the intellectual life is ultimately a spiritual endeavour to synthesize art, music, religion, politics and philosophy.1
"I was brought up in a culture that made no special place for the “intellectual” as a distinct human type."2 So writes Roger Scruton as he opens his poignant autobiographical essay, Living With A Mind; an opening which forced my mind to receive a somewhat forgotten picture. A picture which although I was familiar with, had begun to be bleak as a result of surrendering to the spirit of the current age. This picture, one less common today, where the intellectual is a hobbyist, has unfortunately given way for the popular image of the intellectual as a technocrat; a professional; a dictator in some sense; a priest in another sense, and a self-anointed fellow in the whole sense of its practice.
The intellectual of the current age seeks to sit in high places with truly worthy fellows like successful inventors, corporate business men, and your regular shopowner on the street. This self-anointed man wants to not only sit with them. He wants to tell them how to run their lives. But this is not how I remember Albert Einstein, for instance, at his patent clerk desk. Or Bishop George Berkeley as he grinded everyday in his parsonage. Or Renee from The Hedgehog as she went about her business being the cranky concierge. Or even Boris Johnson as he got embarrassed time after time for being such an embarrassment as MP and Prime Minister.
On the other hand, I was pleased to know that Mr. Johnson could recite The Iliad from memory…in Greek. Which is the same fascination and admiration that pricked up in me towards Winston Churchill when I learned that he could recite Horatius At The Bridge—the whole seventy stanzas of them—offhand. Both these men then strike me, not as intellectuals, but as men with intellectual lives; for whom the life of the mind was indeed a life rather than a profession or a priesthood. For whom this life was its own thing; a sanctuary; something that must not be allowed to be corrupted by the status-seeking throbbing of the ego; as something that when all of the world goes to dust, remains as an inner well where a fresh spring always sources to bud the trees that have been cut to stump; like Job said “there is hope for a tree that has been cut down; for at the scent of water, it will bud again.”3
This “budding again” is what you see in the faces of alzheimers stricken patients, who after leaving active service, and can no longer remember the names and faces of their favorite daughter, still light up at the sound of a specific opera and can still recite Shakespeare. The scent of water may then be a sonnet or a play; something so recited, etched and lived, that the hands of alzheimers cannot uproot. We see this scent of water in Geoffrey Harold Hardy’s life as he battled depression. When suffering the one thing he (Hardy) had said no man should suffer, boredom, he bud again when encouraged to write a book on Bertrand Russell and Trinity. Or when after attempting suicide and failing, talking about cricket gave him life, even if it was for a moment.4 The intellectual life—or the life of the mind—is then more than a prideful posture of knowledge; something that you only use to get ahead in life. It is a life. Otherwise, it is dead.
However, the counterpicture of “the intellectual” as technocrat, priest, dictator and anointed reflects in the preachy savant who enjoys the act of preaching more than the act of learning. Or per Zena Hitz’s picture, "the overzealous explainer, always anxious to correct us, saying “Actually, . . .”, who "We suspect that he uses learning as a form of social domination, perhaps to compensate for status lost in athletic or erotic contests."5 In other words smart people using their minds as a coarse instrument, like a hammer. They are ever ready to punch a nail in your life like their minds are a hammer. They seem to enjoy the art of shocking people out of their ignorance or knowledge more than they love the communion of knowledge and discovery. They are always looking for the next wall to smash with their hammer. And this does not implicate Socrates by any means. For Socrates always entered a conversation knowing that he knew nothing. As Gadfly-ish as Socrates was, he always believed that he was entering into conversation with a companion with whom they might co-discover the “what” of the matter. Our dictators on the other hand, come to proselyte you and they eschew any resistance you might offer. Where Socrates generally treated others as equals with whom they might see the light together, our proselytes treat you as inferiors whom they must condescend to, insisting—without good measure and at the start of your conversation, where the said authority is the self—that you are not peers and equals. Where Socrates asked questions and gradually tip-toed towards the truth so that his interlocutor might have the dignity of arriving at the solution by themselves, our modern-day proselytes tell you—quite angrily—that they are not your teachers and scold you that you should “read a book.”
Octopichael observes: “my impression is that they are not really interested in thoughts, they are just good at them.” These people, like I once described, are those for whom the mind is simply a jackhammer or a chainsaw—something to be used aggressively to generate ends other than itself such that it is maintained like machinery rather than as an organism with its own life. To generate ends, like crude moneymaking, endless, aggressive moralising, politics, and conflict—up to the point of undermining governments. Without these elements, they are left without a spring source for their intellectual lives. They must preach or wither.
When I say that “without these elements, they are left without a spring source for their intellectual lives. They must preach or wither,” I mean, what Boris Johnson said that “when things are really tough; if they ever find themselves stranded in the bush, say in Autumnland, with a crocodile at the foot of the mangrove and they are up the mangrove and there is absolutely nothing for it but to hang on, and all they can do is hang on to the things they can remember, all they can do is keep themselves conscious by reciting all the poetry that they know; they will not do better than to preserve, than to pickle and to conserve in their brains forever, the great classics such as the Iliad.”6 Remove the Iliad from there and insert your preferred poem or fairy-tales or even a list of stellar constellations; or yet still, types of rocks, and the point stands. For the modern-day book-anointed thinks of being an intellectual only in terms of performing grand gestures, safely ignoring the place of the intellect in the mundane affairs of this world.
And this, friends, is how you know “the intellectual” who does not in fact have an intellectual life: they exclude the use of the intellect in the ordinary and the mundane. They apply the intellect to the things that may be seen, measured, lauded, and praised. They see the intellect as something that is set aside for the grandest things of life. They say things like “I want to talk about things that move the world forward; that go beyond existential issues.” As you may perceive, they do not enjoy the intellect; they enjoy instead, what the intellect can bring. As parents, they crack down upon their children like despots; refusing them to employ their intellect in things as mundane as housechores. Resisting the practice of learning for its own sake. But demand that those children read to suffocation for the singular goal of them coming out on top in their classes. They confine their children’s intellectual aptitude to schoolwork. They regard them as if learning is only good for the faraway future. For the things that others can see, standardise, measure, then praise. Treating the child with an extreme condescension—refusing the use of reason in moral instruction and washing dishes. Acting like authoritarians when the children show sparks of curiosity and rational light. What is worse; they begin treating their peers as children, speaking down to them on the basis of dead sheepskin—one of which the value in our age is as good as imaginary sheep. These and many others is the behaviour of the self-anointed.
Samuel Johnson rightly observes: “Among those whose hopes of distinction, or riches, arise from an opinion of their intellectual attainments, it has been, from age to age, an established custom to complain of the ingratitude of mankind to their instructors, and the discouragement which men of genius and study suffer from avarice and ignorance, from the prevalence of false taste, and the encroachment of barbarity.”7 He succinctly observes the source of their condescension: frustration. Frustrated at the fact that their “superior intellect” has not brought them all the laudits and wealth they so wanted, they drop deeper in their resolve to make serfs of us common men. And this is how I derive my common test: Per Zena Hitz “the removal of intellectual life from the world that accounts for its true inwardness—an inwardness distinct from the narcissistic inner tracking of one’s social standing. It is the withdrawn person’s independence from contests over wealth or status that provides or reveals a dignity that can’t be ranked or traded.”8
As Daniel Pierre-Huet, that also erudite Bishop made clear, the life of the mind requires a sound moral character and indifference to worldly success, and perhaps even the strength to withstand the disapproval of relatives. This does not describe the self-anointed. Especially the “indifference to wordly success.” If anything, these priests enter the priesthood for a want of worldly success disguised in a pseudo-spiritual motive.
Where Schopenhauer also comes down hard in this manner; “Dilettanti, dilettanti! This is the slighting way in which those who pursue any branch of art or learning for the love and enjoyment of the thing, are spoken of by those who have taken it up for the sake of gain, attracted solely by the prospect of money. This contempt of theirs comes from the base belief that no man will seriously devote himself to a subject, unless he is spurred on to it by want, hunger, or else some form of greed…but the truth is that the dilettante treats his subject as an end, whereas the professional, pure and simple, treats it merely as a means.”9 This stern insistence with learning for moneymaking—not to disparage honest working men especially your street shopowner—makes it impossible for a society and an age to sustain for a long haul, the picture Roger Scruton paints. For the moment learning subordinates to status-seeking, human dignity must begin dying a slow death. Because dignity is most secured in those realms of value which Scruton says is “where calculation ends, since that which matters most to us is the thing that we will not exchange.”10 And it shows in everything: a poor use of leisure, hollow conversations, and corrupted language.
Like I said to a friend, you can decide to follow the picture of the current age. You will not be disturbed. But should you choose to stand back and reexamine Sir Scruton’s picture, you will find the entire landscape changing; sometimes uncomfortably. It may cause you to change jobs, plant a garden, watch birds, leave your current town to move to Chicago where you might find a man dancing with his wife11, break friendships, sell all you have and give it to the poor, call politicians buffoons, smile more at children. Or who knows, it might stir you to become a comedian. But then, such is life. And such is the intellectual life. For the intellectual life is to be lived. And anything that is not a life is dead.
Roger Scruton, Against the Tide: The best of Roger Scruton's columns, commentaries and criticism.
Roger Scruton, Living With A Mind on Firstthings.com
Job, Job 14: 7-9
Geoffrey Harold Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology
Zena Hitz, Lost In Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life.
Boris Johnson, Boris Johnson recites extracts of "The Iliad" in Greek
Samuel Johnson, Rambler no. 77, December 11, 1750: Morally unworthy authors
Zena Hitz, The Crisis of The Intellectual Life
Arthur Schopenhauer, On Men of Learning
Roger Scruton, How To Be A Conservative