Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

Abstract

Like any great book, Zena Hitz’s Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life should make the reader extraordinarily uncomfortable. On one level, it is a powerful, yet paradoxical, call to action through inaction, a tribute to the broad utility of the life of the mind by virtue of its raw and unapologetic uselessness. In this regard, the book will please, flatter, and justify the professions of many contemporary academics. Yet on a deeper level, this self-congratulatory panegyric to contemplation is highly deceptive. The book is also an outright accusation, not against those the reader would likely suspect—practical-minded school administrators, politicians, business leaders, and lazy students—but against these very same academics who claim to support and embody the intellectual life it promotes. Among the many virtues of the book, this challenge is the most necessary. It amounts to an open critique of all of the ways would-be intellectuals fail to pursue truth honestly and without self-deception. While the economic and political pressures on academia are well known and much discussed, few before Hitz have called attention to the responsibility intellectuals themselves bear in carrying on the mantle of free and passionate inquiry, devoid of ideological trappings or resultsoriented pragmatism. The usefulness of the intellectual life, for Hitz, “lies in its cultivation of broader and richer ways of being human” (p. 188). It consists of an openness to reality in all its dimensions. But the important thing is that “reality is not up to us” (p. 86). Because of this powerlessness in the face of truth, the intellectual life requires a discipline of mind and body—a sort of asceticism of spirit, as she calls it—that submits itself to all the peculiar ways truth reveals itself. This spirit therefore entails an avoidance of the psychological temptations specific to academic life— for instance, the feelings of superiority, power, and intoxication one experiences by seeing oneself as the possessor of knowledge. Who can deny they have not felt the self-satisfaction of improved social status our positions bring? Is there not at bottom a slight ember of narcissism in all we do as intellectuals? Hitz is more than aware of the ego’s secret machinations as it tries to distort and corrupt what Bernard Lonergan in Insight calls “the pure disinterested desire to know” (University of Toronto Press, 2005). For Hitz, we must, as the heirs of millennia of International Journal of Christianity & Education