What is a Pseudo-Intellectual?

I’m new to Substack. I came here because I had some bits and pieces about farming that didn’t really fit with my other philosophical work, so I figured I’d set up a philosophy/farming-specific outlet here rather than confuse the message on my website. Besides, I’d heard some good things and I was curious about the platform.

Curiosity satisfied, I’m wondering if it might be a short-lived experiment, but I’ll give it a go.

Two things I realised very quickly: a) there aren’t many farmers on Substack (in hindsight this should’ve been obvious) and b) well, read on...

Purification: What is a Pseudo-Intellectual?

Substack has made me think a lot about the pseudo-intellectual.

What is a pseudo-intellectual? (This is a bad question, full of shit, but, like shit, mostly better out than in. The philosophical essay as a faecal microbiota transplant?)

It’s obvious that the ‘pseudo-intellectual’ description fits many of those on Substack, as even many on here would agree, but why is that so obvious? Why is it more obvious here than it is anywhere else? Academia, for example: surely there is enough rampant intellectualism there, much of which lives well beyond its means. But why does academia drift into the pseudo only rarely while Substack can’t seem to help it?

What strikes me most is the obviousness of the contrast. And how it is that I (we) are able to make that discrimination. Because it isn’t a subtle thing: it hits you in the face. Engaging with a Substack feed is like a kind of waterboarding of the brain. It doesn’t help your thinking to breathe clearly, as healthy intellectualism can, but suffocates it with an endless stream of attempts to be clever.

Is that what strikes us: the keenness to be seen to be clever? People saying things in such a way that it sounds clever, when there are simpler (ergo stupider?) ways of saying much the same? I won’t quote – that would be mean – but I’ll imitate: ‘The complexified historicity of Trumpism speaks to the urgency of a neo-scholarly revival.’

The superfluity of such grandiose form (enough...) gives the impression of being only an impression; a shoddy copy; something ‘as if’ a thing but not a thing; something trying to be something it’s not. Classically, that’s where we get a sense of absurdity: when pretensions aren’t met by reality. A man is delivering a serious speech about a serious matter and his trousers fall down, revealing polka-dot underwear: that’s absurd (and funny?). Or, as Camus says, human beings have a need to live in a meaningful world, but we don’t. Our pretensions aren’t met by reality. That’s also absurd (though less funny?).

But pretentious imitation can’t be the defining thing, and neither can the effort to be seen to be clever: heaven knows there’s more than enough of both of those in academia. And there’s nothing wrong with trying to be something you’re not. Anyone who ever achieved anything starts out by trying to be more than they are.

It’s not the attempt that’s the problem, and so neither can it be the falling short. So what is it?

Is there a clue in the word ‘pseudo’? It comes from an ancient Greek word that means ‘false’ or perhaps more accurately ‘falsehood’, since there are many other words that can indicate something not being true (such as by error). ‘False’ is different from ‘failed’, and the connotations of ‘pseudo’ suggest something closer to deception: ‘to cheat by lies’.

The pseudo-intellectual, then, tries to cheat their audience by appearing to be something they aren’t. Perhaps they also cheat themselves.

This deception trades on a distinction between a reality (in this case the ‘intellectual’) and the mere appearance of it, and this is what troubles me, because that is a very old problem. If we say that a pseudo-intellectual is someone who has the appearance of an intellectual but lacks the reality, we have to ask: what’s missing? Since all we ever see of them are their visible ‘products’ (whatever they may be), is there anything to an intellectual beyond how they appear to us? What are we basing this judgement on, if not appearances? And so if the pseudo-intellectual can talk the intellectual talk, as surely they can, then for what reason do we say it’s only an appearance and not a reality?

And yet it’s obvious that something’s missing. Why is that?

Plato

When you’re lost and confused, it can be helpful to retrace your steps and start again from the beginning. For a philosopher schooled in the Western tradition, that means Plato.

Plato says there are three things required to know anything: a name, a definition, and an image. If you have these three things, for any given thing or type of thing, then you get a fourth thing: knowledge. More precisely, a kind of superficial or technical knowledge: you can deploy the names and the definitions and the images correctly, which is all we ordinarily ask of those who ‘know what they’re talking about’. They can talk the talk, mostly accurately.

But for Plato the story doesn’t end there. He says there’s still something missing, a mysterious ‘fifth’ thing, which is an understanding of the idea of the thing itself. The ‘fourth’ thing, which is our collected knowledge of names and definitions and images, gets closest to this ‘idea’ of the thing itself, but it doesn’t grasp it entirely. We know this because we often correct our ‘fourth’ knowledge according to something that stands over and above it, which is our understanding of the idea of the thing itself. It’s our understanding not only of what our names/definitions/images are but what they ought to be.

Everyone’s had that experience. We think we have a pretty good grasp of something, and would be able to convince anyone to that effect and pass uncorrected, but then one day we somehow come to look at the same old thing in a new and different way. We see something that we didn’t see before, and we know we are right to recognise this new thing, even though it doesn’t fit with our current knowledge of ‘name/definition/image’. The mysterious fifth ‘idea of the thing itself’ reaches into our day-to-day reality and we think ‘hmm, I was wrong’.

It’s this mysterious ‘fifth’ that most captivates those who sincerely want to understand things as they really are. In standing over and above all the other ideas that we have about things, and holding them to account, we know that everything depends on it. It’s held in special reverence and we feel the need to acknowledge that in some way. We elevate it to the point of capitalisation – not just true but Truth; not just real but Real – or we ennoble it with an honorific ‘the’: when a serious man’s trousers fall down, that’s absurd, but when we hit upon an idea of human existence as it really is, that’s ‘the absurd’. In really special cases we do both: not just good but ‘the Good’.

When all else fails we italicise. Appearances are real enough but they aren’t real, if you know what I mean: an NFT might be worth many-times the cost of some life-saving cancer treatment or a lifetime of food, and this is certainly undeniable at the level of appearances, but that doesn’t mean the NFT is ten-times more valuable than those things in reality. Only an idiot would think it was (but the world is full of idiots).

Having some idea of what it means to be wise, a philosopher doesn’t want to be an idiot. Ironically, though, they appear to become just that. The highest prioritisation of this mysterious ‘fifth’ causes those who seek it to neglect the world of appearances, because they know that mere appearances will never show them what they want to know. They want to know ‘the thing itself’ (not only its appearance), so far as they are able, even though they know they can never finish this task. It is a pursuit that has no end – philosophy: ‘the love of wisdom’ – and nothing is more important for those who really want to know.

Distracted by this doomed pursuit, they neglect their appearance, their wealth, their fame, and anything that could lead to worldly ‘success’. But by that point they really don’t care for these things so it’s no great loss. They want nothing more than what they have, which is philosophy.

And so we return to the pseudo-intellectual. What is it they want?

Not to reject or neglect appearances, it would seem, since they seem to revel in them. The true pseudo-intellectual trades in nothing else. They have all the words but none of the ideas. It’s as if they have collected all the names, the definitions, and the images, and so have equipped themselves with a capacity to ‘talk the talk’, and then stopped, content that they have everything they need. With that, they start expressing themselves.

When you encounter someone with all the ‘fourth’ but none of the ‘fifth’, it’s depressing and infuriating. Your soul sinks. They seem to know everything yet understand nothing. It’s horrible to talk with someone like that.

They are so sure of themselves. And of course there’s nothing you can do to question them, because they have no concept of there being a place from which they can be questioned, over and above what they know, which is everything.

I think this is the experience of encountering the pseudo-intellectual. They are full of words, and they confound you with all that, but even so you are left with the impression that they don’t really understand what they say. In the end they aren’t really saying anything, and they can’t really say anything, because nothing they’ve learned has been digested enough to constitute what they are. Instead they perpetually vomit up what they’ve most recently eaten.

They only want to show you what they know or think, to be seen to be one who knows and thinks. In the pseudo-intellectual, this isn’t the product of an honest attempt to be better but only a desperate attempt to appear better. That’s why I’m suspicious of the pseudo-intellectual. I’d believe them more if they didn’t make such a show of it.

In contrast to the philosopher, who neglects the ‘fourth’ for the sake of the ‘fifth’, the highest prioritisation of the world of appearances causes the pseudo-intellectual to neglect the ‘fifth’ for the sake of the ‘fourth’. They abandon any pursuit of the mysterious ‘fifth’, which is what holds the world of appearances to account, leaving them trapped in fantasy worlds of their own making. That’s how they deceive themselves and others.

Why do they do this? Because of a fact-of-life that philosophers have had to face for as long as there have been philosophers: pursuing the mysterious ‘fifth’ makes you look like an idiot. Everyone will call you a worthless good-for-nothing, out of touch, naïve, useless. You have to ask questions, assert your ignorance, and claim no expertise: there are no experts in philosophy because those who understand the most would say that they know the least, and those who understand the least would say that they know the most. If you’re sincere in your pursuit of wisdom, you have to be happy to appear stupid, and that’s just what the pseudo-intellectual doesn’t want to be.

There are many ways to get at the mysterious ‘fifth’ but none of them involve showing off. A real ‘conversation with questioning’ is the best and most direct way, so we understand, although only when it’s sincere and conforms to certain Socratic standards: for example, at least one person in the conversation has to be someone who ‘has something to say’, which is why conversations between pseudo-intellectuals will never achieve anything. When conversations aren’t easily available, peer-review of written work can also work, when that process is virtuous and not corrupted. There’s also a place for solitary introspection, and for reading, and that’s often necessary when the world around you screams so much nonsense, only any product of this would always need to be tested by a ‘touchstone’ (which will lead you back to a form of conversation with questioning) in order to avoid getting carried away within worlds of your own making.

But none of this holds any interest for the pseudo-intellectual; unless, that is, they can be seen to be doing it.

Enchantment: What is True Intellectualism?

If there is a ‘false’ intellectualism, presumably it stands in contrast to a ‘true’ counterpart. Let’s lean on some heavy italics: what is true intellectualism?

This is a good question, because the answer will lead, not to petty criticism, but to a clearer understanding of an ideal: that is, precisely the mysterious ‘fifth’ idea that we have about a healthy intellectualism.

That’s a very precious ideal. In the end, I don’t care all that much about what people do wrong, except to avoid doing the same: my business is trying to do what is right, and for that purpose I want to be guided by good ideas.

We can’t answer our question with only the ‘fourth’ kind of knowledge. Collect your names, your definitions, and your images. Look to the picture of success, for an intellectual. It seems to be about being on podcasts. It seems to be about having something interesting to say about everything. It seems to be about having well-articulated ‘opinions’. There is often some writing involved, and who are we to sneer at that. But with the world as it is at the moment, in this age where even intellectual culture is a kind of business, I struggle to see the ideal realised in the picture of the intellectual as it is.

Is there anything left of intellectualism, now, beyond the structures that support it? Or is it only a machine without a ghost? A hollow husk; an empty edifice. If you poke it you can pierce its thin skin and find nothing.

I can’t find good answers by looking at intellectualism as it appears to be. I need to look up to what it ought to be.

First of all, the ‘true’ part of the ‘true intellectual’: a sincere pursuit of ‘the real’ (whatever that means). We say a capitalised ‘Truth’, or ‘Goodness’, or ‘Beauty’, etc. These are only gestures because I don’t know what they are but they are out there (or so I want to believe). But what is certain: with a sincere pursuit of ‘the real’ tends to come a neglect of mere appearance. And so if someone tries too hard to appear to be clever, we suspect they aren’t what they appear; if they really were as clever as they seem, they wouldn’t care so much about seeming so.

Consider Plato again, an example of the ‘true intellectual’ if ever there was one. Plato is so convinced of the priority of intellectual reality over the worldly representation of it that he says you can’t represent this reality. He says you can’t write about these things without making a fool of yourself. He says he doesn’t and never has. This is a puzzle for anyone who looks at his body of written work.

But those who pay close attention will see that Plato doesn’t write to represent reality. He does something else. He represents only representations; he represents human beings representing. He dramatises. He provokes; he doesn’t take you to the destination but only points the way; he guides you away from faulty paths. His goal isn’t to represent the mysterious ‘fifth’ in the ‘fourth’ – to capture our idea of the thing itself in a name or definition or image – because that can’t be done. His goal is only to put you on the path that will enable you to come to realise the ‘fifth’ for yourself, and to keep re-realising it, because that is what it means to be wise.

He will do whatever he can to achieve this. Very often, following his teacher’s (Socrates) example, he deploys a philosophical irony: to show something by saying something else. Often he deliberately appears stupid, or has Socrates appear stupid, so that you can correct him. He offers a contradictory argument, or leaves a question unresolved, to force you to think for yourself. Although he might have an answer in mind, he doesn’t tell you the answer, because he doesn’t think the answer can be told. The point isn’t to give the right answers but to ask the right questions.

Plato’s only concern, as a writer, is the effect he has on his reader: does it elevate their soul? Does it inspire them to take more care of themselves, to look up to the higher intellectual realities that can only be reached by serious study? Or does it, instead, inspire only an ‘unfounded confidence’, which prompts anyone in its possession to stop asking questions and insist on giving answers?

Because that is what happens when you get trapped at the ‘fourth’. And that is what writing at that level encourages. If you offer up your names and definitions and images – or, as a modern philosopher would have it, your ‘analysis’ and ‘arguments’ – as an attempt to capture reality and convey it, there is a danger that anyone reading this will think that’s all there is. What a mistake that would be. What a way to kill off the sincere pursuit of ‘the real’.

This is the danger inherent to the task of writing philosophy: intellectualism itself, even when true, can so easily become a mere appearance. The true intellectual will do whatever they can to avoid that and to rise above it. In the end, it might not be possible to avoid it, because all we have are words and ideas. But any philosopher worthy of the name should try, knowing, as they do, that everything excellent is as difficult as it is rare.

Philosophy is medicine for the soul. The medicine is a purgative: it makes you throw up your errors. Its primary purpose is to cure you of your false and faulty understanding of what matters. It works by disenchanting you from the nonsense that holds your attention before enchanting you, in its place, with wisdom and goodness.

The purpose of philosophical writing is to persuade you to take your medicine. To this end, philosophical writing can work the brain but should work the soul and stomach. The danger of giving an argument in purely intellectual terms is that people engage with it only at that level, which might bypass important aspects of what it means to be human: you might end up missing the point entirely.

This is what happens in the classic example of theodicy and the problem of evil: in solving a problem in intellectual terms, it invites a response in those terms, prompting a debate in those terms, and in that our understanding becomes soulless and inhuman. Truth is soon lost, and Goodness with it. It takes hard work to recover what’s been lost.

Secondly, having mentioned ‘soul work’, and for the sake of avoiding any misunderstandings, a back-tracking caveat: what’s characteristic of the ‘true intellectual’ is a sincere pursuit of ‘the real’ via reason. This is the ‘intellectual’ part of the ‘true intellectual’, because while there are many ways to pursue ‘the real’ only one of them defines the intellectual. We’re not looking to feel our way through this; we want to get where we’re going by thinking it through.

The true intellectual is not a mystic, is not thoughtless, is not ignorant. Their understanding comes from intellectual study, and so undoubtedly the true intellectual will have studied seriously and extensively. This happens naturally whenever someone is genuinely motivated by the pursuit of Truth or Goodness and considers intellectualism to be the best way to make progress towards their goal. Try to stop such a person studying: you’ll find you can’t.

None of which is to say that the true intellectual must necessarily reject the many forms of ‘non-intellectual’ understanding. ‘Reason’ is not exclusive, as anyone reasonable will recognise, if only because there are purely intellectual reasons to acknowledge that there are some forms of understanding in which head and heart (or head and body) are inseparably combined. Learning to swim by only reading instructional manuals on the internet, for example, is quite reasonably considered a bad idea.

Intellectualism can recognise its limits and will certainly do so. As Kant says, when we find the limits of human understanding, the most we can say is that we comprehend their incomprehensibility.

True intellectualism will always have a kind of intellectual humility built into its foundations, but equally it won’t be so humble as to lose all ambition and assertiveness. As Socrates might have said, while complete knowledge of certain matters might prove to be impossible, we will be better, braver, and less helpless if we believe we have a duty to investigate what we don’t know. Are we so sure we’ve hit the limits of human understanding? We’ve thought this before; we’ve been wrong before. We might be wrong again.

Inevitably, the process of serious study will include a lot of focus on the ‘fourth’, which I characterised as a superficial or technical knowledge. Though this characterisation is nakedly pejorative, that is only to emphasise its limitations. This ‘technical’ knowledge is necessary but it is not sufficient. In a time of science and business, the necessity of technical knowledge is very obvious but the insufficiency of it is not. This is the case even in philosophy. It’s worth reminding people once in a while: you can know all the facts about philosophy and still not understand it.

Insufficiency aside, it’s clear that no one looking to understand things as they are should neglect the ‘fourth’ entirely. In this day and age, no true intellectual would allow themselves to be scientifically illiterate: they would deny themselves too much. Only keep in mind that human knowledge and understanding doesn’t begin and end with the sciences, because that would result in an irredeemably shallow understanding: flat, two-dimensional, as if everything that’s worth knowing can be captured in data on a spreadsheet.

It cannot. But (to channel Raimond Gaita) some people seem to be trying very hard to make the world shallow enough for them to describe it in such a way. Why on earth they’d want to do that, I’ve no idea.

Conclusion: A Cautionary Tale

If you want to avoid being a pseudo-intellectual, you must either be a true intellectual or else not be an intellectual at all. This is a matter of holding yourself to account. It’s a matter of being what you would claim to be.

I never worried about it too much as an academic because I trusted the touchstones of my environment. I now think I trusted too much.

As a student and a lecturer, I studied philosophy, discoursed about philosophy, published in it, taught it, defended it, and sold it. In all this academic activity, I certainly looked like an intellectual.

I had doubts. These activities are all the visible show of what philosophy does but, as we know, a show is not a sufficient condition. These activities are all achievable by someone skilfully pretending to be a philosopher. Like an actor playing the heavyweight champion of the world, who certainly looks like a boxer, and trains like one, and acts like one. The show is convincing, but we know it’s not real. Put them in a real contest and you will see what they are.

In the academy, we lecture about how philosophers should not lecture but ask questions. We charge fees for something that we say is priceless. We live in contradiction with ourselves and then call ourselves logicians.

We are not lovers of wisdom but adulterers. We say we love wisdom but we are always pursuing something else: a job, a publication, a citation. These are our affairs.

The dominant form of philosophy represented now in universities is a kind of pseudo-philosophy that presents a believable image of the discipline but without any reality: it is a shadow of its former self. Once upon a time we would have recognised this shadow for what it is and called it what it was: ‘sophistry’.

The increasingly business-oriented character of the modern university is partly and possibly entirely to blame for this. The university changed, and philosophy (having nowhere else to go) changed with it. Sophistry is at home in the new university, but philosophy is uncomfortably out of place in this place.

Francis Bacon, in urging the introduction of the then-new science, complained that universities produced ‘minds empty and unfraught with matter’ having not ‘gathered that which Cicero calleth sylva and supellex, stuff and variety’. Now I complain that universities produce minds fraught with matter but empty of what matters. Their heads are full of stuff but incapable of judgement.

The modern university peddles a version of philosophy that is only a history of ideas combined with the activity of constructing clever arguments. You may as well say that music is just a collection of tunes and the activity of plucking strings. Some musicians do this, of course, and it can be done well or badly, but that’s hardly the point.

Academic philosophy has become trapped in Plato’s ‘fourth’. It has chosen this, and it thinks it’s right to have done so, according to its measures of what matters. You can’t easily assess someone’s understanding of the ‘fifth’; it’s much easier to grade their technical knowledge. And universities are all about giving grades, because that’s the measure of their business. But is that the proper business of a philosopher?

As a musician, to play out of tune and not realise it is one thing. But to realise that you are playing out of tune and to keep playing: that is absurd. Such a person is ridiculous. If you realise that you are playing out of tune, you stop playing. You don’t start playing again until you have tuned yourself up.

So I stopped playing. I’d had enough of being ridiculous.

I don’t know what I am now. I read other philosophers and they are like symphonies, or at least études. I read myself and it’s like hill country blues: rough and slightly out of tune, rustic and not urbane, repetitive, unsophisticated, improvised and full of duff notes. It’s not clean but distorted. I play badly. To the refined ear these are bad sounds, but these days I have no interest in playing any other way.

Having some idea of what it means to be true, I desperately don’t want to be false. I don’t want to deceive myself (again). I have a very reasonable fear that I will drift into the pseudo without knowing it. It happened before and I didn’t notice then. Would I notice now?

And so for the sake of the precious ideal of true intellectualism, I will run away from the mere appearance of it, and I’d encourage all of you on Substack to do the same.

Move beyond the show, move beyond your words, move beyond the ‘fourth’ and look to the ‘fifth’: look to the ideal of whatever it is that you do. Do you exemplify it?

Are you sure?