Who are public intellectuals?
An intellectual who merely addresses the public is not a “public intellectual”. He has to come up with something substantial that may change the lives of the commoners for good
Hisham M Nazer
Public intellectuals are usually expected to stand against all sorts of odds and express, as loudly as possible, their stance. A public intellectual is therefore regarded by many as a problem solver, who has the noble responsibility to produce solutions, from the vast knowledge he possesses, for all sorts of problems, and who has guts, not matter in which social position he belongs, to announce his stance.
But the definition of the public intellectual must have gone through changes with the change of time, since there was a time, much like ours, when thinkerseven the likes of Descarteshad to moderate their thoughts in order to avoid a burning stake. Now would it be wise to doubt Descartes integrity as a philosopher only because he proved the existence of God to remain safe from the wrath of the Church? Do we judge or know a thinker, a philosopher, a theorist, or a public intellectual for all he does or says?
A public intellectual is definitely not a superman with superhuman qualities that can help him survive any sort of influence or threat or situation. A public intellectual surely is not a person who is chained, from his birth, on a platform, and is bound to comment on every single event that the projector-guy projects from behind on a large screen of reality in front. A single man cannot experience all, cannot know all, and therefore, must act for or against only those things that his situations have allowed him to experience. Understanding this is only human, because a public intellectual is, above all, a human.
Therefore, first we need to know what we understand by publicmeaning who are involved with the binaries of communication, and who we can and should call an intellectual. If speaking publicly on any serious issue secures one the title of a public intellectual, then yes, all teachers, to narrow the parameter down to a bare minimum, are public intellectuals. Yet there are differences between a lecturer of philosophy or literature in a classroom and a person who stands on the stage (actual or virtual) making his ideas loud and clear. The crucial difference is- the latter has a plan, bigger than merely making the public understand and agree whatever he says, and all his speeches (markedly different from lectures) are designed to carry out these plans through calculative, often manipulative, words, fit not only for students sitting in rows, but for people from all walks of life. His speecheswhich can even be a Facebook/Twitter posthave larger consequences, and so must be delivered with a kind of sincerity that keeps the peoples sentiment in mind, often to satisfy it or to offend it with rhetoric and logic.
But a teacher might not cross the boundary of a teacher and start teaching his own philosophies (opinions, in case they have never come up with anything original) instead the ones prescribed in the syllabus, for that poses another great problemof determining the role of a lecturerwhether he is reviewed fit to preach or does so on his own selfish accord. Moreover, as teaching methods and methodologies would have it, a teacher cannot be too rhetorical and must not roam too far from the topic that at one point he may find it impossible to return to the actual discussion. But does that mean a teacher cannot be a public intellectual, who, to meet popular expectations, will maintain the charade of a responsible life never for once deflecting from the archetypically delineated course of intellectualism? Of course he can but surely without the charadethe carefully maintained image that discounts human limitations.
Therefore let us not hurry in finding a public intellectual; let us not hurry in defying a public intellectual; and definitely let us not hurry in defining one, because that requires certain level of sophistication from the person who is defining, and, to be so uncompromisingly strict, because that requires the person who is defining to be intellectual himself.
A public intellectual is not bound to meet all our ideal expectations- that he will be a moral police all the time, that he will raise voice whenever he encounters a problem disregarding his actual involvement with it, that he must contribute his ideas or his labour for the overall development of the society, that he will never be partial and will be an ardent advocate of truth. A public intellectual will do all these, but not just that, not all on occasions. He is not bound to talk all the time about all the things, though reticence is a different issue.
Probably we demand too much from a person like that, and maybe that is one of the reasons why they are so rare to be found around these days. We need to understand, and acknowledge sometimes, that public intellectuals cannot know everything and hence at times must remain silent in order to avoid giving opinion that has all the possibilities of not being the real case (for how much can we really know of the intricate and complex social mechanisms?). Above all, a public intellectual has no definition and cannot be forced to have all the superhuman qualities we so readily attribute to him.
An intellectual who merely addresses the public is not a public intellectual. He has to come up with something substantial that may change the lives of the common for good. Karl Marx, for example, never taught in a classroom.
On the other hand, Nietzsche probably never addressed the mass outside his classes at the University of Basel, but the impact of his ideas especially on the entire western world is undeniably tremendous. Are they not then public intellectuals? But again, let us not make public intellectualism, as Foucault would call it, a history of thought, otherwise we might create yet another debate that will only ruin our mood for a cup of tea.
The writer is Lecturer, Department of English, Varendra University
