Lost in Thought

But first, what seems like a digression. “What did you think about the book? What was good about it? Bad about it?” Every time I am teaching a Great Books class or having a discussion with a reading group, that is always the first question I ask. It is the single most important question I ask in any discussion, not because all by itself it generates the best and most thoughtful answers, but because it centers the discussion exactly where it belongs. A person reads a book, and the single most important thing about that interaction is the effect the book has on the Reader.

The best reason to read books, particularly Great Books, is because they force us to confront our own thoughts, to think about what we believe, and to wrestle with the unanswerable questions. We become deeper, more fully human, as our interior life develops book by book. Yes, we can read books for information, we can read them to know what other people said, we can study them to do well on a test or a paper, but all of those purposes for reading a book get in the way of discovering the most important thing in a book. There is simply no pleasure like developing your own thoughts on the questions which matter most by letting your mind wander over the best that has been thought and said.

Convincing people that cultivating the joy of learning should be the real aim of education in an uphill battle. Most people think of education as something with a tangible purpose, usually related to employment. Class by class, book by book, indeed blog post by blog post, I wage my cheerful battle, constantly exclaiming: Look! This book is really amazing!

You can thus imagine my joy in reading Zena Hitz’s Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. It is a wonderful book containing in its depths a new way to make the case for the type of education that matters most, the type of education that is not contained in a college classroom.

Stylistically, the book is marvelous; Hitz’s prose has an erudite charm, patiently inviting the Reader to join her in developing an intellectual life. Imagine a bookish dinner-table conversation full of wit and insight, and you are imagining having Hitz at the table.

Hitz begins by noting that much learning is done for instrumental purposes, “fame, prestige, fortune, and social use.” Those purposes are nice and all, but if you are learning to achieve any of those things, you miss the joy of an intellectual life. The other type of learning is purely for its own sake. It is not a means to an end; it is the end. Convincing people to learn for instrumental purposes is easy. Pay $70,000/year for four years, get a diploma, and then get that job with that nice salary. Convincing people to learn purely for the sake of learning, to read books purely for the joy of reading books, to think thoughts purely because it is pleasurable to do so…that is the harder task.

For the most part, the modern college is of little help in teaching the pleasures of learning for its own sake. As Hitz notes:

If intellectual life essentially involves a reaching out past the surface, a questioning of appearances, a longing for more than is evident, then it has next to nothing to do with what is commonly called “knowledge”—the absorption of correct opinions. And yet correct opinions are what our contemporary intellectual institutions traffic in: the correct opinions about literature, or history, or science, or mathematics. Hence the universality of the bullet point, delivered in a college lecture, whose temporary memorization is the condition for the above-average grade. Hence too the administrative emphasis on learning outcomes; hence the politicization of everything, the reduction of learning to its social and political results.

Colleges have a hard time escaping this trap. Even when they realize they have replaced learning with propaganda, they end up advocating more “viewpoint diversity,” which as Hitz astutely notes is “nearly as superficial and dehumanizing as the forms of indoctrination it means to replace.” Now instead of memorizing one viewpoint to be repeated on an exam, a student memorizes two or three viewpoints to be repeated on an exam, and students have no trouble figuring out which of the options is the correct one.

Learning for its own sake is much more difficult. Learning for its own sake involves removing all the exterior noise which wants to interrupt as we read and think. The exterior noise is easier to eliminate, though, than the interior noise.

Intellectual life turns out to be a sort of asceticism, a turning away from the things within ourselves. Our desires for truth, for understanding, for insight are in constant conflict with other desires: our desires for social acceptance or an easy life, a particular personal goal or a desirable political outcome….“The world” that we sought initially to escape turns out to be in us, part of our inbuilt motivations—not outside us. To exercise love of learning is to flee what is worst in us for the sake of the better, to reach for more in the face of what is not enough.

The fact that developing an intellectual life is hard is one of the reasons it is difficult to persuade people it is worth doing. We are surrounded by things designed to give immediate gratification. The constant hit of dopamine from (pick your favorite pastime) is a difficult thing to set aside for a while in order to ponder the nature of revenge or whether it was possible for the world to have never existed or what restrictions on liberty increase the common good. Asking yourself who you are and whether you have a purpose never quite seems as attractive as that thing you need to do to gain social acceptance or a pay raise or to relax at the end of the day.

This is where Hitz’s book achieves it greatness. The picture it paints of the intellectual life is sublime.

What good is intellectual life? It is a refuge from distress; a reminder of one’s dignity; a source of insight and understanding; a garden in which human aspiration is cultivated; a hollow of a wall to which one can temporarily withdraw from the current controversies to gain a broader perspective to remind oneself of one’s universal human heritage. All this makes clear at the least that it is an essential good for human beings, even if one good among many.

Why does an intellectual life bring these benefits? Why does reading Great Books, reading Dickens or Tolstoy or James, and pondering them purely for the joy of doing so enhance our lives? Why is this joy different from all other joys? Why is developing an intellectual life better than watching gladiator matches or spending time on social media? “Because reality has a better chance to break through.”

Reality breaking through is an intriguing formulation. One of the most common objections I hear from students about why instrumental learning is better than learning for its own sake is the need to live in the world rather than in some lofty tower of thought. Learning how to price municipal bonds seems much more important than asking whether charging interest is inherently a form of theft which leads to figuring out the nature of property and why it exists as a concept which leads to the question of what brings human happiness. Which of those questions is “real”? Which of those questions really matters? Bond pricing formulas are easy to learn and knowing them can bring tangible financial benefits. Pondering the relationship of property to human well-being? That is a question that really matters.

Hitz ends the book wrestling with a question that has obviously troubled her for years. Is it morally acceptable to discover the hidden pleasures of the intellectual life and then live a life simply enjoying those pleasures? Isn’t such a life inherently self-centered? Shouldn’t we be living our lives to help others?

Hitz makes a stab at an answer which clearly doesn’t entirely satisfy her. (By the way, another one of the marvelous things about this book is that Hitz puts her own unanswered questions on display. It is so refreshing to see an author acknowledge that the book you are reading does not solve all of life’s mysteries.) If you want to help others, Hitz argues, you can better do so if you have discovered the intellectual life. The argument is subtle, to be sure, but learning in order to help others is instrumental and misses the real value of learning. Learning for its own sake allows you to see reality, to see the things that really matter. Having seen those things, you will be in a much better place to help others. The tricky thing if you want to help others is approaching the intellectual life for its own sake and not simply for the sake of this other goal of helping others.

I think Hitz’s argument here is right as far as it goes, but because this is the question that troubles her so much, she misses the real force of her own argument. Imagine somebody taking Hitz seriously and developing an intellectual life by reading Great Books and thinking long and hard about deep questions. Over time, reality breaks through and this person discovers answers to deep questions and leads a satisfying intellectual life. What will this person do then? Isn’t it obvious that the answer is “Well it depends on the person and the answers that person found to deep questions”?

One treat which is remarkably obvious to all those who have found the hidden pleasures of the intellectual life is that there is not a one size fits all answer to how life should be led. Indeed, it is one of the joys of an intellectual life that all answers are provisional, that the questions never stop. Does an intellectual life lead to a conviction that helping others is important? Obviously, for some people it does lead to that conclusion. Those people, having thought deeply, seeing reality, will then launch out on a lifetime of helping others, not because they started with believing that this is something that would bring acclaim or assuage guilt, but because having tasted the depths of their own humanity, they realize that helping others is the activity an intellectual should do. Will everyone discover this? Maybe not. Doesn’t the fact that we might come to different answers increase the joy of the intellectual journey?

Hitz did not need to be concerned that her argument does not prove that the intellectual life necessarily leads to a life of service to others. Hitz’s life provides the argument that some people will indeed find that answer. Hitz wants to lead a life in service to others, she uncovers the joy of the intellectual life, and the result is a book which provides a magnificent service to others. Everyone who reads this book and is persuaded to take just one more step along this journey owes her a debt of gratitude.