Zena Hitz is a philosopher who teaches science and literature at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland (US). She studied Classics at Cambridge and obtained her PhD from Princeton in 2005. She is a specialist in Aristotle and his political science, virtues, character, ethics, people, and human action. Hitz is known for her public advocacy of self-learning and liberal education.
Her book Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life has made waves within academia and has been warmly received by the media for its clarity, prioritization of common sense over mainstream beliefs and its raising of questions concerning inertia, elegantly causing a powerful disruption.
Hitz’s words are increasingly influencing thought, with alternative proposals to what’s heard among the popular masses.
From the United States, her ideas are sprinkling across the ocean and making a splash within the public opinion, steadily challenging the thought ecosystem of today which mutes any belief out of sync with what is blasted as “mainstream” by the powers of influence.
Lost in Thought is already available in seven languages, shedding light on questions readers increasingly are asking. In January Hitz will publish a new essay –A Philosopher Looks at the Religious Life – where she will focus her reflections on Christian asceticism and its effects on everyday life.
— Is Lost in Thought a stop towards the depths of human beings to generate a reset?
— All renewal, regeneration, etc. comes from our depths. That’s why it is important to “stock” our depths, so to speak, with books, art, music, images, ideas, and reflections on experience. I don’t like the term “reset” as it makes it sound like a simple new beginning. But we have to begin again and again, renewing ourselves whenever the knots get too tangled or when the narrative stops making sense.
“Our fear of fragility stunts our growth. You can’t grow if you’re trapped in an illusion”
— Because intellectual life feeds us, but it has no prestige…
— Yes, that’s why renewal is required. We operate in the realm of prestige — prestige is leverage, and we need that even for good things. But we get distracted by prestige, and lose track of what “feeds us” as you say, what we care about most. The sources of the things we care about are like underground rivers. If we lose touch with them, we dry up.
— Many influencers invite us to do what our heart dictates, as if emotion and passion were the best guides for our biographies, and reasons were the least of it.
— Yes, I think they are confusing an unavoidable fact with a moral principle. I can only do what I want. I’m limited by my own desires. But emotion and passion in themselves are chaos. They have to be guided by reason, shaped toward rational goals. This is Plato’s great insight.
— Others insist on ignoring the weight of emotions and passions, as if they were all bad and contaminate reason in an intellectualism that, in reality, also ignores man.
— This too is a mistake. Again, emotions and passions are chaos. But reason can also be chaotic. Is the reasoning open-ended and true, aimed at truth? Or is it a rationalization for a pre-ordained— motivated — conclusion? Many proponents of rationality pretend to be doing the former, but are really doing the latter. But motivated reason is just passion with salad dressing. What we need is real, open-ended reasoning, guided by our passionate commitment to truth and to the human good.
— Does the essential thing happen in the heart or in the head?
— The heart is the guide for the head. We always think in a direction. But not everything in the heart is the same – that is the mistake of the sentimentalists or the promoters of the passions. The biggest danger is not reason and not the passions, but the automatic, the default, the easy, and the comfortable. Do we want to spend all day on social media and all night on streaming video? Surely not, but it is comfortable for us to do so – it is a default mode.
All of the things that really matter to human beings, all of the things that make us flourish, all require discipline. That is the eternal strength of the defenders of reason – our desires and passions need to be shaped, guided, and restricted. You can see that in athletic success or in true love as much as in the life of the mind. The fundamental question of how we should live is Socrates’ question, a question of reason. But the answer has to satisfy the heart, and so we need to engage all of our faculties in the pursuit of that question.
“The danger of the 21st century is a kind of frivolity. We do not take the question of transcendence seriously”
— What is balance and what does it have to do with wisdom?
— I don’t know whether balance in itself is worth very much. In his famous discussion of the “golden mean”, Aristotle says that there is no mean for vices like adultery or murder. There isn’t any balance for noxious things, or between the noxious and the wholesome. A life that is only 20% crime or vice or self-destruction is not balanced.
What orders our lives is our ultimate end. What are we living for? What sorts of people do we want to become? We live in the tension between our highest values and our distractions. Either we are making progress or we are slipping back. Wisdom means knowing what matters most and accepting the degree to which we can attain it on our own.
— Social media have led to the growth of double lives: what we live and what we show we live. How can we give prestige to the relevance of the inner life?
— There’s a paradox there, isn’t there? If the inner life has prestige, it becomes yet another consumer identity, a posture or a pretense. I don’t think we can give prestige to inwardness without hollowing it out. The traditional way inwardness is preserved is through special institutions that operate outside the market system: religious institutions and educational institutions, for instance. If we treat contemplative monks as exemplars of an inner life, it was never true that monks had a higher prestige than courtiers or wealthy merchants. But a healthy respect for monks acknowledges that inwardness matters, maybe even that it matters most. Our culture needs to be heterogenous. Not everything can be bought and sold. Adam Smith understood this. He argued that widespread education was needed to counter the dehumanizing effects of the division of labor. Unfortunately, his modern followers have forgotten it.
— In your personal story, the inner life and its defense has a lot to do with the experience of fragility. When we know we are vulnerable, do we mysteriously grow inside?
— I might put it differently: our fear of fragility – of death, illness, humiliation and other forms of vulnerability – stunts our growth. We set up enormous internal and exterior obstacles to avoid confronting vulnerability. We middle-class, comfortable people live in a web of fantasies and delusions about our strength and power. So yes, we grow when we are vulnerable, but that’s because that’s when we’re in touch with reality. You can’t grow if you’re trapped in an illusion. Learning starts from the truth about oneself.
“Culture without inwardness is similar to what Hobbes called ‘the war of all against all’”
— Why does thinking help us to be freer, even from the judgment of others?
— It is easiest and most comfortable, most automatic, to live by pleasing others. We please our parents, our teachers, our bosses and supervisors, our friends and spouses: we try to be what they want us to be. Thought and reflection develop us as individuals. The use of the mind can bind us with alternative communities, the people of the past, writers across the world, anyone with a shared interest or experience. I call this an “inner life” in the book, but it is in fact another mode of connection with others. We need to develop our own resources in order to be able to think and imagine other possibilities for ourselves, and to find the courage to live out those possibilities.
— Are goodness, truth and beauty still transcendental and operative in the 21st century?
— To be honest, I’m not sure. I follow George Steiner in his account of the transcendent. For Steiner, art and thinking require the transcendent. But that requirement can be an absence as well as a presence. That for me explains the value of dark works. Is Shakespeare’s Macbeth about truth, beauty, and goodness? Are Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels? I am not sure. But they reach for something more, for insight into the way things are, and they do so with gravity and seriousness. The danger of the 21st century is not badness, lies, or ugliness, but a kind of frivolity. We do not take the question of transcendence seriously. But without searching for transcendence, whatever the result, we will lose art, thinking, all of the fruits of human culture.
— What are the hidden pleasures of intellectual life?
— The hidden pleasures of the intellectual life are just the pleasures or joys of intellectual activity that has no outward result. Since the book came out many people have told me stories of grandmothers or uncles who lived simple lives outwardly but who nurtured serious intellectual interests in literature, science, or history. The hidden life of learning is what matters about it, what justifies even the most arcane academic work. We think of intellectual life as mattering because of its “impact”, but impact is in fact a distraction from the real value of the life of the mind.
— If intellectual life is a bubble of individualism, prejudices and obsessions, then…
— The question is, are we building the bubble or pushing its limits? We live in a competitive social milieu, and our nature is competitive and exclusive. The love of learning co-exists with other loves that are hostile to it. Our hope is to seek awareness of our bubble, our self-indulgent concern with our own individual status, our prejudices and our obsessions with status. If we seek out the reality of things, we will piece by piece, over a long time, free ourselves from the bubble.
— Is it possible to be a protagonist of culture without inner life and intellectual life?
— I’d say no, it isn’t possible. Culture needs to be fed from the insides of people. Otherwise, these days, we end up with consumer “culture”: buying and selling stances and identities, trading one surface matter for another. Culture without inwardness is similar to what Hobbes called “the war of all against all.”
— Is the education our children receive aimed at intellectual success?
— I can only speak for education in the United States, and even then, only from a partial view. What I see is education aimed at conformity and slavery to corporate masters. Intellectual success can be a real human good, to be used for competition or status, or for growth and service. But what we cultivate now has nothing intellectual about it, and the success sought for is a kind of obedience, submission to economic, psychological and spiritual control that is increasingly totalizing.
“Reading seriously on its own is already very much counter-cultural”
— Is the University up to the task?
— Not at the moment. The university is a disaster. But the university still holds many resources that will be difficult to impossible to replace. My hope is that we will see enough reform in universities to make it possible to keep intellectual life alive for future generations. Otherwise, we will have to try to build and preserve these resources outside of universities, and there is no way that this won’t involve tremendous and permanent losses.
— You say that “reading is the great act of self-liberation of the individual”. What readings do you recommend to begin to liberate ourselves as people swimming as best, we can in a liquid society?
— Of course, I recommend the classics, Plato’s dialogues on the trial and death of Socrates, the great Russian novels, the Hebrew Bible, etc. But I also recommend reading more contemporary memoirs, the most inspiring of which usually feature reading. The Autobiography of Malcolm X is a favorite, as is Huey Newton, Revolutionary Suicide. Richard Wright’s Black Boy also tells a story of self-liberation through reading. Reading seriously on its own is already very much counter-cultural, and finding one’s own way through a literature one loves is its own reward.
— What contemporary realities clog our ability to think and enjoy intellectual life?
— The Internet is a profound and serious threat to the intellectual and creative development of our humanity. We probably cannot abandon it, but we must individually and collectively develop strategies for using it that blunt its destructive and noxious power over us.
“Real knowledge requires our own personal grasp of the truth of something, which requires that we analyze, demonstrate, discover for ourselves”
— Does the crisis of the Humanities in Western education call for a revolution?
— I’m not sure what revolution would look like. Certainly, the crisis calls for action, the action of reform, where possible, and the action of building new institutions, where it is not. Paying attention to something gives it more power. Ignoring something takes away its power. The revolution I’d look for is the one that ignores existing authorities in order to build its own authority based on the provision of the human good.
— Will we be less democratic if we abandon the Humanities for the efficient sciences?
— The future tense is not appropriate here! We are already much less democratic thanks to our abandoning the humanities. Education for “job training” means nothing other than education to serve the corporate overlords, to learn how to do the jobs that they have decided should count as jobs. We are losing and have lost our own voice in deciding how our communities should operate. That voice can be recovered through the humanities, as well as in other ways.
— Will contemplation become a trend out of sheer human necessity?
— Alas, I fear not! We are capable of living in truly sub-human ways. The necessity of contemplation needs social support, community support, to be seen and addressed.
— Has Google changed the way we take on knowledge?
— Yes, of course! It has done a great deal of damage to our concept of knowledge. “Knowledge” becomes what a nameless authority says without evidence. Real knowledge requires our own personal grasp of the truth of something, which requires that we analyze, demonstrate, discover for ourselves. I find it terrifying the extent to which young people – and older people – think that it is unnecessary to look at evidence, find proofs, weigh plausibility for oneself.
— Is your personal story -tragedy, conversion, reset- the best chapter of your essay? If the ideas we bring to the world do not arise from our own experience, have we fallen into intellectual posturing, with no hook?
— I think that the personal story is the part of the book most people find most helpful. When I was setting out to write the book, I read some of the past classics of this genre, Pieper’s Leisure and the Basis of Culture, Sertillanges’ The Intellectual Life. These older books are written with a kind of professorial authority that does not exist any longer. The fact that I have had an excellent education, or that I have years of professional experience, does not give me any special weight in making my case. That might be a good thing, really, because it forces us to speak to our audience on the level, face to face. That is what I was looking to do by beginning with a memoir. “This is who I am; this is what I’ve experienced; take it or leave it.” So much communication now is manipulative. We are constantly talked down to, as if we can’t understand the grounds or the reasons for changing our views. I wanted to write in a way that invited readers to think for themselves. If intellectual life is a human thing, in the way I argue it is, anyone ought to be able to see it, without deferring to authorities or being sold a bill of goods.