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What It Means To Be An Intellectual (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)

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A friend sent me an email this morning and at the end of it, almost as an afterthought, he responded to a quote I’d sent him from an author praising books. “He would say that,” my friend replied, “he’s a writer.” I want to quibble with this statement — how is it that we can dismiss someone’s argument simply because of their job? — but doing so would seem bizarre. There’s a social norm that how much we discuss something should be roughly proportional to its importance. Mountains of print may be spilled on the issues of international relations but spending a couple emails discussing punctuation would seem dreadfully bizarre. There’s just one problem: I enjoy deep discussions of punctuation and other trivialities. I could try to justify this taste — some argument that we should think about everything we do so that we don’t do everything we think about — but why bother? Do I have to justify enjoying certain television shows as well? At some point, isn’t pure enjoyment just enough? After al

What It Means To Be An Intellectual (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought) Raw Thought by Aaron Swartz What It Means To Be An Intellectual A friend sent me an email this morning and at the end of it, almost as an afterthought, he responded to a quote I’d sent him from an author praising books. “He would say that,” my friend replied, “he’s a writer.” I want to quibble with this statement — how is it that we can dismiss someone’s argument simply because of their job? — but doing so would seem bizarre. There’s a social norm that how much we discus

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