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I see an intellectual as someone who explicitly places his or her writing and argumentation in dialog with a tradition (meaning: sequence) of other intellectuals who have written on the topics s/he is engaged with — references, in short
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Of course, that’s not sufficient. When people think it is, that’s when you get the phenomenon of the poseur or the pseudo-intellectual, who goes through the motions of name-dropping for prestige purposes, but who has little original to add to the tradition.
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Hmm, that’s a coherent definition of one kind of intellectualism (traditional/scholastic/straussian). I have a feeling there’s at least a couple of other distinct types.
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I think of them as "take only pictures, leave only footprints" people. Some of my friends who have an intellectual orientation towards, and relationship with life, but don't situate themselves in tradition as a first order of business. Only as a side-effect
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Not necessarily. I'm characterizing the orientation in intensional terms via definitional behavioral constituents such as curiosity which others have pointed out. "Intellectuals are curious" like "water is wet". They try things. They forgo immediate reward. etc etc.
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Likewise, situation in tradition cannot be enough to qualify as an intellectual. Even hidebound priests are situated in tradition. And I'm actually inclined to admit possibility of say "chimpanzee intellectuals". I don't think there are tight necessary/sufficient conditions here
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Here’s a possible synthesis: placing yourself in a tradition means you *aim* to be an intellectual; the complexity and originality of your work within that tradition is what determines how *good* of an intellectual you are.
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Or you aim to be a particular sort of intellectual who seeks that kind of validation and comparative evaluation against others. I think it can simply be a way of living like mysticism. Just as mystics exist in both monastically embodied traditions and as wild solitary hermits.
That does capture part of what I'm getting at here. So for example, as a former institutional academic guy who is now a blogger, I'm still in a "tradition" in Nils' sense, but it is a weaker one, and to the extent I'm intellectual at all, I'm closer to a Crusoe-on-Island one
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