The Reckless Mind: Loving Wisdom Too Much
Idolatry, Tyrannophilia, Radical Politics
The Jewish term for idolatry is avodah zarah, which means strange worship. One can commit avodah zarah by worshipping alien or false gods, but one can also commit it by worshipping the one, true God in the wrong manner. Idolatry, in other words, can be the right worship of the wrong object, or the wrong worship of the right object. Both might be ways of describing “radical politics”—either the pursuit of the right ends in the wrong way or the wrong ends in the right way.
Mark Lilla, in The Reckless Mind, calls tyrannophilia (love of tyranny) the occupational hazard of philosophy. Philosophers are uniquely drawn to radical politics, in part as an overcompensation for their own powerlessness, in part out of an attraction to theoretical purity over and above a sober (empirical) analysis of the world as it is. I find in Lilla’s hypothesis an analogy to the relationship between monotheism and idolatry. Most great thinkers have been and still are anti-liberal or at least skeptical of liberalism. I’m not sure if this is quite true, but I’d venture the possibility that many of the books I’d bring to a desert island are by people who, if they had the chance, might have put me in a gulag—or at least would not have cared to protest. I’m OK with that. It’s a basic fact of life that we need to specialize and that the kind of person who devotes himself to thinking or creating is going to be imbalanced in a variety of ways. (This is, effectively, Hannah Arendt’s defense of Heidegger.)
Anecdotally, I recall meeting a young, French intellectual at a conference in Berlin in 2011 who self-identified as a “Stalinist.” It horrified me, but I was consoled knowing that this person would also never hold real power. Alain Badiou, who I once heard speak at Columbia, writes enthusiastically about Maoism. It’s worth observing which utterances in our culture are cancellable and which get shrugged away as “Continental philosophers will be Continental philosophers.”
Philosophy can go astray either in worshipping the wrong object (tyranny), but also in the way that it worships the right object (wisdom). Tyrannophilia emerges out of narcissistic self-love (“only philosophers should rule because only philosophers like us are qualified to rule”) or else a kind of “grass is always greener” fantasy about power (the more useless one feels in the cloister, the more desperate one feels to assert oneself as making a difference).
Jewish mystical tradition has it that the worship of the golden calf was the result not of disloyalty to God, but of “loving God too much” (hitlahavut Elohim harbeh). We might say the same about intellectuals who embrace, either symbolically or actually, radical politics. The tyrant is the shadow-side of the philosopher, and also a cautionary figure for those who might pursue “truth” at any cost. Tyranny might be a synonym for absolutism, which is perhaps another way of saying “loving God too much.” Meanwhile, compromise is not edifying—provoking neither worship nor false worship.
There is a saying in the Talmud that when the Temple was destroyed, so was the idolatrous urge. Likewise, we might say that when philosophy was or is destroyed, the love of tyranny goes with it. While it is tempting to seek a world that is both enchanted and tyrant-less, both philosophical and responsible, it’s probably the case that we must choose—at the cultural level—between flat, affectless, anti-philosophical liberalism and dangerous, exciting, irresponsible romanticism.
Some solve the problem by creating some circumscribed realms where philosophy can be practiced without fear of political influence, but perhaps we should think of philosophy (or spirituality)—anything that attunes us to some extra-worldly, intangible Truth—as a kind of nuclear reactor; we could use the energy, but it’s so intense that it might destroy us. If secular liberalism solves the problem by clamping down entirely, destroying the good with the bad, and illiberalism solves it in the opposite direction, by accepting so much collateral damage in the name of “awe” (in ancient languages, the word for “great” is also the word for “terrible”), are there any other alternatives? Perhaps, the non-philosophical answer is: compromise. And the psychological answer is: empathy. Appreciate that both solutions involve an important loss. Philosophers and religious people should recognize why the world suspects them of anti-worldliness; and non-philosophers and non-religious people should take seriously the testimony and experience of those who claim to know something about truth, and not simply dismiss these folks as only delusional or malign. We may disagree about where to make the trade-off, either at the federal level, local level, interpersonal level, or personal level, but we should all agree that we face trade-offs.
Neither philosophers nor non-philosophers can have it all.