The intellectual, the community and morality

All discourses that try to describe the intellectual, and above all to pronounce on who the real intellectual is, inevitably have to take refuge in a jargon of authenticity.

In this refuge, who the real intellectual is points to a type of hero that contains all the demands relating to whatever stance is expected, from whatever standpoint one looks. Naturally, all the references of such a typification produce a discursive pressure that leaves today's ordinary intellectual entirely outside analysis and completely destroys his legitimacy.

The ideology that today constructs the intellectual, or any other figure, as a Messiah, as a hero, is itself problematic enough.

What will be put right on the day an intellectual or any hero figure bursts into our lives?

When people see a hero (or, in our example here, an intellectual) who has fulfilled all the conditions of authenticity, will they recognize him as they recognize their own children?

If they recognize him, will they immediately believe in him and attach themselves to him?

Since an intellectual or hero contains the qualities that will fulfill the longings they have invested in their ideals, are they ready to pay the costs that meeting him may require?

History shows that the meeting between the intellectual and his community has not always taken place as an inevitable mutual attraction.

The relationship of the intellectual with society and community as formulated in ancient Greece by Plato with the type of the philosopher is, as its name says, Platonic. The philosopher, for whom involvement directly in politics is a moral necessity, is, because he is the only one who can know what is good and what is wrong for the people, the only one worthy of ruling as well. The business of the state is too serious a matter to be left to the demands of ordinary people.

Because ordinary people generally demand the pleasures of the transient world, these demands give rise to harms and errors whose truth only the philosopher can notice. That is why there is a Platonic justification for an elitism of "despite the people, for the people" between government and the demands of the people.

It is clear that this kind of approach does not give rise to a democratic understanding. Because democracy is a system that makes prevail in society the essentially vulgar and base desires, demands and lifestyles of ordinary people, who already form the majority in number, and thus makes the happiness of the human being in this world and the next impossible. The position that the philosopher is by definition invested with as guardian has been the starting point of the debates conducted throughout history about the social function of the intellectual.

Where a community produces its own intellectual, saint, scholar and friend of God, no serious tension arises between the intellectual and the community. All these figures are expected, vaguely, in one way or another, to play a Platonic role. But let it not be supposed that the Platonic function here works smoothly and in a straight line...

Within the Greek philosophical tradition, the sophists are people who built their relationship with knowledge professionally, who carried no concern for the search for truth or for an existential, ethical foundation, and who looked at knowledge purely as a commodity. This is precisely a figure that has never been missing from the historical typological variations of the intellectual.

When we think of the sophists as a typology of the intellectual, it is impossible not to draw lessons from their role of continually undermining the ontological ground of the community. Because of the professional, materialist and other moral weaknesses of their relationship with knowledge, they deeply shake trust in knowledge and in the intellectual. Another consequence of this is: intellectuality exhibited as a profession and a performance, to the extent that it draws everything into the circle of doubt, razes with a psychological blow, above all, people's common perception of truth, the common perception that makes people a community, the perception that creates in people a cosmic consciousness that they live in the same world.

It has always been thought that the sophists alone sufficiently undid the positive relationship Socrates established between knowledge and being moral. After all, if having knowledge required being moral, the sophists themselves had not only possessed knowledge but possessed so much knowledge that they razed all the grounds on which knowledge rests. Yet perhaps precisely because of this kind of relationship with knowledge, because they saw knowledge as a commodity that could be owned and disposed of, they lost morality.

Whereas the knowledge that Socrates said spontaneously entails moral behavior is evidently not knowledge in the sense of raw information. This knowledge is evidently, above all, a "self-knowledge."

Self-knowledge is knowing one's place in the world together with the places of other beings and, of course, together with the nature of being itself: He who knows himself knows his Lord.

Moreover, the distinguishing difference here is being able to establish a genuine relationship of love with knowledge, without seeing knowledge merely as a tool.

This difference is also not as simple as it is said to be. The love of knowing, the courage to know, the responsibility of eagerly answering the various ways of testing to which one's existence invites, give knowledge a quite separate personality. Knowledge is not seen as something possessed. It is believed that knowledge will choose the person. Whom does knowledge choose? Of course the one who feels this love, who lives this love, who seeks this knowledge with love.

In this sense, knowledge knows its man, senses him and turns toward him.

Those who see knowledge only as a means of defeating their adversaries, as one of many possible ways of earning a living, as a livelihood, as an instrument for establishing power, may also, in appearance, possess the accumulated learning of a philosopher.