 Can you hear me? I'm not even raising my voice. In fact, can you still hear me? Okay, as far as I'm going to sound, I'm presently speaking in slatyw of the whisper, so I can barely hear myself. So this increases the chances that I will be able to speak for an hour. And indeed, I was saying to Gene a few minutes ago that I had originally thought to give the three hour version of this lecture. And I would be able to do that if I was going to whisper. Right. What I want to talk about is the idea of a public intellectual and what we can back into the concept of a public intellectual. And what we might think of a public intellectual and where we can think of a decent role for such a creature that even today I want to argue that things have changed very considerably as regards to public intellectuals, not just for the decades, but through the centuries, we'll see how far we get. I've no idea at the moment, there's almost no word that this is off the clock. First of all, a public intellectual, you might think, is an intellectual who has gone public. But in fact, it's a lot more complicated than that. The trouble is, I've looked it all over the place, there aren't a lot of writings on public intellectuals, but it's by no means a well-designed concept. And I would say that it's not really yet a term of art. People use it in different sorts of ways. In conversation with the French philosopher, yesterday I mentioned that I was going to speak to them about public intellectuals. And he said, ah yes, he said, we have lots of them in France. Good, I said, can you tell me the French phrase for a public intellectual? Because I couldn't actually think of any, I couldn't make a rough translation of course, but the question is what really fitted the concept. Anyway, he said he couldn't think of one and proceeded to give me a variety of paraphrases, none of which really caught the idea that I would say trying to articulate. Nonetheless, of course there certainly are public intellectuals in France and there have been for a long time. If I can give you a sense of the territory by naming just one or two domains, I made a note just before about some folk who I think have got to be included. During the Age of Enlightenment, I say that because that's my comfort zone, during the Age of Enlightenment, Voltaire would certainly be counted as one of the public intellectuals of the age. And in modern times I would say that as far as Britain is concerned, Bertrand Russell was a dominant figure as a public intellectual. And that as far as our management friends are concerned, I would surely have to include Noam Chomsky and if there was only one person to include, I'm sure it would have to be him. In present circumstances in Britain just now, I think I might want to mention the name of Anthony Grayling, much cheered by one part of the public and much reviled by another part which suggested me doing a good job. And I think I want to say something of the sort about Richard Dawkins, who I guess counts as a public intellectual, of whom I would want to say the same thing, that an awful lot seems to love him and an awful lot seems to hate him. So again, I think he's doing well. The question is, what is it that binds these various people? First things first, a public intellectual is not simply an academic who's famous in the public. There are a number of academics who do have public fame or public notoriety. But I think that's really a rather different matter. The phrase historically tends to be associated with intellectuals who go public on matters that are of interest to the public. And generally matters are not just of interest, but are highly contentious and generate an awful lot of heated debate. So that, if one thinks of, if I go back to Voltaire, he was undoubtedly one of the great intellectuals of his age, although he was never a university man, he was never an academic. He would rather have been seen dead than be seen sitting at a professor's chair at a university. And indeed there is absolutely no way that a university of France would have let him through the gates. The relationship between him and the universities was on a mutual hatred while justified on both sides. I mean, each had a very good reason for thinking that way, although of course I couldn't be disapproved of the attitude of the universities. But he was undoubtedly a great intellectual. In terms of his published output, he argued with philosophers, he argued with the mathematicians, he argued with the empirical surface. He was a serious figure in intellectual debate, but at the same time he was a tremendous campaigner on matters, especially matters of justice or things of the chaos affair when a young man committed suicide. And because he belonged to a heated group in two looms, his family were accused of his murder and tortured, horrible things happened to them. In the end, largely as a result of a debate that was instigated by Voltaire and led by Voltaire, there was first a full pardon of gravity and then eventually the family who were prisoners were completely cleared. This was because one of the great intellectuals of France went public with all his intellectual skills, campaigning on behalf of a very serious and moral issue. And I would say that by and large this helps us to define the range of people that I am speaking about as public intellectuals. What we find is that they are out there shouting, out there campaigning, not on behalf of an intellectual or an academic discipline for its own sake. But because people are being confronted with an existential problem, some major issue which can't really wait. We can't say, well, let's herself that, we'll put that to one side and you'll worry about it a bit later. Because the problem is now, it's facing us now, and as regards what we do in the future, well, we want our future to be shaped by the solution that we give to the problem that we are faced with now. I think that is what makes for an existential problem, a practical problem, so that you would find such a problem quite often in the legal sphere when it looks as if some monstrous injustice has been done. In the moral sphere, well, there are questions now being raised regarding, let's say, medical ethics. Questions arising perhaps from problems of the distribution of scarce resources where the issue is what do I do now? Not what are the general parameters of the problem, what are the kinds of criteria that we might employ, and now let's have dinner. But the question is what do we do and let's work it out now, it may be that if we don't, then somebody who would rather stay living was going to be dead. So these are incredibly serious issues. I might add, as well as these ones can certainly sort of individual places, they're not large ones to do the same with the concept of a just war, where one should go to war, where one should go to war, and how one's conduct should be regulated in the course of fighting the war. Does anything go, as has often enough happened in practice, or have we got to say that when we go to war we're not permitted to lead to the rules of morality behind us, but I have to take those rules with us into the war, and if, as a matter of fact, through being the moral law, one ends up, predictably, dead, then what might be said is, well, better like that, I would rather it were like that, than perform an act that will keep me alive and get longer, because to perform that act will be to influence the moral law. These are questions, all of which have got the shape of existential problems. One that's been attracting a lot of attention in the academic world, as well as outside in recent years, in certain questions to deal with animal rights, because these questions affect research in the life sciences, what may we permissively do in the issue to animals? In some cases, if we don't use animals, it may be, and it's always contentious, that it would be better if we didn't carry out the research and get the results that we would otherwise get, rather than treat animals in such a way that it would be said that, correctly said, that we are infringing the moral law. All this is a matter of practical problems where we appear to be in a moral jam, because it looks at first sight when we approach these problems, or whatever we do, it's going to be wrong one way or another. As with the last kind of case that I've just mentioned, where what we've got is a case of a possible case of research where, if we carry it out, we may get the results that will be wonderfully beneficial for the human race. On the other hand, you've got to help the poor animal that's got to suffer when it has to suffer in order to give us a result that's good to help the human race. These are things that have to be balanced. You've got to be thought about, and there are ways worked out in academia as well as elsewhere for investigating all of these things. And there are those intellectuals who have been working out these relevant criteria, the framework of concepts, including the moral framework, that has to be taken into account, just plain deployed in the case of these individual problems. And I'm talking about those intellectuals who not only think about these things, because thinking is completely private, but also go into the public domain and talk about these things, and in fact shout about them because they are motivated that they know that there's very good reason why we should be thinking about all of these matters. So, that value roughly defines the area that captures the concept of a public intellectual. I'm not sure whether it does completely, and that's because we are not dealing with such a well-defined concept. What does one say about those scientists who are working in research areas that the public have got a very lively interest in? It's a matter of wanting to know. So, do we say that if those intellectuals do go to the public on matters of interest to the public, and do offer accounts of their field, and do offer indications of ways forward, and perhaps even discuss moral elements in this concerning what we might do with the information? Do we say that this perhaps has been public intellectual? Well, maybe it does. Maybe it does. I'm not quite sure. To go back to the matter of Richard Dawkins, he is famous for a couple of things. One of them is work on Darwinism. He's a great promoter of Darwinian ideas. The other concerns is arguments for the existence of God. In a sense, that's correct. He does spend a lot of time discussing arguments for the existence of God, but that's for the purpose of demolition. It's not for the purpose of demonstration that God actually does exist. When he is speaking about these matters, in both cases, are you to say that he is operating as a public intellectual, or is that really only why he is discussing matters to do with religion? I'm really not quite sure what the answer is, and if I get insight into that from the discussion that we have later, then I will really be very well pleased. I want to make a distinction here, which I think I'll be deploying later on. On one hand, we've got our intellectuals, and on the other hand, we've got people called experts. I know they've got a general name, and I suppose intellectuals don't have a general name at the moment, because all the heat's off them, because it's on the experts. But the rise of experts, I think, is going to have to be part of my story. I'll come to this later, but the point about experts as such is that they may have very, very little to do with public affairs, in the sense of going public and speaking to the public about these matters in which they are so very interested. I want to say about expertise, that an awful lot of the expertise that is now around can make an old-fashioned public intellectual really rather frightened for his position. I've got the number there, but I guess it doesn't really matter. What I'm speaking about, this of the experts, is that they have an awful lot of data that old-fashioned people with authority, people with authority to people who speak to public intellectuals, simply would not have had. And the experts are also people with expertise in the appropriate methodology for speaking about these subjects, and this is also something that previous public intellectuals would not have had. I've got in mind, in saying this, at least a couple of folk who were dominant in the last century as public intellectuals, fronts at some point, bring had Bertrand Russell. In fact, they've got something very, very important in common, both of them are philosophers, but there are other things as well. And although they vote very important philosophy and we help to define the philosophical discourse from their age, it's not really the philosophy for which they are now remembered. In the case of some, this was a man who was doing his greatest, his biggest philosophical work, in the decade or so before the Second World War. In the roundabout 1943-1944, he started up discourse, very public discourse, on such matters as the resistance. And on collaborators and collaboration, you get the idea. What he's talking about to the French nation there, everybody seemed to be listening to him and arguing on the basis of the premises that he set out. The way he's arguing about is how one conducts oneself in very, very difficult, very serious circumstances, very often collaborators were collaborating simply because if they didn't, they would have been killed and if they didn't, in addition, their families might have been killed. What is one doing in those circumstances? Who's to say? Who lays down what the criteria are in such incredibly exceptional circumstances where we've not really had time hard in five minutes to educate ourselves into a moral context in which things like that can happen? What does one say about the resistance? Okay, wonderful thing. Of course, an absolutely heroic thing and people took their lives in their hands as members of the resistance. But what does one do in a circumstance where if somebody in the resistance plans to kill someone, he knows that there will be reprisals. The other side will simply take 40, 50, 100 civilians and shoot them. Does one go ahead and kill a tactical or strategically significant target if one knows that this will be the outcome for the people on one's own side? So, although one can praise resistance to the skies, there are an awful lot of incredibly heavyweight moral problems that arise from the whole concept of resistance in that kind of context. The situation is morally ambiguous to their best degree. Now, Sartre had an awful lot to say about this and he was listening to. He was a special person, in some ways a very privileged person in society. A person whose background was very privileged. A person who had the most marvelous education that was available in France. And one's got to say he simply came out on top. He was a super great intellectual performer. But of course, there were things that he didn't know he would be thinking on his feet talking off the cuff and saying some wonderful things. But there were an awful lot of things that he simply didn't know and he was getting away with it. Because in substantial measure, what was happening was that there was an audience that was simply listening. A rather passive audience that would then go away, but it wasn't attacking, or indeed particularly defending, Sartre. And what I'm wanting to argue is that Sartre would have been given quite a wonderful money if in fact he had been facing some real specialists who had data, who really knew what they were talking about. Not because they were thinking fast on their feet, but they were patting out the kind of empirical investigation about behaviour of people and how people think, for example, to behave. That would make all the difference to the strength of their arguments so that they wouldn't be speaking with their heads in the closet, or anyway, they would be speaking with their feet firmly on the ground. Now, it would be difficult against somebody like Sartre because he was regarded as a tremendous authority because he really was recognised as such a brilliant person. But nonetheless, one's got to say, there is something slightly dangerous about being an intellectual authority, and that is that once you acquire tremendous authority as a thinker, this has a very broad halo effect when people think that you're really just a great thinker. So never mind the discipline we're talking about, you just ask somebody a question, and if it's fast enough on his feet, they'll give a plausible answer. Potentially extremely dangerous. It may actually have no idea whatsoever what he's talking about, but he's quite clever enough to know what sorts of noises to make in order to get people on his side. I should say it's a kind of a side in all of this, that the sort of character that I'm just speaking about was very familiar to the immortal Plato who thought that there was nobody quite so dangerous on the planet as the orator, the rhetorician, the serious speechmaker, the one who's fantastically good at it. Well, what's so wonderful is this, the job of the orator is to persuade people with speech. Well, the orator, the very good orator, is good at persuading people by speech. Now there are all sorts of ways of persuading people by speech that have got nothing whatsoever to do with having the truth. I have got nothing whatsoever to do with producing a valuable document. No, sometimes, by the way, the truth can really get in the way, because if people didn't want the truth, they would not accept the conclusion you're wanting to put. What's the word? The last thing you want to tell them is the truth, so you lie through your teeth, but there are very persuasive people who lie through their teeth. The main reason for Plato, one of the main reasons why Plato is highly sceptical about democratic politics was that it gave power to the plausible speaker. We have, one or two examples, very recently, in the case of Brexit, where really plausible speakers have been lying through their teeth, but they've been doing it. Pawsible. Pawsible. The outcome is that people have been saying yes to the terrible conclusions that have been drawn from the falsehoods that were told, and the country's political troubles can suddenly be hugely magnified. So, that class of person is very dangerous. It's particularly dangerous, I must say, in relation to the kinds of things I've been talking about from the start. Because one of the things that traditionally one learns in universities, very sadly we no longer teach this, is the ability to argue persuasively on both sides of an argument. This was a characteristic of medieval education in universities. Any fool can argue for a position that they believe in, a really clever person is the one who can argue persuasively for a position they're going to be rubbish. So, it's a major intellectual achievement that is acquired by the students of universities in preceding generations, that they learn the art, the subject is known as disputation. The sheer art of disputation, the sheer art of arguing in order to tell the way. Not to get at the truth, but to get people to think they've got the truth. Now, this makes a public intellectual, it's a very dangerous course, because a public intellectual is in power an intellectual who's got public, which would suggest it is an intellectual who's learned the art of persuasion by speech, and then proceeds to talk to the public. One's got to pray that such a person has got to sound moral values. Well, that's my first paragraph. I now want to get onto my second paragraph. What concerns a change that has taken place, a major, major change that has taken place in the past few decades, I would say, are not going to get that very well. It's made a huge difference to the role of the public. It's to do with media, the mediatisation of speech. What effect does that have on a public intellectual? I speak as somebody who I swear never used as overhead in my life. Let me start this matter of media by going back to the field of the Enlightenment, and particularly the French Enlightenment, although the German Enlightenment did produce some spectacular examples, especially in Berlin. Scotland is the third of the great nations of the Enlightenment. One of the characteristic features of the French Enlightenment was the salon, and the person who ruled the salon was, won't I always a woman? The salon, yeah. In a way, the great heroines of heroes of the French Enlightenment, most formidable women, you needed to be formidable if people like also, and Voltaire, and company, most scary work, were sitting there, having onto your words. What happens in the case of the salon is that there is a meeting in a woman's space in her house in the parlour, that's to say the room in which conversations take place. This is where one speaks to people. In the salon, there are no monologues. The salon is there for a conversation that takes place. The salonier, week by week, researches the material for the salon of the following week. She sets the subject, she decides how it should be divided up, and she thinks of a thought, who she will invite to make introductory comments and so on and so forth, and she guides the audience and she keeps it under some sort of control. This is a meeting that takes place in her space, because it's her parlour, and so she sets the rules for the whole thing. The salon is a feminine space, and a most importantly defined space of the French Enlightenment, which I think would have been a movement of a very different character. It had not been for the salon, everybody who was anybody, the front right, the second right, the third right, the fourth right of the French Enlightenment attended salon, one salon or another. But you have to be careful, because the various saloniers were very proprietorial for their own salon, and indeed would take it as downright treachery if somebody who attended their salon would then go to another one. So, Madame Boufflee would do her absolute utmost to make sure that the folk complained that her salon did indeed stay with her and did not go to the salon of saying that it was a domestic asset. So, we've got a particular space in which conversations are going to take place, and it's a quite different space than the space that I've been talking about so far. This is quite, especially and deliberately designed to be a private space, not a public space, and not just any old private space, but it's a family private space. This is where the woman is most at home. Pretty well, as I think I said just before, almost everybody who attended the meetings of the salon were men. But it's interesting, there is a world out there, a public world, and it operates according to its own rules, there are ways you do behave, there are ways you don't behave, end of story. And especially these spaces of the salon are to be contrasted with the space of court, where there is courtly behaviour and there is a really thick rule book, I'm speaking about Paris now, a really thick rule book that tells you how you may behave at court. Everybody knows that when you are walking out of a room in which there is royalty, you walk out of a room backwards, so you should not be telling your back or royalty. It's not a part of what that is, that it's indeed in the user manual for those who spent time at court, but the thing is that that was an utterly different space from the space of the salon. You couldn't hold the salon at court the way you could in the common. And when we talk about different spaces or spaces of different kinds, I think the different kinds have got to be articulated in terms of the rules that govern those spaces, how they may or may not be used, what may or may not be distributed in these spaces. In somewhat the same way that I could speak about physical space, let's say there is a visual space in which there is a well-known geometry about physical space. We make a distinction between the space that I know by looking on the world, seeing the things that one can see because it's got properties that make them visible, and contrast that with a tangible space. There is a space that I know, not because I can see it, not because I can feel it, I can touch it, I can feel the edge. And I know things about the tangible space, which are totally different from the things that I know about visible space. I might be there, but there is a totally different geometry from visible space from tangible space. And in a very analogical way, in an interesting way, I've got to say that kind of thing about the sort of space that you can say describes the court, the royal court, the sort of space that is a public space and the sort of space that is the space of the Salon. And one leaves the space and its rules outside, so when the people, when the members of the Salon come in, they simply adopt a different kind of rule of behaviour. What's crucial in distinguishing the space of the royal court from the space of the Salon is that in the royal court social status is everything. This very thick robot that I was speaking about makes it clear, for example, that you do not initiate a conversation with somebody of a higher social status than you are. You wait until you're spoken to and then you respond, but that's just one thing. There are also indications, depending on the gap on the distance of status of the one to the other, that the person in the royal status does not contradict the one in the other, but rather says yes. There is an increasing enthusiasm saying yes, depending on how great the distance in social status is between the one in the other. But that's how you define one kind of space. Another kind of space then is in the Salon. What about that? Who speaks to whom? Well in the first instance it's actually the Salon, yeah, who gets things going and invites somebody to speak. And then there will be a response. And the point is that there were members of the aristocracy who would be at Salon. I think it may be that in all the major Salons there were at least some aristocrats. But the aristocratic status of the member of the Salon was totally irrelevant to his behaviour in the Salon. Somebody says something and offers a thesis, a proposition and defends it, that's to say, produces an argument. And then somebody is invited to respond and the response does not take into account the social status of the first people or the second. The question is, does the person who makes the response have a decent argument in reply to that? So the only question is, how good are the arguments from the table? So this, in a sense, is a super democratic setup. There might well be a pecking order, but the pecking order is defined in terms of the intellectual quality of the person who is doing the talking. I said it all the time. How well is he responding if he's been put under attack? Does he know how to defend himself? In the court, if you are criticised by somebody of a higher status, your response can only be, yes, yes, three times more. Of course in the Salon it's the opposite. The opposite will be, no, you are wrong. The following propositions in your premises are false or they are highly contestable and this is me now about to contest them. Now, what we're talking about is not the kind of performance that you would have heard from a service-oriented public intellectual. Bertrand Russell stands before a large crowd and speaks on behalf of CND. He gives reasons why the bond should be abolished, actually a unilateral settlement. The large, large crowd just cheers as nobody is going to make a speech in response. What you've got from Bertrand Russell, therefore, is simply a monologue that space is designed to have somebody of tremendous prestige, tremendous authority, a real public, a real public intellectual. I now think old fashioned says, talking to his audience and not just talking to them. I would say even talking down to them because he's able to disregard whatever arguments he might suppose any of them have got against something that he is saying. So there is no sense of equality here. It's only speaking down, somebody with the authority of a public intellectual speaking down to his audience. Nobody speaks down to anybody in the salon of the French Enlightenment. Everybody speaks on a level to everybody else because everybody is speaking with a voice of reason, presenting a proposition backed by a reason, attacking that proposition and backing the attack by a reason. It's always a question of rationality and somebody's arguments are going to prove to be strong enough. It's able to survive rational power. Now this means that the intellectuals are speaking to each other on the same level and such respect as an intellectual is due, is due to him purely because his arguments are so good. Now the reason I'm saying these things is that I think that the context of the public intellectual has changed quite considerably in recent decades. I became really aware of this several decades back while listening to an interview with the then Prime Minister. The Prime Minister, I have to say, a very, very clever man, very clever, with barely allowed to finish a single sentence. As soon as the interviewer heard something that she thought was questionable, was contestable, she let in to contest it even if the point had not even begun to be developed. There was no opportunity. So what's happening, you see, is that the other, the person being interviewed, has just been treated slightly at a no higher level than possibly at a lower level than the one who's asking you the questions. This is, if anything, the reversal of the rules I was speaking about earlier. But now what we have got is something slightly different still, with which I'm not half as familiar as I thought to be, but it's not going to stop me. We have communication to which everybody has access. It's not just a matter of there being media, as a result of which we can gain access to messages, to information that we would not otherwise be able to access. It's that we have gained access to this, to the media, to the information. We can then react, we can then respond to the person who put out the messages in the first place. So that we've got a media that is not a one-way system, a one-way means of communication. It's a two-way means of communication. And in that sense, it is a great deal more like a conversation than it is when, for example, Jean Paul Soutt stands on the steps of the soap gun and lectures the Swazolwita about their likely next move on behalf of the real democratisation of the University of Paris. The situation then is really quite transformed. And all of this, I would say, which is media-led, is a democratisation of the sort of job that was once being done by the public intellectual. And I think I want to say several things about this. No, I don't. Instead of saying several things, I'll say a few things about it. One of them is that, in a way, I find this transformation of the mode of employment of the public intellectual absolutely delightful in relation to philosophical activity through the millennia. Going back to Plato, it is said that since Plato, all of philosophy has been a footnote to Plato. So he's the founder of all this. His writings, people are all, not quite all, but people are all, his writings that have come down to us are in the form of dialogues. That's interesting. He did not write philosophical monographs. What he produces are not monographs, but conversations. Admittedly, usually somebody is dominating the conversation, but normally it is actually a conversation. It is thought that from the serious intellectual issues that people should be discussing. Well, they really should be discussing. That's the word that's important, a conversation taking place. And the form of the dialogue, which is used so successfully by Plato, subsequently used by, for example, Cicero, and Enlightenment times who have barkly using the form of dialogue. It was because of a sense that certain kinds of intellectual activity should be carried out in the form of social activity. It's not just one person talking to another, but one person talking with another. So there is a new twin throne. And in that sense philosophy has always been there, providing a sort of model that mediatisation is now providing for the public intellectual. The other thing I want to say, and I guess it's my last point, is that I think there's something really good and something healthy about what has been taking place. In this sense that I'm minded to support a form of Darwinism in this area. This is Rick Dawkins, a great field, but I am now going to use Darwinism in a slightly more methodological sense. Darwin was into the idea of the survival of the fittest. I'm minded to say that the sorts of problems that I was outlining at the start of this talk fit Darwin, suit Darwin, very well indeed, with talking about issues that are contestable and, indeed, heavily contested, where there is no simple, straightforward answer if there was. Well, we'll be able to talk about it, we'll just go to the answer and move on from there. But no, always whatever you say in certain areas can be contested. How does one progress? The answer is that people on one side and on the other put forward their arguments in defence of their possessions and then listen to the response that comes to them. So we push out our little cup of shell about whatever topic it is, the way I'm doing with you this evening, and it might sink, it might stay afloat, it might go somewhere interesting, and it depends on the response to it, whether it keeps going and gets somewhere interesting, or whether it just cleans sinks. And what that's to say is that having got a bright idea what one should do is indeed put it into the public domain so that it is analysed and properly critiqued and you participate defending it when it comes under attack if you think you can defend it. And you may succeed in defence, you may fail in defence, but if in the end it turns out that your opponents have got stronger arguments than you have, then, well, your idea of having your hopes might just as well sink if the idea that you've put out doesn't work, then that's probably something else instead. So that we have got, I think, adoption of survival of the fittest, even at the level of our ideas, not just in the scientific media in which Darwin himself was operating. So there is something, I think, really healthy in this process of democratisation. And on the basis that it's going in that direction, not the opposite world towards something that's got something rather tyrannical attached to it, I think that there's something rather healthy happening in the field of the concept of the public intellectual. Thank you.