JGeropoulas
The Living Force
I recently began reviewing a book I came across that I was assigned to read in college decades ago: Anti-Intellectualism In American Life by Richard Hofstadter. Interestingly, the re-emergence of this yellowed paperback was synchronistic with some recent SOTT articles ( http://www.naturalnews.com/031073_science_tyranny.html#ixzz1BgXPvrsn and http://naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=407F9AE226C99ACAC328F71E49BDAC52 ).
I decided to post this because I thought the author offered some helpful observations regarding the difference between "intelligence" and "intellect." Also, his comments resonated with many ideas fundamental to the Forum (e.g. “learning is fun,” true religion and pure science converge, tension between opposing forces shape us, subverted energies within us can hinder us--and perhaps even relevant parallels to different potentials of organic portals vs. souled humans).
But most importantly to me, these excerpts seemed like an eloquent affirmation of “intellect” -- that little, sprouting seed of higher consciousness in each of us here which thirsts for knowledge and feeds on grains of truth—and which lead us all together here on the Forum and FOTCM.
(My comments are bracketed and emphasis is mine)
I decided to post this because I thought the author offered some helpful observations regarding the difference between "intelligence" and "intellect." Also, his comments resonated with many ideas fundamental to the Forum (e.g. “learning is fun,” true religion and pure science converge, tension between opposing forces shape us, subverted energies within us can hinder us--and perhaps even relevant parallels to different potentials of organic portals vs. souled humans).
But most importantly to me, these excerpts seemed like an eloquent affirmation of “intellect” -- that little, sprouting seed of higher consciousness in each of us here which thirsts for knowledge and feeds on grains of truth—and which lead us all together here on the Forum and FOTCM.
(My comments are bracketed and emphasis is mine)
PREFATORY NOTE
“Let us honestly state the facts: Our America has a bad name for superficialness. Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.” – Emerson
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…INTRODUCTION
Anti-Intellectualism In Our Time
Men do not rise in the morning, grin at themselves in their mirrors, and say: "Ah, today I shall torment an intellectual and strangle an idea!"
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Only rarely, and with the gravest of misgivings, then, can we designate an individual as being constitutionally anti-intellectual. In any case, it would be of little value in this enterprise. What is important is to estimate the historical tendency of certain attitudes, movements, and ideas.
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To be confronted with a simple and unqualified evil is no doubt a kind of luxury; and such is not the case here. If anti-intellectualism has become, as I believe it has, a broadly diffused quality in our civilization, it has become so because it has often been linked to good, or at least defensible, causes.
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It first got its strong grip on our ways of thinking because it was fostered by an evangelical religion that also purveyed many humane and democratic sentiments. It made its way into our politics because it became associated with our passion for equality…Hence, as far as possible, our anti-intellectualism must be excised from the benevolent impulses upon which it lives by constant and delicate acts of intellectual surgery which spare these impulses themselves. Only in this way can anti-intellectualism be checked and contained.
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I do not say eliminated altogether, for I believe not only that this is beyond our powers but also that an unbridled passion for the total elimination of this, or that, evil can be as dangerous as any of the delusions of our time.
The man of intelligence is always praised; the man of intellect is…often looked upon with resentment or suspicion. It is he, and not the intelligent man, who may be called…immoral or subversive
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Intelligence is an excellence of mind that is employed within a fairly narrow, immediate, and predictable range; it is a practical quality--one of the most eminent…of the animal virtues. Intelligence works within the framework of limited but clearly stated goals, and may be quick to shear away questions of thought that do not seem to help in reaching them. Intellect, on the other hand, is the critical, creative, and contemplative side of the mind
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Intelligence seeks to grasp, manipulate, re-order, and adjust, whereas intellect examines, ponders, wonders, theorizes, criticizes, imagines. Intelligence will seize the immediate meaning in a situation and evaluate it. Intellect evaluates evaluations, and looks for the meanings of situations as a whole. Intelligence can be praised as a quality in animals; intellect, being a unique manifestation of human dignity, is both praised and assailed as a quality in men
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The opponents of intellect in most spheres of public education have exercised preponderant power… perhaps the most impressive illustration arises from a comparison of the American regard for inventive skills as opposed to skills in pure science
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Thomas A. Edison, was all but canonized by the American public (but) our greatest genius in pure science, Josiah Willard Gibbs, who laid the theoretical foundations for modern physical chemistry, (never received) comparable acclaim…Gibbs, whose work was celebrated in Europe lived a life of professional obscurity at Yale where he taught for thirty-two years. Yale, which led American universities in its scientific achievements in the 19th century, was unable in those thirty-two years to even provide him with more than half dozen graduate students who could understand his work.
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The (intelligent) professional man lives off ideas, not for them. His professional skills do not make him an intellectual. He is a mental worker, a technician… As a professional, he has acquired a stock of mental skills that are for sale
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The fact that the ends are set from some interest or vantage point outside the intellectual process itself…characterizes both the zealot, who lives obsessively for a single idea, and the mental technician, whose mind is used not for free speculation but for a salable end. The goal here is external and not self-determined
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Whereas the intellectual life has a certain spontaneous character and inner determination. It has also a peculiar poise of its own, which I believe is established by a balance between two basic qualities in the intellectual's attitude toward ideas--qualities that may be designated as “playfulness” and “piety”.
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What differentiates…an intellectual from one who is not…is not in the character of the ideas with which he works but in his attitude toward them. I have suggested that in some sense he lives for ideas--which means that he has a sense of dedication to the life of the mind which is very much like a religious commitment. This is not surprising, for in a very important way the role of the intellectual is inherited from the office of the cleric: it implies a special sense of the ultimate value in existence of the act of comprehension. Socrates, when he said that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” struck the essence of it.
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"The proper function of the human race," wrote Dante in De Monarchia, "is to actualize continually the entire capacity possible to the intellect.” The closest thing possible to divinity, is the act of knowing.
Hawthorne, in a passage near the end of The Blithedale Romance, observes that Nature's highest purpose for man is "conscious intellectual life and sensibility."
Finally, in our own time, Andre Malraux puts the question in one of his novels: "How can one make the best of one's life?" and answers: "By converting as wide a range of experience as possible into conscious thought."
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(In times past), the intellectual task had been conceived as a “calling”. His work was undertaken as a kind of devotional exercise, a personal discipline…it was work at thinking, work done supposedly in the service of truth. The intellectual life (had) taken on a kind of primary moral significance. It is this aspect of the intellectual's feeling about ideas that I call his “piety”. The intellectual is engaged, pledged, committed, enlisted. What everyone else is willing to admit, namely that ideas and abstractions are of signal importance in human life, he imperatively feels.
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Intellectuals have often tried to serve as the moral antennae of the race, anticipating and if possible clarifying fundamental moral issues before these have forced themselves upon the public consciousness. The thinker feels that he ought to be the special custodian of values like reason and justice which are related to his own search for truth, and at times he strikes out passionately as a public figure because his very identity seems to be threatened by some gross abuse. One thinks here of Voltaire defending the Calas family…of the American intellectuals outraged at the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti.
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Behind the intellectual's feeling of commitment is the belief that in some measure the world should be made responsive to his capacity for rationality, his passion for justice and order: out of this conviction arises much of his value to mankind and, equally, much of his ability to do mischief.
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That the intellectual has a distinctive capacity for mischief, however, leads to the consideration that his piety, by itself, is not enough. He may live for ideas, as I have said, but something must prevent him from living for one idea, from becoming obsessive… Although there have been zealots whom we may still regard as intellectuals, zealotry is a defect of the breed and not of the essence.
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When one's concern for ideas, no matter how dedicated and sincere, reduces them to the service of some central limited preconception or some wholly external end, intellect gets swallowed by fanaticism. If there is anything more dangerous to the life of the mind than having no independent commitment to ideas, it is having an excess of commitment to some special and constricting idea. The effect is as observable in politics as in theology
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Piety, then, needs a counterpoise, something to prevent it from being exercised in an excessively rigid way; and this it has, in most intellectual temperaments, as the quality I would call “playfulness”. We speak of the play of the mind; and certainly the intellectual relishes the play of the mind for its own sake, and finds in it one of the major values in life. What one thinks of here is the element of sheer delight in intellectual activity…which comes into exercise when the surplus of mental energies is released from the tasks required for utility and mere survival. "Man is perfectly human," said Schiller, "only when he plays."
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Ideally, the pursuit of truth is said to be at the heart of the intellectual's business…the pursuit of truth is itself gratifying whereas the consummation often turns out to be elusive. Truth captured loses its glamor; truths long known and widely believed have a way of turning false with time; easy truths are a bore, and too many of them become half-truths. Whatever the intellectual is too certain of, he begins to find unsatisfactory. The meaning of his intellectual life lies not in the possession of truth but in the quest for new uncertainties. Harold Rosenberg summed up this side of the life of the mind supremely well when he said “the intellectual is one who turns answers into questions”. [see Transcripts :) ]
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But in using the terms “play” and “playfulness,” I do not suggest any lack of seriousness; quite the contrary. Anyone who has watched children, or adults, at play will recognize that there is no contradiction between play and seriousness, and that some forms of play induce a measure of grave concentration not readily called forth even by work. And playfulness does not imply the absence of practicality…intellect is neither practical nor impractical; it is extra-practical.
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Not to say that he scorns the practical: the intrinsic intellectual interest of many practical problems is utterly absorbing…he is simply concerned with something else, a quality in problems that is not defined by asking whether or not they have practical purpose.
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An example of the intellectual's view of the purely practical is the response of James Clark Maxwell, the mathematician and theoretical physicist, to the invention of the telephone.
Asked to give a lecture on the workings of this new instrument, Maxwell began by saying how difficult it had been to believe, when word first came about it from America, that such a thing had actually been devised. But then, he went on, "when at last this little instrument appeared, consisting, as it does, of parts, every one of which is familiar to us, and capable of being put together by an amateur, the disappointment arising from its humble appearance was only partially relieved on finding that it was really able to talk." Perhaps, then, this regrettable appearance of simplicity might be redeemed by the presence somewhere of "some recondite physical principle, the study of which might worthily occupy an hour's time of an academic audience". But no; Maxwell had not met a single person who was unable to understand the physical processes involved, and even the science reporters for the daily press had almost got it right! The thing was a disappointing bore; it was not recondite, not difficult, not profound, not complex; it was not intellectually new.
Maxwell's reaction does not seem to me to be entirely admirable. In looking at the telephone from the point of view of a pure scientist…he was restricting the range of his fancy. For him, thinking as a physicist, the new instrument offered no possibilities for play.
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One may well ask if there is not a certain fatal contradiction between these two qualities…playfulness and piety. Certainly there is a tension between them, but it is anything but fatal: it is just one of those tensions in the human character that evoke a creative response. It is, in fact, the ability to comprehend and express not only different but opposing points of view, to identify imaginatively with or even to embrace within oneself contrary feelings and ideas that gives rise to first-rate work in all areas of humanistic expression and in many fields of inquiry.
Human beings are tissues of contradictions, and the life even of the intellectual is not logic, to borrow from Holmes, but experience [sounds similar to Ark’s comment regarding premonitions: “there is no math yet. But there is experience" http://www.sott.net/articles/show/221694-Feeling-the-Future-Premonitions-and-Precognition-Elements-of-Practice-and-of-a-Theory#reply4213 ]
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The tensile strength of the thinker may be gauged by his ability to keep an equipoise between these two sides of his mind. At one end of the scale, an excess of playfulness may lead to triviality, to the dissipation of intellectual energies on mere technique…to the failure of creative effort. At the other, an excess of piety leads to rigidity, to fanaticism, to messianism, to ways of life which may be morally mean or morally magnificent but which in either case are not the ways of intellect.
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It is a part of the intellectual's tragedy that the things he most values about himself and his work are quite unlike those society values in him. Society values him because he can in fact be used for a variety of purposes, from popular entertainment to the design of weapons.
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But (society) can hardly understand those aspects essential to the intellectual…his playfulness is likely to seem to most men a perverse luxury; In the United States, the play of the mind is perhaps the only form of play that is not looked upon with the most tender indulgence…his piety is likely to seem nettlesome, if not actually dangerous. And neither quality is considered (by society) to contribute very much to the practical business of life.
[And those are just a few excerpts from his introductory chapter!]
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Hofstadter, who died in October 1970, was DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia
University, where he earned his M.A. and Ph.D. After four years teaching at the University of Maryland, Mr. Hofstadter joined the History Department at Columbia in 1946, serving a year as Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University in 1958.
Mr. Hofstadter wrote a number of books related to American history which include:
Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944)
The American Political Tradition (1948)
The Age of Reform (1955)
Awarded the Pulitzer Prize in History
Anti-Intellectualism In American Life (1963)
Awarded the Pulitzer Prize in General Non-Fiction
Emerson Award of Phi Beta Kappa
Sidney Hillman Prize Award
The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965)
The Progressive Historians (1968)
The Idea of a Party System (1969)
America at 1750 (1971)
He also edited, with Mike Wallace, American Violence: A Documentary History (1970)
