Reflections on Art, Thought, and Earthly Life
Fact vs. Fiction.— No one thinks or invents anything important due to the influence of alcohol or other drugs. But everyone who feels an immoderate attachment to a drug of choice has a vested interest in telling himself that these artificial intoxicants enhance thought and inventiveness. And every attachment to a drug of choice is an immoderate attachment.
Luck vs. Intention.– Good artists and, far less often, good theorists, may occasionally wander into a material windfall by way of their ideas. This is all well and good, and one can even feel a certain empathetic pleasure at a sincere spiritual worker’s earthly good fortune — unless and until one sees evidence of the danger of such dumb luck, namely that it so often comes to be mistaken, in the beneficiary’s mind, for a judgment or a standard, and thence for a reason. The moment, however, that a man pursues his thoughts, be they artistic, religious, or theoretical, with the intention of gaining material reward or advancement, one has every reason to doubt the seriousness of his mind and the value of his ideas. For now the essential conversation in which he is engaged is not merely between his own soul and those of his spiritual antecedents. A new voice has entered the discussion, a voice aimed not at the beautiful or the true, but at comforts and consolations of the body, which is to say of the man himself qua temporal individual devoted to his own trivial self-preservation, like any other matter in motion. Such a fundamental conflict of interests must resolve itself one way or the other in his work; and since the man has already chosen to introduce self-protective material gain into his pursuits superfluously in the first place, it is not difficult to predict which way it will resolve itself.
The Philosopher vs. The City.— There are many ways to frame the fundamental and intractable conflict between the philosopher and society, which is to say between the philosophic life as such and the norms and demands of civic life as such. Leo Strauss, in a classroom lecture, offered the simplest and most straightforward crystallization of the conflict: Society is grounded in opinion, whereas philosophy is seeking knowledge. Any healthy society, that is, depends on the maintenance of certain unifying beliefs, often with little or no reference to logic or ultimate reality. The philosopher, by contrast, is one who is constitutionally averse to stopping at a practically convenient but provisional conclusion, or adhering to a comforting but questionable premise. A collision course is therefore inevitable, regardless of the specific virtues or shortcomings of any given society, or the idiosyncratic tendencies or methods of any given philosopher. Impiety, so to speak, is the rule, not the exception, in the relationship between the city and the philosopher.
