9384067385 (N) by Romila Thapar

Author:Romila Thapar
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Publisher: Aleph Book Company
Published: 2015-10-07T18:30:00+00:00

LIVING BETWEEN THOUGHT AND ACTION

PETER RONALD DESOUZA

Romila Thapar defines the public intellectual as one who ‘should take a position independent of those in power, enabling him or her to question debatable ideas, irrespective of who propagates them. The public intellectual has to see himself or herself as a person who is as close to being autonomous as is possible… And…has at the same time a concern for what constitutes the rights of the citizens…particularly on issues of social justice.’

There are two distinct ideas in this definition: that of the ‘autonomous thinker’ and that of the ‘advocate of social justice’. While Thapar seems to imply that these two personas can be easily aligned and that in combination they constitute the social and intellectual power of the public intellectual, I believe, in contrast, that such an alignment is not as smooth and unproblematic as has been suggested and that there is, in fact, a creative tension between the two. Each follows a different logic. The spirit of the ‘autonomous intellectual’ is driven by an epistemic logic which seeks to examine the validity of claims made by a person by using protocols of assessment that are set, agreed upon and independent of the person, whereas the ‘champion of social justice’ is driven by an ethical logic that seeks to examine the structures of society to determine the extent to which they satisfy the principle of a fair and just distribution of societal resources.

This is an important distinction since it acknowledges that each follows a different protocol as they assess societal power and distributive processes. While they may both begin at the same starting point, that is looking for firm evidence to support or criticize policies and institutions, at a later point their paths begin to diverge. While the one chooses to remain agnostic about the search findings because of a commitment to the tentativeness of propositions, the other is prepared to initiate search closure and transit to a phase of action, since the findings, up to the point of divergence, meet the criteria of being satisficing, that is, it is sufficient to establish the situation of injustice. As a result, a time could come when the two may even be in opposition to each other. I do not want to present the issue as if there is a polarity between the two personae as I believe that in every public intellectual resides both the autonomous intellectual as well as the advocate for social justice—a restless cohabitation that gives the intellectual in India a schizophrenic existence.

I have made the distinction here, which to me is mainly analytical and not existential, because I want to bring into our discussion the different logics at work in the public intellectual. This means that when the public intellectual intervenes in the public sphere he or she has to allow one persona to be dominant over the other. This point at which one persona yields to the other, the ‘tipping point’, needs to be understood. In a society and

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