Esoteric Tangles

Abstract

I attempt here a very general reply to the preceding sixteen essays by addressing the broad, structural constraints of my book, from which many of the particular problems raised in the essays flow. Philosophy Between the Lines is an effort to give a very sweeping account—theoretically and historically—of a phenomenon that is, in many respects, highly particularized and situation specific. The characteristic sin of the book is overgeneralization or simplification. In the present essay I attempt a brief and partial clarification, primarily by selecting one main theme of the book—defensive esotericism—and redescribing it from a more localized and fine-grained perspective.

Keywords:

• esotericism
• censorship
• philosophical politics
• Leo Strauss
• Plato
• Socratic Method
• dangerous truths
• Robert Howse

Notes

¹While I do not touch on these points in the book, I do so in the section on St. Augustine in the appendix. See http://www.press.uchicago.edu/sites/melzer/index.html. See also Frederick J. Crosson, “Esoteric versus Latent Teaching,” Review of Metaphysics 59, no. 1 (September 2005): 73–94.

²See Arthur Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 349.

³For a powerful recent statement of the case for secularization theory, see Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

⁴Ray J. Parrott Jr., “Aesopian Language,” in Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet Literature, ed. Harry B. Weber (Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press, 1977), 44.

⁵Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1952), 25.

⁶Lev Loseff, On the Beneficence of Censorship: Aesopian Language in Modern Russian Literature, trans. Jane Bobko (Munich: Sagner, 1984), 58–59.

⁷Loseff, Beneficence, 5.

⁸Robert Darnton, Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature (New York: W.W. Norton & company, 2014), 36.

⁹Parrott, “Aesopian Language,” 42.

¹⁰Loseff, Beneficence, 247n4. Loseff contrasts this with the situation in the Soviet period where “the directives of the censorship have evolved continuously in the direction of none other than a search for ‘double meaning’” (ibid.).

¹¹Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lettres écrites de la montagne in Œuvres complètes, eds. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond. 4 vol. (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléïade, 1959–69) III: 782.

¹²Darnton, Censors, 31.

¹³Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Confessions, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. and trans. Judith Bush, Roger Masters, and Christopher Kelly (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1992), V: 428. There were limits, of course, to what Malesherbes could or would do, and so in 1762, when Emile and the Social Contract were published, a warrant was issued for Rousseau's arrest and he was forced flee France in the middle of the night.

¹⁴Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet, Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain, eds. Monique Hincker and François Hincker (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1971), 219 (translation mine).

¹⁵Quoted by Annabel Patterson in Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 20.

¹⁶Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, trans. Peter Gay (New York: Basic Books, 1962), 95–97.

¹⁷Adding irony to irony, this healthy suspicion and impatience with witch-hunting has also helped to strengthen the resistance to Strauss and his claims about esotericism. For when he or others marshal historical testimony to help prove that, say, Spinoza was a secret atheist, contemporary scholars often dismiss such testimony as so much name calling and witch-hunting. But while one must indeed be careful in accepting such testimony, not all of it is wrong. Voltaire, in the very article quoted above where he describes and attacks such name calling, goes on to declare: “Spinoza was not only an atheist, but taught atheism” (102).

¹⁸W. Robert Connor, “The Other 399: Religion and the Trial of Socrates,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 37 (January 1991): 49–56. Strictly speaking, Socrates was indicted for disbelieving in the gods of the city, introducing new gods, and corrupting the youth. Investigating the things under the earth and the heavenly things was not mentioned in the formal charges. But Socrates goes out of his way to proclaim that the earlier accusers who emphasized these unholy investigations were more dangerous than his current accusers and more responsible for his conviction (Apology 18a–c, 23d, 28a).

¹⁹I would particularly like to thank Thomas Pangle, Richard Zinman, and David Leibowitz for their useful criticisms and suggestions.

²⁰We must always remember that, in arguing that an argument or doctrine was strategically useful to a philosopher, one need not deny that the philosopher was being sincere.

²¹Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. J. E. King (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), 149 (2.5).

²²Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958), 97 (1.25; emphasis added).

²³“Life of Nicias” (23) trans. Peter J. Ahrensdorf, in The Death of Socrates and the Life of Philosophy (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995), 12.

²⁴Apology 25c–26c; see also Laws, Book 9; Gorgias 468bff, 488a2–4, 509e2–7; Protagoras 345d–e, 352b–358d; Meno 77b6–78b2; Greater Hippias 296c; Republic 336d, 381c, 413a, 451b, 505d11–e1, 517b6–c6.

²⁵Compare in this connection the open and searching critique of punishment delivered by Diodotus, the most philosophic of Thucydides’ speakers, in book three of the History of the Peloponnesian War.

²⁶Also consider in this connection Xenophon's laudatory account of Sparta in his Constitution of the Lacedaemonians and Strauss’ interpretation of that work as a satire in “The Spirit of Sparta or the Taste of Xenophon,” Social Research 6, no. 4 (1939): 502–36.

²⁷Robert Howse, “Reading between the Lines: Exotericism, Esotericism, and the Philosophical Rhetoric of Leo Strauss,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 32, no. 1 (1999): 69. These openly expressed arguments making the case for philosophy on the grounds of aristocratic morality itself should be distinguished from a deeper, less dogmatic layer of argument that transcends the aristocratic perspective; cf. Thomas Pangle, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 53–61.

²⁸For further speculation on the matter, see Howse, “Reading between the Lines”; Lawrence Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 145–65; Steven Lenzner, “Strauss's Fârâbî, Scholarly Prejudice, and Philosophic Politics,” Perspectives on Political Science 28, no. 4 (Fall 1999): 194–202; Michael Kochin, “Morality, Nature, and Esotericism in Leo Strauss's ‘Persecution and the Art of Writing,’” The Review of Politics 64, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 261–83.

²⁹Montaigne, Essays, 379 (2.12).

³⁰To be sure, this problem and some of the others underlying the noble lie look very different—less problematic—in the new context of the modern state, a point I emphasize in the book (193–95). Howse pursues this point and makes useful arguments and observations. But this debate is irrelevant to our question concerning what Plato believed about traditional society. Rightly or wrongly, he clearly regarded the land issue and other such questions as real problems, as subversive truths that had to be concealed by myth.

³¹Thomas Gordon, Discourses upon Tacitus: The Works of Tacitus, With Political Discourses Upon that Author (London: T. Woodward & J. Peele, 1770), 4: 149–50.

³²Strauss, “The Spirit of Sparta,” 535. The same point has the last word in Strauss’ essay “Persecution and the Art of Writing” in the book of that title (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 37.