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.
Conversation
I think any definition which does not explicitly contemplate the intellectual’s audience isn’t apt.
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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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The problem with Corey’s definition is that either it displaces the debate to some hoity-toity definition of the “public”; or it means that any entertainer with an audience counts as an intellectual. Is the Honey Boo-Boo child an intellectual? Ron Jeremy? s-usih.org/2013/02/what-i
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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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That weakness is shared by your institutional definition too :D
Was Ramanujan a non-intellectual while he was an outsider mathematician disconnected from tradition and only became one when Hardy found him?
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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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(This also gets us into another one of our perennial debates, namely whether Wikipedia is good or bad for intellectual life. I think Wikipedia is GREAT for pseudo-intellectual life, but ambivalent at best for intellectual life.)
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Yeah that's the strange attractor here. I think the crowd can naturally manifest almost all behaviors we associate with regular institutions if you squint a bit and generalize definitions appropriately. It can be more than just mad or wise. It can intellectualize be scholarly etc
Or to turn the tables on institutions, though I love 'em, I think of them as fundamentally dead patterns of stable, ahistorical, procedural intelligence. Bureaucratware. It is the true "pure" institutionalists who are the real pseudo-intellectuals
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To the extent individual humans achieve anything of value within an institution, it's because they've managed to preserve some of the wild energy that animates them outside of institutions (either in crowd or solitary loci) and resist the full domestication into bureacrat-bots


