Intellectualism and Communitarianism

I feel, as someone who could reasonably call himself “intellectual”, that what a lifelong obsession with abstraction–at least with regards the abstraction of “life”– really bespeaks is an unquenched emotional thirst for a sense of existence.  It is a rebellion against, and a shelter from, tides which seek to devour me.  Existentialism was itself, paradoxically, an unanswered pursuit of the sense of existence.  This is what I feel.  And I feel that being devoured, there is another side.  It is not madness: it is health.

I think what all intellectuals crave is a simple existence where they belong.  I think in this psychological dynamic we can find the unrelenting obsession with community, itself expressed politically as left wing activism, as a community in the future, as a community for other people.

Utopia becomes an emotional ideal, where one belongs without psychological risk.  We are, obviously, all surrounded by an expanse of people.  Community is always there, in possibility.  Where not present, it can be formed, concretely.  But it requires risk, and losing a taste for risk, true risk, is a defining feature of most people who live lives apart from the mass of humanity, who rarely or never come down, who are always at a distance, even when physically or virtually present, even when frothing out clouds of words.

My work continues to bear fruit in ways I am increasingly less inclined to discuss here.