French Intellectuals

[Gruto]

Honoré de Balzac


Charles Baudelaire


Jean-Paul Sartre


Albert Camus


Claude Lévi-Strauss


Michel Foucault


Roland Barthes


Jacques Derrida

[Gruto]

Emmanuel Levinás


Jacques Lacan


Louis Althusser

[Costi]

Marcel Proust

[culverwood]

What is an intellectual? I know it is a term the French like but I have never really understood what an intellectual was. Just someone very clever, a philosopher, a writer of unreadable books, an artist, a scientist? What does it mean?

[Costi]

I know it is a term the French like but I have never really understood what an intellectual was.

It's not as French and hard to define as "bon gout", but let's see a French definition (of the adjective):

Qui fait appel exclusivement à l'activité de l'esprit, à la réflexion, aux manipulations abstraites, par opposition aux activités manuelles, physiques : Il a fourni un gros effort intellectuel.

Source: http://www.larousse.com/en/dictionaries ... tellectuel

By this definition, most of us have to be more or less intellectual to make a living today, unlike 150 years ago, so I think the standards have raised. "A person whose activities and preoccupations are mostly concerned with matters of spiritual nature" (as opposed to material, rather than in a religious sense) is another interesting definition I found in a dictionary (translated into English). Material issues regarded in a spiritual manner may be very intellectual, however.

[couch]

I have always thought that the noun intellectual, properly used, should refer to an inclination or habit of being more than a label of occupation or products. In this sense it would indicate a penchant for the life of the mind, for spending time reflecting on, generating, and exchanging ideas--whatever specific field or fields these ideas might concern. So an artist might or might not be an intellectual, for example, depending on whether he or she created out of sheer intuition and process, on the one hand, or spent significant time thinking and communicating about aesthetic issues (whether directly related to his or her own creative activity or not), on the other. Traditionally the term suggested that the person in question was likely to take this habit of being into the public arena in some way, through writing, conversation, or debate. These days that sense overlaps with the term "public intellectual," which also seems to carry a professional connotation--that the person seeks out, and derives some financial support from, engagement in issues of public concern through interventions in various media.

[NES]

I believe the word «intelectual» was first used as a noun by George Clemenceau in the newspaper L'Aurore, refering to his fellow dreyfusards - the supporters of Alfred Dreyfus in the Dreyfus Affair -:
«N'est-ce pas un signe, tous ces intellectuels, venus de tous les coins de l'horizon, qui se groupent sur une idée et s'y tiennent inébranlables?»