What are the marks of a great intellectual?
What do you think of when you hear that a person is an intellectual? Have there always been intellectuals among humanity? Or is this a more recent development (1500 years is fairly recent)?
To what extent is any great intellectual a product of his/her times? Are intellectuals influential? Or do they merely formulate and reflect? I tend to lean toward reflect. The influence of intellectuals is always very limited.
To what extent is any great intellectual a product of his/her times? Are intellectuals influential? Or do they merely formulate and reflect? I tend to lean toward reflect. The influence of intellectuals is always very limited.
Comments (32)
I shouldn't say intellectuals are never in charge. They are in a theocracy. When else?
The obvious answer is that one should look to context to find meaning. :)
One should look to context to discover the meaning of an utterance. That's pretty obvious, isn't it?
The interest I was expressing by the OP is in the first question: What do you think of when you hear that a person is an intellectual? What about them makes them intellectual? I'm not asking for guidance from you. I'm asking you what you think of.
For example: Teddy Roosevelt is considered to be one of the very few intellectual presidents the US has ever had. Carter was another. One of the funny stories associated with Teddy is that he loved to recite the entire Song of Roland (in archaic French if I'm remembering correctly) to his visitors. If they demonstrated appreciation, he would do it again. That struck someone as a sign that Teddy was an intellectual.
Nice.
Quoting frank
Aye, there have always been intellectuals, though environmental circumstance certainly has a lot to say about how frequently they might emerge.
Some have limited influence, many have none, and the few take their lions share of influence, glory, and greatness (as they do with many things).
But what are the marks of a great intellect?
Is it the charisma to be popular? The scruples to be humble?
Is it a capacity for learning or the drive to do so?
Is it the present or future value or utility of their ideas and ideals?
Does "greatness" merely equate with "influence"?
To the aphid the ant is great, and to the ant, the spider. While masquerading as an antellectual I've encountered many-legged-foes greater than myself, some magnanimous and some cantankerous.
Here forced to define greatness of intellect, I lean toward the precise definition of magnanimity:
Quoting Wikipedia
His prose was dense and bold, but graceful and rich in meaning. And his influence is utter mainstay.
If half of the fanciful depictions of the upstart crow can be half-believed, and if my take on
Shake's work is accurate, he was embroiled in a war of wits with his detractors, his patrons, himself, and the world.Trading gilded barbs with feathered friends seems petty from some perspectives, but for someone so immersed in the craft it would seem a display of respect to be worthy of public satire in the high style of the day.
We know his plays are great, but what did that greatness take? What was he like?
Clever. He was definitely clever. And perceptive (is that the same thing?). Also seemingly obsessive.
Why did he write 126 love sonnets for "a lovely boy"? Why are there so many double meanings in his writings which may have been cryptic even in their time?
I wonder how greatness in production corresponds to qualities in the individual. The qualities that enable people to produce great works might not be the same set of qualities that produces great people. Surely greatness in different areas demands different qualities. Beyond the boldness of taking risks toward worthy and noble goals, and a refusal to be dragged down by the petty and mundane, the qualities of greatness, including greatness of intellect, seems to extend in all directions.
My mind went straight to a challenge I set for myself: come to recognize the ways I'm related to Adolph Hitler.
Why didn't I ever accept the challenge if seeing how Shakespeare is my brother? If our great ones are totally unlike us, we'll never understand them. If they are like us, do we all have latent greatness?
Being Marx.
Being Marx is the best mark of being a great intellectual.
:nerd:
But what can we do with his remarx?
One who is relatively free of that which Freud referred to as 'mass psychogenic delusion'. To be an intellectual is to be a pariah, the greater the independent use of the faculty of intellect, the greater the social isolation of the intellectual.
The greatest intellectuals therefore, are the greatest unknowns.
M
But speaking of intellectuals, I also wonder why intellectuals in Europe receive more attention than those in the U.S.? As part of my college class discussion, we mention the difference between aristocratic Europe and democratic America play a role here - intellectual elites are seen as a threat where the dominant value is equality. So what determines the popularity of intellectuals in a society? Is it true that anti-intellectualism is prevalent today?
Thinking about this now I guess I’ve never really attempted to articulate what I mean by this before. So ... to me it means to be able to offer various perspectives, pull from several seemingly unrelated fields of study, to hold a mirror up to each other, and to explore and readily engage with difficult and often immeidately unsolvable problems.
The best intellectuals are those that manage to inspire people to learn more and to make people feel capable of understanding complex ideas - I’m terrible at this sadly!
Different personalities will give different weight to a problem. People like Feynman can inspire at all levels; he was combative with people in his field and also able to explicate complex ideas to the layman with charm making the listener feel wiser for listening to them.
I guess that is hte key point. A great intellectual makes one feel wiser and one want to be wiser still. Different personalities do this by rousing the listener out of a lazy slumber by charming inspiring them, and/or rebruking them. Some people thrive of combative discussion whilst other shy away from them. One person’s “intellectual” is another’s antagonist. I’ve been inspired by both types with the later being the toughest to get through. A taste of each is likely necessary, but I don’t think either is more effective than another and the weight of the intellectual in question is generally measured by the will to learn on the part of the listener (with both humility and confidence.)
Honestly? If I hear someone say that about someone else that I'm not familiar with, my first thought is typically along the lines of, "The person in question probably says a lot of stupid shit, probably in a humorless way, that impresses the easily gullible person telling me this (or that the person telling me this doesn't understand/feels is above their head)."
I don't always think of "intellectual" negatively, though. Sometimes I think of it simply as referring to someone whose vocation is focused on theorizing, where I don't see the term as making a commitment to the merit of their particular theorizing.
It's very much like the mark of a great, as distinct from a mediocre 'sexual': fruitful intercourse as opposed to masturbation, either mutual or solitary.
^ It will be good if you define your definition of "Intellectual" so that I can give you the mark of the concept you speak of. Because my concept is "Intellectual is a person who are knowable in academia" . That mean the mark of "Great Intellectual" are, their theory/Stories/Works is use through out the ages.
1. What are the marks of an influential intellectual? These are the types of intellectuals that have made the biggest impact in their field of study. Without them, many succeeding intellectuals wouldn't have existed(For example, we could argue that if Plato was never born, the whole history of western philosophy would be radically different. Of course, it could of been better or worse without Plato so we can't assume his impact was positive necessarily.)
The marks of an influential intellectual seem to be:
-Creativity/Originality
-Charisma
-Determination
-Confidence
-Sometimes Arrogance
-Disagreeableness
-Willingness to face persecution for one's beliefs
2. What are the marks of a competent/skilled intellectual? These are intellectuals that have the greatest capacity to think. You can think of them as a kind of virtuoso in thinking. They can maybe write a complicated book in like a couple of weeks or have extensive knowledge in a variety of disciplines. They can understand incomprehensible concepts and come up with complicated ideas. They might employ skilled rhetoric also. Although, despite their skill in thinking, they might not make any meaningful contribution to the history of human though.
The marks of a competent intellectual are:
-Extreme Intelligence
-Great memory and fast thinking
-Interest in a variety of subjects
-Obsession with thinking for its own sake
-Having nothing better to do with their time other than working on intellectual pursuits.
3. What are the marks of an Admirable/Praiseworthy intellectual? These are intellectuals worthy of respect regardless of what opinion you have of their ideas. It is the spirit and the attitude by which they think that makes them special. I think Socrates, in many ways, fits this ideal. He has a genuine curiosity and a desire to learn and understand. For him, thinking isn't about promoting your ideas or showing how smart you are, it is about trying to discover the truth together.
The marks of an admirable intellectual are:
-Humility
-Intellectual Honesty
-Curiosity
-Desire to understand
-Agreeableness
-Good listening skills