Exotericism and the Untroubled Race for the Future

Abstract

The simple case against the philosophic practice of exoteric writing is that it takes too long. Especially short of time are those who would contribute to or even attempt to keep up with the advance of what used to be called natural philosophy. The assumption of progress in science has been purchased with the relentless specialization of its practitioners. In theory transparent to inquiry, in practice specialized, science may be not just anti-exoteric but esoteric.

Keywords:

• Strauss
• science
• Goethe
• Newton
• Darwin
• progress

Notes

¹Arthur M. Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

²Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1958), 174.

³Allan Bloom, Giants and Dwarfs: Essays, 1960–1990 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990).

⁴Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 174.

⁵Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 174–75.

⁶Isaac Newton, letter to Robert Hooke, Feb. 5, 1676, Correspondence, vol. I, ed. H. W. Turnbull, J. F. Scott, A. R. Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), 416.

⁷Francis Bacon, The New Organon, ed. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 82.

⁸William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 336.

⁹Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1952), 157.

¹⁰Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 298.

¹¹Robert Hooke, Micrographia (London: Jo. Martyn and Ja. Allestry, 1665), Preface, quoted in Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 321.