About Zena Hitz
Zena Hitz is a Tutor at St. John’s College. Her book, Lost In Thought, explores the meaning and the value of learning for its own sake, through images and stories of bookworms, philosophers, scientists, and other learners, both fictional and historical. She also gives lectures at colleges for the Thomistic Institute, recently on the theme of leisure and its necessity for human beings.
Zena Hitz’s essays, lectures, and podcasts are on the human need to learn for its own sake and what it means for educational institutions to take that need seriously. Zena Hitz’s scholarly work is on law, virtue, friendship, and human nature in Plato and Aristotle.
A shortcut to increase our knowledge, of history, philosophy, and literature, is to have our home personal libraries full of educational books. Zena Hitz first thought she might want to read, write, and think for a living while writing an essay on Oedipus Rex as a freshman at St. John’s College in Annapolis. After graduating she studied classics and philosophy at Cambridge and the University of Chicago before finishing up her PhD at Princeton. Zena Hitz studied for a time self-knowledge in Plato and Aristotle. Self-knowledge for them is not a matter of awareness of subjective states, but knowledge of human nature and of what it means to be a human being. She wrote her dissertation on the criticisms of democracy in those thinkers, focusing on the conception of democracy as driven by appetite rather than reason.
After finishing her degree she taught philosophy, briefly at McGill University, then at Auburn University, and finally for some years at UMBC. She then spent three years living and working in the Madonna House Apostolate before coming back to teach at St. John’s in 2015. Zena Hitz has also taught in prison programs and has a general interest in bringing humanist studies to non-traditional students.
Zena Hitz has been thinking recently about the moral fragility of human beings. We tell stories of the moral decline and fall of individuals and communities: such stories are at least as old as the book of Genesis and as recent as The Godfather. What do such stories mean to communicate? She suspects that they mean to reveal the terrifying passivity of the human mind and heart. It is not obvious what force within us or outside of us could remedy this susceptibility to the outside, nor how, without it, we could change for the better.
Where to find Zena Hitz
Twitter: @zenahitz
Her website: ZenaHitz.net
Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life
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 the 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.