Great thinkers loathed, loved and endangered

[dArKeR]

By Steve Fuller

Saturday, Feb 26, 2005,Page 9

This spring marks the centenary of the birth of two all-round intellectuals, those ideological avatars of the Cold War era, Raymond Aron and Jean-Paul Sartre. Aron was born on March 14, 1905, Sartre on June 21.

Sartre and Aron began their 50-year acquaintance with a shared elite French education that included a formative period in Germany just before the rise of Nazism. Each in his inimitable way displayed the contrariness both loved and loathed in intellectuals: Aron fancied Anglo-American liberalism before it became fashionable, while Sartre remained a Communist sympathizer after the fashion had passed.

Aron wrote cool, sleek prose about the most heated geopolitical conflicts, while Sartre could turn any triviality into an existential crisis. Yet they often stood together against the French political establishment. Both joined the Resistance when France was a Nazi puppet state, and both called for Algerian independence after France regained its sovereignty.

Unfortunately...

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/edit/archives/2005/02/26/2003224674

[bloom]

1. ...another snip...

"In short, intellectuals want their audiences to think for themselves, not simply shift allegiances from one expert to another. The intellectual's ethic is both exhilarating and harsh, for it places responsibility for thinking squarely on the thinker's shoulders. Every act of deference thus becomes an abdication of one's own intellectual authority.

The slogan "Knowledge is power" may be familiar, but only intellectuals see its full implications. Obviously, greater knowledge enhances our capacity to act. What is much less obvious is that such empowerment requires the destruction of socially sanctioned knowledge. Only then is a society's space for decision opened up, enabling its members to move in many more directions than previously deemed possible."

[dArKeR]

2. This is surely the way it was when I was in college. But it's amazing

to me the number of people I've met with degrees who seem as though they have no worldly/political/business common sense. But then just about every person I 'm friends with who has a degree absolutely think Bush is a liar/fool.

This sort of gets back to a previous post on 'Dems didn't take their message to rual America' story. As I pointed out, maybe the rual people have Neanderthal type thinking? Which gets back to a previous thought that the only educated people the GOP have on their side are immoral souls who purposely sold their souls to Satan for power and wealth. The other 90% are just ignorant of the truth and/or unable to investigate and evaluate facts to come to truthful conclusions.

[ixion]

3. As historian Will Durant said...85% of the population is

still but 'one step out of the cave', intellectually speaking.

And the fact that intellectualism is treated like a disease in the US -- something to be hidden away and/or masked -- does nothing to expedite the collective increase in intelligence necessary for us to actually progress as a civilization. We've been at that one step stage for 10,000 years now, and there doesn't seem to be alot of clammoring for the breaking of inertia in that regard.

The major problem is that having, or not having, a college degree does not mean one can think critically. Unfortunately, it's possible to go through college and never learn to think for yourself. Just ask a business major.

[michaelwb]

4. Well

" And the fact that intellectualism is treated like a disease in the US"

Frankly, I think the fact that far too many intellectuals treat the common people like they are a disease may be related to that.

[dArKeR]

5. Someone needs to make the clarification. "Honesty is a disease

in the US." What must be said is intellectualism = honesty.

[ixion]

7. I agree

thanks for making the clarification.

[ixion]

6. the people who do that are not intellectuals

they are what we call pseudo-intellectuals, and they behave that way in an effort to cover up their own ignorance.

[bloom]

8. You may need to post an actual example of that.

It sounds like you're talking through your hat.

[michaelwb]

9. Well, first of all

First, you would need an accurate and unbiased definition of what is an intellectual.

We have already seen in this thread a typical false dichotomy of intellectuals who support my argument = true intellectuals. Those who do not support my argument = pseudo-intellectuals.

Given that has already appeared as a key concept I question the value of even giving an example.

And frankly, I find it hard to believe that you have not seen academics and writers (which I'll use as a base definition) appear in the media with such attitudes. Heck working in a liberal academic setting I see plenty of foundation-consulting experts who are interviewed by the press who can barely conceal their intellectuals' burden (latter day white man burden) - the need to guide those masses.

Every time you see a public discourse involving "social engineering" of the poor and working class (how many children they have, how they raise them, how they spend their money, where they live, etc.) you are having an argument based on such an assumption. Yet the concept of doing the same for the middle and upper classes somehow escapes this people - because they are caught in the same value system as their peers.

It is equally tied up into our culture's/media's assumption that the middle class lifestyles, values and appearance are the "norm" and everyone should be aiming for it, etc.

[Igel]

10. Eh. Some thinkers are so time-bound or require context to

be "great".

Sartre had his school of thought, and most don't much care any more. We don't study Erasmus, and in 50 years won't study Sartre, unless his ideas stay popular. Derrida will also likely be history in a hundred years, much like we study Herzen and Dobroliubov in Russian literary criticism, or Berdyaev in philosophy.

Others are "great", but hopelessly wrong, and unless their thinking begets a school of reasoning, or they enabled a set of scholars, they're ignored. We can put Margaret Mead in that group.

Newton was real close, and Leibnitz no slouch; but we get through their contributions in AP calculus and physics. They established branches of knowledge, so we pay them lipservice--but who now reads the Principia? Saussure did really fantastic work, but few read his writings. And while I personally think that Wöhler triggered a huge paradigm shift, I've never read his report (he synthesized urea). Their contributions are summarized, credit given in footnotes or as a nicety.

Others are too contextualized, field-specific. Grimm, Verner, and Brugmann were fantastic scholars; but Grimm is more famous for his (and his brother's) fairy tales than his linguistics, and Brugmann's Grundriss is read by a very few number of scholars. Few people read anything by any Bernoulli. Or Panini.

It's gotten harder in the last 50 years to retain knowledge of great scholars. Readers of Derrida are unlikely to follow both Liadov and Cavalli-Sforza, and have no use for Prince and McCarthy.