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ROLE OF INTELLECTUAL


Who is intellctual? I'm amazed the way this term is often used by the people around me, accross the country and globe. Intellectual, to me, is someone who has got capacity to use intellect as a source to know what seems to be unknowable in instinctive sense. Knowledge is not something which could be monopolized by intellectuals. I mean, it is everywhere. You think about a farmer, gardener, or a labourer. They have knowledge and skills for farming, or gardening. Aren't they qualify to be called as an intellectual? Professors are good at theorising what appears to be true as per their intellect and sometimes their intuition. They are the cultivators of ideas, sometimes investigators of something which is not apparent. Here comes the role of an intellectual; to investigate what is hidden, or what is effaced. Noam Chmomsky has invested his life to prove this hypothesis again and again that every common being is creative to the extent that one creates some unique ideas everyday while working or conversing with the people around. In fact, each one is an intellectual as far as one is driven by intellects. For no idleness is required to be a creative being as Butrand Russell argues in his book, In praise of Idleness. You need to look upon the history of intellectualization; it's not like someone who is PhD dominates the intellctual life. In fact, each intellectual is also driven by "leap of faith", to refer Soren Kierkegaard. For example Karl Marx; he is regarded as one of the best social scientists this world has ever witnessed to. And to refer someone a scientist; one has to strictly follow certain rules, like causality and verifiablilty, to rule out any chance of superstition or dogmatism while reaching to the conclusion. But, Marx was also driven through "leap of faith" once he projected communism at the projector of future. What casualty forced him to project something like Communism? It was, to my understanding, the best composed poem, the leap of faith from a materilist. Similarly, to take an example of the father of Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. He claimed himself a scientist, but his projection of "Unconsciousness", or "Oedipos Complex" was more like a prophecy than a verifiable conclusion. In extension to the previous argument, you can talk about Charles Darwin; his hypothesis can not be proved or disproved through data available here and now. His hypothesis is an example of the "leap of faith", a musical imagination. Everybody, in that way, is driven by senses, instinct, intellect, and intuition. Nobody appears to be a pure scientist. Faith is required to survive, to fantasize, to romanticize what is unapparent here and now. So to say that each and every being on this planet is intellectual at the same time believer would not be a wrong statement! No intellectual as such would survive without belief in his or her intellect driven knowledge. 

Over the years, I have observed that the most of the intellengencia, be it a journalist, academician, or bureaucrat, they dogmatically disbelieve in the intelligence of commoners, and reject them as a "bewildered herd", to borrow the phrase of Walter Lipman. In fact, this elitism is responsible for the discrimination with the traditional knowledge. The Role of an intellectual is not to protect a university system, newspaper, or the interest of a few responsible men. Their acts and expressions should be emancipatory!

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