Session 7: Intellectuals: Roles and Responsibilities

Session 7: Intellectuals: Roles and Responsibilities
Chair: Alyce Von Rothkirch

Is the Lock on the Inside or the Outside?  Is There a Lock at all?  The Ivory Tower, Intellectuals and their Role for Today
Rachel I. Waterstradt
Department of Philosophy, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, USA

The first part of this paper intends to briefly introduce the role of the thinker – professional intellectual or average person – in society as discussed in Hannah Arendt’s treatment of the figure of Socrates in her article, “Thinking and Moral Considerations” (as well as other places).  The thinker should serve as a midwife, seeking to bring about inquiry and understanding in others, yet fully realizing that she cannot do this for them any more than the midwife can deliver for the mother-to-be.  The thinker should also serve as a gadfly, stinging the complacent and rousing them to critically evaluate their passively held beliefs from family and society, stirring them to question further than just what the evening news may provide.  Finally, the thinker should serve as a stinging ray, stunning the victim into stopping and thinking.
But therein is the problem.  The second part will present two images of the intellectual and the ivory tower to understand exactly the problem that is being faced today.  If the thinker serves as a stinging ray, as Socrates claims the first one stunned is the thinker herself; this stopped stunned-ness is what has led so many to assess the thinker as a person of inaction and dismiss her position in the debate of the truly pressing issues of the day.  It is as though there are four persons at the door to the ivory tower: the thinker who is trying to get out and the thinker who wants to stay in are working against each other at their cost as well as the cost of the person outside the door who wants to do what is right and responsible who is pulling to open the door, yet who is blocked by another pushing to keep the door shut so that economic and media forces continue their gains.  What becomes illumined through this image is the thinker in society has (as she always has had) a difficult battle to just get to participate as Socrates and most thinkers since have argued we ought.  Yet perseverance is not so much the problem; the problem is one of approach which brings us to the second image: the image of a person pushed on a door that clearly says pull.  This is our main problem in getting the role of the individual thinker back into society.  If we go about the task in the wrong way, we will have as much success as the person trying to get into that door.
Which leads directly into the final issue for the paper: a possible course of action.  Drawing from the influence of Ricoeur and Foucault, as well as from teaching experience and the insights of students, I will argue for a path that reintroduces the thinker’s role without compromise to the “sound-bite” era that we currently occupy by encouraging thought that concerns itself with exactly what a human being is as a thinking thing and an acting being who impacts her world.  We cannot produce a philosophy blockbuster that we change everyone instantly, but, as has always been done, we should continue to discuss and engage, but also involve ourselves in the main pressing ethical issues that face us today.

‘The Responsibilities of Intellectuals and the Value of Understanding’
Ward Jones
Department of Philosophy and Editor, Philosophical Papers, Rhodes University, Grahamstown South Africa

No abstract is presently available