The Role of the Intellect in Society: Intellectual Erotomania, Symbolic Necrophagy, and the Ascesis of the Man of Genius

Any meditation on the role of the intellect in society confronts, within an aporetic order (ᾰ̓πορῐ́ᾱ), a constitutive and therefore irreducible paradox: precisely where the intellect attains verticality — in the created work, in demonstrated epistemic autonomy — it becomes the target of systematic predation and, ultimately, of a project of annihilation. Intellectual alterity is no longer received as a "face" that interpellates, in the Levinasian sense of the term, as an epiphany of the other, but is reduced to the condition of a resource to be confiscated, of an object of symbolic dependence that we shall call intellectual erotomania — a concept outlined in the earlier study, "In Virtue of Friendship: Life, Death and Nature. The Dance of Masks on the Stage of Postmodern Nihilism"[1] — whose structural complement is symbolic necrophagy. Through these two original theories, we capture the mechanisms by which the intellect, rather than becoming a privileged space of dialogic-existential creation, is transformed into a battlefield of vanities; an arena in which not knowledge, but domination constitutes the stakes.

Intellectual erotomania can be analyzed through the conjunction of the concept of parasocial relationship with the dynamics of symbolic capital, as articulated by Bourdieu. In the terms of the study cited: "the discourse of the one in this position, sustained with remarkable polemical constancy, derives essentially from an intellectual dependence on the other as a public entity: their discursive identity cannot be conceived autonomously, but is constituted and perpetuated in a relationship of symbiosis with the image of the other. In the absence of the other as a public reference point, the coherence and visibility of their own position would erode. Intellectual erotomania does not thus aim at affective possession, but at a form of symbolic predation in which the cultural capital, reputation, and prestige of the other are reduced to mere accessories — what in the logic of marketing would correspond to the phenomenon of brand cloning, transposed, however, onto the territory of intellectual identity. In the predator's logic, the other is not a being, but an object of identity parasitism. Their auric plasma articulates itself upon an unintegrated Jungian shadow, transforming fascinated admiration into destructive envy: the intellectual erotomaniac experiences the epistemic independence of the other as a narcissistic wound, resorting to sabotage and discrediting in order to annul the subject's autonomy. This subject — regardless of status and gender — may be a colleague, a relative, a suitor, or a mere stranger"[2].

Complementary to this, symbolic necrophagy designates the behavior by which an individual devours the substance of another, ultimately in order to neutralize the presence they perceive as threatening; in other words, attempting to substitute the original. The symbolic necrophage is one who, structurally incapable of the authentic creative act, feeds upon the core of the other to the point of psychotic and morbid encapsulation — not as an isolated act, but as a constitutive modality. This latter is, essentially, a pathology. It is therefore necessary, at this point, to distinguish symbolic necrophagy with maximum precision from several related concepts with which it risks being confused — distinctions that the present taxonomy traces as follows:

A) The Epistemic/Cultural Register (Steps 1–4)

• Step 1 — Intellectual Convergence (natural, symmetric, and involuntary phenomenon)
• Step 2 — Intellectual Affinity (assumed influence; fertile dialogue with a formative model)
• Step 3 — Cultural Affinity (communion of horizon; without dependency)
• Step 4 — Pastiche (deliberate and declared stylistic imitation; honors the source)

B) The Ethical/Deontological Register (Steps 5–7)

• Step 5 — Intellectual Appropriation (individual-discursive plane; appropriation without attribution, with or without formal modifications); Step 5b — Cultural Appropriation (collective-identitarian plane; unilateral transfer from a minority culture toward a dominant one)
• Step 6 — Direct / Structural / Mosaic Plagiarism, etc. (textual, methodological, or course-architecture theft; imposture)
• Step 7 — Paraphrasing without attribution / False-positive attribution (elusive reformulation; falsification of hermeneutic authority)

C) The Psychological/Existential Register (Steps 8–10)

• Step 8 — Intellectual Erotomania (symbolic predation of the person as a public entity; personality structure)
• Step 9 — Intellectual Parasitism (systematic extraction of resources, networks, and prestige; the host kept alive out of utility; corresponding to the mechanism of "mimetic desire" — see René Girard)
• Step 10 — Symbolic Necrophagy (malignant envy; destruction; the acute form: Single White Female Syndrome, The Traitorous Apprentice — associated, for instance, with Borderline Personality Disorder — BPD)

I. Intellectual Erotomania and Symbolic Necrophagy: A Phenomenological Map

At the base of this scale lies intellectual convergence: the phenomenon by which two minds independently arrive at similar formulations or ideas, in the absence of any relationship of mutual influence or dependency. It is a natural phenomenon, abundantly attested in the history of ideas and in the philosophy of knowledge and language; it acknowledges that certain questions are constitutive of an epoch and that human minds articulate them simultaneously, from the internal force of the same intellectual conjuncture. By its very nature, convergence is therefore symmetric and involuntary; assimilating it with any of the subsequent forms on the scale constitutes an interpretive error.

A superior step is occupied by intellectual affinity: the foundation of any paideia. It is the relationship that Buberian personalism honors in the concept of I-Thou; it represents the driving force of the intellectual tradition, which does not erode but edifies — a relationship in which the duty toward the model and freedom from it call upon one another, rather than excluding each other. Distinct from this, though related through common horizon, cultural affinity designates belonging to the same climate of ideas, to the same formative sources, without implying either dependency or imitation; neither of the two constitutes plagiarism or appropriation.

Pastiche represents the aesthetic form of this affinity: situated within the perimeter of creation, it is a stylistic imitation that honors the source and produces a culture of greater or lesser elevation. It presupposes precisely what any pathology is structurally incapable of: the capacity to dialogue with the model without absorbing it, and to surpass it without denying its paternity. Chrétien de Troyes himself, in Yvain, or the Knight with the Lion, articulated with lucidity this tension between the old and the new. Pastiche is neither appropriation nor plagiarism; it is a gesture in which epistemic humility and creative force coexist.

There follows, in ascending order of gravity, a cluster of related forms of intellectual fraud, often confused with one another precisely because each operates, in its own way, beneath the appearance of legitimacy. Intellectual appropriation — the systematic and unattributed appropriation of ideas, conceptual structures, or creative expressions belonging to other authors — constitutes, on the individual-discursive plane, the first act of fraud proper. Complementarily, cultural appropriation (Step 5b) operates on the collective-identitarian plane: the transfer of defining elements of a minority culture toward a dominant one, whereby the original meaning is decontextualized and dispossessed of its memory, and power asymmetries acquire a new form of aesthetic legitimacy — as illustrated with particular force by the case of YSL versus La Blouse Roumaine and the systematic appropriation of African vestimentary heritage on the great Western catwalks.

Plagiarism — textual appropriation without attribution, klopḗ (κλοπή) — is the classic intellectual fraud, legally and academically sanctionable. Among its principal forms are: "complete or global plagiarism, representing the integral copying of a work; direct or literary plagiarism (clone plagiarism), consisting in the faithful reproduction of a text without adequate citation; paraphrase plagiarism; self-plagiarism, meaning the reuse of one's own prior work without the institution's permission or without explicit mention; contract plagiarism, namely the commissioning of a third party for the integral or partial drafting of a work; and accidental plagiarism, generated by unintentional omissions or errors in source citation — though less grave from a moral standpoint, it constitutes a violation of the norms of scientific integrity" (Bowdoin College; Academic English UK, 2023)[3]. On the same level, though distinct in mechanism, are: mosaic plagiarism (patchwork), involving the insertion of fragments copied or superficially paraphrased from multiple sources; source-based plagiarism, implying incorrect or incomplete citation of sources; false-positive attribution plagiarism — fabrication of sources; and translation plagiarism, meaning the transposition of a text from one language to another without indicating the source.

The eighth step — and the first to engage a psychological rather than a purely deontological dimension — is intellectual erotomania, as defined in the preceding pages. Unlike the preceding forms, which target a particular intellectual product, intellectual erotomania targets the very person of the other; it is not an isolated act of fraud, but a personality structure. From intellectual erotomania there derives organically, as an operational mechanism, intellectual parasitism, which adopts the forms, aesthetics, and posture of knowledge without assuming its ethical foundation, producing what Malebranche, in De la recherche de la vérité (1674), called "knowledge through imagination". The terminal step is symbolic necrophagy: not mere extraction, but destruction; not mere vampirism, but the devouring and annihilation of the other. If the intellectual parasite requires a living host, the symbolic necrophage consumes it to the point of exhaustion and beyond — beyond even the physical death of the host — a dynamic that Chrétien de Troyes's Arthurian cycle prefigures mythically with an almost unsettling precision, especially in the figure of Laudine from Yvain.

The two concepts — intellectual erotomania and symbolic necrophagy — are, in the end, nothing but the obverse and reverse of the same coin: a corrupted relationship to the person of the other, as analyzed in the study "The Ideological Torturer and the Human Condition: Buberian Personalism as an Interpretive Paradigm in the Analysis of Manipulation"[5]. Together, they configure the map of intellectual milieus, in which knowledge is no longer seen as vocation and end in itself, but is instrumentalized in games of financial-political power — a phenomenon that, far from being a theoretical abstraction, finds concrete illustrations in institutions in Romania, such as UAIC and UMF Iași[6] — a reality in the face of which courage, discernment, and vigilance ought not to be optional, but imperative.

II. The Cosmology of the Intellect: Play, Magic, and Seduction

Nevertheless, the fundamental mission of the individual in society consists in the cultivation and development of the intellect — an attribute of human personality and the foundation of any form of existence in the world. The intellect, characterized by a diverse range of knowledge and cognitive abilities, confers upon the anima mundi a substantial ontological dimension. This property — "the intellect as seduction"[7] — demands constant investment; that is, it must be deepened and reconquered in each act of knowledge.

In the endeavor to attain such an ideal, a basic preoccupation is the maintenance of an unrestrained curiosity — not as a mere disposition, but as a virtue in the fullest sense. This represents one of the most elevated manifestations of "human nature" (Scruton, On Human Nature), preparing the ground for that mode of being-in-the-world in which wonder (thaumazein, θαυμάζειν) presents itself as the bond in the preservation of childhood's innocent curiosity. At the opposite pole, one finds the acceptance of the world and reality as an inherent condition that requires no critical examination: not peace, but anesthesia; not serenity, but abdication. Thus, curiosity, in contrast with boredom, sloth, and acedia, remains a perennial value — see the studies "Boredom as a Symbol of the Rupture from Transcendence in Medieval Philosophy and Theology" and "Acedia in Medieval Literature and Philosophy".

This being said, for contemporary man, the realization that he has time to breathe may be an overwhelming discovery. Seneca seems to speak to this point, saying: "the condition of all the busy is a miserable one, but most miserable of all is the condition of those who labor for interests that are not even their own, who adjust their sleep to the sleep of another, their pace to the pace of another"[8]. Thus, in his spiritual awakening, man realizes that the experience of encountering the other does not reduce merely to "a hand that serves and collects"[9], but is amplified through a heart that loves to give.

III. The Portrait of the Intellectual: Love and Sacrifice

An intellectual, therefore, can only be a free man; and only a free man can be a man of genius, an intellectual — for the free man submits only to nature and to the nature of God; he submits to the visible laws of a cosmos (κόσμος) without end and without beginning. Thus, with joy, through his specific piety, the struggle he conducts is not an open one with "the other" (Levinas, On the Other), against the other, but is a struggle of ideas — not from the sterile desire to impress; for the other too has the freedom to be a thinking reed, his gift being that of a complex being, equally enigmatic, who in his freedom may choose the value of good or of evil — but our intellectual finds himself in a kind of debate with himself.

His first appeal is one to silence — what a Christian would call prayer — through which he may overcome his demons; this would be his Socratic daimon, undergoing a metamorphosis; all of this, so that he might afterward offer the world the beauty from within his wisdom. The intellectual bends down and listens with "attention" (Weil, On Attention) to what the other has to say; he seems to move constantly, though he is immovable.

The intellectual is an eternal traveler: his target is the infinite, and his purpose — love; whether we speak of the love of wisdom or of the idea of beauty, his postulate is self-giving, and his "agenda" is justice. A free man can only be a just one, and a just man can only be that free man. He offers a great obeisance to the divinity, to the supreme creator, fulfilling his destiny, his calling, through his very sacrifice; for to be an intellectual means to sacrifice oneself: sacrificing the old man, renouncing preconceived ideas, social mechanisms devoid of the spirit of compassion and justice, of "the spirit of gentleness and humility" (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae). He embodies, cyclically, the function of the hermit and that of the fool.

Yet the intellectual wing is stolen; not only the elders, but the young too; not only the young, but adults — whatever they may be — lose themselves in the games of pride and power, becoming merchants of ideas, sellers of souls; not protectors of cities, not builders, not carpenters, not farmers, not cultivators. It is precisely for this reason that today we find ourselves vividly, not imaginarily, in the world of works such as The Death of Socrates (1787) by Jacques-Louis David and Dante and Virgil in Hell (1850) by Bouguereau; these paintings are already alive: reminiscences of a past-future.

Only a free man, therefore, can be a genius; for all that he thinks comes from the divine self — reason and intuition. The man of genius is the man of God; his words are as those of God, for God breathes grace from His heart into the mind of His child; the man of genius and his home are one with the world — but we do not speak of a homogeneous, uniform world without identity; nor of one eternally antagonistic; the world of the man of genius is the world of a beautiful man; just as art unites pure souls, so too are his actions: he unites life with life and separates falsehood from truth; he accepts death, transformation, but not the death of hope or of justice; he embraces cyclicality, the natural course of God's nature.

His magical practice is the final point of his readings — a risky knowledge that consumes you, but from which, with the help of the divine, you may prevail. His thirst for the spiritual and for knowledge has a primordial principle: he has come to offer knowledge; that is why he reads, for the growth and spiritual elevation of his inner and outer kin; that is why he labors. For him, there is no intellectual growth without spiritual ascent, and vice versa; he knows that the mind of man may expand only as far as his heart enlarges. This is, therefore, a divine-human marriage.

In short, the intellectual lives precisely as Marcus Aurelius teaches us: "he whom the brilliance of posthumous glory blinds does not reflect that each of those who think of him will themselves die; he himself will die soon, and so too each subsequent generation, until finally all that glory, having propagated itself through the midst of every mortal being, dies with them. But even if we suppose that those who will think of you are immortal and that the memory of your name is likewise immortal, what benefit is that to you if you have died, or even, let us say, if you are alive? What use is praise unless in connection with some temporal advantage? So, let go in time of that gift that puffs you up, which depends only on the chatter of others"[10].

IV. Cultural Relativism and the Decline of Values

Equally, we know that education, in the customary definition of the term, presupposes the transmission and accumulation of knowledge and skills within an institutionalized framework; yet it has often come to be transformed into a mere rhetorical act of captatio benevolentiae[11]. In René Girard's terms, mimetic desire, when unacknowledged, degenerates into rivalry: the other ceases to be a model and becomes an obstacle. Thus, "competitive envy" becomes established, generating structures that are recognizable clinically and culturally: The All Eve Syndrome and The Talented Mr. Ripley Syndrome designate that type of vision and relationship in which admiration is overturned into the desire for substitution. From the same maladaptive personality loop derive the Oedipus complex and the Electra complex, as well as phallic envy, reproduced socially in the crab mentality effect: the collective mechanism by which the ascension of one is sabotaged by those who cannot or will not rise.

By contrast, the intellect — in the sense that Plotinus confers upon this concept in On Beauty — is far from being a mere cognitive faculty reducible to instrumental criteria. Cultural perfection presupposes a pluridimensional development of "being," since human beings connected to the divine weigh the world in authentic experiences and honor the memory of the universe, "depository of things past and future." Yet for the protagonists of an inverted universe, what might be called culture reduces to a kind of custom: "frivolous news, hyperconsumerism, and others of the same sphere"[13]. From this, there follows an inevitable axiological impasse: "the proclamation of the equivalence of all values and of their exclusively subjective character"[14].

In this spiritually arid landscape, "religious acculturation"[15] becomes an increasingly pronounced reality; exemplified by the missionary destiny of Francis Xavier: "having arrived in Japan dressed in the habit specific to the first Jesuits, Francis was looked upon with contempt by the Japanese, who considered him a beggar, an unworthy barbarian of the lowest sort"[16]; "for one who has chosen the spiritual path, there is but a single fundamental priority — union with the divine and, through this, the attainment of a happiness that cannot be conquered"[17].

Paradoxically, Debord, with reference to the domination of "having" over "being," captures the mechanism of this alienation with unforgettable precision: "the spectator's alienation in favor of the contemplated object (…) is expressed as follows: the more he contemplates, the less he lives; the more he accepts to recognize himself in the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own existence and his own desire"[18]; and Feuerbach denounces the same decline with implacable lucidity: "but, of course, the present age… prefers the image to the thing, the copy to the original, the representation to reality, the appearance to the essence; for what is sacred to it is only illusion, while what is profane is truth"[19].

Conclusion

In the end, we profess the conviction that every human being carries a spark of universal rationality, unceasingly nourishing the telos of their own becoming and that of the community. Robert Challe explores this dynamic through narrative and polemic: for him, the reason that refuses authoritarian arbitrariness is not rebellion, but fidelity to a deeper order, inscribed in the structure of the human [Cohut, 2013; Seguin, 2013]. This is the capacity that Challe called, in another lexicon, justice toward the other as toward oneself: «La justice est la même pour tous» [Seguin, 2014]; a justice not transcribed in codes, but lived in the unmediated relationship with alterity.

Thus, contemplating works of particular depth, such as The Agony in the Garden (c. 1450–53) by Fra Angelico, documenting ourselves on the missionary work of Matteo Ricci or on the dramatic universe of Luigi Pirandello, we acquire not only linguistic and aesthetic refinement, but also a deeper understanding of the "human condition"[20] in its entirety. This is, at its core, an authentic form of resistance to the spectacle of nihilism: to remain, in the fullest and most exacting sense of the word, living thinkers.

Bibliography

1. Aurelius, M. (2019). Thoughts to Himself (p. 78). Bucharest: Ed. Saeculum. 
2. Challe, R. (2000). Difficultés sur la religion proposées au Père Malebranche. New edition based on the complete and faithful manuscript of the Staatsbibliothek of Munich, edited by F. Deloffre and F. Moureau. Geneva: Droz. Academia.edu. 
3. Debord, G. (2001). The Society of the Spectacle (ch. The Complete Separation, fragment 30). Bucharest: EST. 
4. Deloffre, F. (1995). Robert Challe et la justice. Dans M. Weil-Bergougnoux (Ed.), Séminaire Robert Challe: Les Illustres françaises. Montpellier: Université Paul Valéry. Pensee. 
5. Feuerbach, L. (1961). The Essence of Christianity (p. 21). Bucharest: Editura Științifică.
6. Malebranche, N. (1958). Œuvres complètes de Malebranche (20 vol., A. Robinet, éd.). Paris: J. Vrin. Archive.org. 
7. Paganini, G. (2005). Être déiste ou athée au début des Lumières. Dans les philosophies clandestines à l'âge classique. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. ResearchGate. 
8. Scruton, R. (2023). On Human Nature. Bucharest: Humanitas. 
9. Seguin, M.-S. (2013). Challe à la rencontre de l'autre. Dans G. Artigas-Menant, J. Cormier & D. Aïssaoui (Eds.), Robert Challe au carrefour des continents et des cultures. Paris: Hermann. doi.org. 
10. Seguin, M.-S. (2014). Le statut de la preuve dans les Difficultés sur la religion de Robert Challe. In J.-P. Schandeler & N. Vienne-Guerrin (Eds.), Les Usages de la preuve d'Henri Estienne à Jeremy Bentham. Québec: Presses de l'Université Laval. Shs.hal.science. 
11. Seneca, L. A. (2014). I Have No Other Time (p. 73). Bucharest: Editura Seneca Lucius Annaeus.

References

1. Cocei, L. I. (2024). The throne of the wise man, between the shaded refuge and the light of the sun. Anthropos. Retrieved June 25, 2026, from https://anthropos.ro/liviu-cocei-tronul-inteleptului-intre-refugiul-umbros-si-lumina-soarelui/ 
2. Hellen, N. (May 2026). In virtue of friendship: life, death, and nature. The dance of masks on the stage of postmodern nihilism [Editorial]. Oltart, no. 2(55). https://bibliotecaslatina.ro/biblioteca-slatina/revista-oltart/revista-oltart---mai-2026/ 
3. Hellen, N. (February 2026). The ideological torturer and the human condition: Buberian personalism as an interpretive paradigm in the analysis of manipulation [Editorial]. Oltart, no. 1(54). https://www.bibliotecaslatina.ro/biblioteca-slatina/revista-oltart/revista-oltart-nr.54---februarie-2026/

Categories: philosophy, theology, psychology, culture 

Genre: Interdisciplinary Essay in Philosophy of Culture, Psychoanalysis, Academic Ethics, Existential Personalism 

Reading Level: PhD / Postdoc