Peter M Rojcewicz, PhD

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The most expected requirement for private and professional success is “showing up.” To prosper in life requires more than training, hands-on experience, competency badges, or academic credentials. More than possessing the necessary chops, making one’s way in life requires something less concrete, less technical, and more essential.

Showing up in any real sense presupposes we exhibit energetic and conscious presence in each moment. Showing up appears both profoundly simply and all encompassing – entalling social engagement and empathy, as well as the self-affirmation of interconnectivity that makes learning an essential human activity beyond mere self-reflection and narcissism. Admittedly, showing up is difficult; not showing up is a travesty, a waste of talent and possibility.

In some real sense, not showing up as a citizen means going missing. Divorced from civic duties, we’re neither recognized nor cared about. Missing-in-action, we forsake community in the double sense of its membership and ownership. In the former sense, we are outsiders or strangers; we don’t belong. By the latter, we avoid accountability that comes with co-creating a way and place to live. As such, we’re invisible and can neither be counted on nor trusted. We wear cloaks of suspicion.

How do we need to show up in our life relative to present challenges – uncertainty, chaos, change, and indeterminacy, all of which seem to make sense only within the logic of chaos theory? We face thorny issues, solutions to which cannot be found in books or databases or resolved by current knowledge. Technical challenges of the past have given way to what Heifetz and others call “adaptive challenges,” the answers to which emerge by shifting our perception, judgment, beliefs, or priorities (R. Heifetz). Adaptive challenges raise the question – Who do we need to be– for ourselves, for others, for the earth?

Each of us carries an existential obligation to make apparent our “being” as we speak, listen, and act. Manifesting our essential being means showing up in novel ways at deep purpose in all that we do. It means seeing as an artist, listening as a mediator, thinking as an intellectual, and extending bonds of affection as a lover. The artist seeks the deep unseen; the mediator seeks peace and concord; the intellectual seeks truths and meanings; the lover seeks the beloved. The outcomes of those generative obligations are permutations of self – personal, aesthetic, and social.

One such formulation of self is that of the intellectual (Sartre). What might it mean to show up today as an intellectual? Do intellectuals pursue knowledge for its own sake or engage in pure research?  Are they elites who speak in a specialized jargon impenetrable to the popular ear? Some people look down upon intellectual learning, prizing instead material acquisitions, professional accomplishments, or overwhelming power. Intellectual learning, on the other hand, results in transformation of one’s whole being. Truly educated people, who live a life of the mind, seek to wed interiority and exteriority, form and substance, right views and right practice. They stand on two feet – disciplined knowledge of life and reflexive self-awareness. The goal of the intellectual is not to get something but to release learning into the world.

There are diverse intellectual models after which to fashion a life of inquiry, self-reflection, and deep purpose. One possible permutation of the self to be made evident by living is that of the Artist-Intellectual. What exactly does it mean to be an intellectual who is an artist? How might the Artist-Intellectual be distinguished say, from the intellectual as historian or technician?

The intellectual as historian is a collector of ideas. Historians love the “objects” of their study – chronicles, travel logs, letters, and various other documents needed to tell a story of the directly unknowable past that meets the present needs of a professional community of historians. Supplementing literary documents, some historians examine “silent” artifacts as material manifestations of culture, such as vernacular architecture, artifacts of wood and stone, to substantiate their narratives (H. Glassie). Literary documents and material artifacts together provide evidence of the personality and culture of people of the past. We certainly need intellectuals as historians.  A problem, however, is that their object-love may lead to a dangerous insularity, a self-satisfied retreat from the world.

The intellectual as technician offers a valuable but different model of showing up in our world of complex change, racial and viral pandemics, nationalism, and climate change. Our STEM dominated universities enflame human desires for certainty, predictability, and mechanical control of nature through scientific materialism, technology, and calculative reason. Technicians as practitioners of practical knowledge love their methods of study, efficient, cool, theoretical, and pure. Research methods, however, can be fickle, faithful only in a theoretical, unchanging setting. Method-love is no advance over object-love, and so another move is needed – the Artist-Intellectual.

The intellectual as historian knows what; the technician knows how; the Artist-Intellectual knows why. It may be the case that the Artist-Intellectual shows up as an artist in the generally understood sense of one who writes, paints, dances, sculpts, etc. On thbis point Cicero noted, “We must see not only what each one says, but also what he thinks, and also why he thinks it. As with Eratosthenes, Da Vinci, Thoreau, Sartre, C.S.Lewis, Czeslaw Milosz, Simone de Beauvoir, Ayn Rand, Camus, Duchamp, W.E.B. Dubois, and C.G. Jung, Artist-Intellectuals may be artists in the generally understood sense of one who writes, paints, dances, sculpts, etc. However, the necessary and sufficient element of distinction is their awareness of their goals of study in relationship to what and how they work. Their commitment to deep purpose is a matter of ethics, values, alliances, and responsible actions in the world. It is a matter of thoughtfulness, understood not as the pursuit of irrefutable logic but rather as a commitment to avoid self-deception.

The Artist-Intellectual exemplifies an ideal permutation of self in which one intentionally sets and adroitly arranges and rearranges one’s life’s objects, methods, and goals to desired outcomes. The Artist-Intellectual knows that the same strategic approach to an issue may not succeed from one setting to another. The social setting may require one to creatively apply alternate or mixed methods of research to various objects of study in order to discern solutions to a community issues. This is not to say that one can control the world or always find solutions to problems. This is to say, however, that Artist-Intellectual move fearlessly toward unknowns as opportunities to un-learn what has led us into current dilemmas, displaying radical availability and responsiveness to what emerges in the learning environment.

The transdisciplinary nature of problems we currently face call for both a knowledge of analytical reason plus noetic inter-sensory and tacit knowing that plumb the depths of issues not possible by the discursive intellect alone (W. James,). The noetic literacy of the Artist-Intellectual allows for adaptive decisions, bypassing the reductionist, routinized, or uninspired mind that is never a rigorous mind, so much as a rigor-mortis of the mind (P.M. Rojcewicz). Nietzsche insisted, “One thing is needed: to give style to one’s character – a great and rare art! (It is to) see all the strengths and weaknesses of one’s nature and then turn them into an artistic plan until every appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye.”

Showing up for life as Artist-Intellectuals is a move beyond resilience to response-ableness, the ability to discern what is positive and possible in any challenge. Our artistic expressions and intellectual achievements mean little unless we can derive from them a guiding perspective for life, moral and intellectual authority, and demonstrate to others that we have been made better by the practice of our art and the extent to which we value learning in all we do.

Artist-Intellectuals are capable of thinking in the fullest sense at the borders of objective and subjective knowledge. They are true trans-disciplinarians who eschew artificial distinctions among academic subjects. Still, solutions to intractable problems will not result from our best individual efforts alone, but from dynamic, relational exchanges among people capable of making explicit the deep learning yet to be spoken, heard, documented, and artfully brought forth, as seedlings of change. Eschewing both aestheticism and intellectualism for their own sakes as necessary but insufficient ends in themselves, the Artist-Intellectual shows up as a generative, engaged citizen, learning with, from, and on behalf of others and the earth we share.

References

Glassie, Henry. Folk Housing in Middle Virginia, A Structural Analysis of Historic Artifacts. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press. 1975.

Heifetz, Ronald et al. The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World. Boston: Harvard Business Press. 2009.

James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience, A Study of Human Nature. 1902. New York: Collier Books. 1961.

Nietzsche, Frederich. The Gay Science. 1882. Transl. Walter Kaufman, New York: Vintage 1974.

Rojcewicz, Peter M. “Imagination and Poetic knowing in Higher Education: Toward A Noetic Education.” In Prospero, A Journal of New Thinking in Philosophy for Education. 2000.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. “A Plea for Intellectuals.” In Between Marxism and Existentialism. 1972. New York: Pantheon Books, 1974.