DUCKPOND

So therefore you can define things, elucidate, distinguish, what is what, and what is not. Luckily, I am hopeless at this type of thing. I cannot tell the difference between a spaceship and a saucer.

But I wonder why the English were, as it seems, inclined to empirical philosophy? In doing so they set the frame for the Americans and the other colonials. I suspect it has something to do with the rationalism of Locke and Hume gained over the Eighteenth Century verbal and literate class which the romantic reaction never quite overthrew, because the stature of its primary advocates were not diminished.

Still, I am happy to report there are a set of definitions describe the intellectual in their various guises. Timothy Garton Ash, writing in The Guardian, quotes the definitions of Stehan Collini:

Collini distinguishes three different senses. First, there’s the subjective, personal sense: someone who reads a lot, is interested in ideas, pursues the life of the mind. That’s what people often mean when they say of a friend or relative that he or she is “a bit of an intellectual”. (Usually this is not unkindly meant, as if talking of a harmless hobby or foible.) Then there’s the sociological usage: the intelligentsia as a class, which may be said, for example, to comprise everyone with a university degree. But this sociological usage has never really caught on in Britain, unlike in central and eastern Europe, where it’s part of the standard descriptive apparatus.

Last, and most important, is the characterisation of a cultural role. Collini attempts to pin this down in a careful definition. An intellectual, in this sense, is someone who first attains a level of creative, analytical or scholarly achievement and then uses available media or channels of expression to engage with the broader concerns of wider publics, for some of which he or she then becomes a recognised authority – or at least a recognised figure and voice.

The last, I suggest, is the determining case, in distinction from intellectual training and competence – especially useful among our leaders (thinking of a certain president), who might as a measure of personal integrity forswear a total reliance on spin (thinking of certain prime ministers), if only to avoid the accuracy of the endearment, “charlatan”.

Postscript:

I do not think it true, or even generally true that Australians, as was suggested at work today, are inclined to an antipathy to intellectuals. Definition three represents the closest description, although intellectuals do not need to be public intellectuals. And it seems to me there is no shortage of public intellectuals. Some people may attain the status under definition one. Definition two is less than plausible, if accomplishment is a criteria. The problem with the concept and the definitions is that it leaves those of us non-intellectuals as a grey area. Jacok Bronowski once said that most people are not intellectuals, they are spiritual, which I doubt is true for all people in the category.