A new book offers a guide to uncovering the hidden pleasures of intellectual inquiry.
A new book offers a guide to uncovering the hidden pleasures of intellectual inquiry.
I t is too soon to know where COVID-19 will have its most lasting impact on American life, but surely institutions of higher education are one candidate. Having experienced at least part of a semester conducting classes online, liberal-arts colleges must now think about what makes on-campus, face-to-face education truly distinctive. Parents must confront the question of whether it makes sense to pay exorbitant amounts of money in the midst of a massive economic downturn.
Although Zena Hitz’s new book Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of the Intellectual Life is not primarily about institutions of higher learning, everyone who cares about colleges and universities and their place in American life should read it. The book confronts familiar and abiding questions about intellectual inquiry in an utterly engaging and profound way. With a doctorate in philosophy and as a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md., Hitz follows the twists and turns of philosophical arguments with fullness and exactitude. But the book is no dry treatise—Hitz uses her own biography and figures such as Malcolm X, Einstein, St. Augustine, Primo Levi, Dorothy Day, the Virgin Mary, and even Steve Martin to illuminate a slippery phenomenon: What do genuine learning and intellectual life, at their core, look like? How might we distinguish them from vocational training or the mere transmission of information? What are the persistent threats to intellectual inquiry?
Her most important contention is that intellectual life is something pursued for its own sake. Learning in its purest—perhaps most distinctive—form is not undertaken for the sake of a career or to boost one’s earning potential. The activity itself is intrinsically good and can be engaged in with a variety of objects in view. It must always involve a certain degree of withdrawal from the world to allow space for reflection. She suggests, too, that such activity is a source of dignity and further that it opens up a space for communion between human beings. It is emphatically not the preserve of any professional class or the particularly learned. She tells the story of the 18th-century amateur astronomers William and Caroline Herschel, who would eventually build telescopes more powerful than those built by the royal observatories in England. We also meet John Baker, an office worker in Essex, who became so fascinated by peregrine falcons that he followed them on foot and on a bicycle for ten years and wrote up his conclusions and observations in a volume called “The Peregrine.”
Hitz is insistent that this thirst to know and understand can be found in all of us. But she’s equally committed to exploring how it gets corrupted or driven out of us entirely. Intellectual cultivation is a kind of asceticism, she argues, and “involves uprooting and drying up parts of ourselves as much as it requires sunlight, soil, and seed.” Human beings have all sorts of desires and impulses that can distort or displace the longing to know and understand our world and the kind of beings we are. More to the point, some of our desires can become so entangled with intellectual longing that we mistake a second-rate, instrumental form of intellectual life for the real thing. In one of the most fascinating sections of the book Hitz looks at Augustine’s Confessions. Augustine identifies a disordered love of knowledge called curiositas, which she translates as “love of spectacle.” Love of spectacle is the seeking of mere experience—it does not reach beyond the surface of things. It is a form of empty, intellectual thrill-seeking where we restlessly move from object to object without ever plumbing the depths of what’s in front of us.
The opposite of this vice is studiosus. Though scholars most often translate the term as “studious,” Hitz resists this, arguing that we ought not think of a studious person as a joyless bore. She prefers to call it the virtue of “seriousness.” “Whereas the lover of spectacle skims over the surface of things and is satisfied with mere images and feelings, the serious person looks for depth, reaches for more, longs for reality.” The virtue of seriousness leads to the cultivation of an inner life—that space within us where we consider deep questions about human happiness or our place in the natural world. This is why reading the great works of the past can play such an important role in the discovery of the depths of a human being. They demand a kind of self-forgetting in which we follow the authors along paths that we could never find on our own. This sort of deep reading requires and cultivates humility and patience—but the rewards are many and profound and are available to anyone willing to take up the task. Hitz uses a book called “The Intellectual Lives of the British Working Classes” to great effect. There she finds an account of learning given by a cotton spinner named Charles Campbell (b. 1793): “The lover of learning, however straitened his circumstances, or rugged his condition, has yet a source of enjoyment within himself that the world never dreams of. . . . Perhaps he is solving a problem of Euclid, or soaring with Newton amidst the planetary world . . . or he unbends the wing of his imagination, and solaces his weary mind in the delightful gardens of the classic muse of poetry and music.”
The book concludes with a striking encapsulation of the ways in which institutions of higher learning have lost their way and become detached from the life of the intellect properly understood. The ubiquitous “learning outcomes” on syllabi emphasize the easily digestible and quantifiable. The promotion of learning in terms of social and political results leads to politicization and a rank utilitarianism. Knowledge is reduced to the correct opinions about this or that subject matter, which in turn can be delivered in bullet points on PowerPoint slides. What Hitz refers to as the “opinionization” of our colleges and universities takes different forms. “If we cultivate our college campuses either as echo chambers or as chocolate-box assortments of viewpoints, we think of young people first and foremost as receptacles of viewpoints, as consumers of content. . . . [Thus] we deny the rational agency and inbuilt love of learning of our students.”
Hitz wants something much deeper than the passive adoption of an opinion—she wants to cultivate the longing for and the commitment to finding the truth. This requires something more and more rare on college campuses today: the person-to-person encounter between teacher and student where fundamental questions are probed with joyful seriousness. “If intellectual life is not left to rest in its splendid uselessness, it will never bear its practical fruit,” notes Hitz near the end of this wonderful book. Will colleges and universities have the courage and the will to adapt themselves to this truth in the wake of COVID-19? Budgetary realities will force most institutions to reconsider their core missions and distinguish the essential from the non-essential. Let’s hope that many refocus themselves on a mission that “respect[s] the role of a free intellect in a good human life.”