I READ definitions of the intellectual in The Weekender the other day and just wanted to cry. The public display of ignorance on such a colossal scale about this age-old concept by some of our most senior academics is simply unforgivable — a disgrace, actually.
These impoverished definitions are inspired by Wits University vice-chancellor Loyiso Nongxa’s and Solani Ngobeni’s argument that academic expertise is a prerequisite for intellectual excellence. But nothing could be further from the truth. Historically, the intellectual function emerged in ancient history as a semi-clerical, moral function. In its modern incarnation, the term “intellectual” emerged during the Dreyfus affair in France as a badge of political commitment.
However, in The Reckless Mind, Mark Lilla warns against the romanticisation of the progressive Dreyfusard intellectual — a weakness shared by Jean-Paul Sartre and Edward Said. After all, many intellectuals enlisted themselves in the cause of “philotyranny” as apologists for tyranny — from Dionysus in ancient Greece to Thomas Mann and Martin Heidegger in 20th-century Germany. These moral variations notwithstanding, there was never any conception of the intellectual as an academic expert in all of this 2000-year history.
In his wonderful book The Legislators and the Interpreters, Zygman Bauman argues that it is only in the 19th century that the concept of the “expert” emerges as a response to growing industrialisation. Sartre thus emphatically asserted that to be an intellectual is to be something other than an expert.
In Anti-Intellectualism In American Life, Richard Hofstadter draws a distinction between intelligence and intellect. Intelligence is “an excellence of mind” with an “unfailingly practical quality”. Intellect is “the contemplative side of the mind”. Academic experts rely on their intelligence to solve problems, intellectuals use “the contemplative side of the mind” to engage in “free speculation”. Thus, when Albert Einstein split the atom and Robert Oppenheimer built the atom bomb they were putting their intelligence to practical use. They became intellectuals only when they stepped out in the semi-clerical tradition to oppose the bomb’s use.
That’s just the history of the evolution of intellectuals. Now let me come to their contemporary definition.
Some years ago I taught a graduate course on “intellectuals” for the New School for Social Research — that US citadel of emigre intellectuals. I taught the course with Jeffrey Goldfarb, author of Civility and Subversion. For Goldfarb, the word “public” is superfluous, since intellectual work is by definition public — to promote public talk. Ali Mazrui described an intellectual as “a person who has the capacity to be fascinated by ideas, and has the capacity to handle them effectively”. Garry Wills described an intellectual as “anyone who promotes philosophical self-examination in public meetings and places”. Nowhere is there any suggestion in all of the literature that academic expertise is a requirement for intellectual work. Academic expertise matters only to the extent that it is a prop to the intellectual but never the essence of the function. By Nongxa et al’s definition, neither Studs Terkel nor Steve Biko nor Walter Sisulu nor Saul Alinsky nor Ken Owen would qualify as intellectuals. We know how absurd that would be.
But if the intellectual function is a semi- clerical, political and moral function, then ranking intellectuals would be no different from ranking clerics. The outcome would depend on how many members of your denomination you have in the sample. After all, is this not the same country in which Charlize Theron was ranked as historically more significant than Robert Sobukwe?
The last word goes to my daughter, who seemed perplexed by the whole thing. After all, does this ranking business not go against the very essence of the intellectual, which is to eschew popularity? Is there not something elitist in narrowing the intellectual space to academic expertise?
Well, that’s what happens when academic hermits suddenly find the courage to enter the public stage. Unfortunately, in trying to settle personal scores and put some of us down, these individuals take short cuts. To denigrate public commentary is to display a shocking ignorance of intellectual history, from Socrates to Biko. If our ideas are weak, then point that out, instead of mangling up the scholarship, in the name of scholarship. As for the competition? Sorry folks, I’m not in the running. Such prizes are better reserved for the experts.
Mangcu is affiliated to the University of Johannesburg and the Brookings Institution.