Or maybe a humanist …

… The last intellectual | The fertile mind of Lionel Trilling. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Lionel Trilling (1905–75) was, in the words of Adam Kirsch, the editor of Life in Culture: Selected letters, “an intellectual, a thinker about society, politics, and ideas”. Trilling, too, thought himself an intellectual. On December 16, 1953, he explained the term to an enquirer from Oxford. It “isn’t a word that charms me, but it is, in this country at least, rather forced on one. I use it with much of the sense of ‘intelligentsia’ in it”. He added: “Maybe we should say clercs!”, again suggesting the language’s inhospitality to the offending noun, even in its American variety. He elaborated impishly “that intellectuals are those people whom those of my students who aspire to be intellectuals call intellectuals!” When, in the preface to Beyond Culture(1965), Trilling spoke of New York intellectuals, he was remembering a TLS reviewer who had said one of his books was mostly addressed to a narrow class of New York intellectuals “as judged by [my] own brighter students in Columbia”. In his response, Trilling instinctively turned to the differences in “intellectual temperament” between educated Englishmen and educated Americans. The noun “intellectual” occurs frequently in the letters. It suggests a broader range of interests than “critic” and presupposes some public activism, though in England, and in American academic circles, Trilling is mainly known as a critic, once an admired species.