Thought requires active engagement with a modifying cultural environment to be real

Evidence

One could say therefore that the historical personality of an individual philosopher is also given by the active relationship which exists between him and the cultural environment he is proposing to modify. The environment reacts back on the philosopher and imposes on him a continual process of self-criticism. It is his “teacher”. This is why one of the most important demands that the modern intelligentsias have made in the political field has been that of the so-called “freedom of thought and of the expression of thought” (“freedom of the press”, “freedom of association”). For the relationship between master and disciple in the general sense referred to above is only realised where this political condition exists, and only then do we get the “historical” realisation of a new type of philosopher, whom we could call a “democratic philosopher” in the sense that he is a philosopher convinced that his personality is not limited to himself as a physical individual but is an active social relationship of modification of the cultural environment. When the “thinker” is content with his own thought, when he is “subjectively”, that is abstractly, free, that is when he nowadays becomes a joke. The unity of science and life is precisely an active unity, in which alone liberty of thought can be realised; it is a master-pupil relationship, one between the philosopher and the cultural environment in which he has to work and from which he can draw the necessary problems for formulation and resolution. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1254

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘democratic philosopher’ as one whose personality is an active social relationship of modifying the cultural environment, not a private individual possession.
• XREF: Subjective-thought-as-joke is Gramsci’s critique of abstract intellectualism, paralleling the reader’s critical-theory concern with representation and material conditions. — connects to: thought becomes a commodity when public opinion reaches a certain state; Marginality from the world undercuts the rootedness art and thought require — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 290; Interiorizing culture requires devouring it as inorganic nature — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 1056 (+7 more)