Abstract
Do philosophers lie? Do those for whom the investigation of truth is the highest calling ever engage, not just on occasion but as a matter of course, in systematic strategies of concealment and deception? Do philosophers write esoterically? On the evidence provided by Arthur Melzer’s Philosophy between the Lines, the resounding answer to all the above is “yes.”
Melzer’s book is the best study we have—or are likely to have—on the theme of esoteric writing. His starting point is, of course, Leo Strauss’s classic essay “Persecution and the Art of Writing.” Strauss’s great contribution was to focus on the “the literary character” of certain texts written in times and places where the free expression of ideas was denied, but Melzer assures the reader, you do not need to be a Straussian to buy his thesis. In fact, he seems to prefer if you are not. He provides far greater historical evidence for the existence of esotericism than did Strauss’s lapidary account.
Unlike Strauss, who teased the reader with the possibility that his own writings carried a secret or coded message, Melzer assures us that he is not such a writer. There are no tantalizing references to the “mature” philosopher’s love for “the puppies of his race,” but rather an earnest assurance that his natural preference is for authors “who say exactly what they mean and mean exactly what they say.” He is not writing to revive esotericism as a mode of philosophical communication, but to point out its persistence as a precondition for the study of the history of philosophy. A mischievous critic might ask whether this can be believed.
The book begins from a simple premise. The existence of the esoteric tradition is either ignored or denied by modern scholars, but until around 1800 was recognized by philosophers and theologians from across the centuries and around the world. The best part of the book is Melzer’s exhaustive cataloguing—often to the point of overkill—of the existence of a long tradition of secret or “Aesopian” writing from ancient Athens to modern Burma, from Soviet samizdat literature to John Rawls! The book even directs the reader to an online appendix containing more than seventy-five pages of citations to esoterica from Homer to Wittgenstein.
Melzer distinguishes between four different styles of esotericism that he calls defensive, protective, political, and pedagogical. Defensive esotericism—the most familiar and obvious kind—is a strategy used to avoid persecution that can range from anything from death (as in the case of Socrates) to the mildest forms of shaming and social ostracism. Although this kind of esotericism is most widely found under tyrannical or persecutory regimes, it is a quite ordinary “coding” device used whenever writers or speakers seek to avoid everyday forms of unpleasantness by concealing themselves behind forms of deceptive speech.
Protective esotericism seeks to shield society from what are deemed harmful or destructive truths. Plato’s “noble lie” and its various descendants is the paradigmatic case for this kind of esotericism. On this account, most societies are rooted in customary practices, ancestral laws, and other mythologies that would find themselves deeply unsettled if these practices and beliefs were submitted to the cold light of reason. Philosophers who engage in this kind of esotericism do so less as a form of self-protection, but out of respect for the social norms and practices of the communities in which they live. It is this kind of esotericism that has elicited some of the deepest resistance because it presupposes a radical distinction between philosophical truth and the needs of social order and therefore endorses the necessity for concealing knowledge from the many.
Political esotericism is the reverse of the protective kind. Its goal is not to preserve but to change the world. Political esotericism had its heyday during the Enlightenment and its attempt to use philosophy as an instrument of political reform. The goal of the Enlightenment was not to husband knowledge, but to spread it, often to a populace that was recalcitrant and under the sway of religious superstitions. Accordingly, philosophy had to be sugar coated if it was to achieve its mission of popular enlightenment. The great practitioners of political esotericism were Hobbes, Spinoza, Bayle, Diderot, and the editors of the French Encyclopedia, who sought to create an international civil society called the Republic of Letters based on the free and open exchange of ideas. It might seem surprising that the very philosophers who claimed to value candor and openness as their highest values would resort to strategies of concealment and equivocation to achieve their ends, but as D’Alembert wrote, “Philosophers who open the hand too abruptly are fools.”
The most subtle and interesting form of esotericism is the pedagogic. This also seems the most deeply counter-intuitive. What is the purpose of adopting a strategy of deliberate opacity and deception as a form of pedagogy? This is as likely to lead students down the path of error or even to apathy as to the pursuit of truth. Melzer is alert to these dangers, but again, claims to be describing a practice and not endorsing one. Some of the best pages of the book are devoted to the question of what it means to do philosophy and how it virtually invites a method of concealment. Who has not on occasion felt utterly defeated by the obscurities of Hegel or Heidegger? Yet such obscurity can just as easily serve as a stimulus for thinking. Philosophy is not simply a matter of memorizing formulae or applying a method. It is a deeply personal experience. Philosophical ideas must be felt and lived. Its approach must be indirect or dialectical, leading the student along a path with many twists and turns. Getting people to think for themselves can often be done more effectively through expounding riddles, paradoxes, parables, and enigmas rather than approaching truth as the crow flies.
But if the tradition of esotericism is so widespread, why has there been such resistance to it? Writing like a thoughtful psychotherapist, Melzer outlines the sources of our resistance to the theory. Esotericism offends our modern egalitarian sensibilities; it seems paternalistic, if not outright elitist; it contradicts our demands for openness and transparency; its reticence and caution seems either cowardly or overly deferential to the existing norms of society; and its often-willful obscurantism violates our desire for clarity and truthfulness.
Most of all, our resistance to esotericism stems from the success of the Enlightenment in producing societies open to science, progress, and the free exchange of ideas, societies, in other words, where the need for esotericism has been overcome. There have been undoubted benefits from the “open society,” but it has also enforced a distinctively modern form of parochialism. Modern Western societies typically adopt a “low context” style of communication that emphasizes directness and saying what we mean, but most societies throughout history have been “high context” that value indirectness and find speaking one’s mind to be a sign of boorishness. Melzer even cites a Peace Corps manual that warns potential volunteers that in non-Western countries people are often indirect and it is necessary “to read between the lines.”
It is only at the end of the book that Melzer shows his hand. He often presents himself as a humble under-laborer in the history of ideas simply providing evidence for the existence of a lost or forgotten tradition. It is not until the tenth and final chapter that he fully explains that his thesis is not simply a historical but a philosophical one. Whereas earlier in the book, he had advised readers “if you don’t like Strauss, well, just try not to think of him,” it now becomes impossible not to think of him. The very future of reason may be at stake.
The postmodern world, Melzer avers, has experienced a “crisis of reason” brought about by the emergence of historicism. There is a highly sensitive discussion of the varieties of historicism, but underlying them all is a felt need to “contextualize,” perhaps the most overused verb in the academy today. It is the belief that all ideas are the product of their particular time and place that Melzer, following Strauss, regards as the reigning dogma of our time spanning pragmatism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, and social constructivism. Yet herein lies the paradox. Is historicism the truth, the final truth, about the relation of ideas to society, or is it simply one more Weltanschauung doomed to pass away? It was this paradox at the heart of historicism that Strauss explored throughout all his writings.
The danger of historicism is that it systematically obscures the possibility of esotericism and thereby misconstrues the nature of philosophy. By assimilating all thought to context, historicism denies that it is ever possible to think outside the box of one’s historical moment or that thinkers of one period can communicate with those of another. All thinking simply becomes historical thinking. Historicism presents itself as a doctrine of liberation from the dangers of moral absolutism and false universalism, but is in fact a form of parochialism that confines ideas to their particular localities. Melzer suggests that the recovery of esotericism is oddly dependent on historicism, for it is only when all the possibilities of historicism have been exhausted that it is possible to recover an older meaning of philosophy. Only the recovery of the esoteric tradition can begin to reclaim some idea of critical rationality from the prison house of historicism. Esotericism, it turns out, is not simply a method for reading texts; it is central to the future of philosophy.
As with every important book, Melzer oversells his thesis. The book provides absolutely compelling evidence for the ongoing practice of esoteric writing in the philosophical tradition. Like Molière’s M. Jourdain, it seems as though we have been speaking and writing esoterically our whole lives without ever realizing it. Anyone who has ever joked, equivocated, used irony, subtlety, or understatement—and who hasn’t?—has been engaged in some kind of esotericism. But who ever denied this? Melzer sometimes presupposes a reader so tone deaf to or so naïve and unsuspecting about the uses of language that such a person seems scarcely credible. If there are indeed such readers, I have the title to a bridge in Brooklyn that they might wish to buy.
Melzer argues that a recovery of esotericism is a necessary precondition for philosophy to retain an awareness of its own presuppositions. If self-consciousness about its own premises is central to thinking philosophically, then we cannot engage in philosophy until we have recovered its pre-philosophic roots. As with Husserl and Heidegger, Strauss believed that philosophy was rooted in certain pre-theoretical “givens,” crucially including the experience of the city and its gods. This was the world that Plato and his heirs attempted to shield from the corrosive effects of philosophy through their protective esotericism. Yet it remains deeply unclear how the modern world, overlaid by science, technology, theology, and history can afford access to the primary experiences of wonder and awe from which the original experience of philosophy arose. Is it still possible for a young person brought up on the Internet, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to become “naïve” again?
Strauss suggested that we moderns had dug a deeper cave—a pit beneath the cave—that made access to these fundamental forms of experience even more difficult to grasp. Our only mode of access is, ironically, through a set of highly artificial interpretive and linguistic tools that can substitute for direct access to these original experiences. It is only through careful reading—reading between the lines—that the original need for esotericism can be recovered. Melzer admits some uncertainty about how this recovery can be achieved, but claims it is vital if we are to liberate thinking from our current dogmas. The recovery of the esoteric tradition is a step—a small but important one—in that direction.