The term intellectual is used to designate that individual who dedicates an important part of his life and his professional activity to the study and critical reflection of reality..
The physical origin of the term is found in France, more precisely in the convulsed France of the 19th century, being a political conflict the driving force behind it. Known as The Dreyfus Affair, towards the end of the 19th century a French Army Captain, Alfred Dreyfus, who also had studies as a polytechnic engineer, was accused of having provided the Germans with secret documents. Found guilty by a military court, Captain Dreyfus was not only sentenced to serve life imprisonment, but was also exiled in the Devil’s Island Penal Colony, off the coast of French Guiana in South America. Dreyfus’s family, firmly convinced of the falsity of the charges, years later managed to prove Dreyfus’s innocence, meanwhile, the story comes to mind that in reality as a consequence of this very popular case, the term intellectual was coined for the first time. , designating in this way the group of characters from science, art and culture who supported and claimed in favor of the freedom of the aforementioned Captain.
Meanwhile, over the years and as a consequence of this question of being used to designate those who hold an activity in which thought and reflection prevail and rule, the term socially acquires a prestigious value.
An intellectual and that is basically what will define him as such, he makes use of the limited but at the same time numerous capacities that the human mind has, since he will meditate, reflect, analyze, search, reason, confront opposing concepts to extract from them a conclusion that clarifies the reason for this opposition, will organize ideas, project, speculate with possible scenarios and relate causes with their effects, among the most salient issues.
In addition, in the case of those public intellectuals that each country holds by birth or adoption and who have become cultural benchmarks thanks to the immense trajectory of synthesis that they have made of reality and that, of course, public opinion has accepted and adopted, when they carry out these operations of analysis or opening up to other alternatives, what they do is broaden the perspective of citizens and little by little transform the world through their words.
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