Attempting partisan engagement can destroy the critical gap that gives intellectuals their value.

Evidence

But what is often forgotten in the desire to purge the phrase “activist intellectual” of its oxymoronic connotations is that intellectuals are already actors, although in a very special sense. The intellectual is always engaged in symbolic action, which involves the externalization of his thought in any number of ways. “Men of ideas” are noteworthy only when their ideas are communicated to others through one medium or another. The critical edge of intellectual life comes largely from the gap that exists between symbol and what for want of a better word can be called reality. Paradoxically, by attempting to transform themselves into the agency to bridge that gap, they risk forfeiting the critical perspective it provides. What usually suffers is the quality of their work, which degenerates into propaganda. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 74

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Inverts the common assumption that more political engagement makes the intellectual more relevant; the gap between symbol and reality is the very source of critical power, and closing it produces propaganda.
• XREF: The symbol-reality gap framing prefigures the Frankfurt School’s later critique of instrumental reason and the culture industry; also echoes the Adorno-Benjamin debates Jay will discuss later in the book. — connects to: Political engagement creates an irresolvable tension for leftist intellectuals seeking critical distance. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 73; Moral and political engagement can drain the creative source that justified it — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 493

Broader Connections

• Moral and political engagement can drain the creative source that justified it #corroborates (0.88) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 493
• Political engagement creates an irresolvable tension for leftist intellectuals seeking critical distance. #corroborates (0.85) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 73