Intellectual Biography: Gossip or Illumination?

Reflections On Jerry Z. Muller's Professor of Apocalypse

I.

“Those who cannot attack the thought, attack the thinker.” - Paul Valery

Although I did my Masters in History, I switched to Theology for my doctorate. I love history, especially the history of ideas, and am particularly enamored of meta-history or historiography: the theories about history that different thinkers have developed over the ages (From Herodotus and Thucydides to Ibn Khaldun to Vico to Walter Benjamin to Carlo Ginzburg). But one thing that frustrated me about the discipline is that you mostly have to contextualize intellectuals as products of their time instead of distilling and evaluating whatever wisdom they might have to offer, regardless of context. To say the obvious, historians have a historicist bias (a belief that the the most important thing you can say about an idea is how it developed in its time.) I found this historicist bias particularly irritating when studying Jewish texts in various institutions influenced by the 19th Century Germanic school known as Wissenschaftes Judentums (the scientific study of Judaism)—for, it seemed to me, to put religious ideas at a far remove from my own spiritual life.

I wanted to have ideas myself, not just write about how X influenced Y, which often felt both too reductive and too stand-off-ish, so I went to Theology, which, for all its incoherence and strangeness as a discipline allowed for more leeway. To this day, it’s Leo Strauss’s and Martin Heidegger’s ideas that mostly interest me—on their own merits—not their lives. But I am also interested in their lives and the question of the relationship between life and thought. Over time, I’ve become less strident in my reaction to what I used to think was just middle-brow gossip for people too lazy to spend the time actually reading the thinkers themselves. I now see an appreciation for history and biography as part of being a balanced person and thinker.

II.

Still, one of the difficulties of focusing on the biographies of intellectuals is that it can feel shallow or even cynical, reductive, a way of profaning what is holy in a work, or cutting it back down to human size. I suppose, though, that this tendency to see philosophers primarily as people ruled by psychology and sociology and history, rather than as minds and spirits that broke out of their fetters to touch on insights of enduring concern, which I see as cynical—and which Nietzsche might see as an example of ressentiment—might just be a necessary protection against delusions of grandeur and intoxication. Often, we cannot separate the profound from the base, and the same insights that can open up the soul to heaven can be used to lead us into hell. Our genius has a kind of radical evil to it. And when you zero in on anyone, you see that the selfsame qualities that make them charming can make them grotesque.

I found myself coming to these thoughts while reading Jerry Z. Muller’s excellent biography of Jacob Taubes, Professor of Apocalypse. Despite my above reservations about the project of intellectual biography, I found the book to be meaningful and stirring, leaving me with a feeling of tremendous awe, but also sadness. If art is “the promise of happiness,” (not the fulfillment of happiness) the book is a work of art, because it promises a happy future in which I might process its teaching. In the case of Taubes, who seems to have been, in some ways, more of a superficial thinker than his friends, mentors, and peers, I found the genre of intellectual biography well-suited. That is because, ultimately, what Taubes has to teach me is mainly the cautionary lesson of his life. I’ve read and enjoyed Taubes’s books, but they are not so memorable or hard-hitting that his life becomes less relevant.

Thus, a biography of Taubes is a kind of edge case for testing the question of how much we should value a thinker’s thought vs. their life. In some ways, the book confirmed my intuition that biography is only relevant in lieu of ideas. The best way to insult someone is to read their biography, which gives one the illusion of being superior to the other person by getting to cast judgment on their life. Then again, Taubes also lived an exceptionally colorful life; many intellectuals’ lives are boring by comparison. Part of what makes Taubes a terrible person and a great artist is his propensity for drama and conflict. He turned his own life into something of an epic.

III.

Taubes was mentally ill. Many of his destructive behaviors can be explained by his struggles with bipolar disorder. Yet what is mental illness? What keeps us from applying the concept of mental illness to any thinker whose behaviors fall outside the normal distribution of human existence? Would Heidegger’s Nazism or his affairs be any more excusable or understandable if we were to say that he struggled with depression? When we go back further in time, the concept of mental illness becomes even more tendentious. Did Napoleon have a Napoleon complex? Many great thinkers are mentally ill by some definition, but why is that relevant from the standpoint of thinking? Either the thought is good or it is not. Perhaps philosophy itself is a kind of pathology, in which case the invocation of mental illness serves to discredit the endeavor altogether. The lesson is implied: Had Socrates had the right meds he wouldn’t have gone around asking people inappropriate questions about their views on justice. He would have been content to “go along to get along.”

IV.

My take-aways from reading a long biography of Jacob Taubes are mostly at the level of life advice, not intellectual content (although I found the content riveting):

1. Pursue a life of balance and moderation. Eschew drama.

2. Intensity, personal or political, has more downside than upside.

3. Messianic zeal is probably foolish and destructive.

4. Charm and charisma are not good indicators of a moral life.

5. Diversity of friends and social contexts is a recipe for both creativity and loneliness.

6. The relationship between Jewish and Christian theology remains under-examined and has been made even more difficult by the Holocaust.

7. Ignorance is bliss. But for those of us who cannot choose ignorance, try to offset the dangers of valorizing intellectualism by deliberately spending time with and serving non-intellectuals.

8. Most radicals, especially those who profess egalitarian ideals, are self-serving. Be careful of elites who position themselves as spokespeople for the everyman.

9. The culture wars on university campuses in the ‘60s and ‘70s, in the U.S. and Europe, make today’s kerfuffles seem lightweight.

10. If Western leftist intellectuals of a previous generation could justify Maoism and Stalinism, don’t be surprised by what they might welcome tomorrow.

11. We still have no idea what antisemitism is or why it is, but it is impossible to debate it without causing a frenzy, because it’s a phenomenon that is fundamentally political and politicized; ironically, antisemitism is the opposite of a unifying cause. I find myself, personally, drawn to Judaeo-Pessimism (a belief in the transhistorical endurance of antisemitism).

12. We should reward and help people who are creative thinkers even when, or especially when, their offering is not articles or books, but something more ethereal like being a cultural force or a connector or a muse. (Taubes published nearly nothing in his lifetime, yet was an inspirational teacher and mentor to many). Tenure or patronage on the basis of publishing will exclude many great minds from getting discovered and making their mark.

13. Bureaucracies reduce variance, keeping out eccentrics like Taubes, for better and for worse. Taubes likely would not get an academic job today and would probably be fired immediately for all kinds of violations of ethical code.

14. “Redemption through Sin” (Scholem) is more often than not just the “Banality of Evil” (Arendt).