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

If this book was a dish, I would say it needs some lemon juice. All the ingredients are there. Sweet, savoury, richness, but no acid. It lacks a certain 'oomff', a spark that brings it all together.

I had looked forward to this book for a while, but I found the actual text somewhat disappointing. It's less a rallying call for intellectual life for its own sake, and more for the value it can bring in terms of service to other values and other people. I may be over-reading the authors own biography - as told to us in the first chapter - but it feels like an attempt by an academic to become an activist while still validating that new approach as equally intellectual. That one can still serve the world out there without losing the previously validating connection to the world in here.

Lost in Thought starts well, but becomes somewhat lost in its own way. "The value of intellectual life lies in its broadening and deepening of our humanity" we are told. Without seriousness, "intellectual life risks superficiality, conformity and complicity with evil". These may be important values, but I am not sure how they reflect the intellectual life. The need for connection seems deep within the purpose of this book, but as Hitz rightly notes elsewhere, many like the intellectual life precisely because of the capacity to gain separation. Is there anything wrong with that?

And what of evil? Why cannot evil and intellectual life co-exist? Intellect is not morality or character or justice, and while those relationships are entangled, is not the intellect the place to deeply engage with what evil is? Those who questioned religion (Nietzsche), who questioned slavery (Douglass), who question capitalism (Marx), who question power (Foucault), who question family (Socrates) have all been viewed as evil, and some of them (Marx) indirectly contributed to great evil. But as intellectual endeavours they have all fundamentally succeeded and we are the richer for it.

There are real elements that I liked about the book. Hitz rightly critiques what academia has become. Not least the profoundly distortive status-seeking which feeds all the problems of cost, citations, awards, rankings, guilds and all the other bullshit that gets between a scholar sitting down and trying to figure something out. Academia has real, serious problems, and at the core of it is that so much of what is produced is simply designed to impress other people. The occasional dash of acid you find here - the snark against 'high prestige academics' who 'produce reams of research, much of it completely disconnected from any recognizable human question' often only serve to make me wish there was more - and used to build a stronger justification of the intellectual life in light of those problems.

I can't help but wonder what such a book in the hands of a Robert Hughes or Germain Greer (to choose two Australians) might look like. Both intellectuals knew the power of acid, and while at times applied too much, their work sparkles as a result. At its best, the work of those two authors gives the reader a fundamental insight "what does it feel like to be an intellectual". But in Lost in Thought so much of the argument is an outsight. Rather than drawing you in to validate on its own terms - consequences be damned - it seems much more about how to validate it in light of the troubled external world. Such as swapping status for service, for reasons that seem unrelated to the intellect.

I didn't really embrace it, but as a Youtube Chef I like rightly says, "you do you". That seems to me a comprehensive defence of the intellectual life in just three words.