An intellectual … lives for ideas—which means that he has a sense of dedication to the life of the mind which… — Richard Hofstadter
An intellectual … lives for ideas—which means that he has a sense of dedication to the life of the mind which is very much like a religious commitment. This is not surprising, for in a very important way the role of the intellectual is inherited from the office of the cleric: it implies a special sense of the ultimate value in existence of the act of comprehension. Socrates, when he said that the unexamined life is not worth living, struck the essence of it. We can hear the voices of various intellectuals in history repeating their awareness of this feeling, in accents suitable to time, place and culture. “The proper function of the human race, taken in the aggregate,” wrote Dante in De Monarchia, “is to actualize continually the entire capacity possible to the intellect, primarily in speculation, then through its extension and for its sake, secondarily in action.” The noblest thing, and the closest possible to divinity, is thus the act of knowing.
p. 27Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
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It is the historic glory of the intellectual class of the West in modern times that, of all the classes which could be called in any sense privileged, it has shown the largest and most consistent concern for the well-being of the classes which lie below it in the social scale.
p. 29
Whatever the intellectual is too certain of, if he is healthily playful, he begins to find unsatisfactory. The meaning of his intellectual life lies not in the possession of truth but in the quest for new uncertainties.
p. 30
As with the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of truth is itself gratifying whereas the consummation often turns out to be elusive.
p. 30
