A philosopher’s argument against the cult of achievement | Zena Hitz: Full Interview

I'm Zena Hitz. I'm a philosopher and a college professor. I teach at St. John's College in Annapolis, and the title of my book is Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life.

I grew up in a very bookwormish, amateur intellectual family. We read books, we talked about ideas, we got into arguments about petty facts. I went to a liberal arts college—the college where I teach now, St. John's. I studied totally useless stuff: ancient botany, French poetry, and all kinds of things that supposedly don't get you anywhere in the world.

I went to graduate school in philosophy and classics, and I ended up in very high-powered elite programs. There I was gradually disillusioned with academic life, both with the research and with the teaching. I had a kind of early mid-life crisis—I was in my 30s, so I guess that's still a mid-life crisis—and I left.

I left the profession entirely and lived in a monastery, a Catholic religious community, for three years. While I was there, I really tried to encounter myself as a human being, not just a professor, not someone with a certain social status. I wanted to figure out what intellectual life really was: what is this practice of reading, studying, and thinking? Is it just a profession, something we professors do, or does it belong to every human being as our natural heritage? My instinct was that it was the latter, and living in a community full of ordinary people, where I had no access to the profession, I began to see how that might actually work in practice.

One thing I've tried to do in this book is to think about the bad reputation intellectuals sometimes have, and the ways in which it is deserved. People say about professional intellectuals like me that we're lost in the stars—so withdrawn from ordinary life that we can't connect with other human beings, or even with our own bodies. I think there's something to that, and it generalizes to anyone who works with their mind rather than with materials. There's something deeply wholesome about working with materials: washing dishes, building things. If you're doing something with your hands as simple as washing dishes or laundry, you'll find things that won't work. You'll find that reality resists your will. It's easier to see with laundry—those stains won't come out no matter what you do—but it's true of dishwashing too: how do I get the grease off this pot? It just keeps coming off, and there may be a point where you have to say, we're putting it away with some grease on it, because I can't get it off. That's an ordinary feature of our encounters with the world: the encounter with limitations, with things that won't do what we want.

What happens in the world of the mind, I think, is really dangerous, and it's one reason intellectuals have such a bad reputation, sometimes justifiably: you work in the realm of language, and language doesn't fight back the way reality does. You can tell yourself something is true, and it can be totally false, and it can sit there stubbornly for years without responding. In fact, wholesome intellectual activity always involves something like that manual-labor feeling of coming up against reality. You're writing a term paper, you started with grand dreams of writing the best paper ever, and then it's two in the morning, you're dead, and you realize it's just going to be a cruddy paper. That's a moment where hard reality cracks your ideas about yourself and what you want it to be. Likewise, a scholar genuinely trying to find the truth may have a pet theory, find a piece of evidence, and the theory has to go—which can be very painful. Having always been good with words, I could talk myself out of anything, so spending time washing dishes, sweeping floors, and working with my hands forced me to become more accustomed to the resistance of reality. I think that's a piece of our humanity broader than intellectual life: one sign that anything we're doing is going well is resistance. It means we've hit reality, and that's where we want to be as human beings.

So I decided to leave the community and return to St. John's to teach, putting teaching more at the center of my intellectual life. I started reading about what was called the crisis in the humanities—really the collapse of the study of the humanities in US universities—and I didn't feel any of the commentary was saying what I thought was true. So I wrote this book to communicate this understanding of intellectual life as a human thing, learned through my life experiences as well as my studies.

I had a personal crisis that was in some ways related to the other one. By 2015, when the topic was being written about, it was becoming clear that the study of the humanities in contemporary colleges and universities was collapsing: numbers of majors are down, departments are closing, and the common culture has lost the sense of why these kinds of study matter. A lot of young people are under enormous pressure to study pragmatic fields and get degrees that lead to lucrative or prestigious jobs. That means philosophy, literature, and political theory are honestly disappearing from our academic institutions, and there's a threat that they'll disappear from our common life as well.

One possibility is that universities and colleges can reform themselves—take a good look at what they need to do to restore and preserve these modes of study. I think that would be good if it happened, but I wouldn't depend on it, because there are a lot of pressures moving the other direction. What I'm interested in right now is finding ways to bring the humanities into the ordinary lives of ordinary people, so that it's built into our ways of life. There's an old tradition of that going back to features of the labor movement in Britain and the US in the 19th and 20th centuries: working people, who would not normally have had the opportunity for an education, formed grassroots organizations, reading groups, and reading clubs. They gathered in the evenings and read very serious books—Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, historical works, Eastern classics, you name it. They educated themselves and, in a certain way, liberated themselves from the diminishment of their surroundings.

I've read some of the history of those movements, and I think something like that is possible now. People can organize informally within their communities, and there are actually a lot of opportunities online right now to connect with others, to read seriously, to think seriously—not for any special practical purpose, not to make more money, not for a prestigious program or a big PR splash, but just to grow and develop as human beings: to recover a sense of one's own dignity, connect with others on a deep level, cultivate an inner life, and cultivate a practice of engaging with the questions fundamental to human existence—not as a professional thing, but as an ordinary thing.

I define an intellectual life in a few different ways. One is that it's an inner life — something that belongs to you, that's private. It's a part of yourself that, in principle, no one else has access to: the space of your own thinking, withdrawn from the world. And I mean "the world" in a specific sense — withdrawn from the social world insofar as it's the locus of status, competition, who's in with who, the world where your focus is on how you're evaluated and where you fit in a structure or hierarchy, whether at the top or the bottom. Withdrawing from that realm of competition is part of intellectual life. I also think it's a source of dignity and a way of connecting with others. Those are the abstract foundations.

But in practice it looks like things that are pretty ordinary to most of us: reading, thinking, speculating about people's motivations and what makes them tick, bird watching, walking in nature, mathematics. It has a very wide range in human activity. When you look at those activities and think about the elements I mentioned, you can start to get a glimmer of what the intellectual life is.

The clearest examples of things opposed to it are all the practices connected with social competition: advancing in one's career where that's a matter of status, or forming an in-group of people who are in the know, who are superior in some way to those outside it. This doesn't mean you don't use your mind when pursuing that kind of life — and that life could belong to all kinds of people. It could belong to a philosophy professor trying to get into the most prestigious institution, or a stockbroker trying to make the biggest trades. So it's not exclusive to any specific walk of life, but it's an element in all of us and a threat to our basic values.

You can use your intellect in striving for status, and you might be very good at it — there's an art to it. But you're using your mind as a means to an end, in an acquisitive way. What interests me is an intellectual life that's not acquisitive, that isn't trying to get anything else, but just wants to be doing what it's doing — that finds the good in the activity itself.

There's a wonderful book by the philosopher Kieran Setiya about the midlife crisis. He calls these activities "telic" and "atelic." Atelic activities have their ends in themselves; they're worth doing all on their own, and they're the parts of one's life that could feel like its culmination, where you're not looking for anything beyond what you're doing. Think of examples: reading or studying, where you get lost in what you're doing; being out in nature, not trying to get anything, just looking at it; prayer — religion is a huge resource of this type of activity; being with one's family or loved ones is probably the most common way it's lived. There's a set of activities we seek for their own sake, and then there's so much we do for other reasons, usually to acquire things. You go to the store to get milk; you apply for a job that might introduce you to a person who can connect you with someone who can help you do what you really want to do. Most of what we do is instrumental, a means to an end.

Consider work: we work for money — but what's the money for? Sometimes the money is actually just for the sake of the work you're doing, and then you're caught in a vicious cycle: you're using something as a means to an end as if it were an end in itself, and you never get to the thing your work is really for. We have a hyperactive, workaholic society here in the US, and I think also in Europe. We tend to get locked into acting for the sake of something else without ever getting that something else. Part of what my work tries to do is ask people to reflect on what that something else is: what is all your busyness and activity really for? What are the moments that really matter to you, where you feel this is the point, this is why I'm doing what I'm doing?

I say these activities could count as the culmination of a life because of cases like playing cards, which I love. You're not usually doing it for any other reason — it's just fun and relaxing. But if your whole life culminated in playing cards, you might not feel that was a life you were proud of, or that you'd accomplished something. So you want something done for its own sake that is also what your work culminates in. Without those things, our lives are pointless. That's where intellectual life lies — reading, studying, cultivating an inner life. It's in that realm of things we pursue for their own sake, just because of what they are and what they do for us. Aristotle, a philosopher I've studied a lot and spent time with, thought there was...

Aristotle worried that our lives could become totally focused on these instrumental activities. He defined human flourishing not just as the culmination of an individual life, but as something political community had to aim at. He offers a couple of arguments that contemplation is happiness—that the best life is the contemplative life.

Work is for the sake of leisure

One of his arguments for the contemplative life being the best life turns on leisure. As he puts it, work is for the sake of leisure, not the other way around. He offers another analogy: war is for the sake of peace. He thinks of work as analogous to war—a constant struggle just to get into place the conditions you need for the things you really care about, which are the works of peace. Leisure is the analog of peace in ordinary life, where we work and work and work, and then there is this thing, leisure.

Aristotle thought leisure was primarily contemplation, and that contemplation was really philosophy. He had a narrower view of contemplation than I do: for him it meant philosophizing the way he philosophized—which, to be fair, also included natural science, investigations into nature, animals, astronomy, and so on. But it did not include, I think, the kind of contemplation we might have being with one's family, thinking about who they are and seeing them with appreciative love, with loving vision. I think that is also a form of contemplation, though not one Aristotle would have recognized.

Reading old books as conversation

Even though Aristotle has been dead for thousands of years, reading an old book is like having a conversation. You always have to look for ways of connecting what you're reading to something that seems true to you—and sometimes you'll find things that don't feel true to you. In fact, that happens pretty often.

With Aristotle, the best example of this, even better than the expansion of contemplation, is that he thought the contemplative life was something only a few people could do. His definition of human happiness was really something for a handful of rich gentlemen—definitely men, definitely rich, probably Greek. What's interesting is that you can look at Aristotle, see that feature of his thinking, which most of us wouldn't accept today, and then also look at his thinking about leisure and work, peace and war, and what it means for an activity to be for its own sake. We can think about the questions he's asking and the structures of his thinking, and then ask ourselves: what does that mean for all of us—not just the rich, not just Greeks, not just men?

In this case, I think it's not so difficult. Aristotle couldn't have imagined a world where so many people were literate, able to read and write. But now we know—and that's one reason I love these histories of working people and their intellectual movements. They're about people who worked full time with their hands, the kind of people Aristotle would have thought were good only for producing food or shelter, whom he might really have treated as means to an end. Yet they find a way within their work, after their work, around their work, through their work, to think about things in a way that he might have understood—I can't be confident of that, but he might have.

Why young people fear not knowing

What we have instead is incredibly fierce, ruthless social competition, and a sense in our schooling that achievement is the end of an education—which, translated into other words, means that being at the top of your class is the end of an education. If you think that through, it makes zero sense: you can't set up a whole educational system or a whole school so that some people end up at the top of the heap on some ranking.

This feature of today's young people has been observed by a number of others—it's not unique to me, and it comes with the regular qualification that older people always have ideas about what younger people are like. But it does seem that they are more fearful about uncertainty, about not knowing, about sitting in the space where they really don't know what the answer is going to be, where they really don't know what's going to come out of their mouths. That's uncomfortable by nature, but it's particularly uncomfortable for these young people, for two reasons.

First, we have this relentless achievement culture, which I think has only gotten worse in our schools. There's a sense that if you make a mistake, you're kicked off the totem pole—everything has to be perfect, every flaw will be held against you and will dramatically affect your future. It all happens under the guise of anxiety about the future: what kind of lives they're going to lead, what kind of success will be possible, whether they'll get into the schools and professions they want, and the intense competition leading up to that. The sense that any mistake is sudden death.

The other reason is more general, and to me more frightening in a certain way: the internet has taught us to think of learning as information retrieval. You have a question, you ask the internet, it tells you the answer. And that leaves aside the question of where real learning takes place—which is, how...

But how did the person—and there's always a person—who put that answer into the internet, from which you retrieved it, actually come to know it? What was their evidence? What were their sources? How did they reach the conclusion they placed somewhere you could retrieve it as information? If you pull back the curtain on even pretty garden-variety pieces of information, you find the result of a thinking process that is open-ended and messy, with stops and starts.

To me, the feature that gives any serious learning its authenticity—the sense that real learning is taking place—is that open-endedness, that feeling of being lost. You don't know where the answer is coming from. You get totally befuddled; you don't know what to do. Sometimes you're in that condition for quite a long time—an hour, a week, a month, years—and then suddenly the thing you were looking for is present to you. This is a very ordinary intellectual experience once you become accustomed to that uncertainty and the discomfort of not knowing what's going to happen.

One of my concerns in writing and talking about intellectual life is trying to recover it as something open-ended, where we put ourselves in a space where we don't know the answers. In a way, if we know the answers, that's when we don't need to learn. So we should be moving always toward the spaces where we don't know the answer, where the information isn't retrievable—because it doesn't exist, or it isn't really information. What learning really is, what education really is, is the movement from one place to another. I try to explain this to my students often: it's not about getting to point Z. It's about starting from wherever you are and getting to some point further on. That's learning.

We have a very achievement-oriented educational system, with all the social and economic biases built into it—an achievement system that disadvantages the poor and anyone who's different in any way, who stands out from the people who govern things. That creates a sense that achievement and intellectual life are co-extensive. The way I understand it, not only is that not strictly true, it's in a way the opposite of what's true: if you're chasing achievement, you're not actually living an intellectual life.

So we have a situation I find really perverse nowadays, where a high-prestige professor, a professional academic and intellectual, may not actually be living an intellectual life, because all they think about is advancing up the incredibly arcane ladders of status distinctions that academics make up—and I assure you those exist. Meanwhile, a taxi driver who reads like crazy, thinks about everything, and has all kinds of profound thoughts, doing it all for its own sake, is living an intellectual life more than the professor is. We might have been more used to that idea a hundred years ago. For some time now, we haven't been accustomed to thinking of learning or intellectual life as having to do with the individual's attitude toward what they're doing, rather than that person's social standing, wealth, race, gender, or whatever else. It's something much more basic than that.

The fact is, even if you're at the top of the heap, in a high-status position, that's not really where your value comes from. The same judgment that arbitrarily rejected all those other people put you on top. What does that have to do with who you really are? Nothing.

I was a very successful academic for a time. It looked like the beginning of a really accomplished career, and it felt somehow off to me. It took me some years to untangle why. I think it was something like this: in my restlessness as a younger person, my attempt to feel like I was worth something, I was just climbing whatever ladder I could find. I was a natural intellectual, so academia was a natural place for me, and I always had somewhere in me a real love of learning. But there were points where I was really just thinking about where I was on the totem pole, and that took over the way I did things.

I think that's an old story, one many people can tell: you achieve a kind of success, and an emptiness comes with it, a sense of diminishment. It's a little mysterious, because you're so fortunate, so lucky—so many people want what you have and don't have it. On the other hand, what your real value is lies much lower down. For me, leaving my career, leaving my profession, going to...

When I left my career and joined a community where I was no one special, I washed the dishes and swept the floors like everyone else. Some people knew I had this fancy philosophy background; most didn't. I had to recover my value as a human being independently of the status I had previously gotten from the outside. That's what a refuge from the world is: a place that everyone—winners and losers of the status game—needs, a place where your real value as a human being comes through.

On the one hand, that value is less than you ever thought it was. You can find your worth as a human being washing dishes—what's more ordinary than that? Anyone can wash dishes. On the other hand, it's also more than anything you would have thought, because it's something you have regardless of what other people think of you. You have a kind of freedom, a depth, and resources within yourself that no one can touch.

We tend to think of being human as a biological fact given to us at birth, but it has the capacity to grow—we can always become more human. My view on how we become more human is very traditional, nothing original to me: it's knowledge and it's love, and these are connected. The more we see, the more we appreciate; the more we appreciate, the more we want to keep seeing. The mind is an engine for growth, for our becoming more who we are, more human.

In the book, I tell a lot of stories I love: stories of people in diminished social circumstances—people in poverty, people with disabilities, people from abusive families—under the enormous pain and pressure of social contempt. In books, in studying, in thinking, in looking at nature, they find a different way of seeing themselves than what they're being told from the outside. They turn to poetry, art, thinking, to anything in themselves that feels like a weapon against that external diminishment. Their dignity as human beings is inalienable; it can't be taken away.

I did some volunteering in jails and prisons some time ago, teaching a couple of philosophy classes to prisoners. These are very low-status people in our community—they haven't won the game of society—but they're full of thoughts and reflections. In a way, being confined and unable to pursue what a normal person can do nurtures that. That's not a defense of the prison system, which has all kinds of problems; it's just that there's a strange recovery of humanity possible there, I think because you're pressed to the limit.

Malcolm X

The historical examples include Malcolm X. His father was murdered by Klan members, and afterward his family was broken up by the welfare office, his brothers and sisters scattered into different families. He was the smartest kid in his class, and his teacher didn't think he should be anything more than a carpenter. He was under the brunt of American racism about as bad as it gets. He got into selling drugs, running numbers, running gambling operations, and was involved with the musical scene in Harlem. Then he was arrested for burglary and thrown in prison.

There he read the entire prison library. He changed his name—that's when he became Malcolm X—converted to Islam, and joined the Nation of Islam. He came out a different, focused person who looms in American history in a special way: a person of incredible strength and honesty, with what seems to be inner depth. He never stopped thinking about things, never stopped responding to realities as they revealed themselves. To me, that's a perfect example of what the inner refuge really looks like and its possibilities for us.

Einstein in the patent office

The other stories are a bit less dramatic. People think being a graduate student who can't get a job is the worst thing that could happen to you—and they forget it happened to Albert Einstein. He was a weird kid, very absorbed in his own things, and a member of an ethnic group—Jewish—that was not particularly high status, an object of hatred and fear in his environment. He went to graduate school in physics and couldn't get a job afterward. He had a wife and child to support, so he took a job in a patent office, did his work, and then sat and thought about physics—really in isolation from any academic community, denied any serious prospect of advancement through it. He was left with just his way of looking at the world and his mathematical training. In a letter he wrote later in life, he called the patent office the worldly cloister where he hatched all his most beautiful ideas. It's where he wrote the three 1905 papers that were totally transformative for physics. Despite being denied a place in the world he aspired to, he found within himself a space where he could be who he was and think about what he wanted to.

Mary as a reader

In medieval and Renaissance art, the Virgin Mary is often depicted reading, sometimes with a huge stack of books, usually in the scene of the annunciation, when the angel Gabriel tells her she will be the mother of Christ. I wanted to know why she was reading and what it meant for the painters and for the people receiving these images that she read. What I discovered is that there's a very old tradition of thinking of her as a reader—someone who knew the Hebrew Scriptures backwards and forwards and had read the prophets.

So she's read Isaiah, where it says, according to tradition, that a virgin will conceive. Then this angel turns up and says, "You're going to conceive a child," and she's like, "Oh yeah, I know what you're talking about—that's something I read in Isaiah." It's just part of the tradition that she's fully aware of what's going on because of her study of the Scriptures.

Here's this teenage girl—not a high-status character, not someone with a lot of power—and through her study, through her intellectual work, she gets into a different kind of space: a sense of her own value, a sense of the way the world works that isn't the way people tell her it is. The result of the angel's visit is that she's pregnant, and she's engaged to someone else. In that time, a woman who was pregnant without being married could be stoned and thrown outside the city, so she's undertaking a huge risk. Where does she get the strength and fortitude to choose this? I think part of what the book is doing is trying to give an account of that: she reads, and that inwardness, that wild refuge from the world, is what gives her the strength to make choices that are really radical, strange, counter-cultural, and dangerous.

I don't watch a lot of sports, but when I do, it tends to be a big game, and I often see spectacular things I remember for a long time. I think I saw a playoff game against the Yankees where Curt Schilling in 2004 had a leg that was literally bleeding from a suture—he had some injury that was bleeding while he pitched—and he pitched the game of his life, with just unbelievable athletic ability. Even if you're not a sports player, you're transfixed by this human excellence: someone resisting their physical pain and weakness while exercising their abilities to the highest degree. There's a way in which an inner refuge or inner strength could be seen as a kind of athletic achievement of the Curt Schilling type. You discipline yourself, you don't care about your surroundings, you fight for your dignity and exercise it like a sport. And there's something right about that: part of having a refuge from the world is having a kind of discipline where you give up some things in order to achieve others. You see it everywhere—in sports, in art, in finance—anything you care about involves restricting yourself for a higher goal.

But I wanted intellectual life to be a bit different. It can look like that, but I wanted it to be a kind of dignity that didn't depend on our achieving things. When you think about Curt Schilling, or the ancient Spartans—300 of them standing against the invading Persian army—you think, wow, human beings are amazing. But you're hearing about extraordinary people, exceptional people, people who have trained for this. I use all these examples of famous people, but I'm really interested in ordinary people. I want to know what's available to anybody: what kind of inner refuge is available to anyone, not just a matter of being a high achiever in the inner life. When I hear someone say that, I think, there can't be a "high achiever in the inner life"—the inner life is for everyone, and achievement is not the right standard. That's the tension I was struggling with when thinking about Curt Schilling.

J. A. Baker was an office worker in Essex. He worked at the British equivalent of AAA, the automobile association. I read his biography; I'm not clear exactly what the work was, but I think it was probably about as boring as work gets—paperwork, a pretty pedestrian kind. He never went to university, but he loved literature, and at some point he got interested in peregrine falcons. He spent ten years of his spare time, on top of his full-time job, chasing them by bicycle through the countryside near where he lived: ten years of luminous maps, scrupulous notes, counting how many birds he saw and how many peregrines were killed, keeping track of particular birds in particular locations—absorbing everything within reach of his bicycle about peregrine falcons. Then he wrote: he boiled down all his journals and diaries into an incredible short 200-page book called The Peregrine, a kind of poetic exploration of what it means to look at an animal, what it means to look at a violent animal that lives by killing, what happens to a human being when we watch an animal that likes to kill, and what tensions that brings about in the watcher. It's an incredible book, and yet another example of someone who was not a professional intellectual, not an academic, not someone moving in the literary circles of his day—a testament to the capacity ordinary working people have to reach out into reality and really make something with their surroundings.

I went on Twitter initially to promote my book, though I've actually met all kinds of amazing people there. MC Hammer is definitely one of the more remarkable. I discovered at some point that he was posting scientific articles—sometimes more popular science, but sometimes journal articles—and that he had a particular interest he had studied to some depth: the nature of life and the nature of consciousness.

Intellectual Life Belongs to Everyone

I started looking at what M.C. Hammer was doing because it's another example of what I'm talking about. We think of intellectual life as a contained academic thing, but in fact it's something everyone does. Hammer isn't just anyone—he's an extremely accomplished artist, producer, and entrepreneur—but the things he's famous for have nothing to do with the scientific or philosophical account of consciousness or the nature of life. I was late to Twitter, as always, and he had put up a video of the regeneration of planaria—flatworms that regenerate very quickly. If you're interested in what a living organism is, its independence, its capacity to maintain itself—its dominion over material things, to put it poetically—planaria are a perfect example, and something we study at St. John's. He posted the video with no explanation, and I got very excited. We've been having conversations since then.

To me, it's a fabulous witness to what's available through the internet for thinking about questions that are fundamental, serious, and complex. There's nothing about them that's shut off: you don't need a degree in life sciences to think about why life matters or what consciousness is, and you don't need to produce an article yourself. He may, but I don't think it would matter whether he did. His understanding of this stuff is what matters, just as a matter for all of us. Because of his fame, Hammer is even an emblem of the kind of intellectual life I'm talking about: done for its own sake, not necessarily resulting in scientific papers, not coming out of a graduate degree—just done because someone wanted to understand something about who they were and the world they lived in.

All kinds of people can live in intellectual life: carpenters, factory workers, taxi drivers, famous hip-hop artists. We can't see that because we're enchanted by a mystique we get from a Hollywood picture of the intellectual. A Beautiful Mind is a perfect example—a mathematician genius who sees things no one else can see, in a class apart, not like you and me. I think that's a distortion of what an intellectual really is.

Consider someone like Albert Einstein, with his huge profile, the mystique of genius, the puffy hair, the million quotes none of us could have come up with. But think of him as a young man in his late twenties with a wife and a kid, unable to get work because he was too weird and too disrespectful of authority, working as a bureaucrat in a patent office—and thinking about things. He looks at the clock tower, looks at trains going by, and starts to have real insights into the way the world is. Someone like that isn't so different from John Baker, the Essex office worker preoccupied with paragraphs. Baker wrote a wonderful book, so he's famous—but how many bird watchers are out there just looking at birds, taking them in, learning about them? Where does that knowledge go? Maybe it's passed on to family, friends, or fellow bird watchers; maybe it's lost when they die. But it has value in and of itself.

If you train yourself, as I have through these strange experiences I've had, you start to see the ordinary forms as more real, more emblematic, more central, more authentic than even the famous versions. The image of John Nash in A Beautiful Mind starts to seem fake—a fantasy of an intellectual we imagine but that doesn't really exist—whereas the real thing is more extraordinary, and also more available to us in all kinds of surprising ways. I really encourage people listening or reading to start looking for it in daily life: think about those weird relatives who lived behind your grandparents, worked in the factory, and had memorized all of Victorian poetry.

Some years ago, when my first essay on this came out, I got a letter from a college classmate who had grown up in Nigeria. He told me about growing up capturing bugs, reading encyclopedias, and studying them. I thought of a Darwin biography I'd read, where that's exactly what Darwin did as a kid: he catalogued the rocks in his yard, messed around with the chemistry he found around the house, collected and looked at bugs. If you look at what these people are actually doing, it's the same thing. I hope this breaks down some of the pedestals and fantasies and false ideas of what an intellectual is, and helps us see it in our own lives.

You can't leave your basic humanity to specialists. If I'm right that intellectual life—thinking, reflecting, asking fundamental questions about yourself and your relation to the world—is part of what it means to be alive, to be human, to be a member of a community, then we can't pretend that only smart people, rich people, or winners get to do it. It should be for everyone. And I don't need to argue for that, because it's already taking place all the time; we just don't pay attention. There's a wealth of intellectual activity going on all around us in very ordinary places.

Because of its littleness, its humbleness and authenticity, it can help us recover something. Those of us who are winners—people with relatively high social status, professional intellectuals, academics—can be reminded of what the point of our work is. The point is not to add lines to the CV, not to get a slightly more prestigious job so we can slightly diminish our teaching. It's to cultivate and practice this human activity, this thing that makes us who we are.