Do you consider yourself an intellectual?

I am cursed I have to live among all the rest of you people who are not as smart as I am.

I'm not sure where but within the past two weeks I read about a study that asked participants if they considered themselves more moral and intellectual than others. A lot of people said they were more moral but few said they were more intellectual. This doesn't really contribute to the thread but I found it to be interesting.

We are all kinda biased towards ourselves we you think about it, but I am well aware there are many people out there smarter than me. I don't consider myself to be an intellectual but I do love to learn about whatever. The more I learn the less I know.

I read Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Gabriel García Márquez in language. I have visited Volubilis, the Roman ruins in Morocco, in order to verify which pieces were misappropriated to build the palaces of Moulay Ismail in Meknes. I eat tofu, rice cakes, and hummus daily. I consider myself an intellectual.

When your ideas begin to impact the world that is the start.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual

Me? No. Just a mechanic at best. Very few get to live in the world of ideas alone.

Otto: Don't call me stupid.

Wanda: Oh, right! To call you stupid would be an insult to stupid people! I've known sheep that could outwit you. I've worn dresses with higher IQs. But you think you're an intellectual, don't you, ape?

Otto: Apes don't read philosophy.

Wanda: Yes they do, Otto. They just don't understand it. Now let me correct you on a couple of things, OK? Aristotle was not Belgian. The central message of Buddhism is not "Every man for himself." And the London Underground is not a political movement. Those are all mistakes, Otto. I looked them up.

i can cook perfect sticky rice without a rice cooker thus i am an intellectual.

you have to think deep thoughts and have other people find them to be insightful. That last part is key. Don't matter how many sticky-rice dishes you can cook...

Interesting. Would you rather live in a world where you were substantially smarter than most everyone else or in a world where most everyone was substantially smarter than you. Think about it.

the intellectual wrote:

I am cursed I have to live among all the rest of you people who are not as smart as I am.

Conundrum wrote:

Interesting. Would you rather live in a world where you were substantially smarter than most everyone else or in a world where most everyone was substantially smarter than you.

Think about it.

Easy, I'd want to be substantially smarter. Most people are d-bags and many who are substantially smarter than you will try to take advantage of you (and if they are really substantially smarter than you, they'll probably succeed). Sure, being the smartest will probably leave you lonely and isolated, but at least you won't be at the mercy of everyone else.

Yes I are

People I know say I am. I don't agree. Sure, I like to learn and read a lot of nonfiction. But I see myself as more of a street-wise, hard-scrabble, common street thug who uses my gleaned knowledge to infiltrate the upper levels of my socioeconomic environment to acquire wealth and status. I am a cad and a scoundrel. A hedonist and advantage taker. I am the secret spy. I am no intellectual. No one agrees with me on these points.

Most of these people who pride themselves on being "intellectual" are usually pretentious, vain fools. They are the picture described in Romans 1. Of course, most of these people scoff at anything related to Biblical truth despite the very marrow of their bones telling them that the image they're looking at in Romans 1 is essentially a mirror of themselves.

I'm a college prof who thinks critically, enjoys the process of walking around an issue and thinking it through, and does his best to teach others that process. So the first thing I do with a question like this is think critically about it. The identity "an intellectual" is a socially conditioned thing: it's not static, but rather it emerges in time. I'm quite sure that Plato and Socrates would not have called themselves intellectuals. The Greeks believed in training the whole human--body as well as mind.

When somebody in 1950s America said "I'm an intellectual," they meant that they wore horn-rimmed glasses, subscribed to Commentary and Partisan Review, and went to parties where people drank too much and argued about the same set of Great Books. They meant it to some extent in class terms, although most of them would have sneered at the Leninist idea: an intellectual was a member of a vanguard of ideas whose job it was to lead the masses (or the proletariat, although that idea by 1955 had sorta gone out the window) or the non-reflective, advertising-addled general public by thinking for them.

An intellectual in that sense is only a step away from something to be mocked: a pointy-headed intellectual, which is to say a Brain Disconnected From Reality, and a 98=pound weakling to boot. An intellectual in that sense, in America, was something to be suspicious of--he classes himself above you, thought he was better than you--and something to disown. He was almost un=American: an anti-Frontiersman, an anti-jock who probably couldn't put the rap on a pretty girl.

In France during that period, though, to be an intellectual was the definition of sexy. Albert Camus! Even Sartre: an ugly man with an amazing mind. (See his treatist ON LOVE, a phenomenology of the love-clasp. Whew. You'll never think about her body, or yours, the same way again.)

Am I an intellectual? I enjoy thinking things through. But I also enjoy putting down the hammer in the final half mile of a 10K and toasting your a**.

Be Greek.

As a human being, you have a duty to be an educated person if you want to live a life of substance. However, "intellectuals" are -- by far -- the most nauseating people on Earth. Straight out of ancient Gomorrah.

Thanks for the link to the wiki article. Based on that, and my frequent contributions to a thoughtful forum like this one--not to mention my near-stratospheric IQ and the "mental" nature of my day job, when I get work--I would have to put myself in the "intellectual" category.

However, none of that keeps me from being as dumb as a sack of hammers.

I need to learn another language or two before I could consider myself an intellectual. And finish that Ph.D. in astrophysics (MS currently).

Right now, I am just intellectually inclined.

[quote]Conundrum wrote:

Interesting. Would you rather live in a world where you were substantially smarter than most everyone else or in a world where most everyone was substantially smarter than you.

Think about it.

[quote]

That depends. Are those who are less smart than I capable of being taught and brought up to a similar level of "smarts"? And if I am less smart than everyone else am I capable of becoming "smarter"? I guess the important question is are smart and intelligent interchangeable, or do they mean different things? If "smart" is something you can improve upon then I would not mind living in either world. Both teaching and learning can be a blast.

the used to be cancer guy wrote:

When your ideas begin to impact the world that is the start.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual

Me? No. Just a mechanic at best. Very few get to live in the world of ideas alone.

Did you even read that Wikipedia entry you cited? Here is the section where it defines "intellectual":

"Intellectual" can denote three types of people:

"An intellectual is a person who uses thought and reason, intelligence and critical or analytical reasoning, in either a professional or a personal capacity and is

1) a person involved in, and with, abstract, erudite ideas and theories;

2) a person whose profession (e.g. philosophy, literary criticism, sociology, law, political analysis, theoretical science, etc.) solely involves the production and dissemination of ideas;[1]

3) a person of notable cultural and artistic expertise whose knowledge grants him or her intellectual authority in public discourse."

So I'm certainly an intellectual in the senses of 1 and 2. Probably not so much in terms of 3, though that would depend what group I'm with and what we're talking about.

"Intellectual" as a noun doesn't necessarily mean someone who is highly intelligent.