But doesn’t saying they have “an intellectual orientation” risk becoming tautological?
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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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Curiosity cannot be enough to qualify as an intellectual. Even kittens are curious, despite the mortality risks.
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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.
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Then it sounds a lot like what others have tried to describe as a Cynical tradition.
Which is distinct from the “tender, quiet freemasonry of useless erudition” or whatever.
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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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Are you trying to describe a virtue/foible or a sociological category that takes the good with the bad?
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I feel like any suitable definition will also comprehend the phenomenon of the “rock star intellectual”.
For instance, Jordan Peterson is an intellectual. Of a funny American televangelist type. But I think he has to count. Otherwise you’ll just end up defining philosophy etc.
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Certainly he counts. Intellectuals in the tradition-based sense don't have to necessarily like *all* competing traditions. People may judge his individual quality as an intellectual from both within his own and other traditions either generously or harshly. True of everyone.
some tricky cases: Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peele, Dale Carnegie, Malcolm Gladwell
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