Zena Hitz: Gulliver's Travels and the Failures of Human Understanding

What a lot of fun I had talking to Zena Hitz about Gulliver’s Travels. As well as discussing Swift, slavery, genocide, rationality, Christianity, and science, Zena told me that good philosophy is like a box of cake mix and that a liberal education requires you to be freed of false expertise. I also took Zena on a detour to discuss Iris Murdoch, the Catherine Project, and modern philosophy.

TRANSCRIPT

HENRY OLIVER: Today I am talking to Zena Hitz. Zena is a tutor at St. John’s College. She is a philosopher, the author of Lost in Thought. She runs the Catherine Project. She’s famous on Twitter. We don’t know how she does it all. Zena, welcome.

ZENA HITZ: Thank you, Henry. It’s great to be here.

OLIVER: And we’re talking about Gulliver’s Travels because it is 300 years since it was published, and it’s a book that you love.

HITZ: A book that I’ve loved for a long time.

First Encounter with Gulliver’s Travels

OLIVER: So tell me, when did you first read it?

HITZ: Well, it was an important moment for me. I was in high school, and I was admitted to a scholarship summer program which offered college courses at different campuses. There were some normal-looking college courses at normal-looking colleges. And then there was this course at St. John’s called Science as Literature, Literature as Science. [laughs] It had this description that was just unbelievable. And I thought to myself, “This is the one, obviously the one to go to.”

So I went, and we read books that no one in their right mind would assign to high school students now, and maybe not then. The fragments of Parmenides, Plato’s Timaeus, selections from Aristotle’s Physics, Gulliver’s Travels. After reading a number of—preface to Ptolemy’s Almagest, geocentric astronomy. And we read Gulliver’s Travels after reading selections from Hooke’s Micrographia, so the inventor of the microscope, and Galileo’s Starry Messenger, which is one of the great first uses of the telescope to discover the nature of the moon and the satellites of Jupiter.

So then we read Gulliver’s Travels. We also read Emma and Flannery O’Connor and various other things. And one of the faculty who was running it said at one point, “Well, we thought we’d throw a bunch of things together and see what you could do, what you could make of it. We didn’t actually have an idea of how these all fit together,” which I think was probably true.

At any rate, I think I came to Gulliver’s Travels thinking about these scientists who were looking at very large things and very small things, and thinking in general about the follies of human perception, whether that was shown in literature or philosophy or what have you, the ways in which human perception and knowledge don’t work very well. And I think Swift is still one of the best people to—Gulliver’s Travels is still one of the best books about that because it’s in the mode of a travel diary, an eyewitness account.