Immanuel Kant, in my opinion, one of the greatest philosophers stated that the intellectual is "an advisor to the truth". "A curious and bookish being," Octave Uzanne would have said. An intellectual is nothing more than a servant of truth and knowledge; he is the person who learned to dictate between emosions and facts in order to find virtue in freedom and truth. An intellectual is such a brave man that he places reason above the passions that gladden the masses: family, race, homeland, class, entertainment and vice".
However, in the contemporary world, a totally different phenomenon is occurring with respect to intellectuals, with the social decline that occurs in the strata of society in cultural and intellectual terms, it has not been the intellectuals who have been saved from this decline. From a few years to here we have seen how these have been marginalized, because our society has replaced the figure of the virtuous man with that of the artist who advocates any kind of pseudo-social right with fascination to the naked public. And for the collapse and fall of the great stories, but for the continuous association of intellectuals to struggles and ideological stratagems that blind the criteria of impartiality and (self) criticism.
Not for nothing did Carlos Alberto Montaner assert that today's intellectuals are nothing less than "lyrical idiots". "Tourists of the ideal", in the words of Ignacio Vidal-Foch.
And when we analyze the background we realize that history is always written from the point of view of whoever possesses the pen, whoever has the pen, arrogates to himself the power to mold the minds of others who are weak of mind, because whoever tells stories shapes the passions and dreams of others. And if intellectuals stimulate to a greater or lesser extent the politicization of the State, the nature of the power of the State always entails and in turn the politicization of the administration.
What happened to neutrality?
Zaid made it very clear in De los libros al poder (1988) the existence of a university guerrilla. And he denounced the responsibility of this intellectual class in the propagation of political mythologies, some founded on totally adverse ideologies. Zaid admitted about the oligarchic role of intellectuals:
"It took me a long time to discover that I was part of that oligarchy. Mirrors would like to believe that we do not have particular interests (social, political, economic, related to the construction of mirrors): only superior interests (Truth, Art, People, History, Progress)".But it is not so, this corruption of the intellectual being is given by the ambition of being part of the administration in turn to shape their ideas, intellectuals usually yearn to satisfy their illusions of power even helping anyone who feels in power as long as it gives him the opportunity to shape his utopia in order to control society.
And it is because arrogance has always been the greatest problem of intellectuals, although there have been some whose thoughts have not been led by arrogance as Albert Camus, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes or Rousseau, we have seen others whose thoughts have created nothing but disaster and hardship.
Should we expect anything from intellectuals other than their ideas, because to dispense with impartiality and replace the quest for objectivity with particular beliefs turns out to be something totally disastrous and dangerous. Can we really expect more from schoolchildren than the vindication of their particular opinions?
The intellectual must learn to control his emotions and to subdue his passions, and why should he do so? George Sorel, in his Reflections on Violence (1906) expressed that: because of the desire for dominance, "intellectuals are not, as is often said, men who think, they are people who make a profession of thinking", people who work for bosses and with arguments already used today to fabricate debates. And they favour propaganda along with the manipulation of feelings, as the first matter of knowledge.
The protagonism of intellectuals does not often obey the utilities or discoveries of their work, but comes from their desire for notoriety, from their dependence on the power of superclasses, a circumstance that Hegel himself influenced when he spoke of the need for intellectuals to submit to the service of the State.
The logic of domination, which is characteristic of politics, has made the intelligentsia more than a lighthouse a ration of food called ideological material that society needs to consume daily in order to maintain its political, economic, social or cultural interests.
And the answer to this whole essay lies in what can be done about it. What can the journalist, the scientist, the historian, the philosopher, or the literate do for society? First of all, do not defect from your profession. Nor should they move away from improving their understanding of their fields of knowledge. This involves critically examining theories, evidence, errors in reasoning... And, if necessary, incorporating new evidence, including those that may challenge our own research and our own ideas.
Secondly, and I consider this point to be the most relevant, the historian, the poet, the scientist, the journalist... must abandon the idea that power and its institutional concretion are an expression of wisdom at its highest level, as Plato dogmatised in his Banquet dialogue in the fourth century BC. And if everything is political, where is the knowledge? Raymond Aron in Democracy and Revolution (1952) would say that "there is a human activity that can be more important than politics: it is the search for truth".
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