The Art of Manliness - #656： The Hidden Pleasures of Learning for Its Own Sake

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.180 When we typically think about learning, we tend to think about being in a structured

00:00:14.360 school and doing it for some reason, to get a grade, to get a degree, to get a certain

00:00:18.400 job.

00:00:18.920 But my guest today says that if you want to live a truly flourishing life, we ought to

00:00:22.340 make time for studying thought long after we leave formal education behind and embrace

00:00:26.260 learning as something wonderfully useless.

00:00:28.320 Her name is Zena Hitz, and she's the author of Lost in Thought, The Hidden Pleasures of

00:00:32.140 an Intellectual Life.

00:00:33.160 We begin our conversation with how the unique great books curriculum at St. John's College

00:00:36.320 works, and how Zena got her undergraduate degree there and went on to pursue a more traditional

00:00:40.000 academic path, only to discover the downsides of the modern university system and be drawn

00:00:44.120 back to St. John's, where she now is a tutor.

00:00:46.380 From there, we turn to what Zena argues are the hidden pleasures of the intellectual life,

00:00:49.600 which include learning for its own sake, as opposed to doing it to advance some goal,

00:00:53.100 developing a rich inner life, and embracing the idea of true leisure.

00:00:56.280 We then discuss how thinking and studying for its own sake is different from watching

00:00:59.600 TV or playing video games, and how it can create a resilience-building, inner-directed

00:01:03.300 refuge from an externally-driven world.

00:01:05.300 We end our conversation with how you can carve out space for contemplation amidst the overload

00:01:08.500 and noise of modern life, the importance of finding a community that wants the same

00:01:11.480 thing, and how to get started with deeper study and reflection by reading the great books.

00:01:15.300 After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash lostinthought.

00:01:18.880 Zena Hitz, welcome to the show.

00:01:35.060 Thanks so much.

00:01:35.740 It's great to be here.

00:01:36.740 So you got a new book out, Lost in Thought, The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life,

00:01:41.000 which we're going to talk about today.

00:01:42.320 But you're also a tutor at St. John's College.

00:01:45.320 And for those who aren't familiar with St. John's, it's a unique university, but a lot

00:01:50.800 of people don't know about it.

00:01:51.560 What's the curriculum like?

00:01:52.780 And can you walk us through that?

00:01:54.740 Sure.

00:01:54.960 It's a very small liberal arts college.

00:01:57.380 We have about, on each campus, somewhere around 400, 450 undergraduate students.

00:02:02.560 And the program is set up as a encounter with great books, starting with ancient Greece in

00:02:11.340 the freshman year and concluding with 20th century authors in the senior year.

00:02:17.440 And what's particularly unique about our program is that we have a seminar where we read great

00:02:24.720 works of literature, philosophy, political theory, Plato, Aristotle, Adam Smith, et cetera,

00:02:30.340 Jane Austen.

00:02:30.900 But we also have a mathematics and a science component where we do mathematics, also chronologically,

00:02:37.820 starting with Euclid and ending with Einstein.

00:02:41.360 We have a science curriculum that looks at science from original papers and original experiments.

00:02:48.340 So it's a foundational look at science.

00:02:51.120 And also a music curriculum.

00:02:53.220 And we have also some languages.

00:02:55.500 We study ancient Greek and French.

00:02:57.160 So one of the many things that's unique is that it's an all-required curriculum.

00:03:02.140 That is, there's basically no electives.

00:03:04.280 Everyone does the same thing, which builds a really intense sense of community on campus

00:03:09.460 that not only is everyone, say, among the freshmen reading at the same time, but there's

00:03:16.220 a common store of books that the students can call upon as they progress in their studies.

00:03:21.040 And they can talk to anyone on campus about these things.

00:03:24.680 So the other unique thing about it, apart from the, so to speak, the content of the curriculum

00:03:29.000 and the books is that the classes are conducted by discussion.

00:03:32.760 So the faculty, like myself, we take a more of a side role, more of a collaborative role.

00:03:39.400 We don't call ourselves professors for that reason.

00:03:41.480 We don't hand down the truth from on high about what is going on with the material, but we

00:03:47.400 work alongside with our students.

00:03:49.460 We let them take the lead.

00:03:50.860 And that helps not only to keep the discussions fresh and spontaneous, but also it makes sure

00:03:58.640 that the learning is directed by the students' own questions.

00:04:03.140 So we're trying to keep the liberal, that is, the freedom in liberal arts education.

00:04:11.740 We think that education is about cultivating a free mind, a person who can formulate their

00:04:18.200 own questions and undertake their own answers.

00:04:20.900 And so it's important to us that the students be given a lot of responsibility over their

00:04:24.640 learning.

00:04:25.280 So that's it.

00:04:25.640 That's it in a nutshell.

00:04:26.500 We have also MA programs for adults, which are probably more common among your listeners,

00:04:31.560 but that's the core of what we do is our undergraduate program.

00:04:36.720 And the two campuses, there's one in Maryland and the other one's in Santa Fe, right?

00:04:40.160 That's right.

00:04:41.060 So the Annapolis campus is closer to all the East Coast stuff, but the Santa Fe campus is

00:04:46.800 exceptionally beautiful.

00:04:48.600 So that's what divides us is the preferences between the two places.

00:04:53.620 I love Santa Fe.

00:04:54.900 Oh my gosh.

00:04:55.820 Santa Fe is incredible.

00:04:56.840 Is there like tests or do you take an oral examination?

00:04:59.920 Like, how do you, is there, do you figure out proficiency?

00:05:02.940 Like, how do you decide, yes, you understand this concept or is that, does that even happen?

00:05:06.940 Well, what I would say is that the education is really student directed in the sense I was

00:05:14.520 describing earlier.

00:05:16.000 That is, an individual student is meant to bring their own questions to class and undertake

00:05:20.660 their own work and come to their own conclusions.

00:05:22.600 And going along with that, we think of learning as being progress that a student makes.

00:05:29.060 I mean, if you think about it, what's learning?

00:05:30.440 Learning is moving from one place to another.

00:05:32.940 You start in one starting place, you end up in another place.

00:05:36.840 And our ordinary schemes of education, which rely on testing and competency and so on,

00:05:42.800 don't really respect that fact about learning.

00:05:45.440 It's more about reaching a certain set standard.

00:05:48.160 And for this type of education, I guess I'd say there, there's a minimum standard.

00:05:54.800 That is, you, you have to stay engaged.

00:05:58.700 You have to be thinking seriously.

00:06:00.440 You have to be putting in some work, turning up for class.

00:06:03.400 But there's no, I think we're reluctant to say there's one thing that a liberal educated

00:06:07.640 person should look like.

00:06:08.760 So no, we don't have many tests.

00:06:10.220 We do have some oral exams, which are really more like conversations about what the student

00:06:15.240 read, a way to explore one-on-one with a student, what they've been thinking about.

00:06:20.760 And we have large essays every year and also for many small essays for classes.

00:06:26.240 But we try to de-emphasize grades and de-emphasize in general the cultural achievement, not because

00:06:32.540 we're hippies necessarily, but because we think that learning is something which is individual

00:06:37.220 and is best determined by an individual and an individual's progress.

00:06:42.260 Well, let's talk about how you ended up at St. John's, being a tutor at St. John's, because

00:06:46.520 I think it talks, I mean, it's sort of like this book is in a little, in some ways, it's

00:06:50.500 a sort of an intellectual biography of how you've gotten to think about what it means

00:06:54.880 to have an intellectual life.

00:06:56.220 You weren't always at St. John's.

00:06:57.760 What were you doing before that?

00:06:58.880 And how did you end up there?

00:07:00.860 Well, I was an undergraduate there.

00:07:03.260 I had heard about it as a high school student and was totally repelled.

00:07:07.580 It sounded completely boring and uninteresting and nothing like I wanted to do.

00:07:10.780 But I was on campus for a summer program for high school students that was, we had a class

00:07:17.180 that was taught in the St. John's style and I was just instantly enchanted and wanted to

00:07:21.760 stay.

00:07:22.620 So I had a very formative or maybe transformative experience there as an undergraduate.

00:07:28.680 Then I went away to graduate school and I ended up by some good luck and some very elite

00:07:32.580 programs.

00:07:33.280 So I became a research academic.

00:07:35.500 So research academia is the most prestigious part of academia.

00:07:41.960 And that's what, you know, the great research universities, the R1 universities are the prestige

00:07:47.400 centers of American education.

00:07:49.480 So I was a research academic and I taught at mostly public universities for a number of years,

00:07:56.440 eight years, something like that.

00:07:57.840 And I think there were two things that went wrong.

00:08:01.180 At first, of course, coming from St. John's, it's a wonderful place, but we prize the amateur, 1.00

00:08:07.840 you know, we prize the lover of learning for its own sake.

00:08:11.280 And that has a certain cost.

00:08:12.920 That is, you can miss out on really understanding a topic in depth in all of its context and all

00:08:19.800 of its facets with all of its details.

00:08:21.700 And I actually loved that aspect of being a research academic.

00:08:25.520 I loved getting into the depths of the details of the materials.

00:08:29.600 I was a, I was a scholar.

00:08:30.860 I still am a scholar of classical philosophy.

00:08:33.060 And so I was doing scholarly research and that was supposed to be the center of my life,

00:08:38.580 the center of my career.

00:08:39.620 And I found it harder and harder to feel motivated by it.

00:08:44.040 I enjoyed it, but it seemed a bit, the audiences are small and it's not obvious really what the

00:08:52.680 social worth of that kind of research was, or it wasn't clear to me then.

00:08:56.720 And then the other thing that drove me down in ordinary academia was the teaching, which

00:09:02.860 as in most places, it's a large classrooms, which really require, you know, focus on lectures,

00:09:10.140 a focus on digesting down the material into a few points that need to be memorized or learned

00:09:16.940 and then repeated.

00:09:18.760 And that just wasn't the type of learning that I wanted to pass on to my students.

00:09:23.620 And it was frankly boring after a while to keep doing it.

00:09:27.660 It's not intellectually exciting for the professor.

00:09:30.640 And I suspect in most cases, it's really not intellectually exciting for the, for the students.

00:09:35.080 I think a lot of what's happened in our universities, as far as the humanities and liberal arts is

00:09:39.820 concerned, is a kind of deadening of intellectual excitement, thanks to these large classes,

00:09:45.980 which are really not suited to the subject matter.

00:09:48.520 So anyway, I got disillusioned.

00:09:51.160 I kept casting around for something different, some different way of doing things.

00:09:54.740 Couldn't figure it out.

00:09:56.420 I finally, I had undergone a religious conversion right after I finished my PhD.

00:10:02.120 I became Catholic.

00:10:03.060 And so I, it was natural for me as a new convert to look at the various kinds of weird ways of

00:10:10.880 life that the Catholic church offers.

00:10:12.540 So I ended up leaving the profession and living in a Catholic religious community for a time

00:10:17.360 in rural Canada for three years.

00:10:20.480 And when I was there, I thought a lot about, I couldn't do much intellectual work.

00:10:24.820 I had to really just be a more ordinary, grounded human being.

00:10:30.540 And that forced me to really think about why, why intellectual work, why study matters for

00:10:37.720 ordinary people.

00:10:39.000 And that in turn made me realize that I could be happy as an academic if I went back to St.

00:10:45.240 John's as a, as opposed to the, the research academic life that I've been living previously.

00:10:50.980 So that, that's a somewhat long-winded version of, of the story that I tell in the first part of my

00:10:56.400 book.

00:10:57.480 Well, let's talk about digging into the book and sort of your philosophy about learning.

00:11:00.840 You, you say that learning the intellectual life, there's hidden pleasures to it.

00:11:04.660 Like what, what do you, what sense is the intellectual life, the pleasures of an intellectual

00:11:08.260 life hidden?

00:11:10.280 Well, the concept that seems to be central is learning for its own sake.

00:11:15.680 So if most of us these days, when we think about going to college or going back to graduate

00:11:21.760 school, we're thinking about trying to either advance ourselves in our careers in some way,

00:11:28.760 get better jobs, get more prominence, or make an impact in the world in some way, make a

00:11:35.340 difference, as they say.

00:11:37.100 That is the opposite of hiddenness.

00:11:39.060 So that is, that is what you might call worldliness or publicity or something like that.

00:11:44.540 So learning for its own sake is hidden in the sense that in one way, because it's useless,

00:11:51.600 it doesn't make a difference in the same way that say, pharmaceutical research makes a difference

00:11:58.760 when people are figuring out how to cure COVID or similar life-threatening diseases.

00:12:05.720 It doesn't have an obvious use and that makes it hidden.

00:12:10.240 That's one thing.

00:12:10.920 The second way it's hidden is that I think it's part of the inner life of a human being.

00:12:16.520 So it's something that we keep in ourselves, regardless of what else is going on in our

00:12:22.620 lives.

00:12:23.200 So I think one stock example, right, the bookworm sort of hiding in the corner, reading a book,

00:12:30.880 is leading a kind of inner life.

00:12:32.940 And likewise, if you are the sort of person who goes on walks and thinks about things,

00:12:38.040 many of us are, that too is a kind of inner life.

00:12:41.480 It's a kind of hidden life.

00:12:42.840 So I wanted in my book, because we hear so much praise of impact and making a difference,

00:12:50.140 I wanted to praise those other features of being a human being, what's private, what's

00:12:54.540 inward, what is for its own sake, what doesn't necessarily make a splash.

00:12:59.440 Because I think that, in fact, we need those things in order to be happy, healthy, flourishing

00:13:06.000 human beings.

00:13:07.900 Well, let's dig into these ideas a little bit deeper.

00:13:10.280 So we can talk about learning for the sake of learning, because this goes to Aristotle,

00:13:14.680 right?

00:13:14.880 Like ins and means and things like that.

00:13:17.420 Exactly.

00:13:18.260 Right.

00:13:18.580 And I think today in the modern world, we typically think of education.

00:13:22.860 I think we give it a lot of lip service, like, hey, learning for the sake of learning.

00:13:25.820 But when we go to college, like what we mean is, well, you go to college so you can get

00:13:29.540 a career and make money or whatever.

00:13:33.060 That's right.

00:13:33.480 So I don't, I think I want to be clear.

00:13:36.060 I, in a way that I'm not always in these types of interviews, there's nothing wrong

00:13:40.820 with learning for the sake of something else.

00:13:43.940 That is, there's something wrong with studying medicine in order to become a doctor or studying

00:13:48.500 massage in order to become a massage therapist or any of these things.

00:13:51.500 There's, there's nothing wrong with that, becoming an engineer.

00:13:54.960 It's, the problem is when we think that that's all there is to learning.

00:14:00.200 And I think we think that's all there is to learning because we think that's all there

00:14:05.720 is to life.

00:14:06.580 Whereas if you think it through along the lines that someone like Aristotle thought about

00:14:10.960 it, your life doesn't make sense if everything is a means to an end.

00:14:15.220 So some things have got to be means to an end.

00:14:17.040 If you want certain things, you do certain things to get them.

00:14:19.280 Um, but we have a weird tendency to be workaholic, to instrumentalize absolutely everything, to

00:14:28.500 seek, seek out, uh, modes of achievement as if they were valuable for their own sake and

00:14:35.200 not for the sake of something else.

00:14:37.320 So the, in other words, if you, so let me use a more down to earth example.

00:14:42.540 I think I'm being a little abstract.

00:14:43.980 You know, if I ask myself, why do I eat breakfast?

00:14:46.420 Now that's an instrumental activity.

00:14:48.360 Usually you eat breakfast for the sake of a bit of energy to get through your day, to

00:14:53.040 stay healthy for nutrients.

00:14:55.960 Uh, well, why do you do that?

00:14:57.380 Well, you do that because you need to work.

00:14:59.280 You do that because you want to be there for your family.

00:15:02.220 You could imagine giving a string of answers, which never culminate in anything.

00:15:08.180 What you want, it seems to me to say about your own life is that there's some activity

00:15:14.680 or set of activities that is what your life culminates in that constitute your wellbeing

00:15:20.560 or your happiness.

00:15:21.380 Whether that's playing music or being with your family or studying or going on walks in

00:15:27.380 nature or whatever it is, it has, there has to be something like that, or your life doesn't

00:15:31.860 make any sense.

00:15:32.580 So that's, that's the thought about means and ends.

00:15:35.440 And that's, that's the danger of instrumentalizing learning is that we lose track of the fact

00:15:41.380 that there are forms of learning that are really just for their own sake.

00:15:43.780 They don't have any use.

00:15:45.040 And those are the things that need to be especially preserved in a, in a market economy or in a very

00:15:50.940 utility focused culture.

00:15:53.200 We need to make a special effort to preserve the things which don't have an obvious use because

00:15:59.140 they're in fact, in a certain way, the most central things for us, the things that, the

00:16:02.860 places in which we flourish and are happy in which our lives culminate.

00:16:06.100 We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.

00:16:10.560 And now back to the show.

00:16:12.180 Well, all those things you described, taking walks in nature, spending time with family

00:16:15.820 and friends, learning because you just enjoy it.

00:16:18.160 Like that's what we would call leisure, but you have this great section of the book, like

00:16:22.640 particularly in America, we kind of lost touch with what it means to have a leisurely life.

00:16:27.820 I think that's right.

00:16:30.320 And I, I think you can see that actually in, I mean, it's a bit of a cliche, but the contrast

00:16:36.140 with European culture, where there's a bit more of a sense that there's more to life than

00:16:41.180 work.

00:16:41.880 And you see that in the way they take vacations and the way they use their weekends.

00:16:46.820 I'm sure it's changing just as, just as we have much built into Europe or anything like

00:16:52.280 that.

00:16:52.480 But whereas I, myself, and I know many people who are like me, we're content working 60,

00:16:58.600 70, 80 hours a week.

00:17:00.420 And you, you know, you have to ask yourself at some point, what are you doing that for?

00:17:05.920 Is that really what your life is all about?

00:17:08.540 One example I use in the book that was, I found very moving.

00:17:11.880 It was an essay on Medium a couple of years ago by a journalist named Lauren Smiley, who's

00:17:16.740 based out in the Bay Area.

00:17:18.440 And she was describing how, you know, in what's called the gig economy, you have these workers

00:17:25.100 who are stacking job upon job to make a living.

00:17:27.840 You know, they, they're an Uber driver part of the time and they do Amazon delivery part

00:17:31.980 of the time and they just stack thing upon thing.

00:17:35.560 And then she looks at the people that they're serving, the sort of high-end tech workers in

00:17:40.400 the Bay Area.

00:17:40.980 And what are they doing with all of this time that's created by all of these conveniences,

00:17:45.600 the DoorDash and the Uber and the delivery and the home cleaning service and the home

00:17:51.100 hairdressing service and the home organizing service?

00:17:53.900 Now, what are they doing with all the free time?

00:17:55.100 Well, they're working more for their companies.

00:17:57.540 So they're putting in these huge long hours.

00:17:59.640 So you get this image of an upper class and a lower class, each of which is working their

00:18:04.320 absolute butts off.

00:18:06.340 And it doesn't, it doesn't make sense.

00:18:08.220 Human beings are meant to have some parts of their life that are dedicated to leisure.

00:18:13.360 And leisure is not just resting up so you can do more work.

00:18:16.780 It's again, it's what your life culminates in.

00:18:19.020 It's what makes you flourish as a human being.

00:18:21.320 And that, that requires some discernment for individuals, but it's, it's, it's always something

00:18:26.680 for its own sake.

00:18:27.580 I think it always has that structure.

00:18:29.100 Now you had this great section, you're describing that, that dynamic and heavy, all these like gig

00:18:33.800 economy workers working for these titans of Silicon Valley.

00:18:37.080 And here's, I'll read it.

00:18:38.740 I thought it really hit me.

00:18:40.080 It says the master's quotation marks of our current serving class have no leisure either.

00:18:45.360 The slave is a slave of a slave.

00:18:47.520 And these days at the top of the heap of slaves, there's not even an exploitative gentleman

00:18:51.340 farmer writing essays, dissecting animals and speculating on the nature of the political,

00:18:55.860 but another slave at a higher social rank.

00:18:58.240 Uh, yes, that's right.

00:19:00.660 I, when Aristotle wrote, of course, uh, Aristotle's notoriously what you'd call elitist.

00:19:07.340 Elitist is in a way kind of a weak word for it.

00:19:10.140 He's deeply inegalitarian thinker.

00:19:12.760 So he thinks that if some human beings can live the best life and only a few are really

00:19:19.760 capable of living the best life, because for Aristotle, the best life is really just philosophy,

00:19:23.860 then it's perfectly reasonable to ask other people not to live a, to live a sort of substandard

00:19:30.680 human life in order to provide for the necessities of the best people.

00:19:35.180 And that's an idea that's had a lot of influence in the history of, of Europe and the U S and

00:19:41.660 that's has a history for intellectual life, because of course, that's, it's that intellectual

00:19:46.640 work, which belongs to the top with the country gentleman and his researches.

00:19:51.420 And of course, I think I was probably thinking of someone like Thomas, a polymath like Thomas

00:19:54.800 Jefferson, right.

00:19:55.480 Who, you know, if you've got a Monticello, this guy was interested in absolutely everything

00:19:59.060 and studied and thought and wrote, and that was all possible of course, by, by slave labor.

00:20:04.120 So part of what I want to do in my book, and it's not original to me, it's something which

00:20:09.200 thinkers of the early to mid 20th century were also striving to do.

00:20:14.200 It's to keep that idea, that Aristotelian idea of an intellectual life as involving leisure,

00:20:20.980 as involving contemplation, as being necessary for human happiness, but noticing the ways in

00:20:27.860 which ordinary people can also live it.

00:20:30.260 So my book has a very strong egalitarian motive in that.

00:20:36.780 I, I think that this type of, I think that thinking and study for its own sake are really

00:20:40.580 for everyone.

00:20:42.340 And I, I want to bring out the ways in which they benefit the lives of thinking and studying

00:20:49.120 benefit the lives of, of ordinary people.

00:20:51.340 And going along with that, I think it's going back to the passage you read, it's, it's of

00:20:56.140 course, deeply ironic that aristocracy that we have now, such as it is, has no leisure,

00:21:01.760 has no beautiful products or incredible books, or it's just, it just keeps producing more

00:21:08.980 and more of itself.

00:21:09.860 That is more and more conveniences, more and more devices.

00:21:12.300 And there's a sense in which our common life, as well as our individual life is missing

00:21:19.680 a point, is, is missing some meaning or some, something fundamental.

00:21:24.460 And what is it about learning, you know, reading the great books, it could be like, or learning

00:21:29.400 about art or music.

00:21:30.700 How is that different?

00:21:31.920 You know, someone can say, well, I, I have leisure.

00:21:33.600 Like I, I play video game.

00:21:35.340 I watch Netflix.

00:21:36.380 I mean, how is, how are, how are those different from what you're kind of encouraging in the

00:21:42.420 book?

00:21:43.200 That's a great question.

00:21:44.480 And I, I, I try, I think I fail sometimes.

00:21:48.740 I try not to be too moralistic about it.

00:21:51.000 So it's, I do think there's a difference between Netflix, doom scrolling on social media,

00:21:59.020 playing video games.

00:22:00.940 Those are normally what I would call a distraction.

00:22:04.340 They're, they're not bad.

00:22:05.660 Sometimes it's the best you can do.

00:22:07.440 You're just too tired to do anything else, but they're not restorative.

00:22:12.260 There isn't necessarily any kind of personal growth that results from them.

00:22:16.900 The way that you, you tend to grow from learning.

00:22:20.200 It's one of the things that makes learning, learning.

00:22:22.160 So it's, the distinction's a bit intuitive and it's a bit flexible because of course you

00:22:28.120 can imagine someone who really thought there's actually a philosopher working now named T.

00:22:33.380 Nguyen who is thinking about games, including video games and the ways in which they can

00:22:39.620 be contemplative or the ways in which they involve real thinking.

00:22:43.200 And that's of course a real possibility that you're, you're really thinking about things

00:22:48.000 when you're playing games or, or you're exercising a creative capacity, like as you would in creating

00:22:54.220 art or music, but in general, the differences between distraction, something which wears you

00:23:02.380 down in the end, if you do it for too long, something which makes you feel empty after a long period of

00:23:07.620 time and the kinds of activities, which are nutritious, so to speak.

00:23:14.100 They, they, they give you something to, to grow from, to live on, to find rest in.

00:23:21.220 And I think everyone can feel that distinction with a bit of reflection.

00:23:26.080 We all know which things are restorative or make us grow and which things really just in

00:23:33.860 the longterm aren't good for us.

00:23:35.020 For me, it's social media.

00:23:35.960 That's my, that's my distraction of choice, but I know there's a difference between that

00:23:39.860 and reading a good book or playing music or, or what have you.

00:23:43.980 So I, I think most people have some, some way of making the distinction in their own

00:23:48.680 lives between distraction and contemplation.

00:23:52.300 And I want to go back to this idea you talked about.

00:23:54.120 It's not, there's nothing wrong with learning for the sake of a job, et cetera, status.

00:23:58.100 And in fact, because you have to make a living, there's a certain satisfaction that comes from

00:24:02.120 achieving something.

00:24:03.460 But you also make this point in the book that what starts off as a means, like for, you know,

00:24:09.260 it can end up as an end, right?

00:24:10.680 Like the instrumentality of like learning can actually end up being the thing that leads

00:24:15.060 that person to doing it just for the love of it.

00:24:18.400 Oh, that's right.

00:24:19.340 So yeah, that's, that's something I say to try to bring out too, that it's not learning

00:24:27.620 for its own sake, as opposed to learning for the sake of something else, learning instrumentally.

00:24:32.340 It's not, it's not like a matter of purity.

00:24:35.720 So it's not as if you've got to just only do absolutely the most pure forms of learning

00:24:41.460 and examine your conscience and make sure you're really doing it for your own sake and not its

00:24:45.140 own sake and not for the sake of the grade or the achievement or the degree or anything

00:24:48.840 like that.

00:24:49.600 The fact is that most of the time, the types of learning we undertake have mixed motives.

00:24:54.700 And what's interesting to me is that you can easily make a transition.

00:25:00.100 I think it's very common from a very instrumental achievement oriented approach to learning and

00:25:06.440 learning for its own sake.

00:25:07.640 So my favorite example is from Steve Martin's autobiography.

00:25:12.200 He's dating this woman as a, as a teenager, he's madly in love with her.

00:25:18.020 And she's, she reads this book called the, the razor's edge by Somerset mom.

00:25:24.260 And she tells him to read it.

00:25:26.100 And he says, you know, I, if she'd told me to want to put on a ball gown, I would have

00:25:29.880 done it, but she told me to read this book.

00:25:31.480 So I read this book and by reading the book, he falls in love with, with learning for its

00:25:35.820 own sake, with wisdom, with philosophy as depicted there.

00:25:38.920 And of course he became a philosophy major in college, thanks to that.

00:25:44.100 And that's an example of, you know, why did he start to read that book?

00:25:47.920 Well, it was sort of people pleasing.

00:25:49.240 It was to get in with his girlfriend.

00:25:51.680 It was to make her happy.

00:25:54.820 And what happened along the way is that he actually ended up being touched in a different

00:25:59.700 way by the learning and doing learning for its own sake.

00:26:02.340 So similarly, I think it's very common, you know, people learn, say their math and physics

00:26:07.520 because they've, they've got to get into a good college.

00:26:10.660 And those are the fields that really matter.

00:26:12.660 And they just study their butts off.

00:26:14.180 And all they're thinking about is getting the A or maybe the A plus and maybe the extra

00:26:17.520 credit so they can get into the best schools.

00:26:19.960 But it can happen that you pause for a second and suddenly realize how beautiful and fascinating

00:26:26.480 mathematics or physics is.

00:26:29.840 And I think that is, is very, that's probably the way that most people who love learning for

00:26:34.760 its own sake and do it at a professional or academic level.

00:26:37.860 That's probably the way most, it happens for most of us is you start out in the world of

00:26:41.880 achievement and you, you find yourself doing it for other reasons.

00:26:45.500 You find yourself exploring different ideas, which aren't necessarily directed at achievement.

00:26:51.100 So that to me is a sign that there's something in us that really wants to learn this way.

00:26:56.100 It's not imaginary.

00:26:57.520 It's not moralistic.

00:26:58.940 It's, it's just something that we want and something that's good for us.

00:27:02.760 And that we need to just recognize and try to cultivate.

00:27:06.120 Yeah.

00:27:06.140 I had that experience.

00:27:07.020 I got my bachelor's degree in letters, which is basically a humanities degree at the University

00:27:12.060 of Oklahoma.

00:27:12.880 Yeah.

00:27:13.100 And I did that because like everyone, I guess I wanted to go to law school and they're

00:27:15.620 like, well, if you're going to go to law school, letters is a good degree to get.

00:27:18.040 It's like, okay, well, that's what I'm going to do.

00:27:19.640 Well, I ended up just falling in love with philosophy and literature.

00:27:22.720 And like, you know, 20 years later, I'm, I'm still reading the stuff I was reading as

00:27:26.180 an undergrad, but just, just for fun, because I enjoy it.

00:27:29.200 No, that's the perfect story.

00:27:30.660 Exactly.

00:27:30.960 I think it happens all the time.

00:27:32.440 So I, for that reason, I, I try to be, I try to moderate my, my critique of the instrumental

00:27:38.820 approach to education.

00:27:39.660 I think it, it does a lot of good for people and it, and it also can really be valuable.

00:27:44.560 I mean, you, you, there's stuff that needs to be done and you've got to do some learning

00:27:47.980 to do it.

00:27:48.880 The only worry is when that, when you never get past that or, or when you're really discouraged

00:27:54.020 from getting past that because you're so anxious about taking the time to really do

00:27:58.900 something that you care about.

00:27:59.980 All right.

00:28:00.500 So there's just a pleasure of just learning for the sake of learning, because it's just

00:28:03.160 part of being human.

00:28:04.340 We have a chance to do something that has no other, it's like not a means to anything

00:28:10.400 else.

00:28:11.160 That's right.

00:28:11.560 It's leisurely.

00:28:12.660 Well, another pleasure of it is that learning, the intellectual life can be a refuge from what

00:28:17.920 you call, quote, the world.

00:28:20.540 What do you mean by that?

00:28:21.420 What is the world?

00:28:22.180 So the world is a term of art, as we say, it's, it's a word I'm using in a very specific

00:28:30.860 way.

00:28:31.500 So I don't mean the world as in the outside world or the natural world.

00:28:36.360 What I mean is the world basically of social competition, the world of striving for status

00:28:44.460 and for money and for advancement.

00:28:48.040 So it's a place where the standards are a place that is, it's a state of being really, or an

00:28:58.300 attitude towards what you do, which involves thinking about other people's standards.

00:29:03.480 That is, it's, it's externally directed.

00:29:07.320 And what's wrong with it is not that there's anything wrong with being aware of the standards

00:29:13.020 of other people or that there's necessarily anything wrong with engaging in the world of

00:29:18.140 striving and competition.

00:29:19.920 But I do think that if you live totally in the, immersed in the world in this sense, then

00:29:27.560 the way you're living is task after task, achievement after achievement.

00:29:32.400 And there's an emptiness that goes along with that.

00:29:36.580 There's a hollowness.

00:29:38.880 There's a dependence on others, which is not healthy.

00:29:42.860 So much of our great literature, 19th century novels, it's about people who strive for recognition

00:29:50.440 in the social world.

00:29:52.300 And they may get it for a time, but the world is capricious.

00:29:57.160 It gives favor one day and it takes it away the next.

00:30:00.140 So we need in our lives sort of spaces of being, modes of being, which are withdrawn from considerations

00:30:10.600 of status, withdrawn from considerations of money-making, withdrawn from the standards of

00:30:17.680 the judgment of others.

00:30:18.600 And so the inner life, in other words, what I call it, an inner life where you withdraw from

00:30:25.240 the world and cultivate things that you care about most.

00:30:29.440 And it's the inner life that's a source of resilience.

00:30:33.340 One of my beefs with contemporary ways that we talk about education is we talk about educating

00:30:38.440 for success, educating for achievement.

00:30:40.900 There's nothing wrong with success and achievement, but they're not exactly always in our control.

00:30:44.800 And you need to have resources within yourself to handle whatever happens.

00:30:51.820 You need a way for your life to be rich and meaningful, even in the worst circumstances,

00:30:56.940 even in failure and despair.

00:31:00.040 No.

00:31:00.460 Well, I get that.

00:31:01.100 Because when I was reading that section, it really resonated with me because this idea of

00:31:04.740 the world, whenever we engage, I think everyone has to engage with it to a certain extent.

00:31:09.180 But whenever I do, I often feel like I don't really own this.

00:31:11.680 A part of me, whenever I put myself out there, I no longer own myself, right?

00:31:16.900 Right.

00:31:17.340 Then other people can say and have opinions about what I do.

00:31:20.360 And I don't know, you become aware that you're performing and that just feels weird.

00:31:27.920 And so I like having that idea where I have a place where it doesn't matter what I do.

00:31:31.580 I'm just doing this for me.

00:31:32.980 I don't care what anyone else says about it.

00:31:35.060 It's a way to like, when you withdraw inward, it's a way to, I don't know, a way to restore

00:31:39.640 dignity, I think.

00:31:42.160 I think that's right.

00:31:43.380 And I, as I'm thinking about it, there's in a way two ways of thinking about it.

00:31:47.320 There's the way that I write about it mostly in the book, which is in the way that you just

00:31:51.880 talked about it, where you're, and I think this is a perfectly healthy way to live.

00:31:55.320 You live part of your life out in the world, in the realm of competition, in the realm of

00:32:00.420 status seeking.

00:32:01.540 And, you know, there's nothing wrong with that.

00:32:03.240 But then you've got to take a break.

00:32:04.940 You retreat.

00:32:05.660 You find things that nourish yourself.

00:32:07.520 That's really withdrawn from, from all of that stuff.

00:32:10.700 So I think that's healthy.

00:32:12.100 I also think that, and maybe I wish I'd said a bit more about this in the book.

00:32:16.860 I think that if you become accustomed to living more inwardly and less focused on the external,

00:32:25.320 the status markers, the competitive, the sense of performance and performance for an audience,

00:32:31.340 I think truthfully, when you do get involved in the world, that is to say in the community,

00:32:39.720 in the political world, that I think what you do is actually more effective.

00:32:44.320 I think you have, you can see more clearly what really matters.

00:32:50.000 There's some independence from the judgments of others and some independence from competition

00:32:55.960 for status is good, even for outward directed activity.

00:33:00.640 It, it, it makes you more aware of what matters and more able to focus on doing work that's

00:33:06.800 good, as opposed to doing work that meets the market at the moment.

00:33:12.160 Well, this is a, this reminds me of an example from Thoreau.

00:33:15.760 Thoreau, you know, when he first started his career, he went to New York, he wanted to make

00:33:18.420 a big splash in the literary world.

00:33:20.620 And he just, it was total flop.

00:33:21.840 He just, just everyone laughed at him and said, get out of here.

00:33:25.800 And so what he does, what he goes to the Walden pond and he just starts doing it.

00:33:29.820 He writes about nature, builds a shack, writes about whatever.

00:33:33.460 And that's the thing that became like, that's, we, that's why we were talking about Thoreau

00:33:36.740 today.

00:33:37.900 Exactly.

00:33:39.320 Exactly.

00:33:39.840 And of course it's ironic, just in the same way it's ironic that of course, you know,

00:33:43.400 this is, this is my first book and it's, it's being received well.

00:33:47.940 And it's all about how you shouldn't just try to do nothing but publish books and have

00:33:52.880 impact.

00:33:53.900 So I mean, a bit of not, I'm not as brilliant as Thoreau, but it's a similar situation where

00:34:00.120 you, you can make your career by promoting being anti-career or something like that.

00:34:06.260 I think Thoreau is also a great example for thinking about inwardness.

00:34:09.320 One of the things I discovered recently is Thoreau's journals, which are extremely beautiful.

00:34:14.760 You know, they're just full of these little reflections, usually on nature or, or something

00:34:20.000 else.

00:34:21.040 And, uh, you know, they're, they're not things he wrote for an audience so far as I know.

00:34:26.640 And they're, they're some of the best things he wrote.

00:34:29.100 So I, that's another example I think of, yeah, just how much inwardness can matter, not only

00:34:35.240 for oneself, but for others.

00:34:37.120 So what does this look like in the 21st century?

00:34:39.000 Doesn't, doesn't necessarily mean you have to go to a pond and build a shack.

00:34:42.040 So, but how can you sort of withdraw and set up an intellectual space just for yourself?

00:34:48.280 Well, I, I think that's what's challenging for most of us, especially these days, if you're,

00:34:54.180 you know, if you have the good fortune to work remotely, it's hard to find a space that's

00:35:00.360 not workspace or time that's not work time, or that's not, you need time that's not designated

00:35:07.280 to any particular purpose.

00:35:10.240 And so carving out some piece of time, even if it's 10 minutes, 15 minutes, half an hour,

00:35:16.040 an hour to sit and think, to reflect, to write in a journal, to read any of those things,

00:35:24.180 I think is really crucial.

00:35:26.260 The other thing I say in this context is I think it's very important to try to find other

00:35:31.620 people who are also interested in undertaking learning for their own sake or, or cultivating

00:35:40.360 inner life.

00:35:40.900 It sounds paradoxical because I'm talking about inwardness and a certain kind of self-sufficiency,

00:35:45.620 but for all of these things, we need, we need a bit of help and support.

00:35:50.100 And I think that a friend or two who, who are also trying to do the same thing, who you can

00:35:55.540 touch base with and swap notes with, I think that can make a huge difference to one's success

00:36:02.480 in, in, in really carving out, carving out space for oneself, but it's so variable.

00:36:08.620 And so dependent on people's circumstances, the types of work they have, the types of family

00:36:12.220 life they have that I, it's hard to give very specific advice apart from carving out space,

00:36:18.880 no matter how, how small carving out time, no matter how short and finding people to talk

00:36:25.500 to about what you're doing so that you can have some support in that.

00:36:30.700 Yeah.

00:36:30.900 Conversation, one of those human activities, just it's pleasurable just for the sake of

00:36:35.140 doing it.

00:36:36.260 Exactly.

00:36:36.940 Exactly.

00:36:37.480 I think that conversation for its own sake is also something a bit endangered and where

00:36:44.000 a conversation that's where you're really trying to seriously work something out with

00:36:49.500 someone else, but not, not for any particular purpose.

00:36:53.600 I think even I don't have conversations like that as much as I used to have, or as much

00:36:57.560 as I might want to have, even though I'm supposed to have built my life around it.

00:37:01.060 So it's, yeah, I think conversation is great.

00:37:04.220 Well, I think, I think what a lot of people try to do, they try to do it on the internet.

00:37:07.400 Like they try to tweet this stuff or like, and like that never works.

00:37:11.940 I don't know.

00:37:12.840 I mean, maybe it does work.

00:37:13.900 I've never had good, but like the best experiences I've had is when I've been with people I know

00:37:17.600 I've had like this connection with them.

00:37:19.180 We're in person and we just sort of balance ideas off each other.

00:37:22.480 They go different places and it's edifying.

00:37:25.840 When you try to do that on Twitter, I don't know, the mode of communication doesn't really

00:37:29.320 allow that that much.

00:37:30.760 You know, I have to say I've had a very good experience on Twitter.

00:37:34.320 I've been on for a little over a year.

00:37:36.320 I got on to promote the book.

00:37:37.840 I think one thing it's good for is connecting with people who have similar concerns or similar

00:37:45.260 values.

00:37:45.760 So I've, I've met a ton of people on Twitter who are seriously interested in learning for

00:37:51.060 its own sake, who I never would have known about otherwise.

00:37:53.100 Some of them are academics who are working, doing similar work as I am.

00:37:56.400 Some of them are just ordinary people who are, who are trying to learn in kind of straightened

00:38:00.960 circumstances.

00:38:01.580 And Twitter is one of their only points of access.

00:38:04.880 So you can connect with people that way.

00:38:06.860 I agree with you that as far as real conversation is concerned, probably the best thing to do

00:38:13.860 would be to use the internet to, to find the people and then bring those conversations into

00:38:20.160 something like real life, even a telephone conversation, if not an in-person conversation,

00:38:26.700 try to build a real friendship beyond just the social media connection.

00:38:33.040 Well, so we've been talking about the pleasures of an intellectual life.

00:38:36.160 What's something like, say someone, they're like, I want to do this, but I don't know how

00:38:39.820 to get started.

00:38:40.600 Like, what's the first step someone can take in embracing this love of learning for the,

00:38:44.840 just the love of learning?

00:38:46.320 So I think that I'm a big fan of what are called great books.

00:38:51.660 You can take as broad a view of what they are as you like.

00:38:55.020 There's great books in a variety of traditions from all over the world.

00:38:59.260 Some of those overlap with, you know, the stuff that I tend to teach, which is what you'd

00:39:03.580 call the Western tradition, but some of them don't overlap.

00:39:06.980 And there's all kinds, every culture in the world has some repository of wisdom and learning

00:39:12.360 that's worth investigating.

00:39:14.860 So you, I think reading great books is a really, really good way of cultivating one's inner life

00:39:21.760 and cultivating a life of reflection and cultivating a life of leisure.

00:39:25.780 I think that the key obstacle actually more than time is, of course, community.

00:39:31.700 So there's a, there's a, that's why I say find a friend or a pair of friends to read with.

00:39:37.580 It doesn't take a lot of resources, right?

00:39:39.520 You just need a couple of people and some books and some time to talk.

00:39:43.340 And, you know, work through a book, like a book club style and have conversations about

00:39:48.980 it.

00:39:49.660 And that will make it easier to motivate yourself.

00:39:51.960 Because most of us nowadays with the intent, with the attention spans we have, it's hard

00:39:56.320 to read any book, much less a difficult book.

00:39:59.440 So, so a little bit of social pressure is going to help.

00:40:02.700 There's some online programs which help, which provide community.

00:40:07.480 There's also, of course, local programs through public libraries and things like that, depending

00:40:10.920 on where you live.

00:40:11.500 So I think trying to find a way to, to study and to read seriously is, is one of the best

00:40:17.800 things you can do.

00:40:18.860 Well, Zena, this has been a great conversation.

00:40:20.100 There's some place people can go to learn more about the book and your work.

00:40:23.360 Sure.

00:40:23.760 I have a webpage, zenahits.net, and there's reviews and a few other interviews and some

00:40:29.960 podcasts on there if you want to get a taste of it.

00:40:32.780 And the book itself, I'm proud to say I worked hard to make it pretty easy read.

00:40:37.460 So I hope you'll, you'll take a look at that too.

00:40:40.020 But anyway, it's been a pleasure talking to you.

00:40:42.340 Thanks so much for listening, all of you listening.

00:40:44.360 And, and thanks so much for your questions, Brett.

00:40:47.200 Thanks so much, Zena.

00:40:48.080 Thanks.

00:40:49.580 My guest today was Zena Hitz.

00:40:50.820 She's the author of the book, Lost in Thought, The Hidden Pleasures of Intellectual Life.

00:40:54.260 It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.

00:40:56.580 You can find out more information about her work at our website, zenahits.net.

00:41:00.000 Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash lost in thought.

00:41:03.100 Where you can find links to resources, where you can delve deeper into this topic.

00:41:13.020 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast.

00:41:15.900 Check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as

00:41:19.540 well as thousands of articles written over the years.

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The Art of Manliness - October 28, 2020

#656： The Hidden Pleasures of Learning for Its Own Sake

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