10
The genuine, sole, and most profound theme of all world and human history—a theme to which all others are subordinate—remains the conflict between belief and unbelief.
—GOETHE
The relation of history to reason remains constitutive for the discourse of modernity—for better or worse.
—JÜRGEN HABERMAS
Supposing that the claims made here regarding the widespread practice of esoteric writing are true, what then? Exactly what follows? The most obvious and solid consequence is the practical one drawn in the previous chapter: we should be prepared to recognize esoteric writings when we encounter them and to read them appropriately.
But the stakes are potentially higher still. There may also be profound theoretical repercussions—consequences relating to the whole character of human reason and the legitimacy of rationalism. The rediscovery of esotericism opens up wholly new paths of argument in the ongoing struggle to ground philosophical rationalism and to defend it against the powerful forces arrayed against it today. This further, philosophical reach of the esotericism issue should not come altogether as a surprise since, as we have seen, esotericism was from the start a direct outgrowth of a central problem of reason: the theory/praxis dualism—that is, the problem that arises from the fact that we are not pure minds, the problem of how reason stands in relation to its nonrational context and preconditions. We turn in conclusion to this potentially larger, philosophical dimension of the recovery of esotericism.
The simplest and best way of doing this, I believe, is by examining the thought of Leo Strauss. Whatever may be the case with the whole foregoing account of esotericism, we have finally reached a point where we clearly need him. For Strauss is literally the only thinker who has explored this crucial issue at any length. It is his great and unique contribution. Indeed, this (and not any imagined political scheme) constitutes the true core of his thought, the focus of his lifelong intellectual project. For this reason, Strauss is the best introduction to this issue—and this issue forms the best entrée into Strauss.
Of course, after this lengthy survey of this complex issue many readers will remain unpersuaded. It is therefore important to emphasize, one last time, that the historical reality of esoteric philosophical writing, and the great practical importance of that historical fact, will continue to stand, unscathed, even if one completely rejects the following interpretation regarding its larger philosophical significance.
LEO STRAUSS AND THE CONTEMPORARY CRISIS OF REASON
As we late moderns have moved through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, we find ourselves in very strange intellectual territory. We face an unprecedented double attack on reason. The legitimacy of Western science, philosophy, and rationalism is being radically challenged by two opposite but mutually reinforcing movements: the ancient force of religious orthodoxy and the “postmodern” one of historicism or cultural relativism. Reason is under serious assault—in a kind of spontaneous pincer movement—from both the faith-based thinkers and the cutting-edge, secular intellectuals, from the “church” as well as the “university.” This is the great philosophical predicament of our time, what Strauss called the “crisis of modernity.” The whole of his thought is an effort to respond to it.
It is very difficult today to have a fruitful discussion of this issue, however, because, largely as a consequence of this crisis of reason, ours is a period of extreme intellectual dislocation in which we constantly talk past one another. Not only are the answers up for grabs, but the questions are as well—along with the proper concepts, categories, and principles of justification. What some people regard as the main philosophical issues of our time, others consider tiresome pseudoproblems that dissolve when the proper perspective is attained. The consequence of all this is that one must spend a good deal of time defending the legitimacy of one’s question—as I will try to do here—before developing an answer. This is especially the case with the questions of historicism, relativism, and rationalism that Strauss is centrally concerned with. In many circles today, this weighty concern over the fate of reason, indeed this whole mode of grave “crisis consciousness” that has largely characterized Western thought since Nietzsche, is very much out of fashion.
Let us try to find some neutral ground. In 1995, a conference specifically devoted to clarifying “the present state of philosophy” was convened by the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, and Jürgen Habermas, Richard Rorty, and Leszek Kolakowski were invited to debate their differing perspectives on this central issue. With Habermas being arguably the premier contemporary defender of some form of Enlightenment rationalism and Rorty arguably the premier representative of the postmodernist position, and Kolakowski one of the finest minds intimately acquainted with both sides, the debate was particularly well constructed. This is especially the case because Habermas and Rorty also stand out for the efforts they have consistently made to acquaint themselves with and debate rival positions, both Continental and Anglo-American. Habermas’s paper was entitled “Coping with Contingencies—The Return of Historicism”; Rorty’s, “Relativism—Finding and Making”; and Kolakowski’s, “A Remark on Our Relative Relativism.” As Jozef Niznik, an organizer of the conference and the editor of its proceedings, accurately remarked in his preface:
What is especially interesting is that, without exception, the dominant concepts and problems that appeared in the texts of all three main participants were those of relativism and rationality. . . . The debate shows—in a fascinating way—that these problems create what are probably the most important philosophical issues of contemporary human life and constitute the core of contemporary intellectual anxieties.1
This is precisely Strauss’s view as well.
But let us see if we can derive the same view in a more concrete and, as it were, bottom-up manner. A great many observers today, popular no less than scholarly, speak about a growing weakness in the basic respect for reason and in the role that it plays in our lives. To begin on the popular level, there has been a spate of books, of varying quality, devoted to this precise phenomenon, including two best-sellers, Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason and former vice president Al Gore’s The Assault on Reason. All argue that if you look at the various debates and conflicts that we have been having in this country, you see that in recent years it has become far more acceptable to ignore or dismiss the concern for reasoning, logic, empirical evidence, and science. The point is not that people are reasoning badly but that the prestige and authority of reason itself—and especially the respect for science—seem to be in decline.2
What is the source of this change? These works point to a number of different causes: political factors such as the growing use of manipulation and fear-mongering in our increasingly partisan world, as well as various sociological factors such as the overstimulation of the emotions by the entertainment industry, advertising, and the twenty-four-hour news cycle and the shortening of attention spans by television-induced passivity or internet-induced hyperactivity. But these are potentially passing trends, and at any rate not fundamental.
As most of these works ultimately conclude, what makes possible the truly serious “assault on reason” or “war on science” is the appeal to a source of authority outside and above reason—the appeal to revelation. The key to the serious undermining of reason in our time is the dramatic rise of religious feeling and fundamentalist belief in this country (to say nothing of Islamic fundamentalism, Hindu fundamentalism, and like phenomena around the world). This, and not any of the other factors mentioned, is what makes possible the trumping of scientific evidence in the grand debates over creationism, abortion, stem cell research, and so forth. This is why, ninety years after the Scopes monkey trial, creationism is increasingly powerful and only 39 percent of the U.S. population reports believing in the theory of evolution.3 The essential phenomenon, to repeat, is the surprising late modern resurgence of religion, of the ancient conflict of reason and revelation. Somehow, two and a half centuries after the rise and triumph of the Enlightenment, with its rationalizing and secularizing mission, we are experiencing a powerful revival of the oldest and most fundamental challenge to rationalism.
Still, this religious revival itself would not necessarily be anything lasting and fundamental if it were merely a matter of popular movements, which come and go. (In Strauss’s time in particular, this popular-level revival had not yet really appeared.) What is more crucial, then, is that the religious resurgence had also been taking place on the highest planes of philosophical reflection for well over a century in the radical religious turn of thinkers like Kierkegaard and William James, the mystical turn of Bergson and Wittgenstein, and the religious murmurings of Heidegger, as well as of recent postmodernists like Gianni Vattimo, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard. Thus, the current religious revival would seem to be not merely a popular, sociological phenomenon but a philosophical one, a shift in the reason-revelation balance occurring at the profoundest level of Western thought. That indeed is how Strauss found the situation in his own personal grapplings with the religious question.
Yet this first, religious challenge to reason, as powerful as it is, is still only half the story. Strangely, what tends to be forgotten by Gore, Jacoby, and most others who earnestly deplore the irrational effects of the religious critique of reason is that there is, in our times, a second and no less powerful source of the assault on reason, one that primarily resides on their own side of the intellectual or ideological spectrum. I am referring to the very widespread but amorphous intellectual movement most commonly known today as postmodernism. This is largely the same as what Strauss, using an older vocabulary, called historicism.
Now, it is notoriously difficult to define postmodernism or historicism in a way that includes all of its many variants and practitioners. But it is also not necessary for current purposes. Suffice it to say here (I will say a bit more momentarily) that philosophical postmodernism in most of its forms is a questioning and subversion of “modernism,” understood primarily as the Enlightenment project with its universalistic understanding of reason and its hegemonic design for world rationalization, as epitomized by Descartes (at the origins) and Hegel (at the peak). Postmodernism is, in Jean-Francois Lyotard’s famous definition, an “incredulity towards meta-narratives,” that is, a chastening effort to particularize, localize, and temporalize—in a word, historicize—rationality.4 As such, it involves a wide-ranging critique of reason—a humbling of Enlightenment rationalism, a debunking of the idea of universal, objective, and eternal Truth. Among postmodernism’s various proponents, this critique involves such things as a rejection of foundationalism, essentialism, subject/object dualism, binary oppositions, and a leveling of the distinctions between literature and philosophy and between rhetoric and logic. For most, the key element of this critique of reason is the claim that all thought is necessarily based on or conditioned by something unthought, something given by language, politics, or history and therefore particular, contingent, and transitory. This widespread postmodernist disempowering of reason, in which modern philosophy seems to have culminated, constitutes the second powerful source of the contemporary attack on reason.
This crisis of reason is what formed the beginning point for Strauss’s path of thought and the focus of his philosophical project. Beginning in the 1930s, Strauss was among the first clearly to identify and to confront this precise double challenge and also the first to explain it—that is, to explain the inner connection between these two opposite antirational forces, such that both of them should be surging at the same time. He argued that the strange, late modern resurgence of religion, the shift in the reason-revelation balance, has largely been caused by the triumph of postmodernism or historicism, because postmodernism has undermined the Enlightenment rationalism that had been undermining religion. The postmodernist critique holds that reason is unable to attain to anything like universal, timeless truth and furthermore that such truth is a thing that our culture can easily learn to do without. We can get by with our local “narrative.” But this critique of reason deprives it of the firmest grounds upon which to oppose revelation. You can do many things with a “narrative,” but you cannot refute God. Thus, the ancient force of religion has gained a surprising new lease on life at the end of modernity—and not for sociological reasons but for powerful philosophical ones: through the rise of postmodernism, corrosive modern reason has at length turned on itself, undermining its own capacity to contest the claims of revelation.
But then why did historicism or postmodernism itself arise? According to Strauss, modern, Enlightenment rationalism eventually produced postmodernism—that is, its own self-destruction—largely because of the peculiar defects present within that rationalism from its very foundations, laid by such thinkers as Machiavelli, Descartes, and Hobbes: its dogmatic demand for certainty, for presuppositionless “foundations,” for political realism and practical efficacy, for historical progress, and, above all, for the harmony of theory and praxis, rationality and politicality. Yet this fateful weakness of modern philosophy, he continues, was itself no accident: it arose from the peculiar demands of the fierce battle it was fighting—both political and philosophical—against religion. Modern “rationalism” had become deformed by its particularly bruising struggle with revelation—an inevitable and fundamental struggle that was somehow handled in a less distorting way by classical and even medieval rationalism.
In Strauss’s view, then, it is no accident that modern thought has culminated in the unique double assault on rationalism that confronts us today, which he describes as “the victory of orthodoxy through the self-destruction of rational philosophy [i.e., historicism].”5 Strauss’s philosophical project, then, was to see if it was possible, in the face of the twin challenge of revelation and relativism, to mount a defense of rationalism in some form, especially by moving back, prior to the defective beginnings of modern rationalism, back to classical rationalism properly understood, that is, to a minimalist, skeptical, Socratic rationalism. All of Strauss’s varied writings and far-flung research serve the single aim of “philosophic apologetics”: he is less concerned to elaborate a philosophical system than to see if the whole enterprise of rationalism can be rationally justified by replying to these two most fundamental challenges.
One must immediately add, however, that Strauss did not undertake this reply in a spirit of either certainty or indignation. He was not a rationalist crusader. He was a seeker. Strongly attracted both to historicism and to religion (Judaism), he felt their power and appeal, while being struck by the narrowness and superficiality of most of the existing attacks upon them. In his view, there were no simple, airtight proofs on any side of this issue. It had to be approached with constantly renewed openness, delicacy, and appreciation for complexity.
In what follows, to keep things manageable, I will leave aside the religious question and confine my account to a basic outline of Strauss’s reply to historicism or postmodernism. Although the religious question is clearly the more fundamental one in Strauss’s eyes, it is less relevant to the present inquiry since it is not connected to the phenomenon of esotericism in as intimate and complex a way.6
Strauss’s critique of historicism, I will argue, is perhaps the most powerful of those that have been put forward. This is partly due to the fact that Strauss, having been steeped in the thought of Nietzsche and Husserl and having been educated in and around the Heideggerian circle, begins from an inner understanding and appreciation of the three thinkers most important in bringing the historicist perspective to its highest development. These three thinkers remain fundamental for all the later manifestations of postmodernism.
But the unique power of Strauss’s critique is above all due to that aspect of his thought that at first seems least relevant: his theory of esoteric writing. In multiple ways—in six distinct lines of argument, as I will try to show—Strauss’s theory of esotericism contributes to a highly original, multifaceted, and powerful attack on historicism. Those six arguments, then, constitute Strauss’s answer to the question of the larger philosophical significance of esotericism—which is what we are seeking. Taken together, these arguments show that the rediscovery of esotericism may possibly open the path to a “posthistoricist” or “post-postmodernist” relegitimation of reason through a new return to authentic Socratic rationalism.
THE “CRISIS OF HISTORICISM”
Let us begin by trying to make somewhat clearer what it is that Strauss is endeavoring to combat. What is meant by “historicism”–to revert to this older, although still current, terminology—and why must it be combated?
“Always historicize!” proclaims Fredric Jameson at the beginning of The Political Unconscious.7 That indeed would seem to be the underlying imperative of contemporary thought. Over the last two centuries—arguably since the Renaissance—modern thinkers have labored under an ever-increasing pressure to understand texts, doctrines, and indeed every expression of human reason as manifestations of their times. To be sure, there has been much dispute regarding what it is that actually constitutes or determines “the times.” Major contenders in this ongoing struggle include the Hegelian zeitgeist understood as a stage in the dialectical unfolding of the Idea, Marx’s forces and relations of production, linguistic and grammatical conventions, political relations of domination and subjugation, Wittgenstein’s “forms of life,” Thomas Kuhn’s “paradigms of normal science,” and Heidegger’s epochal destinings of Being. All of this striking disagreement, however, renders only more amazing the underlying agreement: everyone agrees in feeling that there is something in the times that rules and structures human thought. Strangely, we are more certain thatwe are products of our times than how. The profound philosophic aspiration to view things from the standpoint of eternity or in terms of our common humanity has slowly lost credibility. All our belief and delight lies in the act of reducing thought to its external conditions. This driving impulse to radically “immanentize,” and “contextualize” reason—this tendency not only to remove the human mind from its unconditioned, transcendental perch but to fully submerge it in the soil of practical needs and local contingencies so that the mind can never be more than a fruit of its times—is what is meant by “historicism.”
Clearly, it is a rebellion against so-called Platonism: the ideal of the “God’s-eye-view,” of the pure mind, unconditioned by praxis, in touch with the pure, unchanging truth. But while Platonist rationalism sought merely to “transcend” the contingent world of praxis, it was Enlightenment rationalism that sought to conquer and reform it. The latter pursued the radically un-Platonic project to unify theory and praxis through the rationalization of the political world. Thus, historicism is above all a specific revolt against this modern, universalizing form of reason. It might even be described as the revenge of the long repressed and devalued world of praxis against the colonialism of Enlightenment rationality. In other words, historicism is less anti-Platonist than counter-Enlightenment (or postmodern). But, at the same time, for all its rebellion against the imperialist Enlightenment, it does not return to Platonist withdrawal: it still shares the Enlightenment’s activist aim to mend the world, to unify theory and praxis—only in the opposite manner, by fully subordinating reason to the demands of practical life rather than the reverse.
Over the last two centuries, this tendency has become increasingly widespread and powerful. In his famous 1924 essay “Historicism,” Karl Mannheim wrote:
Historicism has developed into an intellectual force of extraordinary significance; it epitomizes our Weltanschauung. The historicist principle not only organizes, like an invisible hand, the work of the social and cultural sciences, but also permeates everyday thinking.8
What was true in 1924 has become truer still in the antifoundational, multi-culturalist world of contemporary postmodernism. Thus, Hans-Georg Gadamer emphasizes the pervasive and profound influence of this heightened sense of historicity:
The appearance of historical self-consciousness is very likely the most important revolution among those we have undergone since the beginning of the modern epoch. . . . We understand historical consciousness to be the privilege of modern man to have a full awareness of the historicity of everything present and the relativity of all opinions.9
Similarly, Habermas states in the above-mentioned debate:
One way to deal with the rather unspecific topic of the “present state of philosophy” is to focus on an obvious feature of contemporary debates—the contextualist mood that prevails in most of the debates, whether in moral and political philosophy, the philosophy of language, or the philosophy of science.
He identifies this contextualism with historicism and describes Derrida and Rorty, in particular, as representing “the most sophisticated version of present historicism.”10
As both Mannheim and Habermas imply here, historicism is more of a general tendency than a specific doctrine or school, and one finds manifestations of it across almost all the social sciences and humanities, although with different names, formulations, and heroes. In philosophy, one could point to neopragmatism, poststructuralism, antihumanism, deconstructionism, anti-essentialism, and epistemological pluralism; in history and philosophy of science, to the Kuhnian school and Paul Feyerabend’s epistemological anarchism; in sociology, to the sociology of knowledge, social epistemology, and social constructionism; in psychology, to linguistic relativity or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis; in anthropology, to the Boasian school of American anthropology, poststructuralism, and Geertzian symbolic anthropology; in law, to critical legal studies; and in various cultural and literary disciplines, to postcolonialism, queer theory, and cultural studies. Although involving widely different methods, vocabularies, and audiences, each of these movements consciously undertakes to fulfill the modern imperative: always historicize.
At the same time, however, the growth of this historicist imperative over the last few centuries has also been accompanied by a growing sense of its dangers. Ever since Nietzsche’s On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life (1874), the “crisis of historicism”—as it was later named in Ernst Troeltsch’s influential Der Historismus und seine Probleme (1922)—has been a major preoccupation of modern thought. Historicism—especially the radical historicism of Heidegger—would seem to entail what a host of books in the last several decades have loudly proclaimed: “the end of philosophy.” Indeed, it would seem to lead to the relativizing of all moral, scientific, and philosophical thinking. For if there are an indefinite number of conflicting cultures, metanarratives, or Weltanschauungen—comprehensive views of God, the universe, and humanity—and if no standpoint outside them is possible from which to judge one truer than the others, it is hard to see how one set of fundamental beliefs and values could be said to be superior to any number of alternative sets.
RELATIVISM: CRISIS OR PANACEA?
It is at this point, however, that the radical disconnectedness of our intellectual life, alluded to above, becomes most apparent and problematic. For as many have pointed out, while the first, “existentialist” wave of Heidegger’s influence filled the cafes and universities with grave talk of nihilism, meaninglessness, angst, and the abyss, the second, “postmodernist” wave privileged a diametrically opposite stance: a lighthearted posture of irony, playfulness, and free-spirited delight in the liberation from God and metaphysics. Suddenly all that high-Nietzschean seriousness has come to seem benighted and passé. Whether this remarkable shift represents a deepening of understanding and a growing postmetaphysical maturity or a form of spiritual exhaustion and denial cannot be explored here. Let us simply confine ourselves to evaluating the moral/political argument that forms one important strand behind the later, positive attitude that sees not a crisis but an opportunity, even a panacea, in historicist relativism.
Surveying the French historicist/postmodernist scene in On Human Diversity, Tzvetan Todorov speaks of “relativism, which is presented as a miraculous solution to our problems.”11 Similarly, within the Anglo-American tradition, Hilary Putnam speaks of the “fashionable panacea of relativism.”12 Todorov summarizes this now familiar view—the moralistic demand for relativism—as follows:
The universalist pretension has turned out, over the centuries, to be nothing but a mask worn by ethnocentrism. Thus, the universalist ideology is responsible for events that number among the most unfortunate in recent European history—namely, the colonial conquests. . . . Universalism is imperialism. . . . Even within states, heterogeneity has been stifled in the name of these same (pseudo)-universal ideals. That is why it is time to leave claims to universalism behind, and to recognize that all judgments are relative: relative to a time, to a place, to a context. This relativism need not be confused with nihilism or with cynicism (the rejection of all values); from this standpoint, values are recognized, but their extension is limited.13
Rorty, for example, in his brief autobiography, speaks of the much-needed tolerance that will result from “realizing how many synoptic visions there have been, and how little argument can do to help you choose among them.”14
Part of this view—its understanding of the problem—makes a good deal of sense. For the fear expressed here of the grave political evils—intolerance, persecution, imperialism—that can arise from reason’s triumphant grasp of “universal truth” is in fact nothing but a restatement of (one version of) the conflictual view of theory and praxis that we have been exploring. Theoretical truth can be dangerous to practical life.
What is new and problematic in this view, however, is its solution, its turn to relativism as the universal antidote to intolerance and related evils. (The discovery of this solution also returns its adherents to the harmonist fold with a vengeance, since it means that the real theoretical truth is not some dangerous moral universal but rather relativism itself—which is a doctrine that, in their view, harmonizes perfectly with the most urgent needs of the practical world.)
The basic argument for this view holds that relativism will lead to toleration for two reasons: it decreases the temptations to intolerance while also increasing the appreciation of tolerance. Relativism weakens the inclination to intolerance because, by undermining the belief in truth with a capital T, a single, objective, universal, and permanent truth, it attenuates people’s beliefs or their sense of certainty and thus disinclines them to the zealous and intolerant effort to impose their views on others. At the same time relativism strengthens the positive appreciation of tolerance as a virtue because, by showing that there are no true and absolute values, it demonstrates—or could seem to demonstrate—that the only rational moral posture left is one of tolerance toward all value positions. Since all are equally ungrounded, all should be equally respected.
These two arguments are fairly sensible, and there is no doubt that, under the right circumstances, relativism can lead to an increase in toleration and a decrease in persecution, sexism, racism, homophobia, imperialism, colonialism, and other forms of moralistic intolerance. The only problem with this project is that relativism is a complex phenomenon, pregnant with other possibilities. Ironically, the proponents of relativism, so proudly anti-universalistic in every other respect, seem naively universalistic when they describe the moral and sociological effects of relativism. Let me quickly describe five alternative paths that lead out from relativism straight to intolerance.
It was argued above that relativism logically leads to toleration as the only value consistent with the realization that there are no universal values. This argument can be questioned, and will be below, but let us take it at face value for the moment. If it is simply thought through completely, it itself opens a broad new path to intolerance. For it does not merely support the value of tolerance: it produces an unparalleled exaltation of it. On this argument, tolerance becomes the sole value left standing, everything else having been undercut by relativism, per hypothesis. It is no longer one virtue among many, but the only virtue, the sole source of moral worth. Likewise, intolerance becomes the single root of all evil. Now, as the proponents of relativism themselves will especially understand, this kind of moral intensification and especially this unification of evil into one thing—this demonization of a single trait—can be highly dangerous (no less than the nonrelativist claims to universal truth). Inevitably, it will lead certain moralistically inclined individuals to denounce the “universalists,” “absolutists,” or “nonrelativists” as uniquely wicked, the one group never to be tolerated. In this way the relativist argument easily and (more or less) logically comes around to its own unique strain of intolerance: persecution in the name of toleration. This is essentially what is meant by “political correctness,” a phenomenon that we do commonly see around us today.
At the same time, among other sorts of people, relativism can lead to intolerance in a completely opposite way. Relativism may—as advertised—initially lead to toleration by attenuating the dogmatic confidence and zeal of people’s value commitments. But eventually this “attenuation effect” may, in certain individuals, extend to the value of toleration itself (a more strictly logical consequence than the heightening of that value just described). When that point is reached, things reverse course: people become more accepting of intolerance. This means that they become too morally easygoing to stand up to the intolerance of others and, more important, to overcome within themselves the crude or intolerant impulses that form, for many people, an essential part of feeling good about themselves. To be sure, these mellow relativists will engage less in the crusading, moralistic kind of intolerance, but they will engage more in the thoughtless and heartless kind—a swaggering, in-crowd arrogance or at least a complacent, easygoing loutishness. And this too is something that we see on the rise all around us.
There is yet a third obvious way in which relativism works to undermine the belief in toleration. The value of toleration gets its psychological force primarily from a kind of empathy: the belief that despite our surface differences we are all fundamentally the same, we share a common humanity, a single nature, a universal dignity. But this belief in human nature—essentialist and universalist—is emphatically rejected by most forms of historicist relativism, which typically hold that we are socially constructed all the way down. There are Germans, Chinese, and Nigerians—but no such thing in the world as “humans.” Todorov points to the possible consequences:
The consistent relativist writes off the unity of the human species. Now this is an even more dangerous position than the naive ethnocentrism of certain colonialists. The absence of unity allows exclusion, which can lead to extermination.15
In short, relativism undercuts all good explanations for why I should tolerate strange and annoying people who violate my values.
Still another path—the profoundest—from relativism to intolerance runs as follows. Historicist relativism is antifoundationalist. It holds that the true sources of human thought are to be found not in universal, self-evident truths available to human reason everywhere and always, but in the unique practices, traditions, and conventions of one’s particular cultural community. This implies that the deepest thinking is achieved, not by detaching oneself from one’s community and adopting a neutral, objective, cosmopolitan, and thus tolerant posture, but rather by cleaving as closely as possible to one’s own tradition, to our “shared commitments,” and seeking out what is genuinely native and homegrown. In this way, relativism leads to the replacement of the ideal of detachment with that of commitment, and the ideal of objectivity with that of solidarity (as Rorty explicitly demands). This shift not only subverts the dignity of the neutral stance of toleration but can easily lead to a heightened fear of foreign pollution, an intellectual nationalism, a philosophically motivated xenophobia that has far more in common with intolerance and fascism than with tolerance and the open society.
The fifth and final point builds on the previous one. If, on the relativist view, all meaning, truth, and value grow from the soil of local traditions and conventions, then one needs to ask where, in turn, do these conventions come from and what sustains them? In answering this question, people today like to use the passive, neutral term “socially constructed.” But precisely how does this process work? Who does the constructing when something is socially constructed—and how do they do it? It is surely not all of us. It is those with power, the hegemons. And they do not do it by consensus. Why does all of present-day South and Central America (excluding Brazil) speak Spanish and worship Jesus? It is not the result of a spontaneous philo-Iberian movement welling up from the masses. It is the work of the conquistadores. Cultures and conventions come primarily from conquests, great founders, ruling elites—from force and will. It’s all political: truth is subordinate to power. That is—and must be—the relativist view.
The nonrelativist, while acknowledging the role of power, could add that an important role is also played by the objective truth of things, the inherent principles of justice, which—permanent and unmoved by human force and “construction”—make themselves known to humans over time and shape their beliefs and values. But for the relativist, there is no objective truth of things standing above the imposed creations of men. Everything is humanly constructed—by the hegemons. And of course, there is no prior, objective justice to help determine who the hegemons will or should be. All there is is a naked struggle for domination, at the end of which the victors not only write the history, but create the values and the truths. In this way, relativism, which at first seems a moderating, anticolonial influence—since it removes the temptation to conquer in the name of universal values—easily becomes an incitement to conquest since it generates new and far grander temptations: to become oneself the creator of new values and worldviews. There is a direct connection, in other words, between Nietzsche’s two great themes: relativism and the will to power.
For this reason, no one should be surprised to hear the insightful words of praise for relativism famously spoken by Benito Mussolini:
In Italy, relativism is simply a fact. . . . Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition. . . . If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and for men who claim to be the bearers of an objective immortal truth . . . then there is nothing more relativistic than Fascist attitudes and activity. . . . From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable.16
Indeed, given that the most profound sources of contemporary relativism are Nietzsche and Heidegger, and that neither of them—to say the least—understood it as either an argument or a force for liberal toleration, it is hard to understand how intelligent people today can be so blithely confident of this connection. Relativism is full of contradictory inner possibilities, some of them quite horrific, and no one can say which will triumph in the long run.
Looking beyond the issue of toleration, moreover, we find many other reasons to fear historicist relativism. It may not lead to the triumph of our basest impulses—as some people fear—but it can easily attenuate our highest ones, as the relativists themselves emphasize. This can sap our capacity for idealism and energetic striving, miring us in apathy and anomie.17 Most directly, it would seem to threaten the way of life built around the longing for truth. For that reason, in Kolakowski’s contribution to the Warsaw debate, he describes “the present state of philosophy” as follows:
Husserl’s unflagging pleas for Truth—spelled with upper case—in the face of the relativist corruption of European civilization went largely unheeded, and this was not so because his arguments were necessarily faulty, but rather because the prevailing cultural trends were going in another direction and eradicated, step by step, the belief in perennially valid standards of intellectual work, [the belief] in the regulative ideal of episteme, and finally [the belief] in the very usefulness of the concept of truth. These trends have reached their climax in our time.18
This is the “crisis of historicism.”
In his own contribution to the Warsaw debate, Habermas situates contemporary historicism and postmodernism in the context of the long struggle between “Platonists” and “anti-Platonists” that, in one form or another, has been going on since Plato’s time. As for himself, he states that while he feels a political sympathy with the “anti-Platonist iconoclasts,” his philosophical sympathy is fully on the side of what he calls “the custodians of reason” in those periods when the justified critique of reason starts to put in danger the very possibility of rationality.19
Strauss’s philosophical sympathy may be described in the same way. He is precisely a “custodian of reason.” While full of skepticism for excessive “Platonism” (indeed, even doubtful that Plato was ever a “Platonist”), he is intent on saving the cause of rationality from the excesses of historicism.
HOW TO CONFRONT HISTORICISM
If one is convinced of the need to combat historicism, however, one quickly encounters the next great obstacle: it is very difficult to arrange a clear confrontation with so amorphous a movement. As Strauss remarks, echoing the above statement of Mannheim, historicism is “not just one philosophical school among many, but a most powerful agent that affects more or less all present-day thought.”20 Thus, “historicism appears in the most varied guises and on the most different levels. Tenets and arguments that are the boast of one type of historicism, provoke the smile of adherents of others.”21 In short, there are many historicisms, displaying varying degrees of sophistication and rigor. One must begin by reconstructing what the serious case for historicism is before trying to respond to it.
Strauss suggests that the historicist position does not rest on any single line of argument but derives from the combined effect of at least three different kinds of evidence—let us call them the historical, the theoretical, and the experiential. First, there is the purely historical evidence, such as the dispiriting spectacle of the great variety of philosophical systems. But by itself this kind of evidence proves little: disagreement is not disproof.
It needs to be supplemented by the second, “theoretical” kind of evidence: a philosophical analysis, a “critique of reason” that, extending the line of argument of Hume and Kant, shows the impossibility of rational ethics and of theoretical metaphysics while also showing the inescapable dependence of the positive sciences on moral and metaphysical presuppositions. But a critique of reason of this kind, Strauss argues, takes us only as far as skepticism, which, unlike historicism, is still compatible with philosophy. (Indeed, Strauss holds that it is precisely skepticism rightly understood, Socratic or zetetic skepticism, that is the most defensible philosophic position.) Furthermore, a theoretical critique of reason could not culminate in historicism without contradicting itself, without relativizing its own claims.22
Thus, Strauss argues, the complete historicist position—the radical or existentialist historicism of Heidegger—emerges from and rests upon a critique of thought that is no longer theoretical, but “committed”: it addresses itself to and attempts to articulate a particular experience, the so-called “experience of history” or of “historicity.” This is the third, “experiential” ground for historicism. To be sure, this inner experience is excited by the sorts of historical observations mentioned above—the meaningless flux of historical conditions and beliefs—but it extends beyond them. It claims to represent a unique awareness or divination that has been given to recent generations almost like a special revelation. It is a feeling of anguish or angst, which when confronted honestly and spelled out discloses an awareness that all meaning, all horizons of intelligibility, have no other ground than the dispensation of fate. “The fundamental experience, i.e., an experience more fundamental than every science, is the experience of the objective groundlessness of all principles of thought and action, the experience of nothingness.”23
But Strauss suggests that appeal to this irreducible experience (much like the appeal to revelation) must confront the problem of the seeming multiplicity of such experiences or revelations. We have many experiences that claim to put everything in its proper perspective—moral experiences, for example, or the experience of humble awe and wonder. How do we know, then, that the anguished experience of historicity is the basic experience that reveals the fundamental situation of man as man? Furthermore, upon careful examination such experiences in fact turn out to have subtle presuppositions that can and must be brought to light and tested by reason. Thus, the crucial appeal to revelatory experience cannot completely escape or trump the authority of rational argument.24
Since Strauss sees historicism as resting on such a complex combination of different kinds of evidence, his response to it is equally complex. His writings are fairly brimming with observations and arguments that are meant as replies to one or another of the strands of the historicist case. But Strauss does have a basic overarching strategy that is clearly enunciated and pursued in Natural Right and History and indeed in his scholarly corpus as a whole. Near the end of the first chapter of that work, Strauss declares that to judge historicism,
[w]e need, in the first place, a nonhistoricist understanding of nonhistoricist philosophy. But we need no less urgently a nonhistoricist understanding of historicism, that is, an understanding of the genesis of historicism that does not take for granted the soundness of historicism.25
Strauss announces here a two-pronged approach.
First, in order to assess the overall plausibility of historicism, it is not sufficient to contest an argument here or an observation there. We need a clear view of the alternative. But historicism is not a specific or isolated thesis; it is or rests upon a comprehensive interpretation of human experience. Thus, historicism as a whole must be confronted by an alternative whole. Now, historicist thought is something that we are privileged to see at its peak in the thought of Heidegger, a (then) living philosopher of towering genius who tended to dazzle and silence all of his contemporaries. In order to free our minds from dazzlement and to consider what an alternative interpretation of the phenomena and experiences emphasized by historicism might look like, we need to see nonhistoricist thought at its peak—which is to be found, Strauss believed, in classical thought. The problem is that the contemporary interpretation of classical thought is itself based on the presuppositions and historiographical methods of historicism. To avoid circularity, we need a new, “nonhistoricist understanding of nonhistoricist philosophy.” That is what Strauss attempts to provide or prepare in the new interpretation of classical political philosophy or Socratic rationalism presented in the third and fourth chapters of Natural Right and History and in many of his other writings. In light of this newly revived alternative, we may begin to seriously entertain the possibility that historicism has been a colossal mistake.
But, second, to help confirm this suspicion, we also need a history of historicism, one that explains how that mistake could have arisen, how historicism could have seemed so right to so many great minds and yet be wrong. In his various studies of early modern thought, of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Spinoza, Strauss attempts to uncover the forgotten—and problematic—foundations of modern philosophy and to explain, in these terms, its relentless downward spiral into historicism.
THE SELF-OVERCOMING OF HISTORICISM OR THE RISE OF “POSTHISTORICISM”
These two particular lines of investigation, it is important to add, not only make good sense in their own right but are required, as it were, by the consistent adherence to historicism itself. Sooner or later, Strauss suggests, they must bring about the self-overcoming of historicism.
This point is clearest with reference to Strauss’s second line of investigation, his effort to give a historical analysis of historicism itself. A truly consistent historicism, he points out, “must be applied to itself.”
Precisely the historicist approach would compel us then to raise the question of the essential relation of historicism to modern man, or, more exactly, the question as to what specific need, characteristic of modern man, as distinguished from pre-modern man, underlies his passionate turn to history.26
Strauss seeks to give a historical explanation for the modern mind’s strange and unique inclination to historicism. He historicizes historicism.
Similarly, Strauss’s first line of attack, his effort to recover an authentic understanding of nonhistoricist or classical thought, is also the necessary result of a consistent historicism. For genuine historicism, he argues, compels one to seek a less provincial, more sympathetic understanding of past thought, to uncover its hidden roots, so as more fully to overcome it. Strauss is thinking here of Heidegger’s famous efforts at a “destruction of the tradition.”27 For example, Heidegger’s “intention was to uproot Aristotle: he thus was compelled to disinter the roots, to bring them to light, to look at them with wonder.” More generally, “by uprooting and not simply rejecting the tradition of philosophy, [Heidegger] made it possible for the first time after many centuries—one hesitates to say how many—to see the roots of the tradition as they are.”28 But this earlier thought, toward which a consistent historicist must strain to move ever closer, is all nonhistoricist in character. Therefore:
The historian who started out with the conviction that true understanding of human thought is understanding of every teaching in terms of its particular time or as an expression of its particular time, necessarily familiarizes himself with the view, constantly urged upon him by his subject matter, that his initial conviction is unsound.29
He comes at length to “understand the possibility which Heidegger had opened without intending it: the possibility of a genuine return to classical philosophy.”30 This end result is what Strauss explicitly calls the “self-destruction of historicism.”31
Strauss’s acknowledged debt to Heidegger means that it is precisely historicism at its peak that eventually, if unintentionally, produced the radical new openness to and reinvigoration of nonhistoricist thought at its peak. Thus, in both of his lines of attack, Strauss sees his own path of thought as not simply sui generis but representing the self-overcoming of historicism. This is perhaps the ground of the confidence Strauss seems to have harbored that the future would bring a settled return to nonhistoricist modes of thought.32
To put this point in a more contemporary vocabulary, many people assert that we have entered a postmodern era characterized by the final break with modern thought and the triumph of some version of historicism. Yet Strauss would argue (as we will see) that historicism is not truly postmodern because, while rejecting important modern elements, it is ultimately the fullest expression of the underlying tendency of modern thought. But he further argues that this modernist historicism is internally unstable and that, worked through, it points beyond itself, back to classical philosophy. One might call this condition—in which historicism, in overcoming itself, opens the path to the recovery of Socratic rationalism—“posthistoricism.” In these terms (which are not used by Strauss himself), what Strauss stands for is authentic postmodernism—which is posthistoricism.
ESOTERICISM AND THE CRITIQUE OF HISTORICISM
We are finally in a position to examine Strauss’s specific arguments against historicism. In what follows, I will pick out six strands of Strauss’s complex argument against historicism and show the crucial role played in each by the doctrine or the phenomenon of esotericism.
Very briefly, the first two strands concern Strauss’s reply to the historical evidence for historicism, while the remaining ones involve his response to the theoretical and experiential grounds. Of these, the second two strands are part of Strauss’s effort to recover a genuine understanding of nonhistoricist thought at its peak, that is, of Socratic rationalism, whereas the final two strands concern his attempt to explain the rise of historicism historically.
1. Historical Evidence
The simplest and most common strand of the historicist argument involves the appeal to historical evidence. The argument holds, as Strauss puts it, that human history presents “the depressing spectacle of a disgraceful variety of thoughts and beliefs and, above all, of the passing-away of every thought and belief ever held by men.” There have been almost as many distinct philosophies as there have been philosophers. “Why are philosophers” asks Rorty, “now as in Cicero’s day, still arguing inconclusively, tramping round and round the same dialectical circles, never convincing each other?”33 This experience of centuries of disagreement and failure seems finally to have exposed the grand delusion of nonhistoricist thinking: there is no final, transhistorical, universal truth.34
This is a weak argument on a number of counts. The spectacle of sectarian disagreement, Strauss points out, has been well known since ancient times without leading to this historicist conclusion. Why, then, does it have that effect on us? Indeed, it is an obvious fallacy to argue from the fact that people disagree to the conclusion that no one of them has the truth—or, worse, that there is no truth. Why, then, are we so tempted by this faulty reasoning?
Strauss’s answer is that, from the start, modern thought aspired to “realism”: to have an effect, to overcome the gulf between theory and praxis. It sought not merely to understand the world but to change it.35 Thus, it tended to identify the rational with the real or the powerful—with what works or what wins. More crudely stated, it tended to worship success. We moderns lack the Olympian detachment from the world and from history that was the hallmark of classical thought. Consequently, all our thinking is shaped by an unspoken epistemological premise: if there is a truth, it will show itself in the world, it will win out in the marketplace of ideas, it will be proved by history. It is because of this very questionable premise that we have become inordinately dispirited by the familiar, age-old spectacle of sectarian disagreement and that we have drawn the unwarranted conclusion from it that there is no transhistorical truth.
But in addition to this reply, Strauss also argues that there is in fact much less disagreement among the major philosophers than a conventional reading of their works would lead one to think. As we have seen, prior to the nineteenth century, all philosophers, in one degree or another, adjusted the presentation of their thought to the particular conventions prevailing in their time and place. This esoteric practice had the effect of systematically exaggerating the appearance of philosophical disagreement. At the same time, philosophers have inclined to hide their deepest thoughts and experiences, especially those at the root of the philosophic life. This has had the effect of systematically obscuring their points of agreement—what one might call the unity of philosophic experience.
For example, it is axiomatic in modern classical scholarship that there are fundamental disagreements between Plato and Aristotle. But Strauss, reading esoterically, rejoined a long tradition of ancient Greek and medieval Arabic commentators on Plato and Aristotle that regarded them as in essential agreement on the most important questions.36 Similarly, Strauss argues that an appreciation of esotericism is necessary in order to see the hidden unity of early modern thought:
We no longer understand that in spite of great disagreements among those thinkers, they were united by the fact that they all fought one and the same power—the kingdom of darkness, as Hobbes called it. . . . This will become clearer to us the more we learn again to understand those thinkers as they understood themselves and the more familiar we become with the art of allusive and elusive writing which all of them employ, although to different degrees. The series of those thinkers will then come to sight as a line of warriors who occasionally interrupt their fight against their common enemy to engage in a more or less heated but never hostile disputation among themselves.37
This is not to deny, of course, that there exist real disagreements among philosophers. Still, ignorance of the phenomenon of esoteric writing has led to a systematic misreading of the history of philosophy, portraying it as far more diverse and chaotic than in fact it has been.
2. Historical Evidence II
The historicist would reply that even if this were so, the mere issue of diversity does not get at the main lesson to be drawn from the historical evidence. As Strauss writes, “most historicists consider decisive the fact, which can be established by historical studies, that a close relation exists between each political philosophy and the historical situation in which it emerged.”38 For example, R. G. Collingwood, in his The Idea of History, writes:
The Republic of Plato is an account, not of the unchanging ideal of political life, but of the Greek ideal as Plato received it and reinterpreted it. The Ethics of Aristotle describes not an eternal morality but the morality of the Greek gentleman. Hobbes’ Leviathan expounds the political ideas of seventeenth century absolutism in their English form. Kant’s ethical theory expresses the moral convictions of German pietism.39
There is by now a vast store of historical evidence, compiled over the past two centuries by philosophers and intellectual historians, demonstrating that even the greatest thinkers of the past were merely mouthpieces for the assumptions of their times, which they naively mistook for timeless Truth. As Karl Marx puts it in a famous passage, “What else does the history of ideas prove than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.”40 Marx considers this historical finding to be not merely true but perfectly obvious.
Marx is not wrong. The historical evidence for this view is indeed massive. But Strauss’s rediscovery of esotericism makes possible the following reply: of course the great thinkers of the past appear to be prisoners of their times, hawkers of prevailing conventions, but that is because they deliberately hid their true thoughts behind a veil of conventionality. Through most of history, the price of real intellectual freedom was precisely the well-cultivated appearance of being a bound prisoner of one’s time. Thus, to address two of Collingwood’s examples above, if one reads carefully and between the lines in Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Ethics, one easily sees that the former ultimately had grave reservations about the Greek ideal of political life as did the latter about the morality of the Greek gentleman.41 In this way, the doctrine of esoteric writing—and it alone—can explain away the otherwise massive historical evidence in favor of historicism.42
This doctrine also explains a related puzzle. Precisely if the evidence for historicism is as obvious as the historicist insists, then why was it not noticed by earlier centuries? Why are modern thinkers alone in drawing the historicist conclusion? Again the solution is provided by esotericism. Unlike earlier readers, we alone naively take the pious and conventional surface of past writings for their true teaching. We take our blindness for insight. In short, it is the modern forgetfulness of esotericism that is largely responsible for the strange and unique susceptibility of the modern mind to historicism.
Thus, on the historical level, when the evidence is read properly—that is, in light of the phenomenon of esotericism—it by no means points clearly to historicism. Indeed, as Strauss goes on to argue, it actually points away from it.
Far from legitimizing the historicist inference, history seems rather to prove that all human thought, and certainly all philosophic thought, is concerned with the same fundamental themes or the same fundamental problems, and therefore that there exists an unchanging framework which persists in all changes of human knowledge of both facts and principles.43
At a minimum, even if permanent answers elude us, the fundamental questions of life are within our grasp, and this crucial “knowledge of ignorance” is all that is needed for a Socratic life of erotic skepticism and passionate questing.
3. Ancients and Moderns
The most serious case for historicism, according to Strauss, derives not from this first category of evidence—these purely historical arguments—but rather from the second and third categories: what I have called the theoretical and experiential grounds. Historicists offer elaborate theoretical analyses that purport to show the inherent limitations of human knowledge. Furthermore, this theoretical “critique of reason,” when properly interpreted, also helps to articulate the fundamental “experience of history” or of ‘historicity” that is somehow the deepest experience of the modern mind. This combination of philosophical critique and inner experience reveals that, from its very origins in Greece some twenty-five hundred years ago, Western rationalism was fundamentally deluded and nihilistic—based on presuppositions that it could not defend or even fully articulate—and that the whole subsequent history of philosophy has been the inevitable, step-by-step self-destruction of this overreaching, rationalist enterprise. Both Nietzsche and Heidegger, as Strauss reports, “regard as decisive the nihilism which according to them began in Plato (or before) . . . and whose ultimate consequence is the present decay.”44
While Strauss has considerable sympathy for this line of argument, he has one basic objection: “I began . . . to wonder whether the self-destruction of reason was not the inevitable outcome of modern rationalism as distinguished from pre-modern rationalism.”45 This led to Strauss’s central intellectual project: first, to uncover the fundamental gulf between ancient and modern rationalism and, then, to demonstrate that, unlike the latter, the former—which is nonhistoricist thought at its peak—was genuinely self-knowing and able to give an adequate justification of itself. Both parts of this project rely decisively on the rediscovery of esotericism.
To begin with, there is the central question—which depends decisively on how we read—of whether such a fundamental divide actually exists: is modern thought essentially different from classical (and Christian) thought? Such a view seems to have been the self-understanding of the Enlightenment, which boasted of its novelty and was much preoccupied with the famous “quarrel between the ancients and the moderns.” But somehow this crucial perspective was lost. It is certainly not the view prevailing today.
A revisionist view took over in the nineteenth century when the romantic reaction against the Enlightenment and the turn away from reason to tradition inclined a new generation of historians—especially the “historical school” of Friedrich Carl von Savigny and Otto von Gierke—to downplay the radicalness of this break and to emphasize the essential continuity of the tradition reaching back from modern times to ancient Greek and Roman thought.
Moreover, the counter-Enlightenment reaction also involved a return to Christianity and an effort to reinterpret the Enlightenment in Christian terms. As Strauss puts it, “from this [Christian] reaction to the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment itself [became] interpreted as Christianly motivated.” He adds, referring to esotericism: “and this [reinterpretation] succeeds because the Enlightenment had always accommodated itself, for political reasons, to Christianity. The thus created fable convenue is the basis of the view ruling today.”46 One example of “the view ruling today” is the widespread claim—found in different forms in Hegel, Wilhelm Dilthey, Max Weber, and others—that the Enlightenment represents, not a radical break with the premodern, but merely a “secularization” of Christian and especially of Protestant thought.
Subsequent scholarship on the history of Western philosophy has been largely shaped by these two revisionist views, which one may call the “continuity thesis” and the “secularization thesis.” Nietzsche and Heidegger, who see the whole of Western rationalism, notwithstanding its inner mutations, as more or less of a piece, would also seem to be heirs of this later tradition of historiography.47
Strauss seeks to revive the earlier idea of a radical rift. But once lost, this view is extremely difficult to recover in anything more than a superficial way. For the early modern thinkers, precisely because they were conscious of making a radical and subversive break with the past, took considerable pains to obscure that break, at least in its full range and meaning. For example, “Locke makes it particularly difficult for us to recognize . . . how much he deviates from the natural right tradition. He was an eminently prudent man. . . . We are then apparently confronted with an unbroken tradition of perfect respectability that stretches from Socrates to Locke.”48 Scholars recognize that there is clearly something new in the early modern thinkers, but they are understandably dubious of the claims to fundamental originality that these thinkers occasionally make, primarily because these claims are surrounded by longer and more emphatic statements on religion and related matters that clearly indicate—at least, to nonesoteric readers—a continuing dependence on the Christian tradition.49
Strauss’s rediscovery of esotericism, then, was the crucial precondition for his famous “ancients-moderns” theme: his rejection of the historiography of “continuity” and “secularization” and his recovery of the radical but partly hidden break in Western thought that makes it possible to decouple classical philosophy from the relentless downward spiral and self-destruction of modern philosophy.
4. The New Interpretation of Classical Philosophy
This decoupling of ancient thought from modern was just a first step. Strauss then needed to demonstrate that classical rationalism, unlike modern, was actually able to defend itself against the historicist critique of reason, both “theoretical” and “experiential.”
He believed, however, that it was manifestly not able to defend itself, so long as it was understood in the traditional way, a way decisively shaped by methods of interpretation that presuppose the truth of historicism. To escape this circle, Strauss saw the need, as we have seen, for a new, nonhistoricist interpretation of classical thought. His recovery of the art of esoteric interpretation—which shows that the classical philosophers were not so much reflecting their times as hiding from them—opened the way to a comprehensive, new understanding of classical thought that was not only more genuine, in his view, but more able to fend off the historicist critique.
Obviously, it is not possible here to elaborate in any detail Strauss’s interpretation of ancient thought. But let me briefly touch on three central aspects of that interpretation that are both crucial to the reply to historicism and that depend on esoteric reading.
Classical Skepticism
The first aspect is the minimalism or extreme skepticism of classical rationalism. Strauss returned to classical thought via medieval thought, especially via Maimonides and, on the latter’s express recommendation, Alfarabi. It is with the help of these thinkers, who speak explicitly of their own esotericism and that of the classical writers, that Strauss was led to his own rediscovery of the phenomenon. And guided by Alfarabi’s esoteric reading of Plato, Strauss came to the view that the true Platonic philosopher—who does not differ essentially from the Socratic or Aristotelian philosopher—was not the “Platonist,” the dogmatic metaphysician who knows the ideas, but rather the zetetic skeptic who knows his own ignorance and who lives in wonder and questioning. Strauss found crucial confirmation for this unorthodox reading of Plato in another long-neglected source, Xenophon, a writer who, since the end of the eighteenth century, had been largely dismissed as philosophically superficial for the good reason that if one does not see the esoteric depths of his Socratic writings, one sees only the sometimes charming, sometimes boring recollections of a retired general.
In Strauss’s new, skeptical interpretation of classical rationalism, derived from Alfarabi, Plato, and Xenophon,
Socrates was so far from being committed to a specific cosmology that his knowledge was knowledge of ignorance. Knowledge of ignorance is not ignorance. It is knowledge of the elusive character of the truth, of the whole. Socrates, then, viewed man in the light of the mysterious character of the whole. He held therefore that we are more familiar with the situation of man as man than with the ultimate causes of that situation. We may also say that he viewed man in the light of the unchangeable ideas, i.e., of the fundamental and permanent problems.50
Understood in this minimalist and skeptical way, classical philosophy presents a much smaller target for attack. On this basis, classical rationalism remains relatively unscathed by such things as the refutation of teleology, the rise of modern science—and by the “theoretical” critique of reason that forms the second ground of historicism. On this interpretation, for example, classical rationalism escapes the central Heideggerian charge that it dogmatically identifies “being” with “intelligible” or “object.”51 Similarly, it is only on this interpretation that the above-mentioned historical evidence—the persistence, amid the flux of answers, of the same fundamental questions—may be taken as a decisive vindication of philosophy against the claims of historicism. “No more [than the permanence of the problems] is needed to legitimize philosophy in the original Socratic sense.”52
The Double Challenge of Religion and Poetry
Related to this emphasis on skepticism is the second key aspect of Strauss’s reinterpretation of classical thought: the centrality of the confrontation with religion and poetry. For if it is true that the philosopher “in the original Socratic sense” possesses no completed metaphysical system but lives “in the light of the mysterious character of the whole,” through what means can he defend his rationalism in the face of the sacred claims of the city and the poets? Similarly, if we have no certain theoretical knowledge of the larger whole, if we must fall back on our direct human experience of the human—well, isn’t the philosopher very clumsy and ill equipped for this, as is classically argued by Aristophanes in the Clouds? For the philosophers are typically detached from and contemptuous of the human things, the merely mortal realm; they are rationalists seeking the universal, the necessary, and the eternal. It follows that true wisdom is the preserve not of the philosophers but of the poets who immerse themselves in human life, who know it from the inside, and who are able to imitate and articulate the unique experience of the human in all its inescapable particularity, contingency, and changeableness. In Strauss’s new interpretation, meeting this fundamental difficulty—the inevitable challenge to skeptical rationalism posed by divine and poetic wisdom—is the defining task of classical political philosophy and the core meaning of the Socratic revolution.
But this is not at all the teaching of the surface of the Platonic dialogues—or of the conventional scholarship based upon it—which rather hold, in Strauss’s words, that “the opposite, or the opponent, of classical political philosophy is sophistry, the teaching and the practice of the Greek sophists.” Socrates is the citizen-philosopher, the great defender of virtue and justice against the sophists. But in Strauss’s esoteric reading, it is not the sophists but the poets who are truly central. “The great alternative to classical political philosophy is poetry.” Again: “I limit myself to the question concerning the character and claim of classical political philosophy, to the question concerning the problem which it tried to solve, concerning the obstacle it tried to overcome. That problem and that obstacle appeared clearly in Aristophanes’ presentation of Socrates.”53 For “Aristophanes’ presentation of Socrates is the most important document available to us on the ancient disagreement and opposition between poetry and philosophy as such.”54
The crucial significance of this second interpretive claim is this: beneath the surface, the real problem that Socrates—and classical political philosophy generally—faced was something quite similar to the great problem that confronts philosophy in Strauss’s and our own time: the double challenge of religion and not of course historicism, but poetry—for poetry appeals to many of the same phenomena and experiences as does historicism. Indeed, the Nietzschean attack on Socrates was in many respects a restatement of the ancient poetic attack as epitomized by Aristophanes.55Thus, the main purpose of the dialogues of Plato and Xenophon, on Strauss’s esoteric reading, is to show how Socrates, by virtue of his unique turn to political philosophy, was able to defend the philosophic life successfully against this double challenge to its legitimacy, the religious and the poetic (or “historicist”).
Indeed, Socratic political rationalism is able not only to defend itself, in Strauss’s view, but also to form the basis of a counterattack against historicism and against its third, “experiential” basis. Radical historicism understands itself to rest ultimately on a unique inner experience of historicity that has been granted to the late modern mind like a revelation. But Strauss suggests that this unique “discovery of History” may in fact be “an arbitrary interpretation of phenomena which had always been known and which had been interpreted much more adequately prior to the emergence of ‘the historical consciousness’ than afterward.”56 That more adequate interpretation, Strauss tries to show, can be found in Socrates’s sympathetic understanding of and response to the challenge of poetic wisdom. To put it differently, through his esoteric interpretations of Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes, Strauss brings out the striking resemblance of the Socratic turn to the historicist turn—and the fundamental superiority of the former to the latter.
The Theory of Esotericism: The Conflict of Theory and Praxis
The third theme of Strauss’s esoteric reading of classical thought is the necessary tension between the philosopher and the city, theory and praxis. This theme follows from the first two, from Socratic skepticism and the critique of poetry and religion. For cities cannot be skeptics: they have and need their certainties. And because these certainties cannot be grounded in reason, they require divine and poetic support. Therefore, there is an inescapable tension between rationalism and social existence, between the philosopher’s way of life and the citizen’s, between theory and praxis.
Once again, this is a theme almost wholly absent from the traditional scholarship on classical thought. But here we have a theme that not only derives from esoteric reading but also points to the derivation of esoteric writing. It is largely because philosophy and the city are inherently opposed, are dangerous to one another, that philosophers must write esoterically.
Now, this fact, in turn, points to a still more direct and essential relation between esotericism and historicism, a point elaborated in chapter 3. What classical esotericism and historicism are, are two opposing answers to the same fundamental question; namely, what is the relation between theory and praxis? As we have seen, generally speaking, two answers are possible: they are either in harmony or in opposition.
The belief in a harmony of theory and praxis—which, Strauss will argue, is the defining characteristic of modern thought—itself logically divides into two opposite forms, depending on which of the two forces is seen as dominant. The Enlightenment view holds that theory is in harmony with praxis because it is able to rule practice, to bring society into accord with reason. The opposite—but still harmonist—view is the historicist thesis, according to which theory is in harmony with practice because it ultimately serves practice, being an outgrowth or expression of existing social life.57
We are in the habit of regarding this famous opposition—Enlightenment rationalism vs. romanticism and historicism—as exhaustive, a habit that stems from and hides the basic presupposition of modern thought. But standing opposed to both of these harmonist views is the classical understanding, which denies that practice rules theory or theory, practice. Rather there is an unbridgeable gulf, a fundamental opposition or incompatibility between the two, which must therefore be mediated by esotericism, to protect each from the other.
Thus, the third element of Strauss’s new understanding of classical thought—the theory of esotericism—constitutes a direct attack on historicism (as well as on the modern harmonist view generally). It holds that the philosopher’s deepest knowledge—the knowledge that makes him a philosopher—is not an expression of his society’s beliefs for the simple reason that this socially destructive knowledge could never form the basis of a society. His truths are not the expression of his historical actuality because such truths could not be embodied in any historical actuality. The theory of esotericism argues that historicism is based on a fundamentally incorrect understanding of the relation of reason and history.58
THE GROWTH OF HISTORICISM FROM THE ABANDONMENT OF ESOTERICISM
The connection between historicism and esotericism is even more complex and more intimate than I have indicated, as will be seen if we turn now to the question of the historical causes of historicism.
Recall that Strauss follows a two-part strategy in confronting historicism. The first part, which we have now discussed, is the effort to revive nonhistoricist thought at its peak—Socratic skeptical rationalism—by distinguishing it from narrow and dogmatic modern rationalism (the “ancients-moderns” distinction), and then by producing a new interpretation of it that is untainted by historicist assumptions and historiographical methods, and finally by showing that, properly understood, it is capable of defending itself against the theoretical historicist critique of reason and, what is more, that it constitutes a superior interpretation of the fundamental experiences at the root of historicism. It also leads to a superior understanding of the relation of theory and praxis that contradicts the historicist view.
The second part of Strauss’s response is to apply historicism to itself, as a consistent historicism requires: to give a historical explanation of the modern mind’s strange compulsion to “always historicize.” Strauss’s causal account of historicism is naturally quite complex, but one particularly important strand of it is this: “the rise of modern historical consciousness came simultaneously with the interruption of the tradition of esotericism.”59 Somehow, there is a crucial causal connection between the decline in the practice of esoteric writing and the rise of historicism. This is the case, in fact, for three distinct reasons.
The first we have already seen. Over the last two centuries, the forgetfulness of esotericism has led modern readers to identify the true thought of past writers with the merely exoteric and conventional surface of their writings. This crucial interpretive error has led to the systematic overestimation of philosophic disagreement and has also produced the false appearance that all human thought is merely the reflection of prevailing conventions.
But the rise of historicism, Strauss will argue, derives not only from the decline of esoteric reading but also and more fundamentally from the decline of esoteric writing. If the classics were right regarding the essential incompatibility of theory and praxis, then the reduction or removal of the esoteric shield that protects society and philosophy from each other must eventually do harm to both. Historicism has arisen, Strauss suggests, as a reaction against or consequence of each of these two harms.
5. Historicism as a Reaction against the Harm Done to Society by the Decline of Esoteric Writing
To find the historical origins of historicism, a uniquely modern phenomenon, one must look to the origins of modernity itself. On Strauss’s reading, we have seen, the philosophic initiators of modernity were primarily moved by opposition to the kingdom of darkness or what he calls “anti-theological ire.”60 On the deepest level, this means they sought to assure themselves of the falsity of the claims of revelation.61 Believing that a theoretical refutation of revelation—one based on a completed metaphysical system—was not possible, they were forced into the realm of practice. Revelation could be refuted “experimentally,” refuted by history, as it were, if philosophers would abandon their contemplative detachment and actively conspire to create a new world of justice and prosperity, a world in which men could be wholly “at home,” attached, and satisfied, and thus a world in which the phenomenon of religion and religious experience could be observed to wither away.62
To this end, the modern thinkers demanded that theory abandon the utopian form of classical thought and become “realistic”—that it root itself in the actual and the practical—so that, on one hand, it would be powerful and effective in transforming the world, and so that, on the other, it would avoid erecting standards that permanently transcend and so devalue historical reality. They set themselves against all transcendent standards, all notions of a “beyond,” both religious and philosophical. They demanded, in other words, the harmonization or unification of theory and praxis: of the ideal and the historically actual, of the ought and the is, of the rational and the real. By overcoming these classical dualisms, they hoped to eliminate every source of alienation or dissatisfaction, to remove every ground of appeal beyond the actual, to seal off the human sphere from everything claiming to be higher, and so to produce an absolute attachment, loyalty, and rootedness, an unqualified this-worldliness, and thus a secularization that would demonstrate its own legitimacy.63
This great modern effort to eliminate all transcendence, to unify theory and praxis, initially took the form of Enlightenment rationalism. In such thinkers as Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, and Diderot, the traditional attempt of classical esotericism to keep theory and praxis apart, to shelter political life from the corrosive effects of philosophic reason, was discarded. It was replaced by its opposite: the Enlightenment project to disseminate philosophic or scientific knowledge in the hope of progressively bringing the world of practice into conformity with reason. Of course, as we have seen, this enlightening project itself still required a kind of esotericism to manage the process of measured subversion. But this temporary “political esotericism” was far more limited than classical esotericism in its degree of concealment as well as its duration.
But as history teaches (along with the contemporary experience of modernization in third-world countries), this unleashing of theoretical reason on the world of practice, whatever its benefits, produced a host of problems. It led to a dangerous universalism, political doctrinairism, and ideological imperialism epitomized by the French Revolution (and, later, the Communist Revolution); it uprooted peoples from their ancient traditions and local customs; it fostered alienation, skepticism, materialism, and the decay of traditional mores. The great Enlightenment effort to make men more rooted and at home on earth was, in many respects, having precisely the opposite of its intended effect.
These political dangers were first pointed out by the great romantics and conservatives who rose up in reaction against the Enlightenment, starting with Rousseau and Burke. It is these thinkers—and especially the “historical school”—who took the crucial turn to history. Of course, having rediscovered the classical insight concerning the danger that undiluted rationalism poses to politics, they might simply have accepted that conflict and returned to the classical solution of esotericism. Instead, they moved forward toward historicism because, for all their passionate and seemingly total opposition to modernity, they remained modern thinkers in the decisive respect: they were still at war with the “kingdom of darkness” and still clung to the underlying, modern strategy to unify theory and praxis that also motivated their Enlightenment opponents. They merely saw the necessity of pursuing that strategy of unification in an opposite way by subordinating thought to social reality. They endeavored to prevent or combat the harms done by theory to practice by imbedding theory within practice, by making thought ground itself in local tradition, in short, by historicizing reason.64
In Strauss’s telling, the long, tortured history of modern philosophy is largely the story of the conflict between reason and social life unleashed by the gradual abandonment of esoteric writing. The more that philosophic rationalism, liberated by the Enlightenment, moved aggressively into the open, the more it posed dangers to healthy moral and political life and thus the more it generated a hostility toward reason. This led to persecution from the nonphilosophers but to something far worse from the philosophers—to la trahison des clercs, the flight from reason, the politicization of philosophy, the rise of philosophic antirationalism.
For the modern philosophers, increasingly impressed by the social dangers of reason, but unwilling to abandon the great humanistic hope to eliminate all transcendence by harmonizing reason and political life, were compelled to engage in ever more extreme efforts to reinterpret and tame reason, to force it into the service of practical life.65 Thus arose the great modern imperative to “always historicize”—the visceral suspicion of rationalism and the eagerness to humble it—that continues to move us to this day. As we have seen, a somewhat simplified version of this political critique of reason—“rational universalism leads to intolerance and imperialism”—remains at the heart of most contemporary historicism and postmodernism. This is how the decline in esotericism—the abandonment of the classical effort to insulate practice from theory and to hide philosophy from politics—has powerfully contributed to the rise of historicism.66
6. Historicism as an Effect of the Harm to Philosophy Resulting from the Decline of Esoteric Writing
Strauss’s history of historicism also involves a second and still more direct way in which the rise of historicism was caused by the decline of esotericism. The above discussion treats the development of historicism in terms of the growth of the imperative to—the profound need and desire for—such a view. The political dangers of Enlightenment rationalism and more ultimately the theological problem created a need within modern thought to deny all transcendence, a need to see theoretical reason as subordinate to practice and incapable of transcending its historical situation. But it still remains to ask: how did the modern thinkers come to be not only so eager but also so able to embrace the historicist thesis? Historicism is not one of those perennial philosophical positions, always available if desired. Almost all past ages seem to have found it a rather unlikely thesis. What is it, then, about the modern mind that causes it to find historicism so immediately plausible?
Historicism Is True—of Modern Thought
Part of the answer we have seen. Our ignorance of esotericism causes us to mistake the conventional and historically parochial surface for the true teaching in the writings of past philosophers.
But Strauss also provides another, deeper answer. For a variety of reasons, he suggests, the modern mind has worked itself into a very unusual and unnatural condition—what he occasionally calls, playing on the famous Platonic metaphor, the “cave beneath the cave.”67 “The cave” is Plato’s term for the imbeddedness of the human mind in its historical situation. For Plato, we naturally grow up in a cave of prejudice and illusion, deriving from the limitations of the human senses and the arbitrary conventions of social life. But at the same time, these elemental illusions tend to be crude and riddled with contradictions, so that there is a relatively clear dialectical path, for those willing to follow it, leading beyond these illusions and into the light of reality. In speaking of the cave beneath the cave, Strauss suggests that modern thought has created for itself a second, artificial layer of prejudice and historical entrapment—and one that, being a product of philosophical thought, is much more difficult to see through and escape. The modern mind is uniquely imprisoned in its historical situation.
With this strange-seeming claim, Strauss is just giving his own elaboration to the observation of a long line of thinkers—Schiller, Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger among them—to the effect that modern thought, especially as compared with ancient thought, is peculiarly abstract and derivative: it lacks direct connection to pretheoretical, commonsense experience. It is out of touch with the sources of its own premises, concepts, and questions.68 Because of this, when we moderns study the thought of some earlier modern philosopher or even when we consider our own thought in an honest and reflective way, we almost always have the same experience: we are struck by the fact that this thought is based on presuppositions that remain unproved and even unexamined, that it is based on ideas and attitudes that were inherited from some time in the past and never radically questioned. In short, our repeated experience is of the historical imbeddedness, the historicity, of our own minds. That is why we moderns naturally gravitate to historicism and find it so immediately plausible: it corresponds to our own inner experience.
According to Strauss, then, there is a relative truth to historicism: it is true of modern thought. Somehow the modern mind, for all its proud claims to liberation, is actually more enslaved to its history and traditions, more trapped in a cave, than was the case in earlier ages. And then modern thinkers compound this problem by naively generalizing their particular situation—the historicity of their own minds—attributing it to all human thought as such.
The Idea of Progress as the Source of the Historicity of Modern Thought
To account for the rise of historicism in modern times, as Strauss is attempting to do, it remains to explain why modern thought is so abstract and self-ignorant, so out of touch with its own foundations, and thus so trapped in its historical cave. Strauss cites a number of different factors. First, modern thought rests upon a long tradition of philosophy stretching back two thousand years, and it is in the nature of tradition to cause many things to be taken for granted and forgotten. Second, this philosophical tradition was for a very long time intertwined, in ways now difficult to disentangle, with a tradition of revelation, that is, of intellectual acceptance and unquestioning obedience.
Third, modern philosophy emerged through an indignant revolt against medieval and classical thought. This polemical character of modernity has had two consequences. It has made it particularly difficult for modern thinkers to recognize, beneath all their noisy opposition, the degree and character of their continued dependence on earlier thought. And it has given modern philosophy a reactive and academic character, because it means that modern philosophy arose not “naturally” from a direct confrontation with the phenomena or from wonder at the permanent riddles of life, but from a reaction against an already existing body of philosophical ideas. In other words, classical philosophy was defined against nonphilosophic life and the realm of commonsense “opinion” out of which it emerged. Modern philosophy, by contrast, is defined against an existing false philosophy, against scholasticism, and so has a far more academic and historically contingent character.69
But the feature of modern thought that is most responsible for its self-ignorance and historicity, according to Strauss, is its famous reliance on the idea of progress. In its commitment to being practical and politically effective—and in its resulting need to overcome skepticism and arrive at settled, certain answers—modern rationalism embraces a kind of hyperfoundationalism: it hopes once and for all to lay down solid, even indubitable, foundations and on this basis to build up a great and ever-increasing edifice of reliable knowledge. In a word, it seeks to make philosophy progressive, like the technical arts.
This idea [of progress] implies that the most elementary questions can be settled once and for all so that future generations can dispense with their further discussion, but can erect on the foundations once laid an ever-growing structure. In this way, the foundations are covered up.70
This progressive attitude is clearest in the field of natural science, but also characterizes modern philosophy as a whole. The basic foundations were laid by Machiavelli, Bacon, Hobbes, and Descartes—for example, a negative or conquering posture toward nature or a demand for the unity of theory and praxis—and subsequent generations took this as their starting point. To be sure, modern thought is characterized by great turbulence and disagreement, but mainly because each successive generation has gone further in the same direction. Locke reworks Hobbes; Rousseau reworks Locke; Kant reworks Rousseau; Hegel reworks Kant; and so forth. Everyone senses that to study any modern philosopher, one has to study the history of philosophy up to his time, because modern philosophy is a historical sequence: every thinker is picking up the ball where the preceding generation left it. As Strauss often asserts, there is a “modern project,” a common enterprise. Modern philosophers are never sui generis. They never make a truly new beginning.
Now, if modern thought as a whole rests on the idea of progress, what does this methodological posture do to philosophy? The idea of progress means that the premises are laid by one thinker, the conclusions are drawn at a later date by others. Thus, progress has the effect of spreading philosophy out over time. It separates the philosopher temporally from his own foundations and thus makes his thought historical. The more that philosophy makes progress, the more its basic presuppositions—what they are, how they are to be justified, and what the real alternatives to them are—become lost in the past and unavailable to it. In other words, from the beginning, modern thought—enlightened and progressive—prided itself especially in its freedom from tradition and its willingness to question everything anew. But the great irony is that the belief in progress necessarily creates a new, more inescapable kind of tradition. Under the sway of this idea, not just religion or custom, but philosophy itself prompts one to accept the teachings of the past without serious examination and move on. All modern thinkers stand on the shoulders of giants—that is why their thought is so ungrounded.
In sum, the growth in modern times of historicism—meaning now the development, not of the will to such a view, but of the inner sense of its plausibility—is largely due to the rise of the idea of progress. For this latter idea is what caused modern philosophy to be so dependent on its own history and traditions, trapped in a cave beneath the cave. And eventually the modern mind, judging of things from its own inner experience, came to its unique “insight,” which all earlier ages had found implausible: the historical imprisonment of all human thought.
The Rise of Progress and the Decline of Esotericism
If the idea of progress was crucial in this way to the rise of historicism, then what does all this have to do with esotericism and its decline in the modern period? The answer is that the idea of esotericism and the idea of progress are opposites—opposite conceptions of how philosophy should relate to its own roots or foundations. (Above, we saw that esotericism is, in a different sense, the opposite of both historicism and Enlightenment rationalism—opposite concerning how philosophy should relate to political practice.) Because of this essential opposition, the decline of esotericism was the crucial precondition for the rise in modernity of the idea of progress and therewith of historicism.
The point here is this. We have seen that the methodology of progress tends to historicize philosophical thinking by putting a thinker out of touch with his foundations or presuppositions. But the practice of esotericism—considering it now in its pedagogical meaning and use—is designed to have the precise opposite effect: when successful, it permits, indeed forces, a thinker to examine and fully appropriate his foundations. There are at least two distinct ways in which esotericism exercises this self-appropriating function.
First, the esoteric writer, by hiding his true thoughts, refuses to give the philosophic reader anything that he can take on authority or take for granted. By limiting himself to hints and puzzles, he forces the reader to rediscover everything for himself. Such compulsion is necessary because philosophy has a natural tendency to decay over time—to turn into a tradition, to “historicize”—because people tend to accept too passively and unquestioningly the conclusions of the great philosophers of the past. This tendency is deadly to genuine philosophy, which requires that one always think everything through from the beginning and for oneself. In the modern period, this dangerous natural tendency to rely on the findings of others was artificially strengthened by the idea of progress, which turns this very tendency into a virtue, into a philosophical method. For whereas such dependence is harmful to clarity and self-knowledge, it is very useful for system building.
But premodern rationalism, which seeks not to build systems but to see clearly, is exquisitely aware of just this danger to philosophy. It puzzles over the question: how do you transmit to others something that can never genuinely be given from without, but only generated from within? The answer it found is esotericism: by hiding the truth in the right way, one entices others to discover it for themselves. Esotericism is the literary counterpart of the Socratic method. A properly esoteric text does not allow the philosophic reader to form a dependence on the writer or on foundations laid in the past; rather it artfully compels him to develop and rely on his own inner powers. In precise opposition to the method of progress, esotericism is a device for forcing thinkers to be self-reliant, for constraining them to stand, not on the shoulders of others and thus within history, but on their own two feet.
Esotericism as Preserving the Possibility of Return
There also seems to be a second way in which esotericism—in opposition to the methodology of progress—is crucial in enabling the philosophic mind to appropriate its own foundations, although I am less certain that I understand Strauss correctly on this point. It concerns a second natural danger to the genuinely philosophic life. Even if a thinker remains free of excessive reliance upon others, his thought may still rest on certain fundamental presuppositions of which he is insufficiently aware. That, of course, is the core of the historicist critique. If philosophy is to hope to escape dependence on such unexamined presuppositions, then the primary task of philosophy must become, not moving progressively forward to elaborate its principles, but moving backward to search its origins and foundations. In a word, philosophy must embrace, not progress, but return.
The philosophical need for return to the ordinary and pretheoretical is an imperative Strauss shares with many late modern thinkers, such as Husserl, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. In Strauss’s view, however, the truest fulfillment of this need is to be found in the famous Socratic turn, that is, his return to the human things. No matter how high philosophy, with divine madness, soars toward the sun, it must always recollect its origin in and continued dependence upon the cave, the world of opinion, the average-everyday, the commonsense surface of things. It must continually test itself by returning to the phenomena as they present themselves to the ordinary, prephilosophic consciousness.
But here is the great problem that confronts a philosophy of return: once one leaves the cave, it is very difficult genuinely to return to it. As Socrates remarks, one’s eyes can no longer see in the dark (Republic 516e–517a). Few things are more difficult than trying to regain lost innocence or to become naive again. Moreover, this loss of access or awareness is not confined to the philosophers themselves, but afflicts to some extent the society around them. Even where there is no deliberate cultivation of popular enlightenment, the very existence of philosophy or science within a culture tends to modify or distort its natural, prephilosophic consciousness. The second danger to philosophy, then, is this: philosophy is to a certain extent a self-undermining activity because, to remain healthy, it needs to maintain awareness of its origins in the world of pretheoretical experience and yet it inevitably tends to obscure or transform that world, to render it inaccessible.
Now, in the modern period, this second natural danger to philosophy has been, once again, artificially strengthened by the ideas of progress and enlightenment. The great but obstructed task for philosophy is return. But the idea of progress proclaims that the proper task of philosophy is rather to move ever forward, without looking back. It teaches that the origin, the prescientific, commonsense world, is a realm of mere superstition and folklore that should be transcended and forgotten. Similarly, the related idea of enlightenment involves modern philosophy in the deliberate attempt to transform popular awareness, to abolish traditional society and the old world of prescientific common sense, and to replace it with a new form of consciousness, a secularized, disenchanted, scientific culture. In these ways, modern philosophy aggressively tears up its own roots and closes off every access to the pretheoretical world. It climbs up a ladder and then throws it away. That is why modern thought is so un-Socratic, so lacking in the self-awareness that comes only from continually returning to and grounding oneself in the experiences of ordinary life.
Classical thought avoids these evils—it remains remarkably concrete, self-aware, and rooted in ordinary experience—because it is a philosophy not of progress and enlightenment but of return. And though there are formidable natural obstacles to return, as we have just seen, classical thought possesses a device for dealing with these: through esotericism, the philosophers protect and preserve the commonsense, pretheoretical awareness of the city. They do not allow it to be corrupted or degraded by their own theoretical pursuits. In other words, Strauss often emphasizes that Socrates practiced protective esotericism because he became fully aware of his dependence on the city. But this dependence is not limited to his bodily needs—of which, presumably, earlier thinkers were not unaware. It is also and especially an intellectual dependence on the city as the natural repository of prephilosophical experience. It is this he seeks to protect. Esotericism is, then, the necessary supplement for a philosophy of return: it helps to preserve that to which philosophy needs to return—preserve it from the effects of philosophy. It is the natural corrective for the inherently self-undermining character of philosophy: it makes it possible for philosophic activity to live safely side by side with the prephilosophic awareness that it needs.
This preservative aspect of esotericism has also a second dimension. Esoteric writings help to secure the philosophers’ access to the pretheoretical perspective not only by protecting that perspective within living society but also by presenting and preserving it in books. As Strauss frequently emphasizes, the writings of classical political philosophy have a unique directness, freshness, and concreteness that are not to be found in modern writings because—on their surface as distinguished from their depth—they deliberately adopt and elaborate the ordinary citizen’s perspective on political things. They do not look down on the political world from some scientific standpoint outside and above, but rather take on the internal, practical, prephilosophical point of view. These writings are forever the great corrective to every kind of excessive sophistication. They are agents of Socratic simplicity and return, helping one to recall and to get back in touch with elemental, pretheoretical common sense.
Thus, in two ways, the classical philosophers wrote in a manner that preserved their access to the prephilosophical. By writing esoterically—that is, by hiding the truth—they sheltered society and its pretheoretical perspective from corruption. And by writing exoterically—that is, by presenting an alternative, salutary doctrine on the surface of their writings—they described and preserved in literary form a version of the prephilosophical view.
I am not claiming, of course, that preserving the prephilosophical perspective of the city is the only or even the primary purpose of classical esotericism. Preserving philosophy itself is obviously a more urgent and fundamental aim, and it is one that is in some tension with the first. It seems clear, for example, that Plato seeks not simply to protect existing Greek ideas about the gods but to reform them in such a way as to make philosophy appear to be a pious and thus respectable activity. But within the bounds set by this latter concern, Plato does also seek to preserve, if not heighten, the moral and religious hopes, longings, and beliefs of the pretheoretical world.
To summarize the second half of Strauss’s overall argument, having revived the great alternative to historicism—Socratic skeptical rationalism—he seeks to give a historical account of the unique modern susceptibility to historicism. He traces the historicist imperative—the need to see reason as imbedded in history—largely to a reaction against the political dangers that resulted when philosophers abandoned esoteric restraint in favor of crusading Enlightenment rationalism. More ultimately, he traces it to the defining modern concern to combat “the kingdom of darkness” through the denial of all transcendence, including that of theory over praxis.
But Strauss also tries to explain the genesis of the unique inner experience of the modern mind that causes it to find historicism not only desirable but immediately plausible. Modern thought, he argues, is fundamentally different from classical thought in that the former attempts to ground philosophy through progress and the latter through return. Classical philosophy endeavored to legitimize itself, to illuminate and test its basic presuppositions, through the constant return to and confrontation with the world of prephilosophic experience (relying on esotericism to preserve that world from transformation in the face of this confrontation).
Modern thought is built on the opposite hope that by its success in transforming, enlightening, and disenchanting the world and by its continual progress in explaining the kinds of things that it can explain, it will cause all testimony to or experience of the kinds of things that it cannot explain to simply wither away. The world of traditional society, with its spirits, gods, and poets, will simply disappear, refuted by history. In short, modern thought hopes to legitimize itself precisely through the obliteration of pretheoretical experience.
But having thus systematically cut itself off from its own roots and foundations, modern “progress philosophy” eventually discovers to its surprise that it rests upon choices and presuppositions of which it has lost awareness. And that is why historicism carries an immediate plausibility for modern thinkers that it simply did not possess for earlier generations: our recurring inner experience, whenever we honestly introspect, is of the historicity of our own thought.
But eventually, as we have seen, historicism facilitates the restoration of our lost awareness of esotericism. And this can—if something like Strauss’s readings and arguments are correct—restore to view the lost path of skeptical Socratic rationalism while also uncovering the hidden history of the rise of historicism as the characteristic modern prejudice. This might, in turn, lead to a genuinely postmodernist, because posthistoricist, relegitimation of reason.
Although Strauss argues, as I have tried to show, that the decline in the practice of esoteric writing greatly contributed to the rise of historicism, he did not hold (and it does not follow) that this practice must therefore be universally restored and the Enlightenment somehow be undone—a change that he hardly envisioned—in order for historicism to be overturned. Modern thinkers can liberate themselves from historicism so long as they recover the art of esoteric reading and engage in patient historical studies that will free them from modern prejudices while acquainting them with the genuine Socratic alternative.