Abstract
Although intellectuals have been a part of the cultural landscape, it is in post-conflict societies, such as those found in Kosovo and Bosnia, that there has arisen a need for an intellectual who is more than simply a social critic, an educator, a man of action, and a compassionate individual. Enter the hyperintellectual. As this essay will make clear, it is the hyperintellectual, who through a reciprocating critique and defense of both the nationalist enterprise and strong interventionism of the International Community, as well as being a man of action and compassionate and empathic insider, strives to create a climate of understanding and to enlarge the moral space so as to reduce the divisiveness between opposing parties. In this way the hyperintellectual becomes a catalyst for the creation of a democratic culture within the civil societies of Kosovo and Bosnia.
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Notes
See Arjun Appadurai (2006:117–118).
Posner (2003: 31) introduces this distinction between oppositionality and opposition. An important element of the former is a sense of moral “homelessness,” something that Theodor Adorno refers to when he writes: “It is a part of morality not to be at home in one’s home” (1974: 39). I take oppositionality to be indicative of a willingness or an urge to search for that which is morally reasonable.
Amsterdam and Bruner (2000: 23).
See Dragović-Soso (2002: 130–131).
Compassion [is] ...a state of mind that is nonviolent, nonharming, and nonaggressive. It is a mental attitude based on the wish for others to be free of their suffering and is associated with a sense of commitment, responsibility, and respect towards the other” (The Dalai Lama and Cutler 1998: 114).
I am grateful to Šaćir Filandra and Enes Karić (2004) for their excellent biography of Adil Zulfikarpašić.
Zulfikarpašić contends that a Bosniac might very well be someone other than a Muslim, a clear reference to his political and ideological notion of an “open Bosniac identity.” He offered a clear expression of this notion in a 1962 article: “But everything suggests that the Bosniacs of all three faiths have become aware that a united Bosnia is the best solution, in the interests of the Muslims, but also of the Serbs and Croats living there” (Zulfikarpašić 1962: 15).
Here I draw upon Kwame Anthony Appiah’s account of cosmopolitanism as communicative and associative (2006). Cosmopolitanism, for Appiah, “shouldn’t be seen as some exalted attainment: It begins with the simple idea that in the human community,...we need to develop habits of coexistence: Conversation in its old meaning of living together, association. And conversation in its modern sense [actual discourse], too” (xix).
Bremer refers to trade unions, political parties, and professional organizations as the “social ‘shock absorbers’” that “help cushion the individual from an overpowering government” (2006: 12).
Autonomy is the capacity to be a self-legislating agent who takes responsibility for his or her actions.
See Paddy Ashdown’s 28 January 2005 Speech and his 28 January 2005 “Decision Enacting the Statute of the City of Mostar.” Both available from World Wide Web (http://www.ohr.int).
Feinberg (1983). Legal paternalism. (In R. Sartorius (Ed.), Paternalism, (pp. 3–18). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.)
Martin Marty points out that “one of the problems with tolerance within pluralism is that those who tolerate often have the power or the will to remake the Other into some manageable image. Hospitality permits—indeed, it insists on—regarding the Other as being really different” (2005: 124). In other words, tolerance allows the dominant to “put up” with the Other.
Granted, the harm created by indifference is potentially greater than that caused by hatred, primarily because of its indiscriminateness (Veteslesen 1994: 252–253); but hatred has a certain directness to its harm that indifference does not possess.
Vetelesen notes that Nazi ideology encouraged the closing of not only the public space within Germany, but also the moral space, which “assumed the form of a suppression of the emotional capacities in each of them” (1994: 9).
See Louden 1992: 152–153.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Professor Dzemal Sokolovic for inviting me to present a draft of this paper at the 2006 Democracy and Human Rights in Multiethnic Societies seminar sponsored by the Institute for Strengthening Democracy in Bosnia.
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Conces, R.J. The role of the hyperintellectual in civil society building and democratization in the Balkans. Stud East Eur Thought 59, 195–214 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-007-9028-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-007-9028-5