Sophia's Reviews > Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

There are some things to enjoy in this book, but I take issue with most of it, beginning with the elitist premise, the supposed necessary «uselessness» of living an «intellectual life». Poverty here always seems like a temporary state or something to be visited, only to return to one’s «proper place» as a middle-class intellectual. The idea that the inner space of reflection Zena Hitz sees as the locus of learning is a place detached from the concerns of «the world», politics and projected results, seems to me not only, again, elitist, but deeply concerning. She asks for political agendas to be kept out of «free thought», which is in itself a political agenda (she’s also Catholic whose research focuses on Plato and Aristotle, and uses references almost exclusively from the Western «canon»). To make this short, I think her analysis is missing that learning and the pursuit of knowledge (a concept she dismisses as the cultivation of «correct opinions») is a socially situated process of co-construction and conversation that is always engaged with real-world circumstances, not just a sentiment of connecting with our «universal humanity». (Also, imagine lauding Malcolm X for speaking not «for the sake of social results or legislative outcomes».) Looking to «make a difference» cannot be just dismissed as looking for money, power and status in order to force a conceptual difference to «person-to-person service» that is never properly developed.