Lost in Thought

The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

Zena Hitz

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691189239
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

An invitation to readers from every walk of life to rediscover the impractical splendors of a life of learning In an overloaded, superficial, technological world, in which almost everything and everybody is judged by its usefulness, where can we turn for escape, lasting pleasure, contemplation, or connection to others? While many forms of leisure meet these needs, Zena Hitz writes, few experiences are so fulfilling as the inner life, whether that of a bookworm, an amateur astronomer, a birdwatcher, or someone who takes a deep interest in one of countless other subjects. Drawing on inspiring examples, from Socrates and Augustine to Malcolm X and Elena Ferrante, and from films to Hitz's own experiences as someone who walked away from elite university life in search of greater fulfillment, Lost in Thought is a passionate and timely reminder that a rich life is a life rich in thought.Today, when even the humanities are often defended only for their economic or political usefulness, Hitz says our intellectual lives are valuable not despite but because of their practical uselessness. And while anyone can have an intellectual life, she encourages academics in particular to get back in touch with the desire to learn for its own sake, and calls on universities to return to the person-to-person transmission of the habits of mind and heart that bring out the best in us.Reminding us of who we once were and who we might become, Lost in Thought is a moving account of why renewing our inner lives is fundamental to preserving our humanity.

CHAPTER 1

A Refuge from the World

Now the members of this small group have tasted how sweet and blessed a possession philosophy is, and at the same time they have also seen the madness of the multitude and realized, in a word, that no one does anything sane, sound, or right in public affairs and that there is no ally with whom they might go to the aid of justice and survive. Instead they’d perish before they could profit either their city or their friends, and be useless both to themselves and others, just like a man who has fallen among wild animals and is neither willing to join them in doing injustice nor sufficiently strong to oppose the general savagery alone.

For all these reasons I say the philosopher remains quiet and minds his own affairs. Like someone who takes refuge under a little wall from a storm of dust or hail driven by the wind, seeing others filled with lawlessness, he is satisfied if he can somehow lead his present life free from injustice and impious acts and depart from it with good hope, blameless and content.

—PLATO, REPUBLIC 6, 496D

The World

In a luxury apartment building in Paris, the residents—civil servants, lawyers, aristocrats—prepare for a day of meetings. An hour spent with the newspapers is the prologue to conversations with lobbyists, legislators, board members, clients, partners in enterprise. Chips move on the game board. Victories turn to losses, losses to victories. The game plan on which everything was staked shifts; another game plan is adopted. Buzzwords are replaced by slogans, slogans by buzzwords. Someone makes money, someone loses money, someone wins a vote, another loses his seat. The men of consequence (they are, generally, men) return home to wives riddled with neuroses, seeking one salve for anxiety after another: special diets, yoga, psychotherapy, medication, jogging, adultery, mindfulness. Their children too are anxious, working around the clock for the approval of their teachers, hoping to advance with honors to the next stage. Their futures stretch before them as an indefinite series of prizes to be won or lost, with infinite and infinitely fascinating gradations of value in between. In the early mornings come invisible cleaning ladies to scrub toilets and do laundry, plumbers to service the pipes, electricians to maintain the wires. The locksmith oils a door and changes a lock. Nameless drivers pull up and pull away. The concierge of the building takes notes from the residents, calls the workmen, instructs the cleaning lady, collects the mail.

Ancient Athens has been made rich by the spoils of empire. The men who beat back the Persian invaders, invented scientific speculation, and wrote magnificent tragedies are now dead or nearly so. Their wealthy sons waste away their time in chariot racing and horsemanship, or they learn the arts of speaking in order to squeeze out a greater share of the winnings of war. The community that once shared its burdens and distributed its spoils has divided into bands of rich and poor, each looking sharply to the disadvantage of the other, each awaiting its chance.

In Roman Palestine, a very young woman, having reached the age of fertility, prepares for marriage. She will be transferred from the service of her parents to that of her husband, expected to bear him sons until she dies. Perhaps then her husband will take another wife. When her sons are grown, they too will find wives to provide them sons, and so on and so on, ad infinitum.

In central Europe at the turn of the twentieth century, scientific discovery is at an apex. The cell and the bacterium have become visible, along with the cures for numerous diseases and infirmities. Electric and magnetic forces have been captured by mathematics; new theories promise to unify physics and chemistry and to demystify the nature of light. As the scientific understanding of the structure of nature explodes in growth, so too do its uses, in the removal of what had seemed eternal obstacles to human flourishing in health, safety, and ease of activity. The fruits of this work grow and fortify the armies of Europe, a busy, relentless buzz underneath unprecedented peace, prosperity, and an extraordinary blossoming of human culture, music, art, literature, and scholarship.

In the fascist regimes of Italy, Spain, and wartime France, political leaders fill the airwaves with a thick fog of lies. The enemy is at the gates. War makes men. A new world is possible. It is expected that the lies will provide the content for any conversation and will shape the choices and form the lives of the citizens. A network of informants relays to the secret police any sign that the lies are disbelieved. Brutal prisons and camps hide the sufferings of the dissenters from view.

In the interwar period in the American North, a young African American man has few prospects. In his childhood his angry and defiant father is murdered by white men, and his family dissolved by the local welfare office. The highest achieving student in his all-white class, he is expected to become a carpenter or a janitor. Angry and defiant like his father, he immerses himself in the hustles of New York City and Boston, selling drugs, procuring women, playing the numbers. He is arrested and sent to prison. He lives in a cell with a bucket for a toilet, his drug habit fed by hustling prison officers.

Naples after the war is beaten down by brutal poverty. The criminal networks own every profitable business. Craftsmen who once prized their own work are tormented by the bitterness of not being able to support their families. Their frustration turns to violence against their wives, children, and neighbors. Women and children whose husbands or fathers are dead or imprisoned are subject to every kind of predation. The past is never talked about, and the future is never imagined. Violence provides revenge, entertainment, consolation. It is sought for its own sake. Even school competitions turn into street fights.

In what follows I refer to “the world” as something that needs to be escaped. By this phrase I do not mean the whole world, the splendid wilderness filled with animals, the entire spectrum of human community with its gardens, farms, and families. I mean the social and political world, which more often resembles these examples than not. The world in this sense is governed by ambition, competition, and idle thrill seeking. It is a marketplace where everything can be bought and sold. Even the most precious goods are reduced to products or to spectacles. Human beings are primarily vehicles to achieve the ends of others. Violence waits at the end of every downward spiral and lurks hidden behind every apparent success. The world in this sense is the human default, but it by no means exhausts human possibilities.

What would it mean to escape the world? What kind of refuge from it is possible?

The Bookworm’s Escape

We are only a few pages into the body of this book and I have already irritated you by asking whether and how escape from the world is possible. You want to know how the world can be changed so that no one has to escape from it. Keep the question simmering on a back burner. Indulge me and imagine that, for the time being, the routes of change that you envision are blocked.

I begin with the escape of a fictional bookworm.¹ Mona Achache’s 2009 film The Hedgehog (Le hérisson) tells the story of the friendship of three people in a block of luxury apartments in Paris.² At the center of the story is Renée, an ugly middle-aged woman of the working classes, the concierge of the building. Renée’s middle age is filmed with unsettling realism—the camera finds her heavyset figure, her unadorned face, her slouchy cardigans, and her solitary chocolate eating. Yet Renée exerts a mysterious attraction over Paloma, a twelve-year-old daughter of privilege haunted by the meaningless lives led by her family members. Paloma’s father is a government minister; her mother, a psychotherapist and professional neurotic. Left to herself, Paloma imagines a world without competition and, somewhat whimsically, plots her own suicide. Renée also attracts Kakuro, the new Japanese resident in the building, who takes a romantic interest in her. It is a shock to the viewer that such an uncinematic figure should be a romantic lead.

Renée’s filmic predecessor in raw middle age is Emmi, the romantic lead of R. W. Fassbinder’s 1974 masterpiece Ali: Angst Essen Seele Auf (Ali: Fear Eats Soul).³ Unlike contemporary Hollywood images of middle age—for instance, the playwright played by Diane Keaton in Something’s Gotta Give (2003), wealthy, accomplished, charming, and still sexy—Fassbinder’s Emmi is fat, wrinkled, silly, and a cleaning lady, at the bottom of the social barrel. Emmi falls in love with a younger Moroccan guest worker, to the disgust of her xenophobic children, as well as her neighbors and coworkers. Renée falls in love with Kakuro, breaking through the invisible wall between her and the building’s wealthy residents. The love affair in both cases amounts to a real human connection that stands out from their appearance-driven social environments.

The twist that The Hedgehog puts on this theme is that this unsettling but authentic human connection has its source and basis in the love of learning. Underneath Renée’s low social status and middle-aged ugliness, underneath her public front of crankiness and ignorance, she has a secret: she reads voraciously—great novels and philosophy, history and classics. As her neighbors chatter and posture at a dinner party upstairs, the camera cuts to Renée in private, door closed, reading philosophy alone at her dinner table. Later she is seen withdrawn behind her kitchen in a hidden chamber, stuffed with books and a reading chair. It is her secret life that attracts her Japanese suitor, as well as the protagonist of the film, Paloma. Kakuro, the suitor, recognizes who she is because her cat is named for a Tolstoy character, as are his cats. Paloma, the protagonist, realizes that Renée is a kindred spirit when she discovers a philosophical treatise accidentally left on the kitchen table. In a central scene, Paloma is in Renée’s kitchen and notices the closed door to her reading chamber. Intrigued, she asks her, “What is behind that door?” It is Renée’s hidden intellectual life, her intense focus on reading and reflection, that draws the other characters, supporting friendships that provide a refuge from the privileged bubble that surrounds them.

The intellectual life as portrayed in this film has four key features:

• It is a form of the inner life of a person, a place of retreat and reflection.

• As such it is withdrawn from the world, where “the world” is understood in its (originally Platonic, later Christian) sense as the locus of competition and struggle for wealth, power, prestige, and status.

• It is a source of dignity—made obvious in this case by the contrast to Renée’s low status as an unattractive working-class woman without children and past child-bearing age.

• It opens space for communion: it allows for profound connection between human beings.

When we cultivate an inner life, we set aside concerns for social ease or advancement. We forget, if only temporarily, the anxious press of necessities. Inwardness and withdrawal can have spatial manifestations: the thoughts and imaginings that constitute one’s inner life can be hidden, unspoken, invisible. We may withdraw from the world to an actually enclosed space, away from public view, like Renée’s secret reading room. Or we may seek out a mountain retreat, a monastery, or a college campus removed from the city, a place that seems a world unto itself.

But it is crucial not to take the spatial metaphors too seriously. One sign of withdrawal into inner life is a sort of insensate stupor. In his Symposium Plato describes his teacher Socrates all dressed up for a dinner party, suddenly lost in thought in the entryway.⁴ According to the historian Plutarch, the great mathematician Archimedes was so absorbed in his proofs that he did not notice that the Romans had invaded and conquered his city, and was killed by a soldier when he insisted on finishing his work.⁵ Later writers gave him last words: “Don’t disturb my circles.”⁶

Socrates is at a party, in a city, and Archimedes could as well have been absorbed in the mathematical patterns of the advancing troop formation. Yet surely they provide paradigmatic instances of withdrawal. Withdrawal from the world centrally involves setting aside a set of concerns—the demands of Renée’s wealthy tenants, the watchful eyes of status-conscious dinner party guests, social and political perils, and even necessities, matters of life and death. Spatial or physical barriers are only useful aids to focus our attention, in keeping our eyes and ears from being pulled into some distraction. It is not just that learning, thinking, and reflection require a total focus. There is rather some fundamental conflict, difficult to notice and even more difficult to describe, between the desires to know, learn, and understand and desires for anything else, especially anything involving social and political life.

We might recognize from the combination of withdrawal and inwardness that we are looking at a form of leisure, at a way of being that lies beyond work, at a form of activity that is worthwhile for its own sake and that could constitute the culmination of a life. When Renée has finished the work that provides for her necessities, she does what she loves most: reading and reflection. Socrates and Archimedes forget for a time about their social uses—teaching others, challenging fellow citizens, building useful machines. They do what most defines them, what characterizes who they are most of all.

The inwardness of the mind at leisure unlocks the dignity that is so often denied or diminished by social life and social circumstances. Socrates is, after all, a poor and barefoot misfit, but his commitment to an intense form of leisured inquiry makes him seem more than human. Renée’s withdrawn inwardness has the character of defiance: she refuses to be defined by her low social status. The defiance follows involuntary failure, for no child dreams of growing up to become the concierge of an apartment building. Yet the power of attraction she exerts over her high-class neighbors suggests that poverty is only one way to be dehumanized by one’s social status. The wealthy put their worth in magnificent real estate, private jets, designer clothes, elaborately subtle forms of food. But a human being is not a glass skyscraper or a gleaming sports car, however well cosmetic technology achieves that appearance. Human beings long for, need beyond words, something that exceeds the merely material or the merely social. High status as they are, Paloma and Kakuro are seeking their own dignity when they reach out of their social class and befriend the concierge downstairs.

Intellectual life is a way to recover one’s real value when it is denied recognition by the power plays and careless judgments of social life. That is why it is a source of dignity. In ordinary social life, knowledge is exchanged for money or for power, for approval or for a sense of belonging, to mark out superiority in status or to achieve a feeling of importance. These are our common currencies, our ways of advancing ourselves or diminishing others. But since a human being is more than his or her social uses, other, more fundamental ways of relating are possible. These forms of communion can consist in the joyful friendship of bookworms or the gritty pursuit of the truth about something together with people one would otherwise find unbearable.

If there were no such thing as a core of humanity that we all shared in common, we could not make sense of our experience of connecting with one another at the depths. So, too, if there were not something in us beyond our social val...