I would like to endorse the spirit and most of the letter of Michael Goldhaber's last contribution to this thread, which overlaps with the other one in intriguing ways.To be intellectual is an activity not a type of person. Given Michael's definitional lead, I would say that to be intellectual is to try to make an object of experience. That is, following Hegel, we all have an experiential soup swilling around inside us, not properly digested. For some people, it becomes a challenge to take part of that experience inside them and turn it into something they can look at Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Precedence: bulk Reply-To: Keith Hart <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
An example. A fifteen-year-old boy goes to a party, tries to kiss a girl, is slapped in the face and retires humiliated from the party. What happens next? If he is of the unreflective persuasion, he may decide to go off sex for life. But most adolescents will ask themselves and their friends, What went wrong? Was it me? Was it her? How could i do it differently? Out of this questioning they may get a generalisation or two which they can put to the test on some future occasion. Rationality works better backwards than forwards, as a way of making sense of the past (experience), rather than of predicting the future (means-end calculation). Rationalisation or reasoning about our experience is indispensible to living with a modicum of coherence. Everyone does it. People we think of as intellectuals do it more than most. This is why I would agree with Michael that educational opportunities should be open as widely as possible to enable young people to develop this faculty. The USA is the only country in the world where higher education of a highly variable sort is universally available. Whatever we thin of the country's present government, it has a lot to do with the fact that America is the world's most advanced experiment in democracy. To call such a society anti-intellectual is perverse. Keith Hart # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
