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What happened to the public intellectual?

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https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/phil...in-public/

EXCERPT: [...] While [Emmanuel] Levinas said little about the mechanism by which “witnessing” might have an effect on unnamed politics, there was a deeper problem with his encomium to the intellectuals. For Levinas, such persons (including, presumably, himself) were elites who arrogated to themselves the responsibility to speak on behalf of others. They had the capacity to substitute themselves as hostages for suffering peoples, but such a gesture had to be founded on their judgment of what constituted suffering, and their assessment of the best interests of these “peoples.”

Levinas implied that intellectuals were “chosen” to express the truth of others, but he could not explain how they were supposed to know that truth, or how they could move beyond “witnessing” to endorsing concrete political action, since in practice politics frequently involves a confrontation between different kinds and communities of suffering. This is sometimes perceived as a “gap” in his work, but, as [Benjamin Aldes] Wurgaft portrays it, Levinas’s hesitancy about bridging that gap was part of what constituted the philosophical dignity of his thinking.

If Levinas was cautious about the prospect of translating philosophical insight into political commitment, [Hannah] Arendt and [Leo] Strauss were explicitly opposed to it. “Commitment,” Arendt said at a 1972 conference on her work, “can easily carry you to a point where you no longer think.” In this, she was in full agreement with Strauss, who stated succinctly that “[p]hilosophy as such is nothing but genuine awareness of the problems.” It was, Strauss admitted, a perennial temptation for philosophers to become “inclined toward a solution,” and yet “the philosopher ceases to be a philosopher at the moment at which the ‘subjective certainty’ of a solution becomes stronger than his awareness of the problematic character of that solution. At that moment the sectarian is born.”

What does it mean, then, to be an “intellectual on the left”? Although I confess the phrase strikes me as somewhat mysterious, it is not impossible to imagine a definition: an intellectual on the left, having arrived at certainty about the correct direction for society, helps formulate and disseminate arguments for moving society in that direction. But if we accept this definition as meaningful, we are compelled to agree with Strauss and Arendt that the figure of the public intellectual represents a debasement of thinking, rather than a model for it. There are plenty of reasons to commit as citizens to political parties or movements — and there may even be reasons to consider that commitment as partly the product of philosophical reasoning. But someone who speaks as a representative of a fixed ideology or group has subjugated the philosopher within themselves to the partisan....

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