I’m not as smart as Noam Chomsky or Norman Finkelstein or my father Herbert Marcuse or my brother Michael. I’m probably smarter than some other people, but what does that mean?

What is intelligence? What is its value? Is there one scale of intelligence or many? And of all the things the mind does, does it make sense to say the success with which they are done is a measure of intelligence? Tying one’s shoes? Hugging a crying child? Contemplating the night sky? Wiping one’s butt? Doing the dishes? Making love? Eating a fig? Do those activities require intelligence? A high IQ? Are they of less value than activities that supposedly do require a high IQ? One can comfort a crying child well or awkwardly and some people have that capacity “naturally;” others don’t. Is the competent hugger of a crying child more “intelligent” than the incompetent hugger?

Is the best hunter in a tribe of hunters and gatherers the most “intelligent,” or rather the most sensitive to their environment, the most intuitive, most capable of identifying with the animal that is hunted, the most observant? Does anyone ask how “intelligent” Rembrandt was, or Vermeer, or for that matter van Gogh? No one cares.

These days we talk about “intelligence” and who is and who is not, casually, as if “intelligence” is one thing and what that one thing is is somehow self-evident.

The mental capacity that is mobilized in an encounter with a world that is direct and sensuous we do not generally think of as “intelligence.” We have a vague idea that “intelligence” is facility with juggling concepts and data and information; the concept having been arrived at by a process of abstraction from immediacy, from the sensuous; data having been selected on the basis of a concept; and information having been extracted from direct unmediated experience, selected and corralled based on conceptions. This facility, even if it had a name, even if people wondered about who had it and who didn’t, has not always been placed at the apex of a pyramid representing the value placed on capacities of the human mind. In the centuries before science as a method of comprehending the world claimed preeminence and proceeded to use mathematics to measure and quantify phenomena and before the world was transformed by the scientific method into what is measurable and calculable and therefore exploitable, the encounter with what was known and the speculation about what was unknown was the domain of religion. Knowledge was embodied in myths and stories recited and sung. What would be the point of asking whether the prophet who spoke with the voice of God or the poet who, accompanied by a lyre, could sing wonderfully for hours of heroes, gods, and demigods was the “most intelligent?” These days we marvel at the “intelligence” of the winners of the Nobel Prize in physics and chemistry, and........

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