Awritingreader’s Weblog

Does the intellectual’s desire to “stay ahead of the crowd,” particularly regarding taste and aesthetic judgment signify an embedded cultural bias/tendency/habit/necessity(?) to elevate the intellectual? Or, is elevating the intellectual a symptom of our aesthetic judgment? Certainly praising the intellectual for their mental work, which is presumably less tedious than physical labor is a reflection of our aesthetic judgment, in that we view it more desire and beautiful to labor where it cannot be seen.

However, I argue that there is an innate quality within the intellectual that perhaps influences our elevation. The educated man/woman can peer into truths and make judgments because they bear witness to the evidence of these truths. While we might value the intellectual merely based upon his/her position within aesthetics, there still remains (at least it seems to me) a true, organic value to intelligence and education. Besides the shape of expansion that education provides in the minds of learners, other more widely effects also take place.

Generally speaking it is the educated who push a society from one point to its next. Discoveries, theories, hypotheses… all these stimulate the society to continue moving along its course in the trajectory of humankind. If we agree with Walter Benjamin that sharing experience is the ultimate aim of communication, then at its basic level, every conversationalist is an “intellectual” and the conversations shared and exchanged push the relationship of two people forward. On a larger scale, this same interchange of information/experience creates our typical notions of the intellectual and their place regarding aesthetics.