2HETORIC å0HILOSOPHY åANDåTHEå0UBLICå)NTELLECTUALå .ATHANå#RICK :KHQZHZHQWLQZHIRXQG3URWDJRUDVZDONLQJLQWKHSRUWLFRÀDQNHG by two groups. . . . Following behind and trying to listen to what was being said were a group of what seemed to be mostly foreigners, men whom Protagoras collects from various cities he travels through. He enchants them with his voice like Orpheus, and they follow the sound RIKLVYRLFHLQDWUDQFH:KHQKHWXUQHGDURXQGZLWKKLVÀDQNLQJ groups, the audience to the rear would split into two in a very orderly way and then circle around to either side and form up again behind him. It was quite lovely. —Plato (1997a, 315a–b). 2IDOORIWKHGUDPDWLFSRUWUD\DOVLQ3ODWR¶VGLDORJXHVWKHPDMHVWLF¿JXUHFXWE\ Protagoras of Abdera in the Protagoras stands out as the most impressive. Not only does he possess the intellectual acuity to argue Socrates to a standstill, but he also has the rhetorical ability to transform a group of strangers into an ordered community through only the sound of his voice. In this way, Protagoras seems to embody both the wisdom of a philosopher and the charisma of a rhetorician. Historical treatments add weight to his characterization. First, Protagoras was the founder and chief spokesperson for the sophistic movement, which dramatically altered the educational system of his age by offering training in public speaking and civic arts to the “average citizen” rather than only to an elite class of aristocrats (Havelock 1964, 230). Second, Protagoras was a wide-ranging WKLQNHUZKRVHZULWLQJDQGWHDFKLQJH[WHQGHGKXPDQLVWLFLGHDOVWRWKH¿HOGVRI “ethics, politics, theology, education, cultural history, literary criticism, linguistic studies, and rhetoric” (Sprague 1972, 3). Third, he was a close friend of Pericles and his “theory and practice of a political rhetoric was valued highly in Periclean Athens” and led to his being given the responsibility of writing the laws for the new pan-Hellenic colony of Thurii (Jarratt 1998, 26). Thus, even if we take Plato’s characterizations to be exercises in hyperbole, there seems to be an element of truth in Socrates’s remark that Protagoras was considered “the wisest man alive” during his time (Plato 1997a, 309d). Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 39, No. 2, 2006. Copyright © 2006 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 127 128 NATHAN CRICK However, despite these accomplishments, Protagoras is generally not considered a candidate for the title of “public intellectual.” The reasoning for his exclusion is based on the prevailing notion that “idea of the public intellectual is a product of the Enlightenment” (Rahe 2003, 27) and is thus a “distinctly modern idea” (Pangle 2003, 15). Hence, it is “because of this essential, if often unarticulated, connection to the modern movements of progress and enlightenment that it feels not only wrong but anachronistic to apply the term ‘intellectual’ to Plato or the Sophists” (Melzer 2003, 7). According to this view, the Age of Enlightenment gave birth to the “public intellectual” because of its revolutionary belief that through the dissemination of the fruits of philosophy and science, one could “enlighten” the state of public opinion and thereby replace a traditional with a rational society. Public intellectuals were those who acted on this faith by situating themselves “midway between the great minds and the people—so as to serve the function of transmitting and popularizing philosophic knowledge” (7). By contrast, the opinion of antiquity was summed up in Plato’s belief that “it is impossible that a multitude be philosophic” (quoted in Rahe 2003, 27). Protagoras, being a part of antiquity, is thus placed in a historical category that makes him ineligible to be a public intellectual, despite the fact that sophistical thought “is considered by some crucial in the epistemic shift called the Greek enlightenment” (Jarratt 1998, xviii). Clearly, modern assumptions about what it means to be a public intellectual are largely derived from modern Enlightenment beliefs that society can progress through the spread of rational knowledge. Only on the basis of Enlightenment ideas could a so-called public intellectual persist in the “the inspiriting belief that his own thoughts and insights . . . once ‘published’ in the modern sense” will inspire a “transformation of consciousness by the dispelling of prejudice and the spread of theoretical truth” (Melzer 2003, 8). However, the debate about the “public intellectual” is not over what the role meant over four centuries ago. The question is what it means to us today and whether we should FRQWLQXHWRGH¿QHSXEOLFLQWHOOHFWXDOLVPLQUHIHUHQFHWRQRZODUJHO\UHMHFWHG metaphysical assumptions that the public is a passive collection of isolated minds, that philosophy is receptacle for universal truths, that intelligence is the capacity to grasp those truths, and that rhetoric is the vehicle for their translation and dissemination. The Enlightenment ideal of the public intellectual remains a popular notion in academia. Take, for example, Alan Wolfe’s editorial in the Chronicle for Higher Education, “The Calling of the Public Intellectual,” which reinscribes the notion that the function of a public intellectual’s rhetoric is to dilute and disseminate this truth to a passive and slightly irrelevant public. Wolfe begins by RHETORIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL 129 GH¿QLQJDSXEOLFLQWHOOHFWXDODVDVRUWRIDFDGHPLFSXEOLFUHODWLRQVRI¿FHU³ZKR brings academic expertise to bear on important topic of the day in a language that can be understood by the public” (2001, B20). However, the implied altruLVPLQWKLVGH¿QLWLRQLVXQGHUFXWE\WKHGLVUHJDUGIRUWKHDFWXDOLPSDFWRIVXFK rhetorical performances. Speaking of his how he gained his own title of public intellectual, Wolfe does not credit the relevance of his scholarship, the popular LQÀXHQFHRIKLVZULWLQJRUHYHQWKHUHFRJQLWLRQRIKLVZRUNE\WKH³SXEOLF´ rather, he credits his accomplishment to the fact that he “found some people willing to publish me” (B20). Furthermore, his authority as a public intellectual comes not from his audience, but “comes only from me, and to be true to that authority, I have to be true to myself” (B20). For Wolfe, public intellectualism reduces to a measure of one’s personal motivation, publishing history, and courage to tell the truth, and as such it is a title that one can bestow upon oneself. Of course, the reaction against this elitist notion of the public intellectual has been equally popular. This reaction typically takes the form of Antonio Gramsci’s concept of the “organic intellectual,” which rejects the value of rhetorical “dissemination” in favor of on-the-ground practices “that are purposeful, agential, and organizational” (Radhakishnan 1990, 87). In Gramsci’s words, “the mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary power of feelings and passions, but in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organizer, ‘permanent persuader’ and not just a simple orator” (quoted in Radhakishnan 1990, 87–88). Intellectuals are thus valued not for their ideas, but for their ideas-in-practice-with-others. As Stanley Aronowitz explains, “their social weight consists in their ability to link themselves with ‘real’ agents, namely classes, which for Gramsci and all Marxists are the only forces capable of making history” (1990, 11). Consequently, Aronowitz praises an intellectual such as John Dewey not for the philosophy that embodied his life’s work, but for his social activism that occurred largely at the end of his professional career. To Aronowitz, “Dewey’s commitment to social action never waned. He intervened throughout his life in practical and political issues—trade unionism for teachers as well as industrial workers, schools (as well as education), and the defense of the rights of persecuted minorities, notably Leon Trotsky and his Soviet followers” (1993, 85). Such praise naturally follows from Gramsci’s ideal of a new class of intellectuals “intimately associated with the life world of industrial workers” (Michael 2000, 7). Unfortunately, both of these conceptions of the public intellectual miss the mark for the same reason—an acceptance of an eviscerated conception of rhetoric that ends up separating the theoretical work from the larger sociohistorical situation to which it responds. Both assume that rhetoric, by its nature, is 130 NATHAN CRICK particular, practical, and stylistic, whereby theory is universal, contemplative, and substantial. Consequently, rhetoric gets drained of content while theory becomes pure meaning awaiting relevance. The only difference is that where the Enlightenment public intellectual values the process whereby rhetoric translates timeless truths for passive absorption by the public consciousness, Gramsci’s organic intellectual rejects the idea of timeless truths and respects only those theories that are immediately put into practice by organized groups of social actors. However, by dissolving intellectual work into social activism, Gramsci effectively dismisses the value of dedicated intellectual work as we know it. Furthermore, because Gramsci is contemptuous of watered-down abstractions and views rhetoric as water, in his hands rhetoric loses even the pretense of disseminating knowledge and is reduced to a “momentary power of feelings and passions.” Intellectuals are thus left with the unhappy choice of either sending press releases from the Ivory Tower or abandoning the tower completely for “active participation in practical life.” I believe this is a false choice, for both conceptions are based on the same fallacy—that something called the Ivory Tower exists as a place with high walls that shelter an elite class of thinkers kept separate from the practical problems of their age. This fallacy, in turn, is based on an implicit adherence to the Aristotelian distinction between theory and practice embodied in the tension between HSLVWƝPH (contemplative knowledge such as science and philosophy) and WHFKQƝ (productive knowledge such as art and rhetoric). On the one hand, the Enlightenment orator wants to disseminate HSLVWƝPH using WHFKQƝ. On the other hand, the Gramscian activist disregards the whole process and instead embraces pure praxis, or practical action. In both cases, however, HSLVWƝPHis impotent on its own, while WHFKQƝis purely derivative. Praxis, meanwhile, because it is separated from HSLVWƝPH drifts uncomfortably toward forms of irrationalism and dogmatism. Neither of these conceptions of the public intellectual is therefore adequate. In fact, they are both equally debilitating to promoting passionate intellectual inquiry and intelligent social practice. +RZHYHULWLVGLI¿FXOWWRHQYLVLRQDQRWKHUDOWHUQDWLYHXQWLOZHUHFRQFHStualize the binary between theory and practice on which these conceptions are EDVHG7KLVHVVD\SURSRVHVWKDWZHDUULYHDWDPRUHHQULFKHGGH¿QLWLRQRIWKH public intellectual by rejecting the strict Aristotelian hierarchy of knowledge and returning to the sophistic notion of WHFKQƝ that absorbs elements ofHSLVWƝPHand praxis within it. In its original usage, WHFKQƝ included “every branch of human or divine skill, or applied intelligence, as opposed to the unaided work of nature” (Guthrie 1971, 15). As John Dewey points out, “it is suggestive that among the *UHHNVWLOOWKHULVHRIFRQVFLRXVSKLORVRSK\WKHVDPHZRUGIJİȤȣȘ, was used RHETORIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL 131 for art and science,” for their art “involved an end, mastery of material or stuff ZRUNHGXSRQFRQWURORIDSSOLDQFHVDQGDGH¿QLWHRUGHURISURFHGXUHDOORI which had to be known in order that there be intelligent skill or art” (Dewey 1915, 195). Thus, WHFKQƝincluded both “contemplative” arts such as science and “productive” arts such as rhetoric for the very reason that they both charted new paths of thought and action that human beings could use to navigate their way through a changing world. In this way, to practice a WHFKQƝ was also to engage in a form of praxis. 2QFHZHEHJLQWRXQGHUVWDQGWKDWVFLHQWL¿FWKHRUHWLFDOSKLORVRSKLFDO humanistic, and artistic work all carry with them the potential to transform our world by altering human beliefs, habits, and behaviors, we can begin to move beyond the form/content distinction that continues to separate theory from practice, thought from action, intelligence from passion, and philosophy from UKHWRULF7KLVUHGH¿QLWLRQQHLWKHUFROODSVHVWKHLPSRUWDQWGLVWLQFWLRQVEHWZHHQ the varied disciplines, nor claims that there is no difference between those who publish in obscure academic journals and those who actively engage public audiences. Rather, it rejects the notion that directly engaging public audiences is what makes one a public intellectual. It forces us to consider that while intellectual work may be intellectual, it is nonetheless work—it is an effort to change the world through the transformative power of ideas. Examples might include Darwin’s Origin of Species, Sinclair’s The Jungle, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Holmes’s Common Law, Dewey’s Democracy and Education, Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, DuBois’s Souls of Black Folk, Marx’s Capital, Mill’s On Liberty, Orwell’s 1984, Emerson’s Nature, Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Copernicus’s Commentariolus, or Plato’s Republic. For every successful work, of course, there are thousands of failures, but one cannot even begin to make such distinctions if they are judged by their form or content in isolation. Only when they are all seen as forms of WHFKQƝ can we begin an inquiry into how any intellectual work as a whole interacts with and possibly transforms the world in which it is created. This embrace of the sophistical notions of WHFKQƝKDVDVLJQL¿FDQWLPSDFW RQKRZZHGH¿QHWKH³SXEOLFLQWHOOHFWXDO´$FFRUGLQJWRWKHQHZGH¿QLWLRQ public intellectuals are not determined by counting public pronouncements, PHDVXULQJ FODVV DOOHJLDQFHV RU ¿WWLQJ WKHLU ZRUN LQWR D FRQYHQLHQW SLJHRQ hole. Rather, public intellectuals are those who react to the problems of their VRFLRKLVWRULFDO VLWXDWLRQ E\ FUHDWLQJ HQGXULQJ ZRUNV WKDW EURDGO\ LQÀXHQFH cultural habits and institutional practices during their lifetimes. Thus, I argue that the work of public intellectuals arises in response to and is directed toward 132 NATHAN CRICK resolving exigencies of their sociohistorical situation much in the same way that rhetoric seeks to address exigencies in “rhetorical situations”; the only difference is that public intellectuals, as intellectuals and not politicians or pundits, respond to exigencies that are broader in time and in space than what are traditionally considered “rhetorical situations.” For example, Copernicus’s work challenged traditional notions of the place of human beings in the universe; Sinclair’s work revealed the horrors of twentieth-century industrial capitalism in America; Kant’s work institutionalized the separation between science and moral values in Germany; Dewey’s work established the vital connection between educational practice and democratic social life; and Protagoras’s work provided a defense of rhetorical training in the face of the aristocratic tradition. The form and the content of the work of each of these intellectuals differed, but what they had in common was that they were all WHFKQƝ that sought to transform their sociohistorical situation. What, then, is the relationship of the work of a public intellectual to her or his situation? To answer this question, I return to Lloyd Bitzer’s landmark essay, “The Rhetorical Situation,” which I believe establishes the ground for DSURGXFWLYHGH¿QLWLRQRIWKHSXEOLFLQWHOOHFWXDO$OWKRXJKKHKDGZULWWHQKLV essay primarily to inquire as to “the nature of those contexts in which speakers or writers create rhetorical discourse” (1968, 1), he did not restrict such an inquiry to rhetorical discourse; the same inquiry might be made into writers of VFLHQWL¿FDUWLVWLFRUSKLORVRSKLFDOGLVFRXUVHDVZHOO7KXVE\DQDORJ\³DSKLlosopher might ask, What is the nature of the situation in which a philosopher ‘does philosophy’?” (1). Bitzer’s essay implicitly accepts that even philosophy, traditionally the most “contemplative” of all arts, is nonetheless related to some actual situation. I believe we need to accept this premise in order to arrive at DQRSHUDEOHGH¿QLWLRQRIDSXEOLFLQWHOOHFWXDOWKDWQHLWKHUGHFRQWH[WXDOL]HVQRU devalues the nature of intellectual work. When Bitzer concludes that “rhetoric as DGLVFLSOLQHLVMXVWL¿HGSKLORVRSKLFDOO\LQVRIDUDVLWSURYLGHVSULQFLSOHVFRQFHSWV and procedures by which we effect valuable changes in reality” (14), we should not believe these conditions are restricted to rhetoric; they should apply equally to philosophy, as they do to science, art, or any other discipline that embodies passionate, intellectual ideas in concrete form. The key to understanding how the situational perspective applies to the public intellectual requires us to broaden our conception of the “rhetorical situDWLRQ´¿UVWRXWOLQHGLQ%LW]HU¶VHVVD\%LW]HUGH¿QHVDUKHWRULFDOVLWXDWLRQ³DV a natural context of persons, events, objects, relations, and an exigence which strongly invites utterance” (5). This “utterance” must be in the form of rhetoric, ZKLFK%LW]HUGH¿QHVDV³DPRGHRIDOWHULQJUHDOLW\QRWE\GLUHFWDSSOLFDWLRQ RHETORIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL 133 of energy to objects, but by the creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action” (4). Thus, Bitzer arrives at his three preconditions for a rhetorical situation: the exigence, or “an imperfection marked by urgency” (6), the audience, or “those persons who are capable of EHLQJLQÀXHQFHGE\GLVFRXUVHDQGRIEHLQJPHGLDWRUVRIFKDQJH´DQGWKHconstraints, or those “persons, events, objects, and relations which are part of the situation because they have the power to constrain decision and action needed to modify the exigence” (8). All of these conditions, however, tend toward the particular in Bitzer’s account. As he says, “a particular discourse comes into existence because of some VSHFL¿F condition or situation” (4, emphasis added). Thus, we have examples like Kennedy’s assassination (9) or Roosevelt’s Declaration of War (11). The emphasis on particularity, of course, has been a hallmark of rhetorical practice since the Sophistic interpretation of kairos, or “timeliness,” as a “radical principle of occasionality” (White 1987, 14). For the sophists, “kairos alludes to the realization that speech exists in time and is uttered both as a spontaneous formulation of and a barely constituted response to a new situation unfolding in WKHLPPHGLDWHSUHVHQW´ 3RXODNRV 7KXVZH¿QGVRSKLVWVOLNH*RUJLDV or Hippias bragging of their ability to speak on any subject and thriving in competitive forums such as the intellectual contests at the Olympic Games (61). Yet we do not live only in a series of atomistic moments. Situations certainly come and go in the moment, but they also develop and linger over time. As Bitzer himself points out, “rhetoric situations come into existence, then either mature or decay or mature and persist—conceivably some persist LQGH¿QLWHO\´ %LW]HU ,QWKH&KULVWLDQWUDGLWLRQIRULQVWDQFHkairos did not deal with particular human responses to individualized situations, but “was focused on the central event of Christ, who is said in the biblical writings to have come en kairo, sometimes translated as ‘the fullness of time’—implying a culmination in a temporal development marked by the manifestation of God in an actual historical order” (Smith 2002, 55). This notion of kairos as appropriateness within the measure of historical time is also used in “the History of Thucydides, where he claims that his work is a creation ‘forever’: because of the cyclical image of time presupposed throughout the book; the events will recur” (54). In these conceptions, kairos extends through time and space, expanding our notion of “situations” beyond our immediate experience. Such situations raise the possibility that “kairos signals the need to bring universal ideas and principles to bear in historical time” that in turn “require wisdom and critical judgment” for their application (56). 134 NATHAN CRICK The latter conception of kairos undoubtedly has a certain Hegelian ring to it, but one does not need to carry over such spiritual or metaphysical commitments to think of kairos historically. In fact, we do it all the time when it comes to contemporary histories of philosophy. What John Dewey wrote in Philosophy and Civilization is now largely common sense: “philosophers are parts of history, caught in its movement; creators perhaps in some measure of its future, but also assuredly creatures of its past” (1931, 4). Even antifoundational thinkers like Richard Rorty agree. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity KDUGO\D+HJHOLDQERRN 5RUW\DGYRFDWHVDQDFFHSWDQFHRI³+HJHO¶VGH¿QLWLRQ of philosophy: ‘holding your time in thought,’” which Rorty construes to mean ³¿QGLQJDGHVFULSWLRQRIDOOWKHWKLQJVFKDUDFWHULVWLFRI\RXUWLPHRIZKLFK\RX PRVWDSSURYHZLWKZKLFK\RXXQÀLQFKLQJO\LGHQWLI\DGHVFULSWLRQZKLFKZLOO serve as a description of the end toward which the historical developments which led up to your time were means” (1989, 55). Thus, by showing how philosophers react to broad movements in history and culture, both Dewey and Rorty advance a notion of kairos that includes one’s entire sociohistorical situation. The question, however, is whether intellectuals such as philosophers, scientists, or artists merely UHÀHFW qualities of their situations or whether they act as agents of change. Rorty seems divided on the issue. On the one hand, he chides leftist academics to “put a moratorium on theory” in order to “kick its philosophy habit” (Rorty 1998a, 91). Claiming that their overemphasis on theory has rendered academics “impotent when it comes to national, state or local politics” (1999, 129), Rorty advises them to drop theory and “get back into the class struggle” (259). On the other hand, he advocates a brand of pragmatism that ZRXOG³WUHDWWKHRU\DVDQDLGWRSUDFWLFH´  DQGGH¿QHVSUDJPDWLVWVDVWKRVH “involved in a long-term attempt to change the rhetoric, the common sense, and the self-image of their community” (1998b, 41). He even praises Dewey not for his social activism, but for his professional philosophizing. Rorty writes, “the period between the World Wars was one of prophecy and moral leadership—the heroic period of Deweyan pragmatism, during which philosophy played the sort of role in the country’s life which Santayana could admire” (1982, 61). Unless we are to completely deny philosophy any rhetorical character, and thus engage in a self-defeating demarcation problem that reinscribes an absolute distinction between theory and practice, we should pursue the line of inquiry suggested by Rorty’s second position. To further this inquiry, I put forward the concept of what I call the “philosophical situation.” The oxymoronic sound to this concept is intentional; it encourages us to embrace Dewey’s pragmatic notion that “philosophy is love of wisdom; wisdom being not knowledge but knowledge-plus; knowledge turned to account in the instruction and guidance RHETORIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL 135 it may convey in piloting life through the storms and the shoals that beset lifeexperience as well as into such havens of consummatory experience as enrich RXUKXPDQOLIHIURPWLPHWRWLPH´ 'HZH\ 7KLVGH¿QLWLRQDVNVXV to consider that even the most abstract intellectual work as a potential form of productive art if it can work its way into the public consciousness and transform the habits and common sense of a culture. After all, despite Plato’s attempt to corrupt it, the original meaning of the word “sophist” was simply “wise man,” derived from the Greek word for wisdom, sophia. Accordingly, Protagoras LGHQWL¿HVWKH³ZLVHPDQ´DVRQHZKR³UHSODFHVHDFKSHUQLFLRXVFRQYHQWLRQE\D wholesome one” (1997b, 167c) and who does so “by the use of words” (167b). The concept of the philosophical situation follows Protagoras’s conception and embraces all those who use the power of ideas to transform the world around them, whether they are scientists, artists, or sophists. Like the rhetorical situation, the philosophical situation shares the same considerations—exigence, constraints, and audience²RQO\ GH¿QHG more broadly. First, an exigence is no longer limited to a particular event in a restricted time and place, such as Roosevelt’s reaction after Pearl Harbor, but expands to include problems that face an entire culture within historical time, such as Dewey’s long-term effort to construct a working ideal of democratic life. Second, constraints are likewise broadened from VSHFL¿F persons, events, objects, and relations to include things like public institutions, governing bodies, religious beliefs, economic relations, historical forces, communal norms, and ethnic identities. For example, Karl Marx wrote Capital to identify the historical roots of the exigencies in his own age and then sought to modify institutional constraints by advancing his dialectical materialism, and his ideas KDGDGUDPDWLFLQÀXHQFHRQVRFLDOSUDFWLFHVHYHQLIWKH\XOWLPDWHO\WRRNDIRUP he had not envisioned. The example of Marx, however, raises the most controversial aspect of public intellectualism—that of audience. For, it could be argued, Marx not only wrote the three ample volumes of Capital, he also co-wrote, with Engels, The Communist Manifesto, which made the ideals of his early social theory “accessible” to the “public.” The problem with this argument is that it merely reverts back to the Enlightenment conception of the public intellectual as a go-between. It implies that if Marx had not written for the “masses” as he did and had left this work to Engels, then it would be Engels, not Marx, who would be the true “public intellectual.” Marx would be lumped with the rest of insular academic theorists while political ideologues like Lenin would be championed as the new “organic intellectuals.” In addition, rhetoric, in this conception, returns to its traditional role of diluting and adapting a complex message to a public that 136 NATHAN CRICK takes on the characteristics of a passive and somewhat irrational mob. In other words, once you deny that an intellectual work like Capital has rhetorical value in its long-term ability to change habits of thought and action, you also deny that its author is a public intellectual just as you deny that the public possesses its own form of intelligence. Who, then, is the audience of the public intellectual? Before answering WKLVTXHVWLRQZHPXVW¿UVWGLVSHOWKHP\WKWKDWWKHSXEOLFFRQVLVWVRIDPDVVRI individuals and that public opinion is the static beliefs of that mass collectively considered. For, as Hauser points out, “publics do not exists as entities but as SURFHVVHVWKHLUFROOHFWLYHUHDVRQLQJLVQRWGH¿QHGE\DEVWUDFWUHÀHFWLRQEXWE\ practical judgment; their awareness of issues is not philosophical but eventful” (1999, 64). Consequently, an ideal public is not, as in the Enlightenment ideal, a monolithic group of purely rational beings who adhere to the same body of values and truths. A public consists of “the interdependent members of society ZKRKROGGLIIHUHQWRSLQLRQVDERXWDPXWXDOSUREOHPDQGZKRVHHNWRLQÀXHQFH its resolution through discourse” (32). Thus, the important qualities of a public are the habits of thought and behavior it relies upon to maintain community life and confront problems when they arise. Accordingly, we should judge the role of public intellectuals in terms of how they alter these habits, particularly those that manifest themselves in what Farrell calls “rhetorical forums,” or those symbolic environments “within which issues, interests, positions, constituencies, and messages are advanced, shaped, and provisionally judged” (1993, 282). In other words, public intellectuals are not outside of the public talking down to it, but are necessary members of a public sphere participating within it. They KDYHWKHLURZQXQLTXHFRQWULEXWLRQVWRPDNHQRPRUHRUOHVVVLJQL¿FDQWWKDQ that of the “average citizen.” The difference is that their contributions are less immediate. Because the public intellectual reacts more to philosophical situations than to more tradiWLRQDOUKHWRULFDOVLWXDWLRQVWKHLUZRUNWDNHVORQJHUWRLQÀXHQFHWKHORQJWHUP habits of a culture. Thus, their initial audience generally consists of those who are equally aware of and have the ability to directly confront these broader isVXHV7\SLFDOO\WKLVDXGLHQFHLQFOXGHVWKRVHSHRSOHZKRPRUHWUXO\IXO¿OOWKH role of organic intellectuals—teachers, journalists, politicians, social activists, FRPPXQLW\OHDGHUVRUPDQ\RIWKRVHLQGLYLGXDOVZKR¿WWKHFODVVLFFULWHULDRI “opinion leader” (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955, 33). These “opinion leaders” then work to apply the ideas of public intellectuals within more situated contexts of the classroom, the community, the town meeting, the church, the newspaper, and the political rally. However, once the ideas of the public intellectual work their way into the culture over time, they begin to take on a life of their own. RHETORIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL 137 They solidify into certain ways of thinking and acting that become a part of common sense. The facts that in the United States slavery is now condemned, that democracy has become a universal ideal, that free speech is enshrined in the Constitution, and that we no longer believe the sun revolves around the earth are indication of the deep and lasting impact that ideas can have when they are given concrete expression by the WHFKQƝ of the public intellectual. None of this is to deny the importance of encouraging “intellectuals” to be active in the public sphere through publications or social action. Aronowitz LVWKXVMXVWL¿HGLQSUDLVLQJ'HZH\IRUKLVFRPPLWPHQWWRVRFLDOFDXVHV,VLPSO\ want to insist that these activities are not what made Dewey a public intellectual. They are what made him a responsible democratic citizen. In other words, the only thing that makes the contributions of intellectuals unique is that they produce intellectual work. Therefore, they should be judged by how the quality of that work affects long-term impacts on the public consciousness. Dewey, for instance, was a public intellectual not because of his occasional intervention in current public affairs, but because he spent his life building a philosophical system that promoted the ideals of democratic social life. Even today, Dewey’s work serves as a guide for implementing democratic methods in other countries, including China (Su 1996) and Central and South America (Donoso 2001). I understand that this approach may sound distinctly un-rhetorical given what seems to be a privileging of theoretical content over persuasive form. MailORX[IRULQVWDQFHEHOLHYHVWKDWVXFKDQ³DFFRXQWHUDVHVWKHVLJQL¿FDQWGLVWLQFWLRQ between an academic professional who writes about publics only in scholarly journals and the intellectual who theorizes publics for multiple audiences, academic and non-academic” (Mailloux 2006, XXX). While acknowledging that “research results migrate . . . from academic disciplines to other sites beyond the university,” he nonetheless believes that the core of public intellectualism is the rhetorical performance of “disseminating and applying his or her own theories in lay public spheres” (XXX). Similarly, Fuller believes that for a public intellectual to function as “an agent of distributive justice,” he or she must also take on the role of a “professional crisis-monger” and “sophistic advocate” (Fuller 2006, XXX). In both positions, the deciding factor in being a public intellectual appears to be not one’s long-term effects on public opinion, but the method by which such effects may (or may not) be achieved. For Mailloux, this method is public performance; for Fuller, it is social agitation. By contrast, I seem to have retreated into the safety of academic specialism (or the classroom) with the naive faith that the truth, once discovered, will carry itself to victory on the wings of a Platonic ideal. 138 NATHAN CRICK This interpretation, however, ignores the pragmatic and distinctly rhetoricalTXDOLW\WKDWHYHQDEVWUDFWLGHDVFDQKDYHZKHQWKH\¿OWHULQWRWKHFRPPRQ sense of a culture. Public intellectuals are simply those scholars who become LGHQWL¿HGZLWKDXWKRULQJWKRVHLGHDV%\FRQWUDVW0DLOORX[WKLQNVWKLVSRVLtion misses the importance of “speaking/writing in the public sphere” and thus collapses the “distinction between public intellectuals and academic political philosophers in general” (Mailloux 2006, XXX). I disagree for two reasons. First, academic political philosophers in general rarely, if ever, have the public’s attention; and second, to place the burden of being a public intellectual on the bare act of speaking or writing in the public sphere makes anyone with academic credentials who appears in the public, regardless of the quality, originality, and impact of their ideas, a public intellectual. Such a perspective culminates in an unhelpful binary that separates content from form, philosophy from rhetoric, and scholars from citizens. I believe a more productive approach is not only to accept the rhetorical principle that abstract ideas only become forms of action once they are embodied in concrete persuasive discourse, but to also accept the philosophical principle that persuasive discourse, to effect long-term change, must be guided by abstract ideas. Insofar as these ideas help produce conviction and have consequences in the public world, then these ideas function rhetorically and their authors function as public intellectuals. To assert otherwise, and to place the burden primarily on the act of speaking and writing in the public sphere, does not so much erase the distinction between public intellectuals and citizen activists as account for the distinction purely by recourse to one’s professional standing and education, a SRVLWLRQWKDWPD\EHÀDWWHULQJWR³LQWHOOHFWXDOV´EXWODUJHO\XVHOHVVIRULPSURYing the quality of democratic deliberation. In sum, I have put forward the idea of the “philosophical situation” to account for and give pragmatic value to intellectual work, whether that work is SKLORVRSKLFDOVFLHQWL¿FRUDUWLVWLF7KLVVLWXDWLRQH[SDQGVWKHQRWLRQRIH[LJHQFH constraints, and audience by linking them to the sociohistorical problems faced by any public. Public intellectuals are those who respond to their philosophical situation by producing a work that conceptualizes and provides direction for solving longstanding and pervasive problems and are then successful in helping change the habits and practices of a public. Thus, even traditional philosophy acts rhetorically, not because it employs the tools of eloquence, but because, like rhetoric, “philosophy grows out of, and in intention is connected with, human affairs” (Dewey 1948, xi). For, as Dewey once wrote, “even highly abstract WKHRULHVDUHRIHI¿FDF\LQWKHFRQGXFWRIKXPDQDIIDLUVLQÀXHQFLQJWKHKLVWRU\ which is yet to be” (1915, 6). It is for this reason that I have put forward the RHETORIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL 139 idea of the philosophical situation. 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