BOOMERBUSTER

BOOMERBUSTER
OLD CELLO

Tuesday, April 17, 2018

DK CURRENT POST PURITAN INTELLECTUALS

"...Near the beginning of his book, Hofstadter distinguished between "intelligence," which Americans always praised, and "intellect," a quality that had come under attack from Republicans in the Eisenhower era--not, as his book aimed to show, for the first time.  "Intellect," he wrote, ". . .is the critical, creative and contemplative side of mind.  Whereas intelligence seeks to grasp, manipulate, re-order, adjust, intellect examines, ponders, theorizes, criticizes, imagines.  Intelligence will seize the immediate meaning in a situation and evaluate it. Intellect evaluates evaluations, and looks for the meanings of situations as a whole."  Intellectuals, one might conclude, see issues in broad perspective, and not least in broad historical perspective, as Hofstadter constantly did and as I continually try to do here and elsewhere...." DK

Why not just call them Puritans, rather than Calvinists, although related?

Can one characterize the Puritan fathers as intellectuals? I guess in a sense they may have been, but not in the sense DK uses the term in the 21st Century. See Starr, p 51, last paragraph.

See Staloff, The Making of an American Thinking Class: Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in Puritan Massachusetts.

No comments:

Post a Comment