Philosophy and Esotericism

Abstract

Arthur Melzer's Philosophy Between the Lines establishes the historical reality of esotericism, or at least the reputation for it, throughout Western and Islamic philosophy until late modernity. But Melzer wants to do much more than that: to establish that there is a whole new world of philosophy to uncover and explore, thus to promote the recovery of “a long lost art of philosophical literacy.” I argue that he fails in this task. Most of the evidence he has for esotericism concerns religious beliefs, and it does not show that a significant portion of the work of important philosophers is to be read esoterically. I offer a detailed analysis of his account of Aristotle's alleged esotericism to give some indication of the weakness of his evidence. I also argue against the Straussian assumption (regarding the dualism of human nature between theory and practice) that stands behind so much of his account of esotericism. I end with a discussion of pedagogical esotericism, contrasting Melzer's Straussian account with my Nietzschean account of what esotericism can contribute to philosophical education.

Keywords:

• philosophical literacy
• religious beliefs
• Aristotle
• Strauss
• Nietzsche
• pedagogical esotericism

Notes

¹Beyond Good and Evil 30. Melzer quotes this part of the passage (118).

²To reassure those who find this “too Aristotelian or essentialist,” Melzer (76) quotes Richard Rorty, as non-Aristotelian as one can get, to the effect that there are two ways that reflective human beings have tried to give sense to their lives: by stressing either their contribution to the community or the way in which they stand “in immediate relation to a nonhuman reality,” that is, through either solidarity or objectivity, a distinction Melzer takes to be between the political animal and the rational animal. But this distinction does not help his case. For Rorty considered objectivity a fantasy. So yes, there is a dualism, according to Rorty, in how thinkers have tried to make sense of their lives, but this in no way reflects a dualism in human nature itself.

³Machiavelli and Plato are the two exceptions. I find that his account of Plato has the same problems as his account of Aristotle, but I cannot go into that here.

⁴See George Boas's 1953 article in Philosophical Review, which Melzer cites later in the book, but not on this issue, for a compelling explanation of these nine appearances of “exoteric.”

⁵Melzer quotes Zeller as expressing an opposed view, that Aristotle is not obscure. Zeller's view is not plausible if its point is that the majority of people will be able to make good sense of Aristotle's Metaphysics, for instance. But if Zeller's point is that those with extensive training in philosophy will find the same work relatively clear and straightforward, then his claim is plausible.

⁶Consider that Melzer makes a big deal of Machiavelli's chapter title in the Discourses, “When one sees a great error made by an enemy, one ought to believe that there is deception underneath.” Although the title refers to military matters, Melzer takes it to apply in the literary realm as well, concluding that we should therefore “be on the lookout for intentional ‘great errors’ as we read Machiavelli.” If we are on the lookout for such errors when we read Melzer, despite his denial that he engages in esoteric writing, one candidate for such a “great error” is his repeated claim to have shown Aristotle to be a multi-level writer on the grounds that he deliberately wrote to keep most people from understanding him. But such writing is so obviously not a case of “multi-level” writing, as Melzer defines it, that it is reasonable to ask if he might be trying to suggest (to some of us at least) a different interpretation, that Aristotle writes to make available to people at differing levels of understanding different interpretations of his words.

⁷I also want to note, although I lack space to demonstrate it, that the kind of esotericism I find in Aristotle seems close to the type of protective esotericism for which Melzer has the most evidence. He claims that there are two types of protective esotericism, both of which recognize that some important truths are “dangerous to society or to ordinary life.” One type hides the truth “for fear that it is too harsh or disappointing for most people,” whereas a second type “would veil or dilute it for fear that it is too exalted and sublime” (162). Melzer is more interested in the first type. It fits with his Straussian perspective, according to which “all social life is based on illusions or myth or commitments without foundation” (200) and acknowledgement of this truth would be harmful to both society and its members. Interestingly, however, most of the evidence he has for the existence of protective esotericism is for the second type, which is “more respectable than its subversive counterpart,” and is found especially among religious thinkers and mystics. They view “the truth as something exalted far above most men's capacity to comprehend [and] fear that if it were openly expressed, it would disorient or corrupt them because it would undercut the approximate truths and goods that are within their reach without putting anything else in their place” (165). But this kind of esotericism is not about teaching different truths to different kinds of people but about allowing people to approach the truth at their own levels of understanding. I suspect that the same may be true of the versions of esotericism Melzer finds in Lucretius and Warburton, two of his very few sources for the Straussian version of protective esotericism. Indeed, I really do not find in Melzer's book any serious evidence that anyone ever practiced this version of esotericism.

⁸Twilight of the Idols: “Germans,” 7.

⁹As Nietzsche says: “A human being of genius is unendurable if he does not also possess at least two other things: gratitude and cleanliness” (Beyond Good and Evil, 74). The “cleanliness” at issue here is, of course, intellectual cleanliness or what Nietzsche elsewhere calls “an intellectual conscience” (The Gay Science, 2).

¹⁰Twilight: Germans, 6.

¹¹I offer as an example my paper “Nietzsche's Misogyny,” which is an esoteric reading of the passages from BGE that constitute Nietzsche's most extended and apparently insulting comments on women and feminism. It is reprinted in my Nietzsche on Ethics and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 141–50.

¹²See Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick, The Soul of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) for more on this example.

¹³See Clark and Dudrick 2012 for more on this.