3 - The Public Intellectual

Summary

‘The intellectual’, according to the first Czech President, playwright and dissident, Václav Havel,

should constantly disturb, should bear witness to the misery of the world, should be provocative by being independent, should rebel against all hidden and open pressure and manipulations, should be the chief doubter of systems, of power and its incantations, should be a witness to their mendacity.

According to Christopher Hitchens (2008) who claimed the role, the intellectual is someone ‘who makes his or her living through the battle of ideas’. Implicit in this view is the notion of the intellectual as outsider to the powerful. Thus, in his 1993 Reith Lectures, Edward Said observed,

At bottom, the intellectual, in my sense of the word, is neither a pacifier nor a consensus-builder, but someone whose whole being is staked on a critical sense, a sense of being unwilling to accept easy formulas, or ready-made clichés, or the smooth, ever-so-accommodating confirmations of what the powerful or conventional have to say, and what they do. Not just passively unwillingly, but actively willing to say so in public.

Or, as he would put it later, ‘the intellectual's provisional house is the domain of an exigent, resistant, intransigent art into which alas, one can neither retreat nor search for solutions’. Similarly, ‘It is the responsibility of intellectuals’, according to Noam Chomsky, ‘to speak the truth and to expose lies’. ‘The intellectual’, according to Foucault, ‘spoke the truth to those who had yet to see it, in the name of those who were forbidden to speak the truth: he was conscience, consciousness and eloquence.’ In short, intellectuals are admirable, even heroic figures who ‘speak truth to power’, counselling on the proper use of power without possessing it and in doing so risking themselves for the public good. They may be a uniquely modern attempt to ennoble politics, but lacking power, they cannot be described as modern philosopher kings who possess and command both.