The Deliberate Owl

"I sensed that I belonged to a broader community of human beings than the community of scholars. What was the point of studying philosophy and classics? What conceivable difference could it make in the face of the suffering world?" —Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought, p11

It can be easy to assume that all our reading, learning, and studying must be in service to some other end—getting a raise, switching careers, leveling up in skills at work or at home. Pursuing knowledge for its own sake, especially esoteric knowledge, with no instrumental purpose in mind, can feel like an unreachable luxury or simply pointless.

Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life by Zena Hitz (Princeton University Press, 2020) argues that learning is of value even without a marketable end goal. It's a book about the love of learning, the point of learning, and what learning is when pursued for its own sake. I started the book in agreement with Hitz, and I enjoyed her arguments, as they reminded me of the importance of pursuing the intellectual life and one's own interests.

One interesting thing about this book, for me, was the humanities perspective. I have read plenty of popular science nonfiction, plenty of books aimed at the business, psychology, and parenting audiences. The way Hitz interrogates her subject is different. She shares anecdotes and reasons from examples to universals. Instead of saying, "Studies show…", Hitz references Aristotle and meanders at the question. For instance, when discussing motivation for learning, instead of asking what science says, she looks at examples of people learning and wonders, is that good? Is that learning for its own sake? Why are people learning in thee cases? What are the counterexamples? It's a different way of looking at the same topics I've been reading about, and I found the change of perspective refreshing.

One highlight was the prologue, during which Hitz shared personal stories. It was more memoir, less argument. I like seeing others' intellectual journeys—here, how Hitz went into academia, out of it, and back—because it helps me reflect on my own intellectual journey, my own path through academic circles, and reminds me of what I liked about academia, what I miss, and why I'm glad I left.

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Disconnect of academia from life

On the topic of academia, Hitz explains how disconnected her work felt from the struggles of real life. I remember feeling that too, even though my work was more practical and applied than hers. The MIT Media Lab, where I attended grad school, was also different from most of academia in its commitment to building things for the world. People tossed around the catchphrase "demo or die" (and later, "deploy or die")—emphasizing that projects needed to be realizable, not just theory; needed to impact the world, not stay in the lab. Even so, social robots and AI often feel completely unrelated to daily life in Idaho, in a smaller city, homeschooling, hanging out with crunchy mamas and homesteaders, far from the high-tech world and academic society that immersed me in Boston. It has been difficult to find an intellectual community of the sort that permeated MIT. As Hitz described, grad school was uniquely a place of intellectual life.

Hitz also discussed how competitive academia felt. I think the competition is far more pronounced in some fields than in others—especially in the humanities, as Hitz found. I didn't experience as much competition and I think that is because my field, human-robot interaction (HRI) was (i) small, (ii) newer, (iii) highly multidisciplinary, and (iv) difficult without a team effort. Many people knew each other well, having studied together as students, or having trained each other's undergrads or grads students or postdocs at different stages of their careers. Doing a successful project requires a mix of technical and nontechnical knowledge, managing robots, computer systems, design, experimental protocols, psychological or educational theories, and more. It was hard to know everything or do everything by yourself. In addition, unlike Hitz, my research was often motivated intrinsically, learning for the sake of learning rather than for the sake of academic achievement. Many of my projects and side projects were sparked by wondering how things worked, hunches about behavior and human psychology, a drive to understand how people work.

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Diving in: Motivation for learning and teleology

Hitz spent a large portion of the book exploring people's motivation for learning. Why learn? She distinguishes between learning for instrumental purposes and learning for the sake of learning. As noted earlier, she takes a humanities approach, meandering instead of pointing at the psychological science of learning and motivation. I expected her to discuss extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation, since that distinction is almost exactly what she's talking about, but it never came up—perhaps because the theory comes from outside her expertise. She's a humanities scholar. Hitz even wonders at natural needs people have that might lead them to learning for its own sake, which sounded a bit like self-determination theory to me, but again, psychological science is not her ballpark.

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Hitz finds it easy to understand extrinsic motivation. Learning for an instrumental end, such as getting a raise, switching careers, or leveling up your skills in a sport, has a clear purpose. She struggles with intrinsic motivation—the whole book is her struggle to understand intrinsic motivation. Hitz writes,

"We tend to think of the objects of our desires as items in a restaurant buffet—perhaps some of this, perhaps some of that. But our desires and their objects are more like rivers. They have a force and pressure all their own. Once we set out on them, they pull us along in a particular direction, opening up possibilities to us that we did not expect or choose." —Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought, p31

She argues that something in us wants to learn for its own sake, "even if we embark on that learning for the sake of some smaller end" (p29). And this telos, this final end that we are drawn toward, is why we pursue learning for its own sake. It's why we are intrinsically motivated to pursue leisure activities. She asks, what is that ultimate end for humankind? What is our personal highest good that we are drawn towards? She suggests that we are drawn toward whatever we think happiness is; of course, our views of happiness could be wrong, misguided, and ultimately dissatisfying. She describes Aristotle's views:

"Do you work for the sake of work, or as Aristotle argues, do you work for the sake of leisure? And what does count as leisure? Leisure is an inward space whose use could count as the culmination of all our endeavors. For Aristotle, only contemplation—the activity of seeing and understanding and savoring the world as it is—could be the ultimately satisfying use of leisure."—Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought, p36

I mean, of course Aristotle thought contemplation was our end goal; he was a philosopher and contemplating was his favorite thing. Hitz, however, is a Catholic convert. She doesn't outright say that God, and attempting to understand God, are humans' telos, but I think that is exactly what she means. Since she is writing toward an academic, i.e. generally secular audience, she mostly keeps her faith to herself in the book. Instead, she says that learning is to escape the world of ourselves to whatever is better.

"Perhaps we ought to think of intellectual life as having not so much an object as a direction: toward the general past to the specific, the universe will beyond the particular, the reality behind the illusion, the beauty beneath the ugliness, the peace underneath violence—we seek the pattern instances, the instance hidden by the pattern." —Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought, p94

Hitz argues that our inner life is a place of retreat and reflection, withdrawn from the world, a source of dignity, a space for communion with other humans. She says,

"From the space of retreat, emerges poetry, mathematics, and distilled wisdom articulated in words or manifested silently in action." —Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought, p185

and

"The social use of intellectual life lies in its cultivation of broader and richer ways of being human." —Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought, p188

Throughout the rest of the book, Hitz discusses the role of seeking truth, how her theory plays into politics, what good work is, the virtue of seriousness, ways to achieve a good life, how service to others improves oneself, and much more.

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The usefulness of wildflowers

I read this book at a good time. This year, I developed an interest in identifying local wildflowers. Is this useful? I don't know. But I think Hitz would say that the usefulness or uselessness of the information doesn't matter. I'm pursuing knowledge, which can be a good in itself. I have some instrumental uses in mind: I want to learn which plants are edible, and what other uses they may have. I want to be able to teach my kids about these plants. But also: I simply want to understand more about my local ecosystem.

Each new flower I find is a puzzle to solve. Which attributes are present? What lookalikes does this genus have? Which species are present to Idaho, per the Idaho Fish and Game website—and thus, is my tentative identification even reasonable? It's satisfying to find an answer, even if sometimes it is a tentative answer. For a couple flowers, I nailed the genus, but it's too hard to distinguish the species. Too many exist in our area that have highly technical differences that are not easy to spot with an untrained eye. Besides, as David Chapman wrote somewhere in his book Meaningness, the categorization is inherently nebulous. The category boundaries can get fuzzy, especially when looking at varieties within a species.

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Lost in Thought Book club reaction

My book club enjoyed Lost in Thought immensely. The book prompted deep thinking and a good discussion. I highly recommend it as a book club pick! That said, the consensus was that the book was hard to get through. Hitz's writing style was heavily "erudite academic"; it was excruciatingly clear that she had previously written elite humanities papers, and would have benefited from clarity and brevity. The prologue, with Hitz's personal stories, was a highlight for everyone.

The book includes a list of discussion questions, which you can also find here.

"To read and inquire as a free adult is to take on the awesome responsibility of allowing oneself to be changed." —Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought, pp.79-80

Lost in Thought Book club discussion questions

In addition to the provided discussion questions, here are more:

1. Is it important to cultivate an intellectual life that is a refuge from daily life? For instance, to read and think about things that have absolutely no obvious relationship to your career or current events, versus purely for joy? Why, or why not?
2. Is useless learning valuable? Should education be practical, in schools or in daily life?
3. In the prologue on page 9, Hitz describes the competitive culture of academia in the humanities. If you have spent any time in academia, what was your experience like?
4. In the prologue, Hitz reflects on the amount of reading, thinking, and learning she did during her childhood. When and how did your hidden life of the mind begin?
5. On page 40-42, Hitz describes the lack of leisure time in many modern lifestyles and says leisure thrives with "free time, exposure to the outdoors, and a certain mental emptiness." What is your lifestyle like? Do you have time for leisure? What challenges do you face in making time for leisure? What activities do you do for leisure?
6. On page 53, Hitz discusses the world as something to be escaped. She poses the question: what would it mean to escape the world? What kind of refuge from it is possible, if any?
7. On page 64, I was reminded of the research on boredom and creativity. Quiet moments are needed for memory to form, for connections to be made, for ideas to take root. What has your experience been with boredom, worldly cloisters, creativity, and the life of the mind? There is a quote from Einstein about how "modern methods of instruction" seem to strangle curiosity and inquiry. This seems to be true still—and relates to the research on intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation, and the problems of motivation in modern schools, and the success of homeschooling and unschooling. And later, on page 67, Hitz links separation from social pressure to the pursuit of what matters instead of the pursuit of worldly things. What about you? Why do you pursue the activities or learning that you do?
8. On page 65, Hitz talks about failure and inwardness. Has failure been a road to inwardness for you?
9. Hitz quotes Einstein regarding resisting social pressure, and links this to his ability to be inward, to have a meta view or vantage different from others who are in the thick of things. What has your experience been with resisting social pressure? Do you agree or disagree with Hitz?
10. Throughout the first chapter, Hitz provides examples of an interior life often cultivated in extreme circumstances. How do we develop an interior life or inwardness in our mundane lives?
11. On page 97, Hitz relates a quote from Irina Ratushinskaua about the benefits of a turbulent life. Do you agree that when things are easy, people lose their love of life? Why or why not?
12. At the end of the first chapter, Hitz asks whether the pursuit of understanding or learning for the sake of cultivating our capacity to love is more primary, and she does not answer this question for us. What do you think?
13. On page 147, Hitz asks, "If we love truth so much, if our happiness consists in joy in it, then why aren't we all happy? Why are the surfaces appealing at all?" Why is it that pursuing spectacle trumps the love of learning and seriousness so often?
14. Hitz mentions the busy listlessness, acedia, that is characterized as often by hyperactivity as by loafing. She suggests simple, effective activities that can bring us back to the real world: knitting, cooking, chopping wood help bring us back to the real world. I was reminded of Jordan Peterson's advice to make your bed in the morning—a simple task to complete. Do you agree or disagree with Hitz that simple activities can bring us back? What has your experience been?
15. On page 177, Hitz describes Dorothy Day's activism and love of reading, and the connection she made between reading books and understanding life. What is the point of reading for you?