Intellectual Life for Everyone: Practical Takeaways

Zena Hitz, a philosopher and college professor at St. John's College of Annapolis, discusses her book, "Lost in Thought, the Hidden Pleasure of an Intellectual Life." She shares her personal journey and insights into what constitutes an intellectual life, arguing for its accessibility to everyone, not just academics.

The Journey of a Disillusioned Academic

Hitz grew up in an intellectually inclined family, reading books and discussing ideas. She attended St. John's College, studying subjects like ancient botany and French poetry, which she describes as "useless stuff" in a conventional sense. After graduate school in philosophy and classics, she found herself disillusioned with the academic world, both in research and teaching. This led to an "early mid-life crisis" in her 30s, prompting her to leave academia and live in a Catholic religious community for three years.

During this period, she sought to understand herself as a human being beyond her professional identity. She questioned the nature of intellectual life: was it merely a profession for academics, or a natural human heritage? Her instinct leaned towards the latter, a realization reinforced by living among ordinary people without the pressures of her former profession.

The Bad Reputation of Intellectuals and the Wholesomeness of Manual Labor

Hitz acknowledges that intellectuals sometimes have a deservedly bad reputation. They are often perceived as being "lost in the stars," disconnected from ordinary life and even their own bodies. She believes there's truth to this, extending it to anyone who works primarily with their mind rather than with materials.

She highlights the "wholesomeness" of working with materials, citing examples like washing dishes or building things. This type of work forces an encounter with reality's resistance. Stains on laundry or grease on a pot demonstrate that reality doesn't always conform to one's will. This encounter with limitations is a fundamental aspect of human experience.

In contrast, the world of the mind, particularly language, can be dangerous because it doesn't "fight back" in the same way. One can convince themselves of falsehoods that persist without challenge. True, wholesome intellectual activity, Hitz argues, involves a similar encounter with reality's resistance. This can be seen in the struggle of writing a term paper, where initial grand ideas are eventually confronted by the limitations of time and effort, or in a scholar abandoning a pet theory due to contradictory evidence.

For Hitz, who was always adept with words, engaging in manual tasks like washing dishes or sweeping floors helped her become more accustomed to this resistance of reality, a crucial aspect of humanity. She believes that resistance is a sign that one has "hit reality," which is where human beings ought to be.

The Crisis in the Humanities and the Path Forward

After leaving the religious community, Hitz returned to St. John's to teach, focusing on making teaching central to her intellectual life. She observed the "crisis in the humanities" – the decline in the study of humanities in US universities, marked by falling major numbers and department closures. She felt that existing discussions on this crisis didn't capture the full truth, leading her to write her book, which aims to present intellectual life as a fundamental human endeavor.

She notes that young people face immense pressure to pursue pragmatic fields for lucrative jobs, causing philosophy, literature, and political theory to disappear from academic institutions and potentially from common life.

Hitz suggests two possible solutions: 1. Academic Reform: Universities and colleges could reform themselves to restore and preserve humanities studies. However, she is not optimistic about this due to opposing pressures. 2. Grassroots Intellectual Life: Her primary interest lies in integrating intellectual life into the ordinary lives of ordinary people. She draws inspiration from 19th and 20th-century labor movements in Britain and the US, where working people, despite lacking formal educational opportunities, formed grassroots reading groups. These groups read serious works by philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Nietzsche, educating themselves and finding liberation from their diminished surroundings.

Hitz believes a similar movement is possible today, with online opportunities for serious reading and thinking. The goal is not career advancement or prestige, but personal growth, dignity, deep connection with others, cultivation of an inner life, and engagement with fundamental human questions as an ordinary, not professional, pursuit.

What is an Intellectual Life?

Hitz defines intellectual life in several ways:

• An Inner Life: It is a private space of one's own thinking, withdrawn from the social world of status and competition. It's a realm where focus shifts from external evaluation to internal exploration.
• A Source of Dignity and Connection: It provides dignity and a way to connect with others on a deeper level.
• Ordinary Activities: It manifests in everyday activities like reading, thinking, speculating about human motivations, bird watching, walking in nature, and mathematics.

She contrasts this with practices driven by social competition, such as career advancement for status or forming exclusive "in-groups." While intellect can be used for these ends, Hitz is interested in an intellectual life that is not acquisitive, one that finds its good in the activity itself, rather than as a means to an end.

She references philosopher Kieran Setiya's distinction between "telic" and "atelic" activities: * Atelic Activities: These have their ends in themselves and are worth doing for their own sake. Examples include reading, studying, being in nature, prayer, and spending time with loved ones. These are moments that feel like the culmination of one's life. * Telic Activities: These are done for other reasons, usually to acquire something else (e.g., going to the store for milk, applying for a job). Most of what people do is instrumental.

Hitz argues that society often gets "locked into" a mode of constant instrumental activity without ever reaching the ultimate "something else" it's striving for. She encourages reflection on what that "something else" truly is – the activities that provide meaning and purpose. While playing cards might be an atelic activity, it might not be the culmination of a life. Intellectual life, she contends, falls into the category of activities pursued for their own sake, contributing to a meaningful existence.

Aristotle, Leisure, and the Democratization of Intellectual Life

Hitz discusses Aristotle's view that contemplation is happiness and that "work is for the sake of leisure, not the other way around." Aristotle saw work as analogous to war – a struggle to create the conditions for "works of peace," which for him was primarily philosophical contemplation. However, Aristotle's view of contemplation was narrower than Hitz's, focusing on philosophizing and natural science, and excluding, for example, the appreciative love of family.

A key point of divergence from Aristotle is his belief that the contemplative life was only for a select few – "a handful of rich gentlemen." Hitz acknowledges this limitation in Aristotle's thinking but emphasizes that his core questions about leisure, work, and activities done for their own sake remain relevant.

The significant historical change that breaks Aristotle's "historical necessity" of intellectual life belonging to a few is mass literacy and the broad availability of sophisticated ideas through books and other media. This means the excuse of limited access to knowledge no longer holds.

The Achievement Culture and the Internet's Impact

Hitz identifies two major challenges to intellectual life today:

1. Relentless Achievement Culture: Schools foster a culture where "being at the top of your class is the end of an education." This creates immense pressure on young people, making them fearful of uncertainty and mistakes. The anxiety about future success and intense competition leads to a sense that any flaw is "sudden death."
2. Internet as Information Retrieval: The internet has conditioned people to view learning as simply retrieving information. This overlooks the messy, open-ended, and often uncomfortable process of genuine learning, which involves grappling with not knowing and seeking evidence and sources. True learning, Hitz argues, is about moving from one place to another, not just reaching a predetermined point Z.

She contends that this achievement-oriented system, with its socioeconomic biases, disadvantages the poor and anyone who deviates from the norm. It also falsely equates achievement with intellectual life. Hitz argues that chasing achievement is often the opposite of living an intellectual life. A high-prestige professor focused solely on career advancement might be less intellectual than a taxi driver who reads widely and thinks deeply for its own sake.

Hitz reflects on her own experience as a successful academic who felt an "emptiness" and "diminishment" despite her achievements. Leaving her career and joining a community where she was "no one special" helped her recover her value as a human being independently of external status. This "refuge from the world" is a place where one's inherent human value, which is both humble (anyone can wash dishes) and profound (it's independent of external validation), can be realized. She believes that becoming more human involves knowledge and love, which are interconnected and drive growth.

Unlikely Intellectuals: From Einstein to MC Hammer

Hitz shares stories of "unlikely intellectuals" to illustrate that intellectual life is accessible to everyone, regardless of social status or background. These individuals find dignity and a different way of seeing themselves through books, study, or contemplation, often as a "weapon against diminishment."

• Malcolm X: Despite a childhood marked by extreme racism, family tragedy, and a teacher who limited his aspirations, Malcolm X transformed himself in prison by reading the entire prison library. His intellectual journey, religious conversion, and subsequent activism exemplify finding an "inner refuge" and developing incredible inner depth.
• Albert Einstein: As a "weird kid" from a marginalized group, Einstein struggled to find an academic job after graduate school. He worked in a patent office, which he later called his "cloister," where he developed his groundbreaking theories in physics. This shows how intellectual work can flourish even in isolation and without conventional academic validation.
• The Virgin Mary (in art): Medieval and Renaissance art often depicts the Virgin Mary reading, particularly during the Annunciation. This reflects an ancient tradition of her being a scholar of Hebrew Scriptures. Hitz interprets this as Mary drawing strength and fortitude from her intellectual work to make radical and dangerous choices, demonstrating how inwardness can provide resilience.
• Curt Schilling: Hitz uses the example of the baseball pitcher Curt Schilling, who pitched a playoff game with a bleeding ankle, to illustrate how inner strength and discipline can be seen as an "athletic achievement." While this shows human excellence, Hitz seeks a form of dignity in intellectual life that doesn't depend on such extraordinary achievements.
• J.A. Baker: An office worker in Essex, Baker, despite never attending university, spent ten years in his spare time observing Peregrine Falcons. His meticulous notes and observations culminated in "The Peregrine," a poetic exploration of nature. This exemplifies the capacity of ordinary working people to engage deeply with reality and create something profound outside of professional academic circles.
• MC Hammer: Hitz discovered that MC Hammer, a famous hip-hop artist, posts scientific articles on Twitter, particularly on the nature of life and consciousness. This demonstrates that intellectual curiosity and engagement with complex questions are not confined to academic institutions or specific professions. His understanding, pursued for its own sake, is what matters, not the production of academic papers.

Hitz argues that the "Hollywood picture" of an intellectual, like the genius mathematician in "A Beautiful Mind," is a distortion. The real intellectual is more like a young Einstein, a bureaucrat thinking deeply about the world, or John Baker, the office worker observing birds. This authentic intellectual life is "more extraordinary, but also more available to us in all kinds of surprising ways."

She encourages listeners to look for intellectual life in their daily lives, in the "weird relatives" who memorized poetry or the children who catalog bugs like Darwin. This helps break down false ideas of what an intellectual is and reveals that intellectual activity – thinking, reflecting, asking fundamental questions – is a basic part of being human. It's not exclusive to the smart, rich, or successful; it's happening all around us, and its humbleness gives it authenticity. For professional intellectuals, recognizing this can serve as a reminder that the true purpose of their work is not career advancement but the cultivation of this fundamental human activity.