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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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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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I agree that Peterson is an intellectual, albeit a crappy one: his current public persona mainly performs a popular image of intellectualism, “a non-intellectual’s idea of a intellectual” (to paraphrase the old saw about how 😡 is a poor person’s idea of a rich person)
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One aspect of what I'm getting at (though not a key one) is to turn that particular kind of insult around. To the extent there is wisdom in a crowd, the crowd's judgment of intellectualism is a valid variable to consider.
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This is Corey Robin's definition of an intellectual: as someone who creates a "public". I think it's a good one. The difference between a mob and a public is the presence of legitimated spokespersons who turn crowd sentiment into arguments suitable for institutional contention
I think you're missing a nuance...Any spectacle can attract a crowd. I think he gets at a real sort of transformation of the crowd into a useful distributed computer through an act akin to programming. Though I get where you're coming from re: Robin from our private convos :D
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