From: rsquires@cyclops.eece.unm.edu (Roger Squires)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.theory,alt.postmodern,rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: Whom Do the Intellectuals Serve?
Date: 26 Jul 92 19:02:30 GMT
Article-I.D.: lynx.73kmxvc
Organization: University of New Mexico, Albuquerque

In article <1992Jul26.144555.9002@panix.com> gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:
>the category of "intellectuals", although we haven't defined
>the term very well.

	In _The Affair_ by Bredin (mentioned on r.a.b. recently),
	it is mentioned that the 'intellectual' was defined fairly
	recently near the end of the 19th century in France, and
	was somewhat derogatory, as it referred to some of the 
	Dreyfusard party, who banded together in his defense
	(or if not exactly in *his* defense, at least in the principles
	his case represented :) ).  I quote from Chapter III, Part III:
		...Since the first signers of the petitions were men
		of letters and men of science, they were qualified by
		their adversaries as "intellectuals," a term already 
		used by de Maupassant in 1879, then by Maurice Barres
		in 1888, and which gained currency thereafter in small,
		hermetic, and elitist leterary journals.  The word,
		in its pejorative sense, would deprecate the vanity of
		men of thought who gave their opinion on public issues.
		It was proudly taken up by those it was intended to
		ridicule, and Georges Clemenceau, in L'Aurore of January
		14, 1898, published the petition and its signatures under
		the title: "Manifesto of the Intellectuals."
	Does anyone know more concerning the de Maupassant reference?

>
>A great many intellectuals, such as the bunch that concocted
>the War in Vietnam, do _not_ engage in useless research and
>other window-dressing; and their studies are arcane and
>esoteric only in the sense that they keep pretty quiet about
>their purposes, since their purposes aren't very nice.
>

	Julien Benda, in _The Treason of the Intellectuals_ (I believe
	a literal xlation is 'clerk,' BTW) rails at those men of ideas
	who whipped up the populace with anti-semitic and nationalist
	propaganda during the Dreyfus affair.

	This is a very interesting
	book, and I have a question about Benda that has always 
	bothered me.  Firstly, I know he was a Jew, a Dreyfusard, and
	and editor of a Dreyfusard paper.  That is all I know about him.
	I was interested to see in Sartre's _Jew and Anti-Semite_
	a reference to Benda.  It went something like "...the
	fact that Julien Benda is a Jew doesn't effect how I feel
	about him," or something to that effect (not an exact quote),
	while in Gabriel Marcel's _Man Against Mass Society_, we
	read "My severe and hostile criticism, on the other hand,
	of a pseudo-philosophy like that of Julien Benda is to be
	explained by the fundamentally abstract trend of Benda's 
	thinking; he has never even suspected the existence of the 
	true philosopher's urgent inner need to grasp reality in
	its concreteness."[from the Preface].  I can kind of dimly
	see here that both these existentialists have a grudge
	against Benda, but I don't have enough context to understand
	what the dispute is about.  Marcel appears to arguing against
	a transcendant philosophy, and in this quote there are 
	traces of (to me at least) the standard anti-semitic consideration
	of Jews as abstract, soulless beings.  Could someone more
	knowledgeable flesh this out more for me?

>-- 
>Gordon Fitch | gcf@panix.com | uunet!cmcl2!panix!gcf 

Roger Squires
rsquires@cyclops.eece.unm.edu
Newsgroups: talk.politics.theory,misc.legal,alt.postmodern,alt.censorship