Episode 79 - Intellectuals Transcript

[00:00:00] David: Hello, and welcome to Overthink. The podcast hosted by two public intellectuals...?

[00:00:19] Ellie: I'm your co-host, Dr. Ellie Anderson

[00:00:21] David: and I'm your co-host, Dr. David Peña-Guzmán, recording from the KSPC studio in Claremont, California.

[00:00:28] Ellie: Shout out to Pomona College.

[00:00:31] David: Ellie, do you feel like an intellectual?

[00:00:35] Ellie: I love that you ask if I feel like an intellectual rather than whether I am one.

[00:00:39] David: Well, because the answer to whether you're an intellectual is obvious enough, and if it weren't, then your response to my question would prove it. Classic intellectual response pointing to the question rather than answering it.

[00:00:52] Ellie: Valid point. But I do like the way that you formulate the question because it makes me think about how I feel like an intellectual in some contexts more than in others, as well as in different ways. Right. Obviously, our professions are about as intellectual as they get. We're both philosophy professors who write scholarly works and teach students, and I would say I also feel like an intellectual in the public work that I do here on the podcast and on YouTube, where we're sharing ideas to a broader audience, but my sense of being an intellectual is more in the background, in a lot of social context in a way that frankly sometimes makes me feel a little bit uneasy. For instance, sometimes at dinner parties, I'll think of references to philosophers or have intellectual points to make, but I hold off from bringing them into the conversation because it feels out of place. Like I don't wanna be that pretentious guy whose shtick is, "as Aristotle says..."

[00:01:47] David: I think I've mentioned this before, but when people ask me what I do like at a bar or in a non-academic space, I always just say I'm a teacher, I try to keep it as generic as I can. And I know that people usually imagine K through 12 when I answer that question. And I think that's exactly what I prefer because there is always this weirdness around, especially saying that you're a philosophy professor because then they put you in this category of a hyper intellectualized intellectual. And then they start asking you questions about the meaning of life and about the origin of the universe, and ain't nobody got time for that.

[00:02:22] Ellie: Which is funny because if you actually were to just say philosopher, they would either think of you as like even more intellectual or they would be like, oh, so you're just a rando who thinks. And then they would think you're not an intellectual.

[00:02:33] David: Yes. But when it comes with the imprimatur of being a college professor with an affiliation to an institution of higher learning there is this weird sense that claiming the identity of philosopher or intellectual, I think especially in a US context, because there is a kind of anti intellectual bias, I think people interpret it as automatically pretentious. Like, Ooh, look at you with your fancy degree.

[00:02:58] Ellie: I know. I don't like that at all. I, I like really resent how anti-intellectual American culture is. And I always tell people that one of the things I love about going to France is that if I meet somebody randomly, say at a bar and they ask what I do and I say, I'm a philosophy professor, they're like, oh, great. Interesting. Let's talk. Yes. And here in the US. Especially in Los Angeles where I live, it's like, oh, okay. And it's either seen as something exotic, but like totally unrelatable. And so nobody ever knows what to ask or there's a kind of implicit disdain of like, ooh, um, random. We still have people like that.

[00:03:39] David: Yeah, we exist still.

[00:03:42] Ellie: How about you? Do you feel like an intellectual?

[00:03:45] David: So. I'm thinking about this, my answer has changed ever since my book came out this past summer. Before the book came out, I would've said, no, not really. I am in an intellectual profession, but that's not the same as being an intellectual.

Often when I think about an intellectual, I think of the figure of the public intellectual, somebody who shapes public discourse, like and has access to, TV interviews, so on and so forth. And that's not really me, and it's not who I wanted to be necessarily. Since the book came out and it has been well received in the profession and in the media.

[00:04:23] Ellie: Congrats. Amazing. When Animals Dream available wherever you purchase books from Princeton University Press.

[00:04:28] David: Thank you. You are my promotion specialist for the book.

[00:04:31] Ellie: We have had some a summer 2022 episode about it if you were interested in going back and listening and haven't yet.

[00:04:37] David: Yeah. And so ever since that book came out, I was asked to be on several podcasts, I was interviewed for several...

[00:04:44] Ellie: very high profile magazines, nation- and worldwide.

[00:04:47] David: Yeah, like magazines, newspapers. For the first time, I will be doing a television interview about my research in about a week. For a television channel in Spain wish me luck, it's in Spanish. I'm a little nervous about it.

[00:05:00] Ellie: Oh yeah. Okay. It's a little rusty for you.

[00:05:04] David: It's honestly, it's very rusty in a way that hurls me into an identity crisis. But anyways, so the point here being that suddenly I've been put in this position where it's weird for me now to say that I'm not an intellectual. Because by any sort of metric, and culturally legible metric, I am a philosophy professor at a university, tenured, who writes articles and writes books and gives interviews. So at that point, I don't know what else would be required. But it does feel a little weird to take on the category and the label.

[00:05:39] Ellie: Unless the most intellectual move is to deny that you are an intellectual in the same way that the most existentialist move is to deny that you are an existentialist. It's like Socrates, I know that I know nothing. He would disavow being an intellectual, right?

[00:05:52] David: Yeah, maybe. I think in my case, to be honest, I don't think it's a meta intellectual, like intellectual square. I really think it has to do with an incongruity that the category of intellectual produces in me relative to my class upbringing. Because I come from a lower class background. It's a class that intellectuals don't occupy. Yeah. And so there, there is a kind of tension. And I recently read this wonderful memoir by a French writer called Returning to Reims, which is a city in France. Oh yeah. You talked about it on a recent Patreon Zoom.

Yes, I did. And the book is precisely about that tension that people from low income backgrounds experience that psychic tension when they enter intellectual spaces. Especially in the university because you feel as if merely by being an intellectual, you have betrayed your class.

[00:06:44] Ellie: I see, I see. That's really interesting. I have a slightly different experience, which is being raised in a pretty upper middle class environment, but one that is not very intellectual. Like neither of my parents graduated from college when they were younger. My mom went back later in life but didn't when she was younger, cuz they were, you know, artists.

They were musicians and actors and I think there was a lot of idolization of intellectual life in my upbringing, but not a lot of knowledge of what that meant, and not a lot of, we, we didn't really know any professors growing up. It was like my family really liked to read and there were dreams of being an intellectual, but that wasn't really actualized.

My grandma, for instance, I think would have been an intellectual had she had access to Higher education, but as like a middle class woman, you know, in like the 1940s, it was just like more the standard thing to get married and have kids.

[00:07:38] David: Yeah. And you know, that that tension that I have felt around family versus profession, is encapsulated in a funny little anecdote, which happened when I was in like my third or fourth year of grad school and I was having a chat with my family and they're like, Hey, how's your MBA going?

You're almost done. No, and I'm like, Oh wow. Like the, the Gulf is, is quite gigantic. Um, and, and it's a failure on their part as much as it is on mine, because it was a problem of rendering each other legible. But yeah, it's, it's interesting to think about the question of class in connection. To intellectuals and intellectual life and what people think intellectuals do.

[00:08:16] Ellie: I mean, I have a lot of family members still today who think that when I'm not teaching, I'm on break, which is like hilarious to me because teaching is a, you know, like a third maybe of my job.

[00:08:27] David: Well, and not just what they do/we do, but what they/we look like. Because I think one comment that you and I have gotten quite regularly, On social media, especially, when people see our faces for the first time and they,

[00:08:40] Ellie: they're like, oh my God, they're so hot.

[00:08:42] David: No, but they're like, oh, you know, they're young. Yeah. And they just don't cohere with our expectation for what these voices. With the kinds of bodies that would be attached to these voices,

[00:08:53] Ellie: to philosophy professors?

[00:08:54] David: Yeah. Yeah. I think, I mean, that's something that we've gotten multiple times.

Today we are talking about intellectuals.

[00:09:03] Ellie: Do intellectuals have a duty to comment in the public sphere?

[00:09:06] David: Or is doing so a betrayal of the role?

[00:09:10] Ellie: How do new media and changing social conditions change how we see intellectuals today?

So I'm kinda coming into this episode fresh and not having. A lot of background knowledge on this topic of intellectuals, but you've been teaching a class this semester on this very topic, and so I'm really excited to hear what you have to say about it and what kind of research you've done.

[00:09:42] David: Yeah. So, yes, I'm teaching this class called the Modern Intellectual and the neoliberal University. Mm-hmm. Uh, and we are thinking about the role of the intellectual, both in the contemporary moment and historically, and we're doing so through philosophy.

Through sociological research and also through literature. we are reading this novel called The Groves of Academe from the 1950s. That was written by Mary McCarthy. It's the first work in what is known as the genre of the campus novel. A novel that takes place on campus. And it's all about like drama between teachers and students, but it, it also features this kind of academic. Who is disenchanted with the world and feels persecuted by everybody around them. But you know, there are these floating stereotypes of the intellectual. There is the one with the heads in the clouds, the other one that thinks everybody's out to get them. And I think literature is a particularly good. Place for thinking about those.

[00:10:38] Ellie: Although, to give a very quick real life example, one of our professors from grad school, no, one of our professors from grad school told me that she would sometimes get into her car and just sit there and wonder why it wasn't moving and then realize that she was sitting in the passenger seat, but she was supposed to be the one driving, which is like an amazing real world example of the absent minded professor stereotype.

[00:11:02] David: So much respect for her. You know, I think I'm slowly metamorphizing into that character. There are times where like I, I do things that I can't explain and I don't know if it's because I just spend so much time alone in my office with books that are inanimate creatures that don't respond.

[00:11:21] Ellie: You're gonna be writing the key to all mythology soon enough.

[00:11:24] David: So yes, someday I, I am going to be Edward, myself. But let me say about this figure of the aloof intellectual who is removed from the world and distanced from the public sphere. I think that's one way to put it. This is a stereotype that we find in a book called The Treason of Intellectuals, written by Julien Benda in the early 20th century.

And this is a book that is very frequently cited in research about intellectuals, about the origins of the figure of the intellectual, and so on, and it's because in this book, Julien Benda essentially champions the figure of the apoliticized thinker. And he argues that historically there have been real intellectuals.

The book is written in French. He uses a term, clerc, to, to talk about intellectuals because,

[00:12:17] Ellie: is that the cleric? Or the clerc?

[00:12:19] David: The clerc. And it actually has the same root as the cleric or the clergy. Yeah. A person who devotes themselves to a spiritual calling that transcends the here and now.

So there's a close connection between the clergy and the clerc, or intellectual. Anyways, that's just a kind of linguistic point. But he says that historically there have been true intellectuals because they devote themselves to the realm of pure ideas, and they do so in a disinterested manner. That's how he defines intellectuals.

And this account became super influential in the 20th century, and in effect, Benda's book is just a rant, sometimes kind of unhinged in some ways about how intellectuals no longer exist in our world because intellectuals have ceased to be committed to that ideal of Disinterestedness and Aloofness, and they have become sort of mired in political controversies that makes them partisans and political agents rather than intellectuals.

[00:13:23] Ellie: Huh. I mean, that strikes me as kind of a classic, like the ivory tower is amazing and we've sadly moved away from it kind of view. I don't know.

[00:13:34] David: Oh, very much so. I mean, uh, he quotes Goethe at some point and uses this phrase as his motto for the book,

[00:13:41] Ellie: you know something's gone wrong when you're quoting Goethe as your motto.

[00:13:44] David: Yes. And the quote is, let us leave politics to the diplomats and the soldiers.

[00:13:50] Ellie: Oh, yeah. No, no, no, no, no, no.

[00:13:53] David: I kind of love it because it's just so out there and so unapologetically so. But the point being is that this, this stereotype that we have, It comes from a certain age and from a certain way in which I do think a lot of intellectuals have seen themselves across time. But Benda does have a good point also because he's not just talking about people who engage in political thinking, period. He's also talking about people who, in his eyes, start using their intellectual standing or identity to justify fundamentally partisan positions. So he's talking about people, for example, who defend nationalism, people who defend the superiority of their race, or of their gender. And he says, all these people have abandoned the arena of intellectual life for politics. So this is what happens when intellectuals become spokespeople For a political worldview.

[00:14:53] Ellie: But my question is whether it's a decision between being a political intellectual and being an apolitical intellectual, or being an intellectual who by virtue of being a citizen in the world, like is involved in politics, and it's just more of a question of how they're relating politically to different available worldviews. So I wouldn't see it as so much a choice between being political and being apolitical, but rather about what kinds of politics you are putting forth.

Because I think for all of us, there's a tension between being part of the lifeworld as like Habermas would call it. In which case we're all situated. We're all involved in power. We all have political views, whether or not we reflectively endorse them because we're acting them out on a day-to-day basis through our material conditions. And then on the other hand, having opinions about different political topics. I think this tension exists for all people, but I think it's especially pronounced for intellectuals because I think this second idea, this idea of having opinions about the life world in which you are situated becomes a bit more complicated. Because I think part of what it means to be an intellectual is having opinions that are at least worth taking seriously by virtue of expertise. Which is not, I think, the case necessarily more generally. But so there's like this default credence that's given, or this default seriousness that's given to your views. But intellectuals have expertise in some areas and not in many others. Right. So I do think, yeah, that there's something to Benda's idea that like my views on certain political issues should not be given any more weight than anybody else's who's not an intellectual, because I actually don't have expertise in that area at all. So I do buy that idea.

[00:16:44] David: Yeah. So there's a question of expertise. Secondly, there is a question of politics, because I obviously agree with you that this is a false dichotomy between either being political or being completely apolitical. And Benda does seem to just run those two together in a very, he just fails to notice the possibility of a more nuanced politicization of the intellectual. And you can really see this even in the politics of his own position. Right. There is a politics to his claim.

[00:17:10] Ellie: So true. Exactly.

[00:17:13] David: And it's reminding me of a passage in the book the treason of intellectuals where he says, you know, back in the day there were real intellectuals. And he gives the example of Leonardo da Vinci. And he says, when Florence faced a series of misfortunes, he doesn't go into detail about this. Leonardo da Vinci did the right thing. He just told all his students and his friends that he was not interested in helping Florence because his kingdom was not of this world.

[00:17:44] Ellie: Oh, wow.

[00:17:45] David: So he does have a clearly conservative understanding of the role of the scholar.

[00:17:51] Ellie: Well, because also think about Leonard da Vinci, he was patronized by many nobles and aristocrats. Yes. To, to accept money from a noble is a political activity. Right. Yeah. And I think we need to think about politics as you're suggesting in a much broader sense than Benda is granting here.

[00:18:07] David: Of course. And I mean, think about that flight from the world, you know, like the, the ticket is, Costly. Yeah. Somebody's gotta pay for that ticket. Exactly. Practically from the world. Exactly.

[00:18:17] Ellie: And, and it might be fine for Da Vinci in the case of these political upheavals in Florence to take a step back, I don't necessarily have a problem with that. Like I'm thinking about the May, 1968 French student protests when all these French students were angered at philosophy professors who weren't like in the streets with the students. I actually don't necessarily have a problem with that because I think it's okay to like, not do everything all the time and to remain in like a space of critical distance and agnosticism, but I think you need to still recognize that that is a political action.

[00:18:48] David: Yeah. There is nothing outside of the political world as long as you are a human who is situated in a human world.

[00:18:56] Ellie: Yeah. And I'm thinking about this a little bit in terms of Kant's distinction in the What is Enlightenment essay between public use of reason and private use of reason, because Kant says there that there's a difference between the way that we use our reason publicly, which is say to, let's use a contemporary example to write op-eds about the worsening conditions of the neoliberal university and take issue with the labor conditions for professors and the rise in tuition among students, right? We can do that. The public use of reason for Kant must always be free, but that's distinct from our private use of reason. Which has to do more with our career position, especially with civic office. So he says, for instance, that somebody can publicly denounce taxation while also pay taxes on the income that they get from their job. And so he does think that private use of reasons should be restricted, which I think raises questions about where the line can be drawn there. Like when are acts of civil disobedience blurring the line between your private use? Mm-hmm. And your public use of reason. But I do think it's a helpful distinction to show that we can adopt different hats in different contexts, and, but I think we might wanna say that both of those public use of reason and private use of reason have political dimensions to them.

[00:20:13] David: Of course. I mean, here we're thinking about this public versus private use of reason. In Kant, which you've done a really good job explaining Ellie, I have not read that essay in a very long time. I actually remember that it was weirdly confusing. His definition of private versus public. I remember thinking it was like inversed in some way. Now if we think about this depoliticized model of the intellectual that we get from Benda that arguably can get problematized with the aid of Kant, we see a very different model of the intellectual in another book that I am using in this graduate seminar that you alluded to. And that is Christoph Charles, Birth of the intellectuals, 1880 to 1900, which is a book that traces the origin of this figure of the intellectual to the 1890s in France, specifically the Dreyfus affair.

[00:21:07] Ellie: Ah, okay. Interesting.

[00:21:09] David: So the Dreyfus affair, for those of our listeners who have not heard about this,

[00:21:13] Ellie: or who, like me, studied it in high school history and might have forgotten since,

[00:21:18] David: and forgot about it. So, it was a major political controversy in France at the end of the 19th century that split French culture in half. On the one hand, you had these sort of like pro-Catholic conservatives that believed in always coming to the defense of the nation, no matter the cost to the individual. And on the other hand, you had these more like socialist leaning leftist anti-Catholics who were trying to fight for a broader conception of justice and trying also to fight the antisemitism of the conservatives. Now, this split occurred because of this very specific political episode involving a military officer by the name of Dreyfus. So all of this happened because somebody found a handwritten note in a trashcan containing military secrets. And so that created a state of panic where people were like, who is trying to give away our national secrets to the enemy?

And the people who worked in that space were all French, all basically Catholic, except for this one guy. Dreyfus, which doesn't sound very French. Dreyfus sounds German, and so this guy gets essentially blamed by the military because he's the one that stands out from the rest and he gets, sentenced to jail. He. Doesn't have really a very good opportunity to defend himself. And if you look at the details of the military trial, it's clear that the military was just trying to find a scapegoat for this unfortunate episode. And in fact, the military lawyers made some really weird arguments about the evidence about this handwritten note, because obviously they tested the note against his handwriting and it did not match at all. So there was no evidence connecting this Jewish German-surnamed guy to the note, but the military's argument was that the fact that there is no connection between his handwriting, and the handwriting on the note only proves the extent to which he went to conceal that it was him, which obviously proves that it was him. So long story short, this guy's ordeal becomes a political battle in France over the individual versus the military, over antisemitism, and it is in this context that the French writer, Émile Zola, writes a very famous public letter entitled J'accuse, which translates into English as I accuse where he in a very public and very direct manner, addresses the president of the republic and accuses the French government of engaging in a conspiracy that is ultimately motivated by antisemitic sentiments. And so according to Christoph Charles, it is in this figure of Zola writing a public piece in a newspaper, addressing the nation, and trying to change public discourse around a contemporary political controversy that we see the birth of the first intellectual.

[00:24:39] Ellie: So this means that the intellectual from the very beginning is mired in politics, and that's actually the point of being an intellectual.

[00:24:46] David: Yeah. You cannot not be a political intellectual. And Charles says that the intellectual comes into being by exercising what he calls the right to scandal. You scandalize the public.

[00:24:59] Ellie: Oh, okay. Scandalize the public. Huh.

[00:25:02] David: It's such a French idea. Yeah. Like the right to scandal.

[00:25:04] Ellie: I know. Oh my God, that is such a French idea. Although I'm thinking about like all the op-eds in the US today that are written, you know, by intellectual scandalizing in one way or another. The clickbaitification of op-eds.

[00:25:18] David: But another point here is that the intellectual exists largely through the visibility that they get in channels of mass media. So there's a very close connection between the intellectual and this public facing persona. Especially like radio, newspapers. Uh, later television. Maybe now we can add other media.

[00:25:39] Ellie: Yeah. So we're not doing something too new with being public intellectuals, podcasting. We are just.

[00:25:45] David: We're like Zola,

[00:25:46] Ellie: we're like, we're like the 21st century Zolas.

[00:25:50] David: But you know, more talented for sure.

[00:25:51] Ellie: Well, and not also, like, importantly coming to the defense of a wrongly accused member of an oppressed group. And so yes, you might be a scholar if you have expertise, but you cannot be an intellectual unless you have that public discourse shaping power. So I think this is so different from the way that we talk about intellectuals in contemporary society because it really seems like, according to Charles's view, the very concept of the intellectual is public, which would actually imply that the term public intellectual is redundant. Intellectuals are public scholars or academics.

[00:26:29] David: Yeah. I mean, what would a private intellectual even look like?

[00:26:33] Ellie: Well, I would think that it would be a scholar academic, right? But I think Charles's point is that that actually wouldn't be an intellectual at all. Because to be an intellectual is already to make a stake in the public sphere through the mass media. If we accept the idea that intellectuals depend upon mass media channels because these channels distribute their ideas and give them a platform, then it would seem that changes. In these channels would change the nature of intellectuals, right? And so like what does it mean to be an intellectual podcasting versus an intellectual signing a petition 50 years ago versus Émile Zola writing J'accuse in the 1890s? And I wonder whether the historical period that Charles is targeting with the focus on petitions and newspapers that are signed by literary giants is no longer quite the situation we live in nowadays. Certainly people are still signing petitions. We often are signing petitions ourselves, but I think we're living in an era where given the rise of social media and our very medium here of podcasting, gives random people a huge platform even when they aren't scholars or experts. So we've perhaps moved from this idea of the intellectual as somebody with a scholarly academic, or at least like learned. I don't know. Profession or character to now being in a moment where people are trying to play the role of an intellectual without having any of that background. They're like starting a podcast or a YouTube channel and doing, say, YouTube essays. When they're 20 years old.

[00:28:34] David: Well, they don't know what they're talking about.

[00:28:36] Ellie: Well, I don't, I don't wanna sound elitist about it, but Yeah, kind of. Or like this idea that people want to have an influence, but it's the question is what kind of opinions do you have that I should be listening to?

[00:28:52] David: I honestly just want names at this point for you I will not continue this conversation unless you tell me specifically who you have in mind here.

[00:29:00] Ellie: Joe Rogan. Okay. Okay. Yes, absolutely. But I think you could also say, I don't have a high opinion of Joe Rogan at all. But let's take somebody that I would see as a more neutral figure. Dax Shepard doing the Armchair Expert Podcast, or the SmartLess podcast. There is an Office Hours podcast, so it's taking a academic name, but the people who host all three of these podcasts are all actors and comedians. I see. And so they have I would say an expertise in their areas, right? In comedy, but they don't have intellectual backgrounds. And so the thing about all these podcast co-hosts, right, is that they're, I don't even think they would recognize themselves as intellectuals, and yet they're occupying space that is associated with the intellectual. A lot of them host actual experts on their podcasts. And so, and I think that does a huge service.

[00:29:49] David: Yeah. That adds legitimacy.

[00:29:51] Ellie: Yeah. And I'm not saying that these podcasts are like terrible or bad, like I actually think they're pretty interesting in a lot of ways and they're very popular. But even when these people host actual experts, they're the ones in dialogue with them. And I think that can very easily lend itself to some dangerous territory. For instance, the way that Joe Rogan was taken really seriously for his anti-vax views of the Covid vaccine by virtue of his status as podcast host, not because he has any knowledge of medicine,

[00:30:21] David: any knowledge of medicine we emphasize. No, but I think you're right that this creates, it blurs the lines that's what I should say. To the point that I have had some students, all of them male, Who have quoted Joe Rogan in their projects for my class?

[00:30:37] Ellie: No, no, no.

[00:30:39] David: It's just very bizarre. But it does mean that in their eyes, he represents a public intellectual with a kind of epistemic authority to the point that they bring him into the university as if he were a citable source. Exactly. I mean even just like the idea of citing a podcast to begin with is kind of weird.

[00:30:54] Ellie: Totally. Totally. I've, I've had student cite,

[00:30:57] David: That podcast in particular!

[00:30:58] Ellie: That is fascinating because I've actually had students cite one of my YouTube videos and I've said, don't cite my YouTube videos, cite scholarly sources, but like,

[00:31:06] David: do the work.

[00:31:07] Ellie: Yeah. Because, well, because me in my capacity as hosting a YouTube channel is different from me in my capacity as peer reviewed scholar, but this is, so much of a starker case because Joe Rogan does not have any scholarly peer reviewed publications. He's not an authority!

[00:31:22] David: Yeah. No, he's not an intellectual. He's a pseudo intellectual. And in general, I think the point here is that new technologies like social media, podcasting, uh, YouTube are dissociating to things that have historically been united. On the one hand, you have scholarly standing relative to a community of experts. Yeah. And then the second one is access to these vehicles of mass publicity or mass media, because now you can be seen as an intellectual, even without having, the badge of honor of a university affiliation, for example, or without having the status of being an author or a writer. In fact, now it sort of goes the other way around. Once you have a big enough following and backing, you become a writer. And you get invited to give talks. So your status as a thinker comes after your fame in these media rather than before it.

[00:32:19] Ellie: Totally. I've been hearing a lot of friends in publishing talk about how there's so much pressure now to give book deals to people with huge social media followings because they can do the promotion for you. And I'm thinking about like, Armchair expert, like, please call me, I wanna be on your podcast. But I think I would have a lot more pull with something like that if I had a hundred thousand Instagram followers rather than having seven to 10 peer reviewed articles in scholarly venues. Even though, I mean, I like to think, given all of our work on the show, that I would be able to convey those challenging ideas from my scholarship in accessible ways for an Armchair expert audience.

[00:32:59] David: Yeah, no, but it does mean that we recognize that we're doing a translation kind of work, of the ideas to a certain public, rather than assuming that the views that we used to create a public or a following suddenly have this larger legitimacy as contributions to a body of knowledge.

[00:33:18] Ellie: Thank you. I could not agree more, and I wanna be careful here because, although I'm really critical of the rise of the pseudo intellectual, I don't think that the only people who have expertise are people with PhDs, right? Even if we're just talking about academics who are employed at universities like we know firsthand David, how many extremely talented thinkers have been gate kept from the kinds of positions of power at universities that you and I occupy by virtue of being tenure track, or in your case tenured. And so I think it would be a very elitist position to say that only somebody who has a tenured position at a university is an expert. I do think we need to be very careful about distinguishing intellectuals from pseudo intellectuals because I do think there's an important distinction to be made there.

[00:34:05] David: Yeah. And I think that would lead that risk of elitism would lead to a contraction of the political arena of intellectual life in two ways. On the one hand, it would contract it only to professors who have an affiliation with a university, which is just too narrow. But it also would limit it to certain vehicles for the spread and dissemination of intellectual ideas, because if we limit it to those professors, then we're only thinking about intellectual life in the way in which those figures do it, namely by publishing in things like academic journals through traditional books and monographs and maybe the occasional newspaper article. But I think that lets fall by the wayside a number of other ways of shaping public discourse and being politically engaged that, you know, maybe professors are not the ones that are doing that.

[00:34:56] Ellie: Sorry, I just had to move my chair and I hope you didn't hear that. We're recording live in-studio, so we can't really edit as much as we usually do. Okay. There we go. Yes. So I agree with you. I mean, unpopular opinion perhaps, but I'm actually all about peer review. I think peer review is a really incredible system. The double blind peer review system that we have is incredible way of, I don't know, like ensuring a certain sort of quality to academic publications. I think there are major problems with it in terms of gatekeeping, but I would say I'd love a reform of the peer review system, not an abolition of it. The question for me, when we're thinking about podcasts in particular is how people are presenting themselves because, you know, one of my favorite podcasts is Binchtopia, which is co-hosted by two young 20 something women, one of whom is a college graduate and one of whom didn't graduate from college. And I would definitely consider that an intellectual podcast because what the two women who host that podcast are doing is drawing attention to research that has been done on the topics that they're discussing, which actually, there's kind of a decent overlap between some of their podcasts and ours. Yeah, like there was, we did like an astrology podcast, then they did one, we did a gossip one, then they did one. But I think that they're bringing,

[00:36:10] David: They wanna be us!

[00:36:11] Ellie: Uh, no. I mean,

[00:36:13] David: they're so much bigger.

[00:36:14] Ellie: They're so much bigger. Um, I would love to work with them at some point though, because I think what they're doing is really, really interesting. They're bringing an epistemic humility to the work that they do. They're really successful communicators. They're really smart, but they're also acknowledging that they're standing on the shoulders of people who have written, you know, peer reviewed pieces and mainstream media articles and books, et cetera, in their episodes.

[00:36:38] David: Yeah, so I agree with you, except that I think we have to differentiate between, on the one hand, what in academic writing gets called the literature review, where you acknowledge that you are standing on the shoulders of giants who have come before you. This has been said, this has been said. And then you position yourself in a specific way in relation to it, and this is what I have to say about it, and on the other hand, peer review. Which is about your peers assessing the quality of your positioning once you've already done it. And so I think in these new spaces like social media, like podcasting, like YouTube, It's very easy to have the literature review version where you acknowledge that you are part of a larger discussion, but that's not the same as the peer review function of establishing whether or not your original contribution to that conversation is actually worthwhile now.

[00:37:31] Ellie: Totally.

[00:37:31] David: Now, I think in the case of this podcast, uh, Binchtopia, yes, I, I also really enjoy the podcast and, you know, hey, send us an email. We would like to collaborate with you. Um, But it is tricky to imagine peer review in social media spaces.

[00:37:46] Ellie: Exactly. And nor do I think it would be necessary, because I think what you're talking about is the difference between disseminating ideas and making an original contribution to a body of scholarship. And even in our capacity on this podcast, I see us doing primarily the work of dissemination. We're not often making original interventions on our show. We're reserving that for our written work.

[00:38:07] David: But that raises another question about whether in doing that dissemination rather than creation, we are doing maybe activism or pedagogy more than original intellectual, shaping of public opinion or innovation. But again, the distinction is very blurry.

[00:38:25] Ellie: No, I, I have a thought on that though. Because I think the original shaping of public opinion is different from original contributions to a body of literature. So I would say that disseminating scholarly ideas is intellectual is an original intellectual pursuit, but that's different from original scholarly ideas.

[00:38:44] David: Scholarly contributions. Yes. And so historically you would've had to prove that you did the latter. Yeah. Before you did the former, you had to prove that you have new ideas, that you're a leader in your field. Yeah. Before you get to spread ideas, sprinkle them over the fabric of social life. But now that's no longer a requirement because of the increased access to channels of information,

[00:39:06] Ellie: there's an autonomy of what was previously the intellectual sphere.

[00:39:09] David: Yes. That, that's exactly right. Now, if all of this is true, I don't even know what we just said, but if it, if it's all true, it raises the question of where do we really find intellectuals today? Where do they come from? And by what means do they express themselves? And the reason that I ask this question about where are the intellectuals is because I think we find ourselves in a really interesting moment that maybe introduces a bit of a paradox about this. So if you go outside of the academy, it is unclear who is an expert and therefore who has the kind of chops and legitimacy to be an intellectual because you get publicness without expertise. But then if you look inside the academy, there is an inverse version of the problem, especially when you think about hyperspecialization where people produce very niche content, you have a lot of expertise, but no publicness. And so if we define the intellectual as expertise plus publicness, You know, it's, it's not in the academy and it's not outside of the academy. So there are no intellectuals anymore.

[00:40:23] Ellie: Yeah. So I just wanna introduce by way of an indirect answer to that, Edward Said's 1994 book, representations of the Intellectual, which is based on some lectures that he did for the BBC. Classic example of a public intellectual thing to do, right?

[00:40:39] David: Yes. In the radio. Yes.

[00:40:40] Ellie: Scholar who's doing BBC lectures. In these lectures, Said lays out a theory of the public intellectual, where the intellectual is someone who articulates a message to and for the public. But specifically, it's a message that seeks to speak truth to power and to criticize the current state of affairs to point towards universal principles of justice. So it actually sounds really similar to the, like Dreyfus affair, Zola legacy. Right. And he says the following: At bottom, the intellectual is neither a pacifier nor a consensus builder, but someone whose whole being is staked on a critical sense. And he describes this critical sense as a sense of being unwilling to accept easy formulas or ready made cliches. And I have to say that I read that and I feel a bit convicted, if not, at least in question, because I see our role as disseminators is of philosophical knowledge and like, you know, we are to some extent trying to get young people interested in philosophy as like, at least involving, I don't know about easy formulas, but breaking down complex ideas into digestible fashion. And I think Said would say, Hey, that is not an intellectual move. You're not speaking truth to power. You're just like sharing ideas.

[00:41:57] David: You're a proselytizer. Yes, you're a propagandist. And no, I think that's right. That for him, it really has to do with the development of a critical attitude in speaking truth to power. And interestingly, Said says that that's precisely why there can never be, by definition, a right wing public intellectual because they don't speak truth to power. They just punch downward. So.

[00:42:21] Ellie: Sorry, Joe Rogan.

[00:42:23] David: Yeah. Bye.

[00:42:30] Ellie: Enjoying Overthink? Please consider supporting the podcast by joining our Patreon. We are an independent, self-supporting podcast, and as a subscriber, you can help us cover key production costs as well as gaining access to an exclusive digital library of bonus content and more.

David, you asked me for this episode to read Gramsci's essay the intellectuals, which is written by Gramsci who's our 20th century neo-Marxist, so really interested in material conditions and I think, yeah, I wanna discuss this with you because Gramsci has a view of the intellectual that is rooted not in intellectual activities, but actually in the social position that an intellectual occupies. So I think it's a bit of a different perspective than ones we've been considering so far.

[00:43:25] David: Yes. And this essay on intellectuals is from the prison notebooks, which just to contextualize the content is a series of writings that Gramsci produced while he was in prison. Imprisoned by Mussolini. And he's trying to evade censorship in prison cuz they have to like, they have to smuggle these texts out.

[00:43:44] Ellie: Oh. I didn't know that.

[00:43:45] David: Um, and that's why the text is So difficult at times because he's trying to write in like a very indirect way. So the guards won't know that it's a Marxist communist text.

[00:43:54] Ellie: That makes sense. Cause I was trying to read this last night after a glass of wine and I was struggling so hard. I had to read it this morning instead.

[00:43:59] David: Well, you, no, you confessed that it was a glass of wine. And then a Paloma, that, "got me lit."

[00:44:06] Ellie: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. It was, it was a Paloma, it was actually a Paloma first then and glass of wine. Okay. Caught. Caught on air.

[00:44:12] David: Caught on air that you were unable to read the Gramsci while, uh, a little tipsy. Anyways, so in this text, Gramsci talks about two figures, two kinds of intellectual. He differentiates between what he calls the traditional intellectual and the organic intellectual. And this distinction sort of frames his analysis in in the whole essay. So I'm curious about what you thought about this, Ellie, this sense that there are two different kinds.

[00:44:40] Ellie: So what I understood is that the traditional intellectual is related to that legacy that you described earlier as the clerc legacy or the cleric legacy. The traditional intellectual is sort of a class of its own of people who don't occupy the class of managers or aristocrats or nobles or proletarians, but they have their own role. I don't know. That's kind of vague. I'm sure you can elucidate this, whereas the organic intellectuals are the members of each class that sort of rise to the fore of their particular social groups. So like the merchants would have intellectuals within them. The garment producers would have intellectuals within them. The clerics would as well.

[00:45:27] David: Yeah. And so it's so confusing that he uses the term organic. Cuz when I think of organic, I think of like the working class, you know, like close to the soil, but by organic he means native to a particular class. So the rich people will have their own intellectuals. People in industry will have their own intellectuals, whereas the traditional intellectual, as the term suggests, is that more traditional image that we have of an intellectual who is not really tied to industry or to a particular class, but is just that sort of free floating figure that is typically represented either by the philosopher or by the priest, for example. And at some point in the essay he says that the traditional intellectual really emerges during Roman times when Caesar tries to unify the empire. And so he incentivizes all the smart people from all the places that they were conquering to come to the center and become sort of Representatives of the empire. So it is this class of people who devote themselves to the life of the mind.

[00:46:27] Ellie: Okay. So people who devote themselves to the life of the mind. Sure. And at the same time, as I mentioned, he wants us not to define intellectuals through intellectual activities. And so he says for instance, that all men are intellectuals, but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals and the function of intellectuals ends up being perhaps paradoxically, since he started the sentence by saying, all men are intellectuals, what he really means by the intellectuals. He says, when one distinguishes between intellectuals and non-intellectual, one is really referring to the immediate social function of the professional category of the intellectuals.

[00:47:06] David: That's right. And so, everybody is an intellectual in the basic sense that we all have capacities,

[00:47:12] Ellie: intellect!

[00:47:12] David: Yeah, intellect and the ability to direct that to various objects. But not everybody is an intellectual in the, in a professional sense, right? So not everybody is a priest. Not everybody is a teacher, not everybody is a tutor. And what he wants to argue in this essay, is that both traditional intellectuals and organic intellectuals sometimes end up playing a social function that is kind of messed up, which is that even when they don't realize it, They end up reifying class distinctions and class hierarchies. So they produce and justify class antagonism. On the one hand, the traditional intellectuals, you know, like he really thinks of professors and priests as the highest expression of this. He says they think that they don't have any class interests because they're just disinterested scholars. But let's be honest, they've climbed up the social ladder precisely by taking up these positions. And moreover, in doing so, they promote a myth of classlessness. So, Even though they don't think they're doing class related work, they are.

[00:48:18] Ellie: Speaking of which, he talks about how school helps develop the intellectuals. Tell me about how that fits into this narrative.

[00:48:26] David: So the thing about Gramsci is that his interpretation of class is very, very closely tied to education and the education system, which is why the prison notebooks, this is the first chapter of the prison notebooks. He begins his Marxist analysis by talking about intellectuals, which is kind of weird for a Marxist to do, you would expect them to talk about material relations, production factories, et cetera. And it's because Gramsci believes that we have these ideologies floating around that maintain us in our class position, and that the best way to break them is by creating new ideologies, new ways of interpreting the world. And that happens through education and through educational leaders, i.e. intellectuals. Okay. So what we need is we need to figure out a way to reform the education system to produce what we might call Marxist intellectuals. Intellectuals that instead of keeping up the current superstructure of society will actually produce new ways of seeing social life so that we can break down class antagonism.

[00:49:32] Ellie: Well, and that seems to be something we have not achieved at all. You know, a number of decades after Gramsci wrote the prison notebooks, at least in the US where, you know, I work at a college that really makes an effort to have an extremely diverse student body. And at the same time, that diverse student body is incentivized, given the broader structure of our culture to go into high paying and structurally conservative jobs like consulting and finance, et cetera.

[00:50:03] David: Yeah, this is Gramsci's point actually that right now the education system encourages people to become only organic intellectuals, i.e. leaders of industry who then just represent the class, the interest of the class that they belong to, or in some cases it encourages them to become traditional intellectuals like professors and lawyers. And so on and so forth. But then those people have such a depoliticized understanding of themselves that they don't actually fight for the interest of the lower class. And so there is a point in the essay that, for me, is the essence of the essay where he says, look, the real plight of the lower class is that the lower class doesn't have any intellectuals that speak for it. Even if there are kids from the lower class that show intellectual potential. They get extracted from the lower class and they move upward. Precisely through in intellectual movement. And that's what I expressed at the beginning of the episode as this tension that sometimes exists between being somebody from a poor background and entering an intellectual profession where you feel as if you've already betrayed your class. As soon as you become an intellectual and Gramsci says that's the case in the status quo.

[00:51:15] Ellie: In that vein, one thing that really struck me about the essay was Gramsci's claim that the mode of being of the new intellectual, so that intellectual today can't consist in eloquence because eloquence is just like a motivator of feelings in a fleeting sense, and it doesn't actually change the status quo, but instead in active participation in practical life. So he thinks that the intellectual today has to be a constructor, an organizer, and a permanent persuader rather than an orator, which seems to me to actually be really closely linked to the stuff we began the episode with, which is talking about how the intellectual was like always in a political position anyway, because everybody is. And so, he seems to be saying like, we have to make the most of that. Does that track?

[00:52:03] David: Well, that, that definitely tracks because Gramsci, and he embodied this himself in his life and in his work, he got his hands dirty in Italy working with the workers' councils. So for him there is no separation between theory and praxis. In fact, for you to show your theoretical chops is to enact them in Marxist practice and, one weird thing about this essay on intellectuals is that at the end he has all these paragraphs that are about intellectuals in various parts of the world. That's kind of confusing. Like he talks about intellectuals in China, intellectuals in South America.

[00:52:39] Ellie: Yeah. it's like half the essay. I got to that point, and I was like, okay.

[00:52:42] David: Yes. Like, intellectuals in Mexico. And the reason is because he believes that in order for you to do that dialectic of theory and practice successfully, you really have to understand the concrete, material and historical conditions in the place that you inhabit. So you have to respond to the specific organization of class distinctions in your culture.

[00:53:07] Ellie: And with that, I think one possible way of reading that is that intellectuals really do need to be knowledgeable about the social material, political conditions in which we find ourselves in order to make a positive impact on the world.

[00:53:24] David: We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

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[00:53:47] Ellie: We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, our production assistant, Emilio Esquivel Marquez and Samuel PK Smith for the original music.

[00:53:55] David: And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.