Who is the ‘intellectual’? Is s/he the smug university professor, or the side bohemian side bum artist? Or is the righteous hermit who thinks himself above us all? A question that had alluded many, and still does. It is not just a question of a simple definition (and definitions are not simple) it is more a matter of how a given society tends to organise itself. Moreover, intellectuals (and they come in different shapes and colours, different names and titles) are the pinnacles under which societies tend to shape itself, they are always above, and bellow, they are looked at for clues as to what this whole confusing life is about. One of my favourite books is Said’s Reith lecture about the intellectual, here is a quote from it, I think sums it up quite nicely: The central fact for me is, I think, that the intellectual is an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public, in public. And this role has an edge to it, and cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d’etre is to represent all those people and issues who are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug. However, this definition, though nice and optimistic it sounds, is little problematic, and I m quoting Chomsky in an e mail exchange I had with him about that same exact quote, he wrote: Nice quote from Ed Said, but it’s worth bearing in mind that he’s talking about intellectuals the way he’d like them to be. Not the way they are. The way they are, and have been back to the earliest recorded history, is flatterers at the Court, usually with a fringe that tries to emulate the ideal that Said imagines, almost always persecuted for their honesty and integrity. I think it is always important to juxtapose two such contrasting, (maybe complementary) barometers, as it were, of things, so we get something out of it, though other might think we get nothing really if we did this way, and that we should just stick to one thing and just run with it, that too is complementary. But to go back to the subject, I’m sure there are a lot of temptations for publically known intellectuals, they become somewhat institutionalized, like a politician somehow. But to me there are three important issues here, firs how could we, whoever “we” refers to, test the intellectual intention, whether they are doing that to advance a cause or to advance their own interest. Secondly, is to ask a very reasonable question that is “what is in it for me?” why would anybody go out of their way with probably not inconsiderable sacrifices to do what only others( in the most part) will benefit from? Of course there is that good philanthropist tingling feeling that comes out of doing good, talked much about in the Nicomachean Ethics, but that won’t last forever, there is a tipping point after which it just become a tedious repetitive frustrating work, (with everybody either blindly mimicking or attacking them or trying to get a piece of their success and fame) like everything else in life, almost. Or it will turn them into a complete narcissist ( of course there is always a level of narcissism, it is only human nature, but when sometimes it becomes a disease) The third issue is that I think it is only in an ideal world that a public intellectual will not be affected by others, Said himself in one of his interviews said that he could not appear so much in the media after 9-11 because he will be spoke to as the terrorist, of course he was not well too, I do not mean to say anything bad about him, I just mean that it is not possible to be completely neutral, like in Sociolinguistics they have something called the referee who is a person or an entity in the speaker mind that would affect their speech pattern, I mean even someone who is not present at the time of speech could make such an effect, how about if they were present, not just physically, but geographical, historically, culturally, and so on. At the end, as just an open ended suggestion, I think there should be an organized effort to change that, to produce a systematic body of intelligentsia that can resist the sway of the winds of whimsicality and power. Charisma can only take us so far, that is, if it did not turn into a dangerous cancer.
Posted on: Sun, 24 Nov 2013 09:08:43 +0000
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