Take a moment and think of someone who seems, to you, to be truly fulfilled. Who springs to mind? The person you pictured is probably not someone who drifts aimlessly through life or lives in directionless ease. More likely, you thought of someone committed to challenging projects, activities, or goals. The artist who spends years perfecting her craft, painting canvases that few will ever see. The activist who organizes tirelessly for a cause, with no guarantee of success. The scientist who spends decades investigating an elusive phenomenon. 

At first, this might seem strange. After all, adopting difficult goals makes us vulnerable to failure; it often brings frustration, exhaustion, and uncertainty. Pursuing that path can seem like choosing self-inflicted unhappiness. Indeed, some philosophers have defined unhappiness precisely as having unmet goals. The nineteenth-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer famously argued that suffering is just having unfulfilled desires. His solution is simple: if desire produces suffering, then eliminate desire, and you’ll eliminate suffering. 

Yet against Schopenhauer’s pessimistic claim, we can see that people striving toward difficult goals are often deeply fulfilled. Many of us have experienced this in our own lives. Whether someone is committed to running a marathon, writing a novel, earning a degree, learning a language, building a business, or raising a family, people immersed in deep commitments often find fulfillment in the very act of striving.

True, these commitments bring moments of unhappiness and frustration: things will go wrong, the work will be hard, the task will seem overwhelming. Some days, the committed person will be excited, full of vigor, eager to throw themselves into the task. Other days, they have to drag themselves forward, weighed down by distraction, doubt, and fatigue. Yet it’s precisely through forming and sustaining these commitments that many people find life’s deepest meaning. As Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor best known for Man’s Search for Meaning, put it,

Commitments come in different forms. Some last for a few weeks or months; others endure for years or a lifetime. Some are overridden by competing pressures; others hold fast through tremendous difficulty. The strongest and most enduring commitments give shape to a person’s life. They don’t just reflect passing preferences, but a sense of what truly matters. 

The deepest, most robust form of commitment is what I call devotion. Devotion is a resilient attachment to a value or a relationship. Devotion is strong but not rigid, enduring but not static. It gives shape and direction to a life, while leaving space for humility, openness, and growth. It can involve love, reverence, and wonder.

Devotion is all around us. We see it in the devoted parent, caring for his child and experiencing joy in helping her through difficult times. Or the lover who devotes himself to his partner, working through challenges and supporting her over time. Or the devoted teacher whose unselfish dedication left its mark on her students. Or the artist who quietly pursues perfection in her work, not seeking fame or recognition but steadfastly devoting herself to creation. Devotion anchors us to people and projects that are of deep importance to us, allowing us to feel at home in our lives, with a sense of satisfaction and purpose.

At times, devotion is easy. It can be manifest in the adoring care of a child; in the embrace of a lover; in the eagerness to return to a valued pursuit. But challenges inevitably arise, and then devotion must withstand them. Two of the greatest challenges are fear and ambiguity. 

Fear threatens devotion by amplifying the costs of commitment. The child rebels; the lover suffers a long illness; the valued pursuit begins to feel burdensome. Sacrifice, failure, and costs can seem overwhelming. And where the uncommitted person would give up, the devotee presses on.

But ambiguity is a subtler and more insidious threat. When we reflect critically on our commitments, questions and qualifications arise. Is this political cause really the right one? Is this belief or worldview really true? Am I living the right life? Couldn’t I be mistaken? It’s rare for things to be black and white—rare to have the confidence that they are. Certainty is often undermined by serious reflection. And without certainty, commitments can waver.

Courage can overcome fear, but it is impotent against ambiguity. As soon as we begin to reflect on the value of our devotion, certainty can be eroded. This shows up in everyday life. We question career choices, relationships, political causes, personal ideals, and spiritual beliefs. And it’s here that we begin to see the line between devotion and fanaticism.

Fanaticism offers clarity and certainty. It thrives on dividing the world into good and evil, right and wrong, us and them. It silences ambiguity. The fanatic believes that doubt is weakness, that alternative views are threats, that questioning one’s cause is betrayal. Think of religious extremists who justify violence by labeling entire groups as enemies, or political ideologues who refuse to engage in dialogue because they see compromise as betrayal. Where devotion allows for reflection, fanaticism shuts it down.

At first glance, devotion and fanaticism can look alike. Both involve sustained commitment. Both involve sacrifice. Both involve passion. From the outside, it can be hard to tell them apart. The real difference lies in how these commitments shape our relationship to ourselves and others. Devotion can accommodate humility, openness, and even change. It grounds us in a meaningful pursuit without requiring that we reject and dehumanize those who differ. Fanaticism hardens. It closes us off.

Beneath its surface intensity, fanaticism is rooted in fragility. The nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche described fanaticism as “the only ‘strength of will’ that even the weak and insecure can be brought to attain.” The fanatic fears that doubt will unravel everything. To preserve his identity and worldview, he must suppress ambiguity and complexity. He cannot allow himself to question—or be questioned—because he fears that even small cracks might bring collapse. So, he adopts a brittle certainty. His confidence isn’t the product of deep understanding; it’s a defense mechanism, a shield against uncertainty.

That’s why fanaticism so often breeds aggression. To silence internal doubts, the fanatic seeks to eliminate external opposition—lashing out at critics, caricaturing alternatives, and demonizing dissenters. What looks like strength is, often, a fear of falling apart.

Devotion, by contrast, is not immune to doubt. But it doesn’t collapse in the face of ambiguity. Instead, it grows through it. 

Imagine someone committed to environmental sustainability. She spends years reducing her carbon footprint—buying local, installing solar panels, recycling, composting, and arguing for policy reform. Her identity is wrapped up in this cause. But then, she stumbles across a study suggesting that her favored policy—say, subsidies for biofuels—has led to deforestation and rising food prices. She begins to worry. She reads more and finds critiques of solar panel production, skepticism about composting, and arguments against buying local. Doubts begin to creep in. What formerly seemed clear now feels ambiguous, murky, uncertain.

At that point, several responses are possible. She might abandon her environmental commitments entirely, deciding that the complications show the project is misguided. That would suggest that her commitment was never deep—more of a preference than a true case of devotion. 

Or she might double down, suppress the challenges, denounce critics, and cling to a simplified vision.

But there’s a third path. She might remain committed to environmental ideals while recognizing the need for revision. Rather than abandoning the cause or retreating into fanaticism, she sees the ambiguity and complexity as an indication that her grasp of the ideal was provisional and incomplete.  She says to herself, “I may have been wrong about what my ideal requires. I may even be wrong about what my ideal is. I need to deepen my understanding of what I truly value.” She continues, but with a different posture—less dogmatic, more open, more reflective. That’s devotion. It doesn’t shut down in the face of complexity. It seeks a deeper articulation of the value that first called it forth.

So, devotion and fanaticism both involve sticking with a commitment despite objections, complications, and uncertainty. Like the devoted person, the fanatic is steadfast—unmoved by objection, unmoved by doubt. But this superficial similarity masks a deeper difference. The fanatic’s certainty depends on suppressing disagreement and denying ambiguity. Genuine questioning feels dangerous because it threatens to unravel everything. 

The devotee, by contrast, can acknowledge ambiguity without disintegration. They stay with the value, even when the path forward is uncertain. They see themselves as fallible, their grasp of the value as partial and revisable. That’s what makes devotion resilient. It doesn’t resist critique by denying it. It resists by integrating it—by holding fast to a meaningful commitment while allowing it to evolve. 

And that’s a capacity we can cultivate. Not by eliminating doubt, but by returning to what we care about and asking what it demands of us and whether our grasp of it is adequate. Devotion is sustained not by rigidity, but by a willingness to stay in contact with something worth valuing while tolerating ambiguity.

We live in a polarized, restless, distracted age. Our challenge is not simply to reject fanaticism, but to find a way of living that is open-eyed, steadfast, and grounded. A life built through devotion—one strong enough to endure, yet supple enough to grow. 

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Paul Katsafanas is a professor of Philosophy at Boston University. He works on ethics, moral psychology, and nineteenth-century philosophy.​ His latest book is Philosophy of Devotion: The Longing for Invulnerable Ideals.