intellectual work

Actual intellectual has an urgent sense of responsibility for his intellectual work. Not actual intellectual has little sense of responsibility for the quality of his achievement; he is interested in money ,deference ,and fame. The intellectual is expected to carry a political responsibility. A Citizen ,a human being, an individual conscious of the rights of others and of obligations.

One is responsible ,yes ,but for what? To whom? Before which Assembly or tribunal. There are conflicting criteria between the duty of neutrality and of reserving judge as well as the duty of commitment.

Intellectual refers to all those who take a committed interests in the validity and truth of ideas for their own sake, then they have surely to recognize themselves as having a very special concern and responsibility for watching over the conditions and observance of rational self-respect. Thus concern and responsibility are rooted in the very conditions of human knowledge and human self-awareness ;they must be viewed as the properly inescapable concern and responsibility of every rationally self-conscious human being .In that very fundamental sense everyone must be considered to have, to some small but crucial sense at least, something of the intellectual in them ,and should be treated morally ,educationally ,socially and politically as such.

All genuine educationalists may be counted as intellectuals in this sense. Not even the agent himself or herself can have any guaranteed assurance as to the precise balance of his or her own motives or the exact moral significance of his or her own behavior. The most rationally self-conscious of agents must know that his behavior must always in principle allow of a dual reading in the language of rational intentionality and the language of natural desire.

By Dr. Daniel Thabo