How Not to Be Alienated from Your Own Life

Renée, protagonist of Le Herisson, or The Hedgehog (2009), reads in her hidden study. “Renée is a model of the intellectual life as I understand it”

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In this installment of Starting Out in Philosophy, I thought of speaking to Zena Hitz. I read her book Lost in Thought before I left for college last summer. Her writing helped me to understand why education felt like an inalienable part of my life that excited me and showed the way to new worlds. But at the time, I didn’t realize how much her thinking ran against the culture of many learning institutions, such as my own. 

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Katherine: Thank you Zena for doing this interview with me. I’m excited.

I first want to ask, What drew you to learning? I also know you left academic work for a time to join a religious community. What made you return?

Zena: In a way I was born into learning.  Reading was just what we did.  I used to read on the bus and keep reading as I walked down the street.  My family liked to talk about big questions, sometimes in a silly way, but sometimes seriously.  That said, it never occurred to me to enter a “learning profession”, so to speak.  I liked theatre, music, photography, and politics.  Those were the kind of things I dreamt about doing as I grew older. 

By chance I ended up attending a summer program for high school students at St. John’s College in Annapolis.  I fell in love with the place and applied in the summer to attend in the fall.  My freshman year I wrote an essay on Oedipus Rex, and it turned out to be a tremendously exciting experience.  At that point I discovered a deeper level, where reading carefully could be a way to think about the deepest questions.  From then on, I think, I was pretty well hooked on the life of the mind.

I think there’s a deep desire for this type of learning in nearly everyone.  It is part of being a human being.  But people need to be exposed to others who learn and think about the deep questions, to those practices and habits.  That isn’t automatic, and over time it has become more and more difficult.

When I came to Madonna House, the religious community where I lived for three years, I knew that I would be deprived of intellectual activity in certain ways.  But I never conceived of giving it up for good — I knew I couldn’t do that.  I kept looking for ways to integrate reading, learning, and study into the community’s mode of life.  That integration was hard, because in principle it was possible, but the realities of the community at that time made it not possible, at any rate, not on the level I wanted.

I went there after a time of real alienation from professional academic life.  I was a philosophy professor, but it wasn’t the life of the mind I had discovered as a freshman.  I knew that I needed a change, but couldn’t see what it was.  And community life as it was lived at Madonna House was very attractive to me.  After a few years, I realized that I couldn’t stay in the community under the condition of long-term intellectual deprivation.  At the same time, I saw that if I went back to St. John’s, to my old college, I could escape the alienation I had suffered previously and live a life that was more focused on the fundamentals of teaching.  I could pass on the habits that I learned there as a young person.  So that’s what I did, and what I still do.

Katherine: Thank you for that answer, Zena. It’s wonderful to hear more about your curiosity as a young person—and it’s something that I can relate to, trying to learn a bit of philosophy.

St. John's College ca. 1994, when Zena was a junior; Katherine’s high school graduation in Cleveland’s Severance Hall

Zena:  I want to ask you a question!  Did you first learn about philosophy in middle or high school?  In that case, your story of discovering and practicing philosophy early on is encouraging.  Did you first learn about it while in college?  In that case, it is very discouraging!  Philosophy is not a hobby — it is a part of a human life.  More of a part for some, less for others, of course.  But imagine if someone told you, “I never knew there was such a thing as music, but it turned up on my Instagram feed, and now I really like it!”  Or art.  Or sports.  Or being outdoors.  There are human activities that we assume every young person should have exposure to.  But these days, intellectual life — reading, thinking, contemplating — is not one of them.

Katherine: I was lucky. I had bright friends and some teachers who had the time and care to field questions unrelated to our courses, unrelated to anything, really. That cultivated an environment of learning and of thinking about the world that I was glad to be a part of. I guess I had some idea that I was interested in philosophy; so I began to learn about it from reading articles online. Much later I would be part of virtual discussion groups.

Zena: It’s so interesting that you say that the introduction to learning came outside of your courses!  It seems like we all need to know that learning is really gratuitous, off the beaten path, to fall in love with it.

One thing I worry about in our technological environment is the flip side of one of its virtues.  It’s very easy — unimaginably easy — to get information:  historical facts, vocabulary, names and dates, basic accounts of scientific phenomena.  Now, I love information as much as anyone does.  But it isn’t really learning.  At best, it’s a start to learning, or a supplement to it. 

The core of learning is seeing where information comes from, and making one’s own judgement about it.  For example:  We read the Iliad at St. John’s; it’s the first book in our curriculum.  The freshmen often bring in or ask about “facts” about the history of the period.  They don’t seem to realize that texts are one of the major resources for knowledge about the past.  There aren’t unsourced determinate facts about the past floating out there in space.  Sources have to be interpreted.  Sometimes, we interpret the archaeological record, but for the most part, people figure out what Homeric Greece was like from Homer’s poems!  Certainly they are the best place to start learning about it.

Another example:  the dictionary.  It’s a classic student-paper move to begin with a dictionary definition.  But where do dictionary definitions come from?  They come from people looking at all the different ways a particular word is used, in print and in speech, and making a judgement about which meanings are primary.  It’s a good exercise just to think through the ways you use a particular word– or look around and listen for other uses — and make a judgement for yourself.  It won’t have the authority of the dictionary definition– again, the sources are limited — but it will train you to think about how words mean.

Understanding where information comes from is much more important than any given piece of information.  Most of all:  we have to understand the role of judgement.  We are terrified these days of exercising judgement on matters of fact.  But it is necessary in every field of human knowledge.  If we want to actually understand what we are doing, we have to learn how to exercise judgement ourselves and observe others making judgements and seeing what their options were.

Fear of making judgements and passive reliance on pre-fabricated information leaves us vulnerable to manipulation.  Whichever side of the American political spectrum you are on, you think the other side is manipulating information or being manipulated by it.  Have you considered that both sides might be right?  Terrifying, eh?

A St. John’s Annapolis classroom, the kind Zena teaches in; St. John's former faculty common room

Katherine: When I learned about philosophy in early high school, rarely was it through philosophical texts! I was sixteen when I first picked up one of Plato’s dialogues, the Crito, which I found in the library of my school. That was the first text of philosophy that I really tried to interpret. But already by then, I thought I knew all about Kant and Spinoza and Marx, just because I had read articles online about them. Perhaps I wasn’t exercising my judgment very much; so I wasn’t thinking all that deeply or really learning, in the full and beautiful way that is possible. I think I would’ve been receptive to that sort of inquiry—when I experience it at college, I run toward it.

Zena: I think that the truth is that lots and lots of people love to read and think about big questions, just for its own sake.  The sense in which the practice is marginalized isn’t exactly lack of interest.  The problem is lack of institutional support.  Since K-12 schools teach to standards these days, they don’t have the leisure to let a book be a book.  The book has to become talking points.  So I think it’s really pretty common to finish even a pretty good secondary education without having actually read a whole book, and certainly without having read for pleasure or at leisure.  Come college, most people feel under pressure to start looking at careers.  If a student happens not to feel that pressure, in fact, their college will consider it important to make them feel it.  Even St. John’s staff and faculty are under pressure to put our students under more pressure to prepare for careers!  It’s possible that this is responding to a real need, but I suspect that part of it is just groupthink and administrator-think.

Katherine: I’ve been in awe of the Catherine Project you began, which offers small tutorials and reading groups with instructors to people from all walks of life, free of charge. How does this figure in?

Zena: Learning and studying and reading require community.  We all need help to read all but the simplest books or to study all but the simplest topics.  So the Catherine Project is meant to fill the gap, in the simplest way possible, between what all these people want to do and what our institutions are willing to provide for them. 

Katherine: I’m glad you pointed out that we need others to help us get through hard texts. I’ve been drawn to community life lately, which seems to be a way to resist pre-professional pressures and a culture of ambition that corrodes individuals. We bring our learning and our experiences, and together we work through the problems and questions that matter to us. This is what I expected university life to be like, actually.

“I took the first photo during my job at Widener Library. Most days, I am given a list of books to grab that people have requested, and there’s often more than enough time for me to read a few pages of each one. I also enjoy the feeling of being surrounded by texts, sometimes deep underground. Other parts of the job include sorting books to be put back on the shelves or making sure that people have the “proper” type of university ID to enter the stacks. The second image is of my friend’s dorm room window. On Thursdays, a group of us gathered for ”Philosophy Night" there. We'd chat about what we'd been reading or questions we have, and people often stood at the window and drew diagrams on it with erasable markers.” - Katherine

But I want to ask a question about learning in solitude, something you explored in Lost in Thought. How can solitude, and perhaps even withdrawal from the world, help us join a human community? What kind of community is it?   

Zena: I first of all want to say that I don’t want to be too fastidious about how people find their way into learning, philosophically or otherwise.  Sometimes (for me, at least!) it is pretension or wanting to win at something when you’re bad at sports!  The important thing is that there be a way into the real thing — picking up the Crito from your school library is perfect.  That’s why community and institutions matter so much — to make sure that there is a way forward for people who start, so that they don’t just skate around on social media without really thinking about something.

As for solitude and withdrawal:  I think in some traditions these are ends in themselves.  I, the individual, stand alone in the face of God or the truth or who I really am or my core values or what have you.  What I am alone, in these traditions, is who I truly am.  I put my emphasis differently.  Solitude does matter for its own sake, but it is ultimately for the sake of engagement, for community. 

The crucial part of withdrawing from the world is withdrawing from the space of social competition.  We tend to define ourselves by our place on the social ladder.  That can be a role in my family:  the favorite, or the black sheep.  Or it can be a role in the high school cafeteria:  the jock, the nerd, the rich kid, the poor kid.  Or it can be our job, our social role.  We all know that jobs are implicitly ranked:  no one aspires to be a taxi driver or to work the register at McDonalds.  Yet, the low-ranked jobs often matter more– a lot more– to other people than the high-ranked ones!  Feeding people or helping them get to places is much more important than creating demand for a useless consumer product.  But you get money and prestige from the latter thing — sometimes a lot!

"For me, images of the Virgin Mary at the Annunciation are the most beautiful expressions of solitude.  She always has a book -- sometimes many books.  Her thoughtful and reflective mind is the sacred focus of the images." Masolino, ca. 1425 (source); Merode Altarpiece, ca. 1425 (source); Filippino Lippi (source).

To get in touch with real goods, with things that really help others and nourish our own flourishing, we need to pull away from the nexus of social competition.  Now I was very addicted to prestige as a young person.  I could not imagine my life without it, even though I knew intellectually it couldn’t be that important.  I did everything I could to break myself from it:  volunteering in jail, living in a boardinghouse, praying a lot.  Nothing worked.  That’s why I had to quit my job (at the time) and live in a monastery.  Now I was looking to live in the monastery for good — I wasn’t thinking of it as a temporary change.  But as it happened, what I really needed was a few years away from my prestige habit, a few years of living as a simple human being among other simple human beings.  I needed to use my freedom to quit my job and make a radical choice, so that I could feel in my bones that I was always free to walk away.  And that’s how I’ve been ever since.  I discerned out of the community, and came back to teach at St. John’s.  And of course, ironically enough, I’ve also launched a successful career as a writer.  But I know now in my bones that if I see it isn’t helping, if I see it’s not wholesome anymore for myself and others, I can walk away.  I can do something else.

It’s true that this kind of freedom is a privilege that not everyone can take.  If I’d had little kids at home, or aging parents that needed support, I would have had to think about my responsibilities before walking away from a good salary or benefits.  But I believe that the most crucial kinds of freedom are internal and are available to anyone.  I might have had to stay in my job, and then I would have had the more daunting challenge of detaching its real value from its superficial rewards while still within it.  I would have had to find another way of life without having time away from everything.  But it could have been done, and it can be done.  We don’t always have a choice, but we always have more choices than we think we do. 

That’s what withdrawal or solitude mean to me:  they are spaces where one can think clearly, face oneself, take stock of one’s life.  You can carve out a bit of time to do nothing every day; or take long walks, if you can; or spend some time in a community, which I highly recommend to anyone who has the opportunity to do it.

Now you asked about community, and here I’ve gone on and on about withdrawal.  One aspect of community I’ve touched on is work.  Work — real work, work that leads to flourishing — serves others.  The best kinds of service are person-to-person.  That’s what makes us happy:  seeing that our work benefits others and knowing the people whom it benefits.  If our work is on too large a scale, as most academic and teaching work is, it won’t make us happy. 

Another aspect of withdrawal and solitude is dignity.  My social role is not my real value, whether it’s high or whether it’s low.  My real value is unconditional, based on my capacity to think and to love.  If I don’t know my own dignity, I can’t see it in others either.  So real friendship and real love, as well as real work, require getting to know one’s real self.  That requires solitude, withdrawal, spaces that are free from advertising, competition, distraction, diminishment, and drudgery.  Those solitary spaces aren’t always comfortable.  They make us antsy or even depressed.  But if we don’t sit through it, little by little, we’ll never know our own dignity or what we really care about most. 

The farm at Madonna House, Combermere, Ontario; the cemetery at Chapel Point, Maryland, a view that Zena loves; Philosophy Night in Harvard Yard

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The last times I wrote to you, reader, I expressed anger at the injustice present in my university. I also talked about the pressures to produce work and to succeed that prevent meaningful engagement with our communities—and with our own lives. Alongside many others, I am longing for the world and my university to be otherwise.

I reached toward the practice of chores and labor on another’s behalf as a way to navigate my university life. But the solution didn’t seem to be enough, perhaps because it is such a minor resistance in the face of something so large. With my friends, I am still trying to find a way to navigate Harvard as someone who strives to be justice-minded and who seeks wisdom. Sometimes, we think about what it means to be in this place at all.

I’m going to take time off from school to give more time to these questions. Maybe I will find the beginnings of answers.

Now, I’m in the middle of final exams, enjoying (most) moments of exhilarating learning before I return to Ohio. Despite the problems of the university, there are scintillations of something that will make it hard to leave this summer and next year. Zena helped give me words to express what that something might be and how I may lean into it during my time off.

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This is an installment of Into Philosophy.