Intellectual


An intellectual is a person who engages in critical thinking, research, and reflection about the nature of reality, especially the nature of society and proposed solutions for its normative problems. Coming from the world of culture, either as a creator or as a mediator, the intellectual participates in politics, either to defend a concrete proposition or to denounce an injustice, usually by either rejecting, producing or extending an ideology, and by defending a system of values.

Etymological background

"Man of letters"

The term "man of letters" derives from the French term belletrist or homme de lettres but is not synonymous with "an academic". A "man of letters" was a literate man, able to read and write, and thus highly valued in the upper strata of society in a time when literacy was rare. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the term Belletrist came to be applied to the literati: the French participants in—sometimes referred to as "citizens" of—the Republic of Letters, which evolved into the salon, a social institution, usually run by a hostess, meant for the edification, education, and cultural refinement of the participants.
In the late 19th century, when literacy was relatively common in European countries such as the United Kingdom, the "Man of Letters" denotation broadened to mean "specialized", a man who earned his living writing intellectually about literature: the essayist, the journalist, the critic, et al. Examples include Samuel Johnson, Walter Scott and Thomas Carlyle. In the 20th century, such an approach was gradually superseded by the academic method, and the term "Man of Letters" became disused, replaced by the generic term "intellectual", describing the intellectual person. The archaic term is the basis of the names of several academic institutions which call themselves Colleges of Letters and Science.

"Intellectual"

The earliest record of the English noun "intellectual" is found in the 19th century, where in 1813, Byron reports that 'I wish I may be well enough to listen to these intellectuals'. Over the course of the 19th century, other variants of the already established adjective 'intellectual' as a noun appeared in English and in French, where in the 1890s the noun formed from the adjective intellectuel appeared with higher frequency in the literature.
Collini writes about this time that "mong this cluster of linguistic experiments there occurred... the occasional usage of 'intellectuals' as a plural noun to refer, usually with a figurative or ironic intent, to a collection of people who might be identified in terms of their intellectual inclinations or pretensions."
In early 19th-century Britain, Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the term clerisy, the intellectual class responsible for upholding and maintaining the national culture, the secular equivalent of the Anglican clergy. Likewise, in Tsarist Russia, there arose the intelligentsia, who were the status class of white-collar workers.
For Germany, the theologian Alister McGrath said that "the emergence of a socially alienated, theologically literate, antiestablishment lay intelligentsia is one of the more significant phenomena of the social history of Germany in the 1830s". An intellectual class in Europe was socially important, especially to self-styled intellectuals, whose participation in society's arts, politics, journalism, and education—of either nationalist, internationalist, or ethnic sentiment—constitute "vocation of the intellectual". Moreover, some intellectuals were anti-academic, despite universities being synonymous with intellectualism.
File:J’accuse.jpg|thumb|upright|The front page of L'Aurore featured Émile Zola's open letter J'Accuse…! asking the French President Félix Faure to resolve the Dreyfus affair.
In France, the Dreyfus affair, an identity crisis of antisemitic nationalism for the French Third Republic, marked the full emergence of the "intellectual in public life", especially Émile Zola, Octave Mirbeau and Anatole France directly addressing the matter of French antisemitism to the public; thenceforward, "intellectual" became common, yet initially derogatory, usage; its French noun usage is attributed to Georges Clemenceau in 1898. Nevertheless, by 1930 the term "intellectual" passed from its earlier pejorative associations and restricted usages to a widely accepted term and it was because of the Dreyfus Affair that the term also acquired generally accepted use in English.
In the 20th century, the term intellectual acquired positive connotations of social prestige, derived from possessing intellect and intelligence, especially when the intellectual's activities exerted positive consequences in the public sphere and so increased the intellectual understanding of the public, by means of moral responsibility, altruism, and solidarity, without resorting to the manipulations of demagoguery, paternalism and incivility. The sociologist Frank Furedi said that "Intellectuals are not defined according to the jobs they do, but the manner in which they act, the way they see themselves, and the values that they uphold.
According to Thomas Sowell, as a descriptive term of person, personality, and profession, the word intellectual identifies three traits:
  1. Educated; erudition for developing theories;
  2. Productive; creates cultural capital in the fields of philosophy, literary criticism, and sociology, law, medicine, and science, etc.; and
  3. Artistic; creates art in literature, music, painting, sculpture, etc.

    Historical uses

In Latin, at least starting from the Carolingian Empire, intellectuals could be called litterati, a term which is sometimes applied today.
The word intellectual is found in Indian scripture Mahabharata in the Bachelorette meeting of Draupadi. Immediately after Arjuna and Raja-Maharaja came to the meeting, Nipuna Buddhijibina appeared at the meeting.
In Imperial China in the period from 206 BC until AD 1912, the intellectuals were the Scholar-officials, who were civil servants appointed by the Emperor of China to perform the tasks of daily governance. Such civil servants earned academic degrees by means of imperial examination, and were often also skilled calligraphers or Confucian philosophers. Historian Wing-Tsit Chan concludes that:
In Joseon Korea, the intellectuals were the literati, who knew how to read and write, and had been designated, as the chungin, in accordance with the Confucian system. Socially, they constituted the petite bourgeoisie, composed of scholar-bureaucrats who administered the dynastic rule of the Joseon dynasty.

Public intellectual

The term public intellectual describes an intellectual participating in the public-affairs discourse of society in addition to an academic career. Regardless of their academic fields or professional expertise, public intellectuals address and respond to the normative problems of society, and, as such, are expected to be impartial critics who can "rise above the partial preoccupation of one's own profession—and engage with the global issues of truth, judgment, and taste of the time". In Representations of the Intellectual, Edward Saïd said that the "true intellectual is, therefore, always an outsider, living in self-imposed exile, and on the margins of society". Public intellectuals usually arise from the educated élite of a society, although the North American usage of the term intellectual includes the university academics. The difference between intellectual and academic is participation in the realm of public affairs.
Jürgen Habermas' The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere made significant contribution to the notion of public intellectual by historically and conceptually delineating the idea of private and public. Controversial, in the same year, was Ralf Dahrendorf's definition: "As the court-jesters of modern society, all intellectuals have the duty to doubt everything that is obvious, to make relative all authority, to ask all those questions that no one else dares to ask".
An intellectual usually is associated with an ideology or with a philosophy. The Czech intellectual Václav Havel said that politics and intellectuals can be linked, but that moral responsibility for the intellectual's ideas, even when advocated by a politician, remains with the intellectual. Therefore, it is best to avoid utopian intellectuals who offer 'universal insights' to resolve the problems of political economy with public policies that might harm and that have harmed civil society; that intellectuals be mindful of the social and cultural ties created with their words, insights and ideas; and should be heard as social critics of politics and power.

Public engagement

The determining factor for a "thinker" to be considered a public intellectual is the degree to which the individual is implicated and engaged with the vital reality of the contemporary world, i.e. participation in the public affairs of society. Consequently, being designated as a public intellectual is determined by the degree of influence of the designator's motivations, opinions, and options of action, and by affinity with the given thinker.
After the failure of the large-scale May 68 movement in France, intellectuals within the country were often maligned for having specific areas of expertise while discussing general subjects like democracy. Intellectuals increasingly claimed to be within marginalized groups rather than their spokespeople, and centered their activism on the social problems relevant to their areas of expertise. A similar shift occurred in China after the Tiananmen Square Massacre from the "universal intellectual" to minjian intellectuals, the latter group represented by such figures as Wang Xiaobo, social scientist Yu Jianrong, and Yanhuang Chunqiu editor Ding Dong.