"What bothers me about Joanna's wording is its emphasis on motive, which is ahistorical and moralistic. "The whole point of being" suggests the isolated (rationally choosing) individual of bourgeois societies, standing back from history and making a free choice of the 'career' he will follow. "Intellectuals" (I'm bothered by the term but don't quite know why) find themselves 'distanced' from the toiling masses; they don't _distance_ themselves."
What you say makes a lot of sense in terms of U.S., Western Europe, etc.
But my first experience was with east european intellectuals and I think it marked me for life.
They were an insanely privileged bunch. Let's take my mother, the daughter of a railway porter and a nearly illiterate peasant newly come to the city. Because of her intelligence and talent, she was included in the ranks of the Romanian intelligentsia as a result of which she didn't have to cook a single meal in fifteen years (dined at a special restaurant for profs and artists) and was given long sejourns in the appropriated castles of the old nobility...to write novels and screenplays, etc.
Despite the fact that all these privileges had been handed to her and her ilk by the victory of the working class over the capitalists/nazis, they had nothing but absolute contempt for working people and they wished for nothing better than to be adopted by their western counterparts.
There were some exceptions: Eisenstein, Ulanova, Gorki, no doubt Chekhov....had he lived, but what I witnessed daily was deeply depressing.
You might object that here again intellectuals were distanced from the working class by the leisure and the castles etc, but isn't the whole point of being an intellectual that you can see beyond narrow self-interest? that despite your privilege, you can see yourself as a historical subject? If that's not true, then maybe we should all spend some time picking tomatoes, or digging ditches, or cleaning latrines....to bring us back to reason. There is certainly no question in my mind that it was this type of work that kept me sane and gave me some kind of perspective in life.
"P.S. Freedom is a collective 'good'; we are free together or we are not free at all. Fishing is a very poor metaphor for freedom."
Just because people fish alone does not mean that they are not "together."
Joanna
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