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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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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A "pop intellectual" might be viewed as one who expresses what a) the crowd knows but cannot express b) is in the blind spot of institutional intellectuals c) gets at interesting truth rather than merely pandering. A metis miner so to speak. Who makes the illegible legible.
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To do a bothsidesism take here. Institutional intellectuals pander to each other's vanities just as cravenly as the worst populist intellectuals do to the crowd's vanities. Prima facie, no particular reason to favor one as fundamentally better.
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So "non-intellectual's idea of an intellectual" is not actually an insult in my mind. It's just a different kind of intellectual whose work has withstood different kinds of scrutiny and has different kinds of blindspots than that of "intellectuals idea of intellectuals"


