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 is confronted, in an aporetic order (ᾰ̓πορῐ́ᾱ), with a constitutive and, therefore, irreducible paradox: it is precisely where the intellect attains verticality (in the work created, in demonstrated epistemic autonomy) that it becomes the target of systematic plunder and, ultimately, of a project of annihilation. Intellectual otherness is no longer received as a "face" that addresses us, in the Levinasian sense of the term, as an epiphany of the other, but is reduced to the condition of a resource to be seized, an object of a symbolic dependency which we shall call intellectual erotomania (a mechanism related to what René Girard (1961) presents as "mimetic desire") — a concept outlined in the earlier study, "In the Name of Friendship: Life, Death, and Nature. The Dance of Masks on the Stage of Postmodern Nihilism" (2026b) — whose structural complement is symbolic necrophagy. Through these two original theories, we capture the mechanisms by which the intellect, instead of becoming a privileged space of dialogic-existential creation, is transformed into a battlefield of vanities; an arena in which the stake is not knowledge but domination.

Intellectual erotomania can be analyzed by combining the concept of the parasocial relationship with the dynamics of symbolic capital, as articulated by Bourdieu. In the terms of the study cited: “the discourse of the person in this posture, sustained with remarkable polemical constancy, derives essentially from an intellectual dependency 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 other's image. In the absence of that other as a public reference point, the coherence and visibility of one's own position would erode. Intellectual erotomania does not therefore aim at affective possession, but at a form of symbolic plunder in which the other's cultural capital, reputation, and prestige are reduced to mere accessories — corresponding, in the logic of marketing, to the phenomenon of brand cloning, transposed onto the terrain of intellectual identity. In the predator's logic, the other is not a being but an object of identity parasitism. Their auric plasma is articulated on an unintegrated Jungian shadow, transforming fascinated admiration into destructive envy (the point at which, in Girard's terms, we enter "mimetic rivalry"): the intellectual erotomaniac experiences the other's epistemic independence as a narcissistic wound, resorting to sabotage and discrediting to annul the subject's autonomy. This other — regardless of status or gender — may be a colleague, a relative, a suitor, or a mere stranger” (2026b, p.8).

Complementary to this, symbolic necrophagy (the micro/individual-scale correlate of the "scapegoat" mechanism described by Girard, 1961) designates the behavior by which an individual devours another's substance in order, ultimately, to neutralize a presence experienced as threatening — attempting, in effect, to replace the original. The symbolic necrophage is one who, structurally incapable of the authentic creative gesture, feeds on the other's core until reaching psychotic and morbid encapsulation — not as an isolated act, but as a constitutive mode of being. This latter condition is, essentially, a pathology. It is therefore necessary, at this point, to distinguish symbolic necrophagy with the utmost precision from several related concepts with which it risks being confused — distinctions which the present taxonomy sets out as follows:

A) The epistemic/cultural register (levels 1–4)

Level 1 — Intellectual convergence (a natural, symmetrical, and involuntary phenomenon);
Level 2 — Intellectual affinity (acknowledged influence; fertile dialogue with a formative model); Level 3 — Cultural affinity (a shared horizon; without dependency); 
Level 4 — Pastiche (deliberate and declared stylistic imitation; honors the source);

B) The ethical/deontological register (levels 5–7)

Level 5 — Intellectual appropriation (individual-discursive plane; unattributed appropriation, with or without formal modification); Level 5b — Cultural appropriation (collective-identity plane; unilateral transfer from a minority culture toward a dominant one);
Level 6 — Direct/structural/mosaic plagiarism, etc. (theft of text, methodology, or course architecture; imposture); 
 Level 7 — Unattributed paraphrase / false-positive attribution (evasive reformulation; falsification of hermeneutic authority);

C) The psychological/existential register (levels 8–10)

Level 8 — Intellectual erotomania (symbolic predation of the person as public entity; a personality structure); 

Level 9 — Intellectual parasitism (systematic extraction of resources, networks, and prestige; the host kept alive out of usefulness; corresponding to the mechanism of "mimetic desire" — see René Girard); 

Level 10 — Symbolic necrophagy (malignant envy; destruction; its 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 influence or mutual 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 era and that human minds articulate them simultaneously, out of the internal force of the same intellectual conjuncture. Consequently, by its nature, convergence is symmetrical and involuntary; equating it with any of the scale's later forms constitutes an interpretive error.

A next rung is occupied by intellectual affinity: the foundation of any paideia (παιδεία). It is the relationship honored by Buberian personalism in the concept of I-Thou; it represents the driving force of intellectual tradition, one that does not erode but builds; it is a relationship in which duty toward the model and freedom from it call upon each other rather than excluding one another. Distinct from this, though related through a shared horizon, cultural affinity designates belonging to the same climate of ideas, to the same formative sources, without implying either dependency or imitation; neither one nor the other 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 its source and produces culture, whether more or less elevated. It presupposes precisely what is structurally inaccessible to any pathology: 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 of the Lion (c.1180), articulated with lucidity this tension between old and new. Pastiche is neither appropriation nor plagiarism; it is a gesture in which intellectual 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 under the appearance of legitimacy. Intellectual appropriation — the systematic, unattributed taking of ideas, conceptual structures, or creative expressions belonging to other authors — constitutes, on the individual-discursive plane, the first genuine act of fraud. Complementary to it, cultural appropriation (level 5b) operates on the collective-identity plane: the transfer of defining elements of a minority culture toward a dominant one, whereby original meaning is decontextualized and stripped of its memory, and asymmetries of power acquire a new form of aesthetic legitimacy — as vividly illustrated by the case of YSL versus La Blouse Roumaine, and by the systematic appropriation of African sartorial heritage on major Western runways.

Plagiarism — the unattributed textual taking, klopḗ (κλοπή) — is the classic intellectual fraud, sanctionable both juridically and academically. Among its principal forms are: “complete or global plagiarism, consisting of the wholesale copying of a work; direct or literal (clone) plagiarism, consisting of the faithful reproduction of a small or medium-length passage without proper citation; plagiarism by paraphrase; self-plagiarism, meaning the reuse of one's own prior work without institutional permission or explicit acknowledgment; contract plagiarism, meaning the commissioning of a third party to write a work in whole or in part; and accidental plagiarism, generated by unintentional omissions or citation errors — while morally less severe, it still constitutes a breach of scientific integrity” (Bowdoin College & Academic English UK, 2023). On the same tier, though mechanically distinct, are: mosaic (patchwork) plagiarism, involving the insertion of fragments copied or superficially paraphrased from multiple sources; source-based plagiarism, involving incorrect or incomplete citation of sources; false-positive attribution plagiarism — the fabrication of sources; and translation plagiarism, meaning the transposition of a text from one language to another without indicating the source.

The eighth level — and the first to engage a psychological rather than a purely deontological dimension — is intellectual erotomania, as defined in the preceding pages. Unlike the earlier forms, which target a specific intellectual product, intellectual erotomania targets the person of the other themself; it is not a single act of fraud but a personality structure. From intellectual erotomania derives organically, as an operational mechanism, intellectual parasitism, which adopts the forms, aesthetics, and posture of knowledge without assuming its ethical substance, producing what Malebranche, in De la recherche de la vérité (1674), called "knowledge through imagination" (Malebranche, 1958; see also Paganini, 2005, for the context of post-Malebranchian deism). The terminal level is symbolic necrophagy: not mere extraction, but destruction; not mere vampirization, but the devouring and annihilation of the other. Where the parasite needs a living host, the necrophage consumes it to the point of exhaustion and beyond — beyond the host's physical death — a dynamic that Chrétien de Troyes's Arthurian cycle prefigures mythically with almost unsettling precision, especially in the figure of Laudine in Yvain; not in a strictly philological sense, but an archetypal one, viewed from a continental perspective.

The two concepts — intellectual erotomania and symbolic necrophagy — are, in the end, nothing but the two faces of the same coin: a distorted relation 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" (2026a, pp.9-11). Together, they map out the terrain of intellectual environments in which knowledge is no longer seen as a vocation and an end in itself, but is instrumentalized in games of financial-political power — a phenomenon which, far from being a theoretical abstraction, finds concrete illustrations in institutions in Romania, such as UAIC and UMF Iași — a reality before 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 the human personality and a foundation of every form of existence in the world. The intellect, characterized by a diverse range of knowledge and cognitive abilities, confers upon the soul of the world (anima mundi) a substantial ontological dimension. This property — "the intellect as seduction" (Cocei, 2024) — demands a constant investment, one that must be deepened and reconquered in every act of knowing.

In striving toward such an ideal, a fundamental concern is the maintenance of unceasing curiosity — not as a mere disposition, but as a virtue (aretê, ἀρετή) in the fullest sense. This represents one of the highest manifestations of "human nature" (Scruton, 2023, pp.59-63), preparing the ground for that mode of "being" in the world in which "wonder" (thaumazein, θαυμάζειν) serves as the bond preserving the innocent curiosity of childhood. At the opposite pole lies the suggestion that one should accept the world and reality as an inherent condition not requiring critical examination — not peace, but anesthesia; not serenity, but abdication. Thus, curiosity, in contrast to boredom, laziness, 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".

That said, for contemporary man, the realization that he has time to breathe can be an overwhelming discovery. Seneca seems to speak to this when he says that “the condition of all busy people is a sad one, but that the saddest condition of all belongs to those who toil for interests that are not even their own, who fit their sleep to another's sleep and their pace to another's pace” (Seneca, 2014, p. 73). Thus, in his spiritual awakening, man comes to realize that the experience of encountering the other is not reducible merely to "a hand that serves and collects" (Levinas, 1969, 36-38), but is amplified by a heart that loves to give.

III. Portrait of the intellectual: love and sacrifice

An intellectual, then, can only be a free man; and only a free man can be a man of genius, an intellectual — for the free man submits to nothing but nature and the nature of God; he submits to the visible laws of a cosmos (κόσμος) without end and without beginning. Thus, with joy, through his particular piety, the struggle he wages is not an open struggle with "the other", against the other, but a struggle of ideas — precisely as Levinas announces: “to approach the Other in conversation means to receive his expression, in which, at every moment, he exceeds the idea a thought might have wished to contain of him. It is, therefore, to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the self” (Levinas, 1969, p. 51) — which would reduce him to itself — not out of a hollow 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. Our intellectual, rather, finds himself in a kind of debate with himself.

His first call is to silence — what a Christian would call prayer — through which he may overcome his demons; this would be his Socratic daimon, passing through a metamorphosis (sophia, σοφία); all so that he may later offer the world the beauty drawn from his practical wisdom (phronesis, φρόνησις). The intellectual leans in and listens attentively to what the other has to say — since "attention is the purest form of generosity" (Weil, 1942, p. 18) — he seems to move constantly, though he is unshaken.

The intellectual is an eternal traveler: his target is the infinite, and his purpose is love — whether we speak of the love of wisdom or the idea of beauty, his postulate is giving, and his "agenda" is justice. A free man can only be a just man, and the just man can only be that free man. He renders great homage to the divinity, to the supreme creator, fulfilling his destiny, his calling, precisely through his sacrifice; for to be an intellectual means to sacrifice oneself: sacrificing the old self, renouncing preconceived ideas, social mechanisms devoid of the spirit of compassion and justice, of "the spirit of meekness and humility", precisely: adaequatio intellectus et rei (Aquinas, 1920, I, q. 16, a. 1). He embodies, cyclically, both the function of the hermit and that of the fool.

And yet the intellectual's wing is stolen; haunted by akrasia (ἀκρασία), not only elders but also the young; not only the young but also adults — whoever they may be — lose themselves in games of pride and power, becoming merchants of ideas, sellers of souls — not protectors of cities, builders, carpenters, nor farmers or husbandmen. It is precisely for this reason that today we find ourselves, vividly and not merely in imagination, within the world of Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Socrates (1787) and Bouguereau's Dante and Virgil in Hell (1850); these paintings already have a life of their own: reminiscences of a past–future.

Only a free man can therefore be a genius, for everything he thinks comes from the divine self — reason and intuition. The man of genius is God's man; his words are like God's, for God breathes grace from His heart into the mind of His child; the man of genius and his house are one with the world — but this is not a homogeneous, uniform world devoid of identity, nor an eternally antagonistic one; the world of the man of genius is the world of a beautiful man; just as art unites pure souls, so too do his actions: he unites life with life and separates lie from truth — here in the sense of syneidêsis (συνείδησις); he accepts death, transformation, but not the death of hope or of justice; he embraces cyclicity, the natural course of God's nature.

His magical practice is the final point of his readings — a risky form of knowledge, one that consumes you, but from which, with divine help, you may triumph. His thirst for the spiritual and for knowledge has a primordial principle: he came 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 human mind can expand only as far as the heart widens. It is, thus, a divine-human marriage; this being the supreme form of eudaimonia (εὐδαιμονία), in a personalist-Christian sense.

In short, the intellectual lives precisely as Marcus Aurelius teaches us — through this exercise of apatheia (ἀπάθεια): “he who is blinded by the glow of posthumous glory does not reckon that each of those who think of him will also die; he too will die soon, and so will each succeeding generation, until finally all this glory, having propagated itself through the midst of every mortal being, dies along with them. But even supposing those who think of you were immortal, and the memory of your name immortal too, what good would that do you — whether you are dead, or, let us say, even while you live? What use is praise, except in connection with certain fleeting advantages? So let go, in good time, of the gift that puffs you up, which depends solely on the chatter of others” (Aurelius, 2019, p. 78). This is the purest form of ataraxia (ἀταραξία).

IV. Cultural relativism and the decline of values

In the topography of the university, institutionalized education cyclically capitulates before a purely transactional logic, being instrumentalized as a rhetoric of captatio benevolentiae (Bourdieu, 1988). Against the backdrop of this axiological dissolution, intersubjective dynamics are captured by the vectors of Girardian "mimetic desire". In other words, this paradigm shift exceeds the bounds of a benign solipsism of the main-character-syndrome type and resists reductive classification as a delusion of relation, governed by "ideas of reference" (Girard, 1961; Bourdieu, 1988). The phenomenon, in fact, configures a phenomenology in which cultural structures such as the All About Eve Syndrome and the Talented Mr. Ripley Syndrome conceptualize this inflection point; this maladaptive personality loop — reconfigured through archaic repressions of Oedipal origin, or through drives of the phallic-envy type, sublimated socioculturally — finds its systemic expression in the crab-mentality effect. What is thereby established is a mechanism of cynical solidarity in imposture: a structural alliance, programmed to sabotage meritocratic ascent.

By contrast, the intellect (nous, νοῦς) — in the sense Plotinus gives this concept in On the Beautiful — is far from being a simple cognitive faculty, reducible to instrumental criteria. Cultural fulfillment presupposes a multidimensional development of "being", since those connected to the divine weigh the world through authentic experience and honor the memory of the universe, "repository of things past and things to come". Yet for the protagonists of an inverted universe, what might be called culture is reduced to a kind of habit: "frivolous news, hyperconsumerism, and the like" (Scruton, 2023). From this follows an inevitable axiological impasse: "the proclamation of the equivalence of all values and of their exclusively subjective character" (Scruton, 2023).

In this spiritually arid landscape, "religious acculturation" (Schurhammer, 1973) becomes an increasingly pressing reality; consider, for instance, the missionary destiny of Francis Xavier: having arrived in Japan dressed in the cassock typical of the first Jesuits, Francis was regarded with contempt by the Japanese, who considered him a beggar, a barbarian unworthy of the lowest rank (Schurhammer, 1973); for one who has chosen the spiritual path, there exists but a single fundamental priority — union with the divine and, through it, the attainment of a happiness that cannot be conquered (Schurhammer, 1973).

Paradoxically, Debord, referring to the domination of "having" over "being", captures the mechanism of this alienation with unforgettable precision: the alienation of the spectator in favor of the contemplated object expresses itself thus — the more he contemplates, the less he lives; the more he accepts recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own existence and his own desire (Debord, 2001, chap. "Perfected Separation", fragment 30); and Feuerbach denounces the same decline with implacable lucidity: but of course, the present age... prefers the image to the thing itself, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence — for to it, only illusion is sacred, while truth is profane (Feuerbach, 1961, p. 21).

Conclusion

In the end, we profess the conviction that every human being carries a spark of universal rationality, endlessly nourishing the telos of its own becoming and that of the community. Robert Challe explores this dynamic through narrative and polemic means: for him, reason that refuses authoritarian arbitrariness is not rebellion but fidelity to a deeper order, inscribed in the structure of the human (Challe, 2000; Seguin, 2013). This is the capacity Challe called, in another lexicon, justice toward the other as toward oneself: "La justice est la même pour tous" (Deloffre, 1995) — a justice not written into codes, but lived in the direct relation to otherness.

Thus, by contemplating works of particular depth, such as Fra Angelico's The Agony in the Garden (c. 1450–53), by studying the missionary work of Matteo Ricci or the dramatic universe of Luigi Pirandello, we gain not only linguistic and aesthetic refinement but also a deeper understanding of the "human condition" (Scruton, 2023) in its entirety. This is, ultimately, a form of authentic resistance against the spectacle of nihilism: to remain, in the fullest and most demanding sense of the word, living thinkers.

Bibliography

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References

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Categories: philosophy, theology, psychology, culture 

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

Reading Level: PhD / Postdoc