On Public Intellectuals

I’m ambivalent, as I’ve said before, about the category “public intellectual.” It’s precious and pretentious, and unfairly denigrates the virtues and vocation of talented scholars who devote themselves to obscure questions no one else is asking, questions that may not interest broader audiences at the time but that may, one day, be of vital importance to more than a narrow few. Or that may, regardless of people’s interest, simply advance our understanding of some small part of the universe.

But if we are going to hold onto and repeatedly invoke the category, I wonder if there may not be a fundamental problem at the heart of it. Public intellectuals are thought of as not only generalist writers speaking to non-academic audiences about issues that matters, but also as moral voices and political actors, men and women who say the unsayable, speak truth to power, confront injustice and oppression, and any one of a number of cliches that fall under the broader rubric of political prophecy.

That sort of vocation requires three things:

  1. Knowledge: A deep understanding of an injustice or oppression and why it needs to be confronted.
  2. Judgment: A political sense of how to confront it, how to marshal whatever combination of rhetoric and force that will ensure that even if it is just a voice speaking out in the wilderness, it is a voice out of the whirlwind rather than lost to the wind.
  3. Courage: An ability and willingness to act on that knowledge and that judgment, whether in speech or deed.

If these are the requirements, I’m not sure intellectuals are necessarily the best candidates for the job.

Intellectuals, particularly on the left, sometimes think the question of political involvement can be reduced to having “good politics,” that elusive combination of metaphysics and morals, truth and values, that used to go by the name of “the right line.” But when it comes to a political struggle of the sort where we might look to intellectuals, public or otherwise, for guidance, I’ve often not found that those with the right line are the best guides: they haven’t a clue where that line goes or how we might get there. Most important of all, they underestimate just how hard it will be to get there, how many forces are arrayed against them, and how easily and quickly they will succumb to those forces.

Looking back on her early years as an academic-in-training, and the collaboration with the Nazis so many of her colleagues would ultimately engage in, Hannah Arendt had this to say:

My early intellectual formation occurred in an atmosphere where nobody paid much attention to moral questions; we were brought up under the assumption: Das Moralische versteht sich von selbst, moral conduct is a matter of course. I still remember quite well my own youthful opinion of the moral rectitude we usually call character; all insistence on such virtue would have appeared to me as Philistine, because this, too, we thought was a matter of course and hence of no great importance—not a decisive quality, for instance, in the evaluation of a given person. To be sure, every once in a while we were confronted with moral weakness, with lack of steadfastness or loyalty, with this curious, almost automatic yielding under pressure, especially of public opinion, which is so symptomatic of the educated strata of certain societies, but we had no idea how serious such things were and least of all where they could lead.

Courage is not always a virtue; it depends on cause and context. But neither is it a common virtue. Not simply because most of us aren’t brave but also because courage requires judgment and knowledge. Possessing all three at the same time is a rarity. Why we would think to look for it among intellectuals is not clear.

28 Comments

  1. Denis Rancourt January 26, 2015 at 1:38 pm | #

    You mean “obscure” the verb, right?

  2. s. wallerstein January 26, 2015 at 1:53 pm | #

    The category of public intellectual makes its appearance, as far as I know, with the Dreyfus case in France. That’s well over a hundred years ago and at that time there were a lot fewer learned people than there are now. While today vast sectors of the population receive a university education in developed countries, back then it was a small minority. That small minority, unlike most people then, had the cultural tools to
    see through dominant ideologies and the official discourse: I think of Bertrand Russell’s pacifism during World War 1, for example. Today lots of people have the cultural tools that Russell had a hundred years ago and so the role of a public intellectual make less sense, in developed countries at least.

  3. fosforos17 January 26, 2015 at 2:01 pm | #

    How can anyone arrive at knowledge and judgment on complex public issues, if not by serious intellectual effort? In any case, someone unwilling or unable to make such an effort has no right to be called any sort of “intellectual.”

  4. Hattie January 26, 2015 at 2:22 pm | #

    One thing is clear: a lot of intellectuals have come down on the wrong side of moral issues. It is a matter of courage, not to mention wanting the best jobs, power, perks.

  5. Benjamin David Steele January 26, 2015 at 2:29 pm | #

    I think you might be confusing intellectual with academic or even with college educated. There is a tradition of working class intellectuals who often act in the role of public intellectuals. This tradition in America goes back at least to the likes of Ethan Allen and Thomas Paine, neither of which was an academic or had much formal education. Still, both could be fairly called public intellectuals.

    You name three qualities: knowledge, judgment, and courage. Being an intellectual most directly has to do with the first. Anyone who has knowledge is an intellectual, no matter their formal education or lack thereof, no matter their academic status or lack their of. It is judgment and courage applied to that knowledge that would distinguish between a mere intellectual and a public intellectual.

    There is a further implication to what a public intellectual means. It is a social role and also a personal identity.

    People with knowledge are dime a dozen these days. A college education used to be reserved for the elite, but no longer. Plus, anyone can have access to vast knowledge now with public libraries, the internet, mass publishing, and ebooks.

    I’m not an academic. I’m a college drop out. Even so, I love to read and often read scholarly books. I’m more well read than most people I know who did get college degrees. I’m an intellectual, but I wouldn’t claim to be a public intellectual.

    To be a public intellectual seems to imply bringing knowledge to a whole other level. It’s not just someone who knows more than others. It’s not just the knowledge itself, but the love and dedication to knowledge (to a strong degree). Also, it is the love of truth and wisdom beyond just academic scholarship. It is what motivates the seeking of knowledge.

    Only someone who loves, not just appreciates and enjoys, truth and wisdom would put their career or even their life on the line for the sake of it. Someone like Paine seemed inspired by learning and truth-seeking, to such a degree that it became an all-consuming passion. As a deist, he even came to see the divine as defined by truth. He literally risked his life for his beliefs. He even was involved in hand-to-hand combat and was imprisoned for speaking his mind. He wrote some of his pamphlets on the battlefield and while being hounded by government agents. If Paine wasn’t a public intellectual, then I don’t know who is is or ever was.

    Here is the problem with public intellectual as a label. It isn’t that it is meaningless. Rather, it has become overused. We have so many intellectuals in society right now with intellectual knowledge having become so common and easily available. We’ve forgotten the distinction for what makes a public intellectual unique, beyond just intellectuality itself. We’ve also come to take intellectuality for granted, something self-taught intellectuals like Paine are less likely to do.

    We are more jaded about intellectuality now. It is harder for us to imagine its promise. Maybe a public intellectual is simply someone who still does believe in the promise of intellectuality to impact the public, and believes they have the capacity and responsibility to do so.

  6. Raven on the Hill January 26, 2015 at 2:35 pm | #

    “Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality. ”― C.S. Lewis

    The point is a good one. As a society, I think the USA has more bluster than courage, so that a ragtag paramilitary can deceive us into thinking they are an existential threat. Nor is this a new thing in our history; the periodic panics which the USA goes through are fine evidence it is not. Is this not, in another way, implied by Hoftstadter’s “Paranoid Style?” The paranoid style would count for nothing, were it not that it persuades—scares—so many of us to action.

  7. Roquentin January 26, 2015 at 2:44 pm | #

    1) I don’t really see a problem with the idea that a “public intellectual” must address the general public. Is that the nature of politics, to be addressing the group as a whole rather than a handful of specialists? Going back to the ancient Greek roots of the term, politics relates to dealing with the polis. The city-state, society are its objects, and any politics, particularly of a non-reactionary sort, will have to address the people at large.

    Furthermore, you could do as someone like Zizek does where certain texts are clearly written at a conversational level for the general public, while others are directed specifically at a much more limited audience which is familiar with Hegel, Lacan, and the continental tradition in general. There is nothing wrong with this approach. Neil deGrasse Tyson has a TV show, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t do serious scientific work outside of this.

    2) A society with a particular structure will always need and produce intellectuals which justify it. Just as other forms of power and production are monopolized within a given regime, the production of ideas follows suit. As the above Arendt quote illustrates, it doesn’t even have to be something as distinct as writing apologia, it could simply be motivating people to stay silent or not get involved with a controversial topic when they otherwise would have.

    I’ve said something to this effect before, but I tend to read Marx alongside Spinoza these days (and even this is a product of reading a lot of Deleuze). Marx at his best understood how what he referred to as the economic/productive base ultimately trumped ideas. More than anything else, the important thing to realize is that the justification for a given ideology often has little to do with its stated assumptions, and it fits into a large system just like cogs in a machine. The trick is to see how the whole apparatus moves and flows from one part to another. Even when he was wrong about many other things, the materialist perspective as such was ultimately the right idea. He was just too optimistic in regards to overcoming capitalism, too sure that something so hopelessly unjust could be so resilient and continue for so long.

  8. Roquentin January 26, 2015 at 3:00 pm | #

    One more thing, while we’re on the subject of quotes. Recent events in my personal life (long story) had me thumbing through my copy of Camus’ “The Plague.” Knowing full well it’s an analogy for WWII, I always come back to this particular passage (pg. 37):

    “There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.
    In fact, like our fellow citizens, Rieux was caught off his guard, and we should understand his hesitations in the light of this fact; and similarly understand how he was torn between conflicting fears and confidence. When a war breaks out, people say: “It’s too stupid; it can’t last long.” But though a war may well be “too stupid,” that doesn’t prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.
    In this respect our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences.”

  9. Joseph Ratliff January 26, 2015 at 3:06 pm | #

    Reblogged this on Joe's Notepad.

  10. grahamlarkin January 26, 2015 at 5:18 pm | #

    January’s really public intellectual month for me. It’s the season for listening to the speeches of MLK, who had the whole package of scholarship, political savvy and courage, all brilliantly on display in the newly-discovered speech.

    https://twitter.com/bglarkin/status/557202292584484864

    In addition to the three qualities mentioned in your blog post Dr. King had tremendous wit and oratorical skill–reminding us that one also needs to be *entertaining* to have a great deal of public reach.

    January is also the anniversary of the 2013 suicide of my friend Aaron Swartz–another charismatic public intellectual who fought to the death. This struggle is beautifully laid out in the new biopic at this link:

    https://twitter.com/bglarkin/status/559444589845970945

    There are some interesting parallels & differences between these two masters of civil disobedience. One straight out of the Bible, the other out of Philip K. Dick. And each a product of his time…

  11. John Caldwell January 26, 2015 at 6:27 pm | #

    “Why we would think to look for it among intellectuals is not clear.”

    Why we should *not* think to look for it among intellectuals is equally unclear. As a PhD-prepared (and therefore over-qualified) pastor I speak and work partly from a background that privileges the long line of Jewish prophets that stretches from Elijah to Marx and partly from an academic background. From time to time prophetic voices do emerge, sometimes even from pulpits, this in spite of the nearly complete neo-liberal captivity of North American religion. Sometimes courage has little to do with it. Sometimes the role picks the person, rather than the other way around.

    I can call it something else if I want, but I don’t think I can escape being a public intellectual. It would be ridiculous not to admit to being an intellectual. My work is also inescapably public.

    • Benjamin David Steele January 26, 2015 at 6:49 pm | #

      I like your straightforward response.

      “Why we should *not* think to look for it among intellectuals is equally unclear.”

      Exactly. Not looking for it among intellectuals seems to imply some kind of anti-intellectualism, as if all intellectuals could be grouped together as the same and dismissed in that manner. But obviously not all intellectuals are the same.

      For example, I pointed out the old Anglo-American tradition of the working class intellectual as public intellectual. Paine wasn’t a Jew, but he could be said to have played the role of prophet in taking his society to task. That is part of another Anglo-American tradition, that of the jeremiad (see The American Jeremiad by Sacvan Bercovich).

      “Sometimes courage has little to do with it. Sometimes the role picks the person, rather than the other way around.”

      I like your perspective. It is very down-to-earth. Paine is also an example of what you suggest here. He didn’t pick his role. He didn’t become a pamphlateer and revolutionary until middle aged. He attempted to be many things prior to that, including an upstanding British citizen and civil servant, but events in his life intervened.

      “I can call it something else if I want, but I don’t think I can escape being a public intellectual. It would be ridiculous not to admit to being an intellectual. My work is also inescapably public.”

      That is the heart of the matter. All that a public intellectual means is to be an intellectual in the public spotlight. A public intellectual might be courageous and with good judgment, but those actually don’t seem like defining features.

      A public intellectual could be a meek commentator or a prophetic preacher, could be a scathing critic or an inspiring leader. A public intellectual could even be a coward who doesn’t always act with the best judgment. Anyway, many a morally low person was forced to play a public role against their preference and ended up playing it well, despite their personal flaws and failures.

      Maybe we shouldn’t be trying to narrow down what a public intellectual is. Sure, it might be good to speak about what makes a great public intellectual versus a not so great one. Even so, being a public intellectual doesn’t require greatness. A public intellectual might even play a rather minor role and it still might have its relevance in the public sphere.

  12. SC January 26, 2015 at 9:57 pm | #

    FWIW, the NEH kinda has a definition of “public scholar” in the paperwork (and presumably in their selection of the winners) for the grants in their new Public Scholar program. Public Scholars “must address significant humanities themes likely to be of broad interest and must be written in a readily accessible style.”

    http://www.neh.gov/grants/research/public-scholar-program

    Perhaps “public scholar” isn’t quite the same as “public intellectual” but for the NEH, the focus is on knowledge . . . judgement and courage don’t seem to be in play.

  13. Peter Dorman January 27, 2015 at 2:40 am | #

    There are two ways (at least) that I can think about public intellectuals. One begins from the Russian notion of an intelligentsia, a stratum of highly educated and culturally revered individuals. Some of them may choose to deploy this reverence on behalf of public causes. A modern example of that for me is Noam Chomsky. (It could be that the US, lacking the cultural tradition of an intelligentsia, expects its public intellectuals to acquire honor on a personal level, as Corey suggests.)

    The other idea is more elusive. Normally intellectuals reserve their highest gear, so to speak, for their interventions in the world of their fellow intellectuals. Their most intensive research and analytical activities are directed at this sphere, and they give less of themselves, intellectually, in other aspects of life. A public intellectual, however, devotes a significant portion of her deepest, most searching intellectual activity to the public sphere. She addresses broader issues and uses a more popular language, but there is no falloff in her intellectual intensity. She is not an intellectual who goes to the public but someone whose intellectuality is to a large degree developed and honed in public. In doing this she brings intellectual and public life that much closer. Was Hannah Arendt such a person?

  14. David Chuter January 27, 2015 at 4:45 am | #

    I don’t think we can call public intellectuals into existence, nor demand that they have specific qualities or beliefs. A public intellectual is someone who writes about serious issues, in a sustained form, for a non-professional audience, and hoping to influence their opinions. They may support or oppose conventional thinking, but a successful public intellectual is one who has influence. (George Orwell, for all the reverence he rightly receives, was not influential during his lifetime.)
    Many of the most important public intellectuals of the twentieth century came from the Right. In England, one thinks of the Catholic controversialist and novelist GK Chesterton, or the Anglo-Catholic CS Lewis, author of popular books on religion and morals, and an intellectual by any standard. In France, the most influential public intellectual of modern times is probably Charles Maurras, whose “Action Française” as a newspaper and a movement was enormously intellectual, pushing a conservative monarchist ideology that both articulated and reflected the right-wing thinking that led to the Vichy regime.
    That’s the problem with intellectuals, I fear: being an intellectual is no guarantee you will have opinions we would regard today as acceptable.

    • Benjamin David Steele January 27, 2015 at 10:03 am | #

      “I don’t think we can call public intellectuals into existence, nor demand that they have specific qualities or beliefs.”

      I was coming to the same conclusion.

      “That’s the problem with intellectuals, I fear: being an intellectual is no guarantee you will have opinions we would regard today as acceptable.”

      Yeah. Then again, that is true for the rest of the population as well.

      I’m not sure why we would expect the combination of being an intellectual and a public figure would make someone morally better than others. There are good people and there are not-so-good people. Public intellectuals are first and foremost humans like the rest of us.

      I do understand the wish that public intellectuals were somehow better than the average person or even the average public intellectual. But I doubt there is any good reason to expect it to be true.

      That said, I would guess that certain cultures and conditions are more likely than others to support and promote public intellectuals of a higher moral quality. It might be interesting to research that. For example, do societies that measure high as cultures of trust tend to have a disproportionate number of public intellectuals that act in a way that public deems trustworthy toward the public good?

      Maybe we should look at the issue more systemically, rather than just focusing on individuals. When a society has lost its moral compass, one would like public intellectuals to help society regain what was lost. The problem, however, is that those public intellectuals are part of that same society and so a product of it.

      Where is a public intellectual supposed to gain moral fortitude and vision if he lives in a society that doesn’t value the role of public intellectuals as moral figure, and may instead punish any public intellectual who attempts to play that role?

  15. David Chuter January 27, 2015 at 6:20 am | #

    Sorry, the Action Française was “enormously influential” – automatic spelling checkers for you.

  16. jonnybutter January 27, 2015 at 8:52 am | #

    I agree with the implication that the idea of the public intellectual became over-burdened with requirements (say, in postwar NYC or Paris). Does a public intellectual need to be a political prophet to be useful? Why does an intellectual who cares to engage with the public have to be a moral exemplar/saint, yet simultaneously also be perfectly practical? The cliche is the problem, not the thing. I don’t look to Chomsky for practical political wisdom as such, but I do think he is a kind of moral exemplar and is certainly a public intellectual. He plants a stake – “I believe *this*” – which allows fruitful discussion to happen around it. That’s useful. At a different scale, George Scialabba is a wonderful public intellectual, IMO. In fact, he claims that there no longer is such a thing (presum. in the OP post-war sense) because there is now too much knowledge for one person to master and generalize about. He’s modest. But despite that determination (and modesty), he still wants to be a kind of generalist too, maybe with a smaller universe; If he can *make* it a universe, good on him.

    The honest, competent attempt to synthesize and abstract is so helpful, particularly for the general reader. I don’t see why someone with that project is necessarily an affront to a regular scholar. I think of Corey Robin as something of this kind of public intellectual too. He’s a wonderful scholar but also serious about politics. Good, I say. Ambivalence is appropriate to lots of things…

    [Arendt:] moral conduct [was thought of as] a matter of course. I still remember quite well my own youthful opinion of the moral rectitude we usually call character; all insistence on such virtue would have appeared to me as Philistine, because this, too, we thought was a matter of course and hence of no great importance

    I find two things striking. One, she’s writing in Germany shortly after the Great War (But Things Can Always Get Worse). Millions of people slaughtered year after year for nothing, the shattering breakdown of Europe – but moral rectitude is a ‘given’ and unremarkable? It sounds weird for her group to feel that way. Of course it sounds weirder in hindsight, but it’s *her* hindsight.

    This quote also reminds me of Corey’s earlier comment about the tendency in today’s (Anglo/American?) humanities/history academia to discount surprise, to ‘dull our receptivity to the unexpected, [making] both past and present unremarkable.” I think that is more pretentious and more destructive than the current mode of being a public intellectual.

    Where but in Academia would an ideology be inculcated which sought to deliberately render the beautiful ugly, the fascinating dull, and concern with moral rectitude a la blasé? Maybe I’m misreading Arendt and what she says there is only meant to reflect the youthful foolishness of her young self and other students. But I kind of doubt it.

    It’s way better to be, and to have, a public intellectual now than in the past, I’d say. It’s better to be saturated with media, as we are now, than to be thunderstruck by one or two of them, (i.e. as in the teevee age). It’s such a huge platform now that there’s some breathing room for each exponent. We can have tens of thousands of public intellectuals, and the public can read it all (if it’s not censored). I think having more public intellectuals, in this more modest sense, is a net plus. Something is lost, of course (like, often, the ability to make a living just from being one), but quite a bit is gained too.

    • s. wallerstein January 27, 2015 at 9:05 am | #

      Jonny Butter,

      I took Arendt to be criticizing her youthful blaséness.

      I can recall that in the 60’s most people I know considered themselves to be so cool, so avant-garde, so radical, so hip that we saw “moral character” or “rectitude”, as square or bourgeois or old-fashioned.

      That wasn’t a consistent posture, of course, because we had strong ethical postures about the War in Vietnam and a freer sexuality, but we (the people I hung out with) were far from consistent.

      • jonnybutter January 27, 2015 at 9:35 am | #

        Hi SW

        Of course she was talking about her own and her fellow student’s youthful views, but was she talking *only* about them, or did she mean for the blase to reflect on her teachers and the milieu they created, too? I’m guessing ‘yes’ but only guessing.

    • Benjamin David Steele January 27, 2015 at 10:42 am | #

      A good comment.

      “I agree with the implication that the idea of the public intellectual became over-burdened with requirements (say, in postwar NYC or Paris). Does a public intellectual need to be a political prophet to be useful? Why does an intellectual who cares to engage with the public have to be a moral exemplar/saint, yet simultaneously also be perfectly practical? The cliche is the problem, not the thing.”

      This is an insightful and useful perspective. Where did these expected requirements come from? Why did they come to be embraced as definitive qualifications, not merely as admirable traits? Why do we want to hold a public intellectual up to a higher standard than, for example,a public servant?

      “The honest, competent attempt to synthesize and abstract is so helpful, particularly for the general reader. I don’t see why someone with that project is necessarily an affront to a regular scholar.”

      There does seem to be an implied conflict. Also, what about the working class intellectual? Is the working class intellectual, often in the position as activist or movement leader, an affront to an academically-trained intellectual? Is this a turf war about who controls the public stage and so holds the public attention?

      “I think of Corey Robin as something of this kind of public intellectual too. He’s a wonderful scholar but also serious about politics. Good, I say. Ambivalence is appropriate to lots of things…”

      I think of Corey Robin the same way. I was wondering about ambivalence. I tend toward ambivalence. As I see it, our entire society tends toward ambivalence. It feels like we live in an age of ambivalence.

      It is appropriate to lots of things, but I’m not sure how it does or should apply to the public intellectual. The greatest public intellectuals that come to mind (Paine, MLK, etc) were people who seemed to have had a passionate lack of ambivalence, at least in how they played their public role and how they expressed themselves publicly. I’m sure privately that someone like MLK felt all kinds of ambivalence, but he apparently didn’t see it as his role and responsibility to express that ambivalence.

      Is it a good thing for a public intellectual to not express ambivalence, even if they feel it personally? Or should a public intellectual fully express their doubts and uncertainties, to give voice to them?

      Why is it harder to imagine a public intellectual expressing such fiery righteousness as did MLK? Have we come to expect public intellectuals to be ambivalent? Have we come to mistrust righteousness?

      Is there a reason someone couldn’t simultaneously feel ambivalence and righteousness, and yet still be a public intellectual? Are public intellectuals allowed to be complex individuals?

      “This quote also reminds me of Corey’s earlier comment about the tendency in today’s (Anglo/American?) humanities/history academia to discount surprise, to ‘dull our receptivity to the unexpected, [making] both past and present unremarkable.” I think that is more pretentious and more destructive than the current mode of being a public intellectual.”

      I’m glad you brought that up. This could be a fruitful direction to explore. How does dullness connect to ambivalence? Why do so many people seem to expect academics to be both dull and ambivalent, and hence without strong personal opinion? Should an intellectual be so neutral as to be detached? Is there a role for righteousness, not just for the public intellectual but also for the academic scholar and teacher?

      “I think having more public intellectuals, in this more modest sense, is a net plus. Something is lost, of course (like, often, the ability to make a living just from being one), but quite a bit is gained too.”

      I agree, but you also make clear why so many people feel threatened. The place of the intellectual has been opened to a larger number and a wider variety of people. This has created competition. The old elite model of media and academia has been challenged. This is a genuine threat because it hits people where it hurts, in their ability to make money from it their position in society.

      I’ve heard similar complaints from established authors who see new technology as a threat because now anyone can write and get something published. Anyone with talent who aspires to be a public intellectual or an author can now do so without getting the approval of traditional gatekeepers. There are problems to this, of course, but there are also great potential benefits to increasing the number of voices being heard.

  17. jonnybutter January 27, 2015 at 1:58 pm | #

    How does dullness connect to ambivalence?

    Hi BDS,

    I don’t have as much time as you to comment further, unfortunately. I will just say quickly that I mentioned ambiguity, a.) because our host said that’s how he feels about public intellectuals, and b.) not as if it were any kind of failing (like dullness, which can be a BIG failing), but as an occupational hazard of being human. It’s easier to count the things one *doesn’t* feel ambivalent about. It’s an obvious point I guess, but I’m trying to understand what motivated the OP.

    • Benjamin David Steele January 27, 2015 at 2:27 pm | #

      I don’t see ambiguity as a failing. I’m actually amiguous about my views on amibiguity. I’m probably ambiguous about more things than not. I feel conflicted and uncertain about my personal relationship to ambiguity and to what it means in society.

      For the purpose of this post, I more specifically wondered what it means for academia and the public intellectual. It seems to me that our entire society has an ambiguous attitude about amiguity or its lack, specifically as righteousness. As recent events show, righteousness often gets associated with right-wing fundamentalism, authoritarianism in general, and violence. Many intellectuals feel quite ambiguous about how tolerant we should be of those who righteously lack ambiguity.

      I agree that amiguity is an “occupational hazard of being human” (one of many). But research shows that not all people are equal in this regard. Certain personality traits correlate to tolerance of amiguity or cognitive dissonance, and people who measure high on these traits are predisposed to liberalism, intellectualism, and academia. So, ambiguity is even moreso an occupational hazard for particular kinds of people and in particular kinds of professions.

      The ability to tolerate, entertain, and express ambiguity can be both a strength and a weakness, depending on context and the purpose to which it is applied. On its own terms, though, ambiguity is a neutral experience that everyone experiences to varying degrees.

      I too wanted to know what motivated the OP. But I was also using it as an opportunity to speculate more widely about the related issues.

      • jonnybutter January 27, 2015 at 10:42 pm | #

        The ability to tolerate, entertain, and express ambiguity can be both a strength and a weakness

        Hmm. If some measure of ambivalence is an appropriate response to a situation – in fact, to *most* situations – then the ‘ability to tolerate, entertain, and express ambiguity’ can’t be a weakness. Ambiguity is different from indecision, and from the famous inability to argue for one’s own position. Ambivalence is more like dialectical thinking.

      • Benjamin David Steele January 28, 2015 at 12:42 am | #

        “If some measure of ambivalence is an appropriate response to a situation – in fact, to *most* situations – then the ‘ability to tolerate, entertain, and express ambiguity’ can’t be a weakness.”

        I tend to come from a psychological perspective on such issues. In terms of social science research, there most definitely is weaknesses and strengths various cognitive styles and personality traits. Tolerance for amiguity falls under various personality constructs (Hartmann’s thin boundary type, FFM openness, MBTI intuition, etc).

        Certain professions and activities necessitate lower tolerance for amiguity and so attract the kind of person with that trait. As a surgeon or an engineer, where technical precision is required, tolerance for amiguity very much can be a weakness. Amgibuity can also be a weakness when one is seeking to inspire and motivate people, especially as a leader of a movement, which is probably why someone like MLK didn’t express a lot of ambiguity publicly, but there is of course a difference between experiencing and expressing ambiguity.

        It depends on the purpose at hand.

  18. David Chuter January 27, 2015 at 4:19 pm | #

    I think part of the problem (ambiguity if you like) comes from the English word “academic”, with all its connotations. Academics (professional researchers and teachers) are not the same as intellectuals. In French, for example, there’s really no equivalent word for “academic,” and indeed “intellectuals” in the European tradition, are by no means necessarily university teachers. Some work at, or run, independent research institutes, whereas others just live off books and journalism. In any event, I’m not really sure that we would want all, or even many, academics to be public intellectuals, even if they were capable.
    In addition, I have the impression that the intellectual world is a lot smaller than it used to be, and the scope for public intellectuals to say interesting things is correspondingly less. The sharp divisions that existed until the 1980s have largely been subsumed now into a soggy economic and socially liberal consensus from which it is very hard to depart. There is nothing today like the furious polemics over nuclear weapons in the 1980s, where public intellectuals like the British marxist historian EP Thompson played such a major role. Nor is there anything like the willingness of Orwell (and some writers as late as the 1970s) to critically question the assumptions of some in the Left from within the Left itself. Those that do (such as a small number of French writers who are arguing that the Left should stop being just a collection of elite identity groups and engage with ordinary people once more) are howled down by others on the Left, when they are not simply ignored. Public intellectuals, such as they are, tend all to sound the same, for that reason. I decided this morning not to read an article on how the Charlie Hebdo affair is a threat to the whole of western culture, because I’d already read the same argument a dozen times elsewhere.

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