The Allure of Withdrawal
Withdrawal and the so-called “ivory tower:” this is the constant temptation of any thinking person–especially those intellectuals who want to produce something that is likely to last.
Reading Lionel Gossman’s Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas, he has a case study on the Swiss scholar Johann J. Bachofen. Born in 1815, Bachofen was the intellectually talented scion of a wealthy family, appointed at a young age to a professor’s chair at the University of Basel, with high expectations that he would ascend to political life and the city’s governing elite. But objections to his appointment led to a minor public scandal; the inexperienced, sensitive Bachofen was more than rich enough to withdraw from formal employment entirely, which he largely did for the remainder of his 71-year life. While he would make a name for himself in posterity with his intellectual work (Mother Right), which he pursued without institutional restraint, the upheavals and revolutions across 19th-century Europe that he witnessed with increasingly conservative horror led him to an attitude of withdrawal from the world. Gossman describes it:
In the face of the collapse of traditional societies and traditional values, the only reasonable policy was to withdraw, cultivate those things that would enrich one’s own inner being and that might be shared with a few other individuals similarly inclined, and thus wait out the coming crisis, as it were, in order that beyond it, when humanity had come to it senses again, the torch of true learning and wisdom might be handed on. For though Bachofen described himself as a “pessimist,” he did not believe–any more than Burckhardt did–that the present age was the last word on human history. “The old world of Europe lies on a sickbed from which it an expect no lasting recovery,” he wrote to Meyer-Ochsner, but this did not signify the end of history, only the destruction of that which had to be sacrificed so that the history of mankind could take on a new turn. Sickness and death were the prelude to regeneration. Whatever the fate of the established states, therefore, “at the individual level, much that is good can be salvaged, much that is worthwhile can be newly created.” So, too, at the local level: “The best seek a sphere of activity in the concerns of their municipality. From there they hope to win back later a part of the ground that has been lost. My past experience and my studies indicate that my province should be that of magistrate and judge.” All the effort and energy expended on politics and the state is now best directed toward the improvement of individual lives, for it is individuals who will transmit what can be salvaged of the old culture, not states. (132)
Judges and magistrates were non-professional, part-time appointees in Basel at that time, something closer to a citizens review board for the well-connected than the respected high-powered career that the job implies in the West today. As for what Bachofen regarded as his life’s work–his writing and thinking–he was, Gossman writes, willfully unknown, hidden during his lifetime, a recluse and stranger to his own hometown at his death.
Entire ways of life are built around withdrawal to stimulate the contemplative powers (e.g., monastic traditions). And withdrawal might provide what the intellectual has been been searching for in active public life: unification between ideals and action (because action reduces to a minimum), and the discernment of purpose in one’s surroundings. In active life there is limited opportunity for real reflection, and it is often necessary to work alongside people and forces one neither accepts nor understands. For a thinking person who enters active life, it is a tough lesson to learn: deliberation and careful analysis can only take you so far–and they probably make things harder. In withdrawal one can control more of the circumstances that make the intellect a liability: time elongates, the number of events decreases, the variables one cannot account for are excluded. Perhaps it highlights the danger of all intellectual work: understanding is a pause in action. It always comes with the risk that when you step out of the stream, the crucial event you needed to see happened without you.
Withdrawal can also be one of the most seductive, double-edged options available to the intellectual, the writer, the artist. Too often, he or she is born into circumstances that have no use for them. Her community will have to be invented, across both time and place. One of the great challenges of the creative person’s life is to pull together (discover, invent, organize) a community that is responsive to the rhythms of her mind, one that results in real exchange, that fosters her own creative processes, that allows her to occupy positions of both reciprocity and dependence. A ready-made community: this is one of the largest gifts that schools and universities have to offer. But if the demands of finding a place are too great, if she is unlucky, if the historical moment conspires against her–pulling back and turning inward remain available. It is not unusual to find a creative person, like Bachofen, who goes more or less his whole life in a state of (half-)self-imposed inner exile.
The person who withdraws is not indifferent to what happens on the outside. The act usually comes with an expectation, an eschatology of collapse and renewal. Gossman again:
Bachofen’s insistence on personal cultivation and personal salvation in the face of what to him was a collapsing public and political order resembles Burckhardt’s evocation of the hermits and monks of the declining Roman Empire in The Age of Constantine the Great. For Bachofen, moreoever, self-cultivation was not a simple personal solution, but a matter of free individual choice. It was an obligation, because it was part of the same Providential design and of the same history of humanity in which the disintegration of the European political order had been decreed. “In the life of the soul, egoism is justified; indeed, it is an obligation,” Bachofen wrote in 1855. In the end, the choice is not really ours. We are the willing or unwilling instruments of a higher plan. “In the decisive moments of our lives,” we read in the eulogy of Streuber, “we seldom freely determine our own actions. What appears to be our work has its origins in a higher design. We believe we choose our vocation, but in fact we are chosen by it.” (134)
This expectation–that one’s quiet inward development somehow contributes to and harmonizes with the largest calamities at a worldwide scale–seems to me like it would be one of the most anachronistic sentiments for our own time. Or maybe not–many people are non-political, going about life with the latent belief that traditional or unremarkable habits will one day be recognized as worthy, that the big problems will correct themselves without the concern of the individual. But Bachofen suggests that there really is no such thing as withdrawal. Even the most insignificant, passive non-participant in historical events is holding onto something, a human archive of alternatives that might be carried out of the wreckage. Within this philosophy may be an expectation of a possible return, a re-opening and reunion with the world that Bachofen never saw.