when not subjugated to lesser motivations and desires, provides an authentic “guide to life with its own integrity and independence.” We reflect on the sources of our thoughts, submit ourselves to challenges to alway become more clear-minded, more connected to what we learn and think about. We can seek to get to the bottom of reality and life and understand where meaning comes from. The exercise of the love of learning “uncovers a human being who is not reducible to his or her economic, social, or political contributions.” The intellectual life involves reaching out past the surface, questioning appearances, striving for what is not evident.
“A human being is more than an instrument of personal or public benefit.”
After 9/11 she reflected on the futility of her academic existence and wanted to make a difference, helping the poor and living without luxury. She became Catholic and lived for a time in Madonna House, a primitive Catholic commune. This, like many of her prior experiences, shaped her impression of the importance of an intellectual life separated from status, from social performance, from the disingenuous urge to please others or the self. Her book is a study of the contemplative life based not only on her experience, but the experiences of philosophers and scientists and thinkers, the worlds of novels, and characters from other forms of fiction.
She distinguishes between instrumental uses of the intellect — motivated by results and outcomes, like a spy gathering intel, a Wall Street quant maximizing profit, a political activist supporting their cause, and the intrinsic value of learning, not as a means to an end but as something worth pursuing, what she calls hidden learning, withdrawn from the pressure to produce economic, social, or political outcomes. She points to mathematics, science, philosophy, and literature as examples, all of which have instrumental uses but like anything else can be enjoyed purely on their own merits, as a fulfilling thing to study and find beauty in. She aims to answer the question she anticipates many might ask: what good is it to learn if it is hidden, and not used for good or healing?
Aristotle argued our ultimate end has to be for its own sake or our actions will be empty and vain. Hitz seeks the ongoing development of a rich inner life, through books and understanding and learning. Living to work is a futile existence, she argues. A redundant and unsatisfying life. Leisure must be used and not merely as rest to prepare us for more work. She discusses how we can use our leisure time to pursue intellectual life, even if we are short on time, or do not think of ourselves as intellectuals. Reading and contemplating for ninety minutes a week, for example, or setting aside 30 minutes a day. Manual labor is in fact quite fruitful to this, leaving the mind free to ruminate in ways other vocations may not.
Contemplation in the form of learning is worthy for its own sake and worthy of time and resources. In cultivating an inner life, we set aside concerns for social ease or advancement, we instead follow self development without concern for how it appears to others. Inwardness and withdrawal manifest as thoughts and imaginings that are unspoken and invisible.
Many examples of common humanity are shared through her study: an instructor teaching prisoners Shakespeare dissolves barriers between teacher and student due to the substance of material; WEB Du Bois finds in books a world without a color line division. Something beyond community produced by work is offered in the realm of the intellect. Bonds transcend time and space, to those dead or foreign or vastly different and removed from our familiar world.
She addresses the perceived uselessness of intellectual life, in Thales and Socrates and others, addressing its popular perception as childish and empty. It is distorted by ideas of civic and economic and political usefulness. We do not see intellectual life clearly because of our devotion to lifestyles rich in material comfort and a sense of social superiority. We are fixated on the superficial and mundane and hollow.
We are petty and shallow and infantile-we want the benefits of an intellectual life without the devotion to it or the sacrifices needed, like obscurity or poverty or lack of material wealth. She raises valid points about the sacrifices that should be made for true intellectual life. She looks at the self-serving wishful thinking of watered down, instrumental forms of intellectual life. Social justice and think tanks and entrepreneurship and economics and politics, and ways to flex a pseudo-intellectual muscle but never for the sake of intellectual pursuits, as means to an end.
Hitz reflects on the self deception of social advancement. She evaluates Aristophanes’s play Clouds as a critique of wealth and empire and disdain for true knowledge. Its main character Strepsiades is a bundle of incoherent impulses. In her view, the Athenians were blind and self deceived if they took this as an attack on Socrates, which they did. Strepsiades represents the shortsighted simplistic man whose distorted view is that only things of practical value are of any worth. Wealth, Hitz remarks, should be seen as a tool, not a goal.
The theme of redemption of the mind through philosophical discipline is visited over and over, primarily through Augustine’s Confessions, examining his journey of learning and questioning, his egoism, sexual preoccupation. Hitz contrasts the transformative discipline of philosophical search for truth with the love of spectacle and the news media and social media preferring outrage, shock, horror and unpleasant falsehoods over agreeable truths. Untrue sensationalist things spread fast and garner mountains of attention and become ingrained in the public subconscious. But the corrections go barely noticed, and don’t attract the same attention. “Love of spectacle wallows in novelty and negativity.” Our culture prefers the horror or thrill of shock and revelation rather than the quiet truthful correction.
We also want to become the spectacle, and this gives rise to legions of bored, vapid addicts to outrage performing for each other on the internet, an endless theater of pretend people having pretend reactions to manufactured scenarios and piles of lonely outraged people clicking their approval and spreading this sentiment, to the detriment of reasonable discourse or creativity or usefulness. All our worst minds and natures are wrapped up in news media and social media, especially Twitter and TikTok and tumblr.
She recognizes the necessity of creativity and producing art for flourishing. Experience itself is not a meaningful end or purpose, it must feed something deeper in us. “Unless we treasure something beyond our own bare experience, we cannot distinguish gazing at a mighty river from gazing at the TV channels changing one to the other, over and over again.” One who dwells at the surface of things is a mere spectator of spectacle.
She takes us through the corruption of learning by the love of money or social success, and by politics. “When we attempt to produce just outcomes from the top down we shortcut the communion of the reader with the author, and so suppress the egalitarian community of learning… Worse, the longing for justice is reduced to a set of rules for the use of language or for which opinions can be expressed. The correct justice-promoting words become tools for gatekeepers, protecting a hierarchy in the end not obviously different from the one that prompted the revolution. Social justice becomes not only trivialized, but also emptied of content, used for purposes counter to its professed aims.” It is the emptiness of political speech and activist language games that have sucked dry any thoughtful project for justice.
In her broader discussion of how knowledge is often treated as the learning and recitation of the correct opinions, she reflects on this practice within her own institutions, the church and the university. In universities, she argues, much of what is called education in the contemporary humanities is the cultivation of the correct opinions. The education supported by progressive activists, for example, seeks social and political results instead of the cultivation of free, thoughtful human beings. And the conservative mirror image of progressive activism, promotion of the correct opinions about free markets or economic liberty, also with aims for political results.
Politics is in many cases a means of social advancement, and the recitation of learned platitudes aids this. Hitz calls this “opinionization”, “the reduction of thinking and perception to simple slogans or prefabricated positions, a reduction motivated by fear, competition, and laziness.” Those participating in this ritual show they belong to a tribe by parroting approved phrases and words.
She offers what I think are compelling counterpoints to the diversity of opinion, often championed today in response to the rising illiberalism of progressives. As important as the diversity of opinion can be in certain areas, she argues, I think rightly, that opinions are often superficial and devoid of real inquiry. To engage in meaningful intellectual activity requires challenging opinions, having a stronger and more defensible basis for believing what we do. We often engage in debates with the intent to only further affirm what we believe rather than engaging in dialectic to have discussions that get at the fundamental substance of ideas and work out what is true. As Harlan Ellison said, “You don’t have a right to your opinion. You have a right to your informed opinion.” In true learning, we are not merely throwing around competing opinions. We develop discipline and seriousness, and discover why most opinions are without merit.
Again and again she aims to convince the reader that the goals of intellectual life should be as separate from spectacle as possible. I think she succeeds in this. She contrasts the differences made in society by people like trash collectors who aren’t brought onto TV for their tireless and consistent efforts, and those who are glamorized and celebrated for making what amount to be much less significant or impactful differences, but that are flashy and attention grabbing. Often our notions of “making a difference” are superficial and disconnected from real human need.
The ultimate use of the “useless” intellectual life is the self transformation into a reflective person, connected deeply with life and meaning and one’s relation to others, I would argue not only human but transcending species. It informs the way one thinks and operates and behaves day to day, in some ways small in other ways big and immediately impactful. The virtue of seriousness, as she puts it, requires our dedication to what is important and what is meaningful, an appreciation for the deeper substance and significance behind seemingly mundane ideas or observations or events, not that which is merely self-serving or fleeting, and provides the clarity to act in ways that promote the flourishing we want to ultimately understand.
The more we read and learn and study and immerse ourselves in learning for its own sake the less self-congratulatory we may become, as our awareness opens up to the complexity of other lives and experiences and problems and ideas, the less tribal and pompous, the less vapid our interactions with others, the less self-involved we become. Paradoxically, the more we read and the more we experience through other eyes and ages, the less special we feel about our own erudition, and we become attuned to the obscure ways in which knowledge matters and is shared, recognizing it even in those who are inarticulate, uneducated, or as alien to us as possible. It may make us more sensitive to the forms of emptiness that reside within us and destroy any sense of smug superiority that we were once tempted to feel, while also filling some of that emptiness and changing its character.
We learn to examine our own motives for what we do, as we try to untangle the truth from what we tell ourselves is the truth of our actions. The intellect, when not subjugated to lesser motivations and desires, provides an authentic “guide to life with its own integrity and independence.” We reflect on the sources of our thoughts, submit ourselves to challenges to alway become more clear-minded, more connected to what we learn and think about. We can seek to get to the bottom of reality and life and understand where meaning comes from. The exercise of the love of learning “uncovers a human being who is not reducible to his or her economic, social, or political contributions.” The intellectual life involves reaching out past the surface, questioning appearances, striving for what is not evident.
“A human being is more than an instrument of personal or public benefit.”
July 21, 2022
I would probably really give it a 3.5; It probably deserves a 4.5
I was really excited about this book when I bought it. I had heard her interviewed on Mars Hill Audio, the TOC was awesome, and it just looked great.
Halfway through this book, I was struggling. I expected sparkling; I foundit a slog.
I determined to persist. I'm glad I did.
Many of her examples were not in my frame of reference - Elena Ferrante's The Neapolitan Quartet, some movies I'd not heard of, etc - her careful explanations were both necessary and tedious to make her point. Sometimes I got lost in the example without seeing the reason thereof. If I had been more conversant with her source material, I suspect I would have enjoyed this book greatly.
However. By the finale, it said a lot of things about ideas I've been thinking on about the intellectual life, aids to, hinderances to, need for, simplicity of, etc. This work may not be sparklingly pithy and quotable, but it's because it's more serious for that forcing the reader to contemplation and introspection.
As a mom of soon-to-be college bound children, her scourging of academia gives much grist for the mill.
There was much here I didn't understand, but that doesn't make it less thought provoking; rather more. I find the deficiencies are mine. As usual.
I was really excited about this book when I bought it. I had heard her interviewed on Mars Hill Audio, the TOC was awesome, and it just looked great.
Halfway through this book, I was struggling. I expected sparkling; I found
I determined to persist. I'm glad I did.
Many of her examples were not in my frame of reference - Elena Ferrante's The Neapolitan Quartet, some movies I'd not heard of, etc - her careful explanations were both necessary and tedious to make her point. Sometimes I got lost in the example without seeing the reason thereof. If I had been more conversant with her source material, I suspect I would have enjoyed this book greatly.
However. By the finale, it said a lot of things about ideas I've been thinking on about the intellectual life, aids to, hinderances to, need for, simplicity of, etc. This work may not be sparklingly pithy and quotable, but it's because it's more serious for that forcing the reader to contemplation and introspection.
As a mom of soon-to-be college bound children, her scourging of academia gives much grist for the mill.
There was much here I didn't understand, but that doesn't make it less thought provoking; rather more. I find the deficiencies are mine. As usual.
September 6, 2020
1.5 stars. This book seemed like it was written to help the author convince herself that learning for its own sake should be a viable way to make a living. I don’t think the argument was quite there. I love learning, but this author’s line of reasoning didn’t convince me. It could have been great. I felt like the author was so close to something, but I never got what it was, and she never made the final connections. In the introduction she said her ideas were “half-baked.” I think that was the problem for me. She also said she wanted to treat the subject from a secular view. I know that makes what I’m about to say outside the scope of the book, but I really would have liked to have learned about her insights into the intellectual life that she gained because of her conversion to Catholicism. Does she see any connection, or is her religious life separate? Does the Church merely fulfill her need to serve?
I also did not like the writing style. Throughout the book, the paragraphs are full of lists. It was so abrupt that I often had to read paragraphs more than once to understand them. That was really annoying. Toward the end I found a section in which almost every paragraph was a phrase, a colon, and a long list. I couldn’t wait to finish this one.
One more thing... Almost all of this author’s examples were from socialists. I wonder if she realized that.
I also did not like the writing style. Throughout the book, the paragraphs are full of lists. It was so abrupt that I often had to read paragraphs more than once to understand them. That was really annoying. Toward the end I found a section in which almost every paragraph was a phrase, a colon, and a long list. I couldn’t wait to finish this one.
One more thing... Almost all of this author’s examples were from socialists. I wonder if she realized that.
Read
June 20, 2020We like gossip. We love indulging in other's successes and stories, and act like we are part of them. When intellectual life represents themselves as sadism and self-denial, the inbuild suffering from their work seems done a big job for us. Overpass money and constant seeking of alternative knowledge might sound like what the book analogy as athlete training: no pain no gain.
But what caught my attention is the attitude and intention of these intellects, not only their humility to test hypothesis or warning flowery words that lead to emptying one's soul, but also their diminishing of everything, including the subject of which they should care about: poverty, crime and impulse. The diminishment of otherness has left the legacy of academic hierarchy, which is grossly sucking administration fee with marketing success.
What can intellectual do these days? What is intellectual for the public good? Who are they or how are they circulating different communities? Where are they from? Another interesting question on secularism as the commonality of intellectuals, is group common the fundamental to alternative religion?
Interesting book with some valid questions to our pedagogical systems and everyday epistemological practices.
But what caught my attention is the attitude and intention of these intellects, not only their humility to test hypothesis or warning flowery words that lead to emptying one's soul, but also their diminishing of everything, including the subject of which they should care about: poverty, crime and impulse. The diminishment of otherness has left the legacy of academic hierarchy, which is grossly sucking administration fee with marketing success.
What can intellectual do these days? What is intellectual for the public good? Who are they or how are they circulating different communities? Where are they from? Another interesting question on secularism as the commonality of intellectuals, is group common the fundamental to alternative religion?
Interesting book with some valid questions to our pedagogical systems and everyday epistemological practices.
July 29, 2020
This is a great book with lots of examples from the author's intellectual experiences and other historical intellectuals on how to conduct one's own intellectual life. I guess her main point was reaching a sort of intellectual asceticism through leaving academia and caring about what she really considers meaningful in her life. She thinks that the academic life is somewhat intoxicated by our inner motives ( Status, Wealth, Power). She even mentioned an anecdote where she thought that professors actually wanted to be Worshipped!
Anyway, it is an escapist read, though it was a bit formulaic, and at some point lengthy (lengthening some ideas for more than enough time.)
Anyway, it is an escapist read, though it was a bit formulaic, and at some point lengthy (lengthening some ideas for more than enough time.)
July 15, 2023
many blessings on zena hitz.
i have too many things to say about her book.
at some point, this review would sound like
hitz paid me to gush.
that is not the case.
rather, hitz book hit me
at the prophetically ideal time
and she presented arguments
answering questions i'm asking / praying
in real time:
mainly, what does it mean
to possess the kind of inner life and leisure
that leads to a "quiet mind".
stack hitz up alongside alan jacobs
and tish harrison warren and jenny odell
and eugene peterson
for writers who've shaped that very
inner life and "quiet mind" for me.
hitz' book is indispensable.
i have too many things to say about her book.
at some point, this review would sound like
hitz paid me to gush.
that is not the case.
rather, hitz book hit me
at the prophetically ideal time
and she presented arguments
answering questions i'm asking / praying
in real time:
mainly, what does it mean
to possess the kind of inner life and leisure
that leads to a "quiet mind".
stack hitz up alongside alan jacobs
and tish harrison warren and jenny odell
and eugene peterson
for writers who've shaped that very
inner life and "quiet mind" for me.
hitz' book is indispensable.
February 17, 2022
I’m not reviewing this per se. Just offering a warning that it’s not the book it seems to be. To most it probably appears to be an exploration of how to be an intellectual in daily life no matter who you are. A defense of that desire.
What it actually is is a defense of academics that enjoy being academics, intended to be read by academics. (Note the distinction I’m making between academics and intellectuals.)
Even it��s language is mostly thicker-than-needed ivory tower verbosity.
Repetitive, inconsistent, a bit boring and not as accessible as it appears to be.
What it actually is is a defense of academics that enjoy being academics, intended to be read by academics. (Note the distinction I’m making between academics and intellectuals.)
Even it��s language is mostly thicker-than-needed ivory tower verbosity.
Repetitive, inconsistent, a bit boring and not as accessible as it appears to be.
July 4, 2020
I had such high hopes for this after reading about the premise. Ultimately disappointing, with lengthy discussions about texts I haven’t read and don’t particularly want to.
December 26, 2021
I personally really enjoyed this book. Not something to be taken as a sole authority on the matter, but a really nice reminder about the dangers of viewing education in purely utilitarian terms.
I find most compelling the reminder that the intellectual life is a human good in its own right, and one that should be available to all, not just the intellectual elite. It is the property of cab drivers and farmers as much as professional scholars.
I can imagine Hitz’s arguments about social reform being overemphasized, however, which may not be a problem with the book as much as with how academics tend to think about education (at least that’s how Hitz would see it). Hitz is not arguing against social reform as a product of the intellectual life; although she is arguing against social reform as the only product of the intellectual life. She is also arguing against a narrowing range of opinions on social issues in higher education, particularly in the humanities. Some of her statements to this end can seem rather harsh, but in context of the book as a whole, none of them seem to be a wholesale rejection of social reform as a goal in higher education. I think this is clearest in her comparison of social reform as intellectual exercise and social reform as lived experience. Her discussion of Simone Weil was especially poignant to that end.
I think the proper way to walk away from this book is to consider it evidence for a personal reevaluation of a personal outlook on intellectualism. It’s a reminder to love learning for its own sake. Readers can, I suppose, follow Hitz’s principles of education to varying degrees, but regardless of where any one reader lands in relation to Hitz, this book is an important voice in a debate about the importance of the university and of private intellectual endeavors, endeavors that may have limited utility.
I find most compelling the reminder that the intellectual life is a human good in its own right, and one that should be available to all, not just the intellectual elite. It is the property of cab drivers and farmers as much as professional scholars.
I can imagine Hitz’s arguments about social reform being overemphasized, however, which may not be a problem with the book as much as with how academics tend to think about education (at least that’s how Hitz would see it). Hitz is not arguing against social reform as a product of the intellectual life; although she is arguing against social reform as the only product of the intellectual life. She is also arguing against a narrowing range of opinions on social issues in higher education, particularly in the humanities. Some of her statements to this end can seem rather harsh, but in context of the book as a whole, none of them seem to be a wholesale rejection of social reform as a goal in higher education. I think this is clearest in her comparison of social reform as intellectual exercise and social reform as lived experience. Her discussion of Simone Weil was especially poignant to that end.
I think the proper way to walk away from this book is to consider it evidence for a personal reevaluation of a personal outlook on intellectualism. It’s a reminder to love learning for its own sake. Readers can, I suppose, follow Hitz’s principles of education to varying degrees, but regardless of where any one reader lands in relation to Hitz, this book is an important voice in a debate about the importance of the university and of private intellectual endeavors, endeavors that may have limited utility.
February 8, 2024
حقیقتا نمیتونم رابطه خودم با این کتاب رو شرح بدم چون هنوزم برای خودم گنگه،واقعا نمیتونم بگم دوستش داشتم یا نه .یه جاهایی اینقدر از جملاتش خوشم میومد که مدام برای خودم هایلایتشون میکردم یه جاهایی اینقدر ناخوانا بود که نمیفهمیدم چی دارم میخونم و چندبار باید تکرارش میکردم.اما چیزی که درموردش مطمئنم اینه که موضوعش رو خیلی دوست داشتم ،چون من خودم همیشه از یادگرفتن لذت بردم و صرفا به عنوان یه ابزار نگاهش نکردم ،از طرفی به نظرم کتاب کتاب خوبیه اما ترجمه اش واقعا افتضاحه . اصلا رسا نیست اصلا روان نیست و اگه علاقه ای به موضع نداشته باشید همون اوایل میذاریدش کنار.از طرفی به نظرم اوایل کتاب چندان گیرا نیست ولی هرچی جلوتر میره پخته تر میشه و واقعا جذبتون میکنه یه جاهایی حس کردم خود نویسنده هم وسط چیزایی که نوشته غرق شده و متن انسجامش رو از دست داده البته هنوزم معتقدم به خاطر ترجمه بدیه که ازش وجود داره .
به نظرم این کتاب،خوندنش قلق داره و باید بدونی چجوری باهاش تا کنی وگرنه تا لحظه اخر عذابت میده😅
به نظرم این کتاب،خوندنش قلق داره و باید بدونی چجوری باهاش تا کنی وگرنه تا لحظه اخر عذابت میده😅
Read
December 19, 2023“Our social world is our intellectual comfort zone. To break its bonds, so as to actually learn something, requires a sort of intellectual violence: the pain is inflicted by a torturously realistic book, by an unanswerable question, or by the presence of an intelligent human being who is oriented differently than we are.”
Sometimes it takes well over half a year to finish a book that’s traveled farther in that time than my own intellectual pursuits have, but c’est la vie. I think I want to talk to the author now, ask her all kinds of questions, and maybe stop in for a seminar at St John’s.
“A real yokel, as we’ve seen, is not a simple rustic but someone who pursues wealth and status no matter the cost. We are ourselves the yokels.”
Sometimes it takes well over half a year to finish a book that’s traveled farther in that time than my own intellectual pursuits have, but c’est la vie. I think I want to talk to the author now, ask her all kinds of questions, and maybe stop in for a seminar at St John’s.
“A real yokel, as we’ve seen, is not a simple rustic but someone who pursues wealth and status no matter the cost. We are ourselves the yokels.”
November 17, 2020
Akademi dünyasında olanlar için can alıcı sorular ve bu sorulara makul cevaplar bulma çabaları var. Öğrenmenin kıymeti nedir, neden öğrenmek önemlidir, dışarıda bu kadar acı varken entellektüel işlerin hayatımızdaki yeri ne olmalıdır benzeri az çok hepimizin aklına gelmiş olan sorular var. Dört yıldızın sebebi kitabın bazı bölümlerinde konuyu takip etmekte zorlanmam oldu.
Read
March 25, 2021I would have thought that I was the ideal audience for this book. As a child I used to annoy friends and family by intentionally getting tagged out in games of Steal the Rocks so I could sit in jail and spread out my books and read. As an adult I similarly rent an "introvert cabin" on family vacations so that I can escape to solitude and writing.
Hitz does passionately and eloquently argue for the beauty of these retreats, and the importance of intellectual pursuits for the sake of knowledge and contemplation rather than solving problems or accruing wealth. Her arguments are thoughtful and well-written. Many of the sentences are beautiful.
Several aspects of the book left me in the cold, however.
First, its moralistic tone. Rather than arguing that the intellectual path is a wonderful one and that more people should pursue it through work and in their leisure time for its many rewards, she seems to be arguing that it is the *only* such path, going so far as to suggest that other paths reduce human dignity. She even spends long sections warning about paths that look intellectual but aren't, that stay on the surface. This leads to a strange sort of gatekeeping about what counts as intellectual and what does not, and worse, this gatekeeping is inconsistently applied. For instance, studying the lives of birds is introduced as true intellect that can be done outside of a university, but beekeeping or tomato cultivation are presented as surface "simplicity" that isn't deep enough to be intellectual. What? Film gets the thumbs up, but theater is often "spectacle" (overly emotional and ultimately simplistic), and she frequently lampoons television as a mindless couch potato activity.
She also really, really disapproves of alcohol, sex, and anything that is done on a screen. I'm not sure what video games ever did to her, but they get the worst treatment, being likened to shooting heroin or mainlining pornography. All of this judgment was wearying to read.
Hitz is careful to try to sidestep charges of elitism by noting the dignity of manual labor and how it can coexist with thoughtful contemplation and a rich inner life. She doesn't offer the same grace to the middle class, however, frequently criticizing work that "pushes papers around" and tackles "complex but surface problems" as being on a meaningless treadmill. All together, one gets the sense that people like Hitz who pursue a life of the mind are filled with more dignity and humanity than people who might work an office job to provide for their families and then come home and unwind with a little tv or video games and on weekends enjoy food, drink, and yes, sex with the people they love. There is no space for considering that maybe intellectual endeavors give Hitz (and me!) certain rewards and dignity but that there are individual variations in personality and preferences and upbringing that mean that other people find those rewards and dignity in other pursuits than the intellectual. This is elitism.
Finally, I'm probably taking out on this book a disciplinary bias against philosophy, but the lack of considering counter arguments or disproving evidence bothered me. This lack was particularly hard to read when the same works are cited where they provide evidence for her claims and then not when they don't. For instance, Malcolm X is cited as an example of the power of studying in enforced solitude (as he did in prison) but then his work is ignored when she makes the argument that intellectual scholarship should be apolitical and never pursue aims of social justice.
Ultimately, well-written but alienating.
Hitz does passionately and eloquently argue for the beauty of these retreats, and the importance of intellectual pursuits for the sake of knowledge and contemplation rather than solving problems or accruing wealth. Her arguments are thoughtful and well-written. Many of the sentences are beautiful.
Several aspects of the book left me in the cold, however.
First, its moralistic tone. Rather than arguing that the intellectual path is a wonderful one and that more people should pursue it through work and in their leisure time for its many rewards, she seems to be arguing that it is the *only* such path, going so far as to suggest that other paths reduce human dignity. She even spends long sections warning about paths that look intellectual but aren't, that stay on the surface. This leads to a strange sort of gatekeeping about what counts as intellectual and what does not, and worse, this gatekeeping is inconsistently applied. For instance, studying the lives of birds is introduced as true intellect that can be done outside of a university, but beekeeping or tomato cultivation are presented as surface "simplicity" that isn't deep enough to be intellectual. What? Film gets the thumbs up, but theater is often "spectacle" (overly emotional and ultimately simplistic), and she frequently lampoons television as a mindless couch potato activity.
She also really, really disapproves of alcohol, sex, and anything that is done on a screen. I'm not sure what video games ever did to her, but they get the worst treatment, being likened to shooting heroin or mainlining pornography. All of this judgment was wearying to read.
Hitz is careful to try to sidestep charges of elitism by noting the dignity of manual labor and how it can coexist with thoughtful contemplation and a rich inner life. She doesn't offer the same grace to the middle class, however, frequently criticizing work that "pushes papers around" and tackles "complex but surface problems" as being on a meaningless treadmill. All together, one gets the sense that people like Hitz who pursue a life of the mind are filled with more dignity and humanity than people who might work an office job to provide for their families and then come home and unwind with a little tv or video games and on weekends enjoy food, drink, and yes, sex with the people they love. There is no space for considering that maybe intellectual endeavors give Hitz (and me!) certain rewards and dignity but that there are individual variations in personality and preferences and upbringing that mean that other people find those rewards and dignity in other pursuits than the intellectual. This is elitism.
Finally, I'm probably taking out on this book a disciplinary bias against philosophy, but the lack of considering counter arguments or disproving evidence bothered me. This lack was particularly hard to read when the same works are cited where they provide evidence for her claims and then not when they don't. For instance, Malcolm X is cited as an example of the power of studying in enforced solitude (as he did in prison) but then his work is ignored when she makes the argument that intellectual scholarship should be apolitical and never pursue aims of social justice.
Ultimately, well-written but alienating.
November 26, 2020
This book was not what I expected, but I loved it all the same. Part memoir, part philosophy, part rebuke to corrupted universities, part warning against the vices and temptations common to intellectuals, part wrestling with religion, all honoring the good of the intellectual life and calling for its celebration and restoration.
December 2, 2020
A good reminder of what's important in life. Makes a case as to why intellectual life isn't confined to the "elites," and the failure of higher education in reflecting the intrinsic value of learning. Highly recommend.
November 28, 2020
The second star is earned only bc she diagnoses *some* of the problems of academia correctly in the last chapter. But this book was a mighty disappointment.
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