The term “public intellectual” is met with controversy, scrutiny, admiration, and confusion, depending on who you are talking to. “Public intellectual” has been defined differently by numerous scholars (perhaps public intellectuals themselves?), yet the people of America still wait in darkness for a clean-cut version of who the heck this ambiguous public intellectual could be. No real guidelines exist for who could be a public intellectual, leaving people, myself included, confused and alone on how to determine one when we see one, or how to measure their influence over public opinion. The public intellectual realm is vast and intriguing, but before we can delve in on some of the issues that make public intellectuals tick, we need to find out WHO they are and WHAT exactly it is they do. Sound good?
Remember when we all started reading and you came to a reallllly hard compound word, and you didn’t know what it meant? Like hotdog, or grandfather. What did you do to better understand this word? You broke it down into pieces. Let’s apply this elementary technique to tackle something that is just as confusing as those damn compound words in kindergarten, although this is more of a compound term, I suppose.
First word. Public. What does public mean in this context? How far do you have to go into the public realm to be considered a public intellectual versus just an academic intellectual? Does the public have to receive you well in order to be considered a public intellectual? Is there an empirical way of determining the breadth of a person’s knowledge? Does a person have to get published a certain number of times before being considered a public intellectual?
Second word. Intellectual. Are certain disciplines considered more intellectual than others? Should arts and humanities be excluded from the public intellectual realm as cynic and empirically obsessed Richard Posner suggests? What sorts of issues and different realms need to be discussed, and what level of expertise must you obtain to be considered intellectual?
Tackling these questions is both challenging and thought provoking. And totally arbitrary, which is why it’s so hard in the first place.
One thing I would like to take a minute to examine, while we are on the topic of the extreme arbitrary nature in defining the makeup of a public intellectual, is the influence of your personality in determining your own definition of public intellectual. I personally am an extremely emotional and subjective person. I do PR. This is how I act, and how I deal with situations. My father, a lawyer and real estate mogul, is extremely objective and has about five emotional gestures on record since 1998. That is how he deals with situations and views the world. I define public intellectual very broadly, with few guidelines and little need for empirical and concrete support. Objective minded people like my father, those who just neeeed a definition, see things more narrowly, often citing empirical evidence and imposing exact guidelines. Personality heavily influences who you see as a public intellectual. Now I’m not just talking about how you might agree or disagree with specific people being labeled public intellectuals – that does obviously have to do with personality, but more with personal opinion. I’m talking about the way in which you think - without thinking about it. When discussing who should be public intellectuals, my mind instantly floats to the fact that some people get left out and maybe that’s not fair, because I am emotional and subjective. My father might instantly cross somebody off if their published work has not sold more than x number of copies. Your personality causes you to make decisions that are ingrained in your daily behavior. Leave it to me, the PR obsessed chick, to start talking about how your personality traits shape definitions. Human behavior is such a complex, amazing thing to examine. Often the people who think they know most, are so close minded that they truly know the least. Richard Posner is somebody who I would say is the quintessential empirically obsessed, objective person I described my father as, and is a perfect example of that, and we will later discuss his desire to exclude arts and humanities, one of the most respectable and complicated disciplines out there, from the public intellectual realm. Idiot.
In researching the public intellectual, I came across an essay by Alan Lightman which I found to be extremely helpful and innovative in defining the public intellectual. Lightman, after making his definition, describes three different levels of being a public intellectual. Level I includes those public intellectuals that speak and write for the public only about thier discipline of expertise, usually writing clear and simplified explanations of specific topics, for example, stem cell research. Level II expands into those who speak and write about their discipline and then connect it to how the discipline relates to the surrounding social, political, and cultural realms. Level III, the most exclusive level, is “by invitation only,” and describes the intellectual who has become elevated to a “symbol.” This intellectual can be asked to both write and speak about a wide variety of public issues which may or may not be connected to their original area of expertise. For example, Einstein’s original discipline was clearly science, but after he gained fame, he spoke about religion, ethics, and philosophy as well.
What I would like to do here to develop my solid definition of a public intellectual, is take Lightman’s framework about perhaps the more “intellectual” side of the term, and combine it with a corresponding level framework on the “public” side of the term. Let me clarify. With this framework, a Level I public intellectual would need the least amount of public recognition and support – so perhaps they only have a widely read blog, or have only published a few interesting articles. A Level II public intellectual would need to step up their publishing action not only numerically, but also begin to publish across many different media facets (newspaper, magazine, book, internet) in order to reach across many different audiences. Lastly, a Level III public intellectual would need not only an extremely high number of well read, published works, but also a widely spread and diverse writing style that could transcend from book writing to blog writing. A Level III public intellectual would need a complete “fan following,” and would have to be well known to even the most average individual.
Of course, that second part of the framework is completely my own innovation, so lots of work would have to be done to specify the amount of published works and public following necessary for each level. Perhaps this would be a way to appease those obsessed with factual and empirical evidence and combine that sort of theory while also attempting to keep the definition fairly broad.
Another thing I quickly want to touch upon with the potential framework I just laid out is the fact that it allows mobility between the different levels of public intellectual, but I do think that it would be hard to move up in the different levels. For example, if I don’t really require Level I intellectuals to have too many popular published works or a public following, how would they ever reach Level II? Could people jump straight to the second or third levels or would it always be a gradual process?
Another key component of my personal definition of public intellectual and something I think is important to the framework I have laid out is the issue of role and responsibility of the public intellectual. In my “level framework,” I definitely think that the role, influence, and responsibility grows as an intellectual moves up the ladder. Lightman at one point discusses the intense responsibility of being a Level III intellectual – he explores the immense amount of responsibility to offer expertise on things that are not the original area of expertise, and describes how these elite individuals must be extremely self aware of their own prejudices and biases in certain issues. This level of self-examination is hard to achieve and is one of the defining factors in determining the uppermost echelon of public intellectuals.
What is the role and responsibility of a public intellectual? I, often admittedly looking through rose colored glasses, still believe that citizen participation is the key feature of American democracy, therefore I truly believe in the role, responsibility, and influence of the public individual, especially of the independent public intellectual. Stephan Mack, in an essay entitled “The Decline of Public Intellectuals,” said “Trained to it or not, all participants in self-government are duty-bound to prod, poke, and pester the powerful institutions that would shape their lives.” I could NOT agree more. Public intellectuals take this duty and push it to the next level, and I think they set a great example for other American citizens. I love the concept and idea, ambiguous as it is, of public intellectuals stirring up innovative ideas and helping communicate complicated concepts to the average American. It essentially helps to preserve some of the key ideals presented by our founding fathers.
Well, we just took quite a journey didn’t we? We asked ourselves some key and thought provoking questions about the definition of a public intellectual to get our wheels turning, and then explored how the arbitrary nature of defining the public intellectual often ties in closely with a person’s personality. Alan Lightman lent to us his Level I-III framework, allowing us to view public intellectuals in a less cut-and-dry definition way, and instead see public intellectuals more in a concentric circles, encompassing many different types of people with different levels of public acknowledgement and achievement. We highlighted the importance of a public intellectual in today’s society, and how the role and responsibility of a public intellectual changes as they move up the ladder. Overall, I strongly believe the term public intellectual encompasses many more people than most scholars limit the definition to. Being my usual subjective and emotional self, I believe that lots of different people can be public intellectuals, and while there is need for guidelines and defining characteristics, having difference echelons of public intellectual allows us to hear the testimony of many; because in the end, the public intellectual is somebody that is passionate about their discipline – passionate enough to give part of their life to helping others learn about it – and when a person finds this passion, I find it difficult to give them the finger and say they can’t have the elusive and arbitrary title of “a public intellectual.”
Works Cited
“The Decline of Public Intellectuals” Stephan Mack – www.stephanmack.com
“The Role of the Public Intellectual:” Alan Lightman, MIT Communications http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/papers/lightman.html
Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, Posner, Richard A., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2002.
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