[lbo-talk] A short soliloquy on freedom and fishing

[Arthur Maisel]

Perhaps the term intellectual bothers Carroll because it can be (and has
been) taken to imply that understanding (to understand, intelliggere in
Latin, literally means something like to gather together) can be
*separated* from practice---that (1) there can be a class of people who do
nothing but seek to understand, an arid idea, and (2) that those who engage
in doing things in the world are without understanding.

As with his example of the value of a calendar to an agricultural society,
it's clear that someone who engages in understanding can contribute to the
welfare of everyone, but perhaps it is in the segregation of such people
that the difficulty arises. There's no reason why someone engaged in labor
like everyone else couldn't have noticed astronomical patterns and helped
devise a calendar; I think it's unlikely that people were set apart to
devote their time to study of the heavens until they had already shown a
proclivity in that direction.

On Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 12:32 PM, martin schiller <mschiller at pobox.com>wrote:


>
> On Nov 8, 2013, at 7:36 AM, Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> > "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.
>
> When Joanna posted "The whole point of being an intellectual, it seems,
> was to distance yourself from working class.", my first reaction was to
> suggest that the point might also be viewed as an exercise in rationalizing
> the intellectual's distance from the proletariat.
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