On Intelligence in Human Life
For us humans, intelligence is roughly the mental faculty of reasoning to solve problems, learn, and understand aspects of the world. For the many, intelligence merely serves desire; once obligatory schooling ends, the intellect is used only when the satisfaction of desire requires it. This is an understandable phenomenon, given the various vulnerabilities of the human condition. In such cases, intelligence sees no combat experience beyond the subjective and largely egoistic purposes of its possessor. It never serves on foreign soil. Its fight is limited to service in the National Guard. This is a practical rationality, which in itself is good, though it does not venture into the epistemic realm. In contrast, for the few, intelligence is applied to survey the objective world, both its material and immaterial aspects, seeking to map its features into the mind of the understanding surveyor. Such intelligence is like a foreign service cartographer who spends his career learning about the world outside his native locality.
These foreign service agents are the scientists and philosophers of the world. Theirs is an epistemic rationality. They have a sufficient reservoir of intellectual and volitional power ready and able to interpret the world in addition to managing the affairs of practical life and, moreover, they are intrigued by the non-subjective features of reality. These are the rarely found thinkers whose concerns range beyond those of practical self-interest, that existential force which occupies the full attention of the many. Again, the few are like the painter who creates for the sake of fine art, while the many are like those who paint merely for coin.