"nobody is born an intellectual, or with intellectual interests, or even with much in the way of a natural propensity for those things of the mind that most excite people who think themselves intellectuals: ideas, art, and culture. a high intelligence quotient may help, but it isn't an absolute requirement; many people with stratospheric IQs -- among them people doing high-level science -- have little interest in things that absorb the thoughts of intellectuals. intellectual interests have to be learned, acquired, cultivated. they are in some sense artificial, a construct of a sort, and chiefly the work of previous intellectuals



an intellectual is a man or woman for whom ideas have a reality that they do not possess for most people, and these ideas are central to the existence of the intellectual. because of this extraordinary investment in ideas, the intellectual is occasionally admired for a certain purity of motivation, but he or she is just as often thought of as unreal, out of it, often a comical, sometimes a dangerous character. historically, the intellectual has been guilty of all these things.



intellectuality is the quality of being able to talk about ideas -- political, historical, artistic ideas -- in a confident, coherent, or (best of all) dazzling way. if not everyone admires intellectuals, intellectuality tends to garner praise, especially from the social classes that think themselves educated or enlightened, among whom i include most but far from all members of the vast army of PhDs now roaming the universities.



whenever intellectuality is on display, an air of edginess, contention, one-upmanship, put-down, or general nervousness i won't say pervades but usually hovers over the proceedings.

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in intellectual life, everyone begins as a novice. some have the slight advantage of being brought up in bookish homes, although in america, for some reason, the most impressive intellectuals seem to have been brought up in homes where culture played almost no part; perhaps it was the absence of culture that increased their hunger for it. but turning oneself into an intellectual is all on-the-job training. from learning correct pronunciation to acquiring cultural literacy to becoming adept at playing with ideas to discovering which ideas, personages, issues are more important than others -- for all these things there are no schools, no self-help booklets, only one's own mental energies, love of the life of the mind, greed for that loose collection of knowledge that comes under the baggy-pants category known as the cultural.

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in her novel the mind-body problem, rebecca goldstein posits the notion that the further an academic's subject is from the truth, the more snobbish he or she is likely to be. in this amusing scheme, mathematicians and physicists care least about clothes, wine, food, and other such potentially snobbish refinements, while people in english, history, and modern language departments, whose subjects put them so much further from the solid ground of unarguable truths, care a great deal, since their reputation for being cultivated is really all they have going for them. quite nuts, or so it might seem, if lots of evidence didn't support it."

-joseph epstein, snobbery-