This article uses the career of an individual scholar as a platform to explore the complex relationship between knowledge and the persona of the knower. During his career between the 1920s and the 1940s, the Swedish philosopher Einar Tegen (1884–1965) shifted the trajectory of his academic life from a solitary thinker, focused on seclusion, introspection, and detachment from the outer world, to a pioneer in interdisciplinary scholarship and an academic public intellectual. The article analyses the masculinity constructions that were associated to these knowledge positions, how the gendered relationships of private life modified Tegen’s scholarly persona, and the role of travel and international exchanges in the shaping of scholarly self-conceptions.