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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
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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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Corey’s definition also suffers from presentism. Is someone who writes “for the drawer” (4ex, in a dictatorship) not an intellectual because she creates no public? If she goes unappreciated in her lifetime, is she not an intellectual—but then becomes one once she’s “discovered”?
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I actually don’t believe in institutional definitions (though it gets trickier with “scientists”) — my main definition, again, is that the intellectual writes within an explicitly identified intellectual tradition. And that is something Mr Crusoe can absolutely do.
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Sure, so long as he arrives on the island with a brain primed with received knowledge etc and choose too. But if he arrives there with only basic literacy and no such membership, and becomes the island's only expert on breadfruitology from scratch... he still counts for me
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