PREFACE
1. Goethe to Passow, 20 October 1811, in Goethes Briefe und Briefe an Goethe, ed. Karl Robert Mandelkow (Munich: Beck, 1988), 3:168. Translated by Werner J. Dannhauser.
2. Alexandre Kojève, “The Emperor Julian and His Art of Writing,” in Ancients and Moderns: Essays on the Tradition of Political Philosophy in Honor of Leo Strauss, ed. Joseph Cropsey, trans. James H. Nichols Jr. (New York: Basic Books, 1964), 95.
3. This whole identification of individual freedom with secrecy will initially strike us as counterintuitive, since we associate it rather with openness and transparency. Certainly it is true that secrecy practiced by the government is a threat to freedom. But when we think about the actions of the individual, don’t we rather cherish the “rights of privacy”—which is to say, of secrecy? We feel that our freedom is endangered if we are totally transparent, if others can easily read our letters, access our email, and tap our phones. Individual freedom is inseparable from some capacity to hide from the government and the public at large.
4. See James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), which takes for its epigraph and theme the Ethiopian Proverb quoted above. This brilliant and inspiriting study of the myriad ways in which subordinate groups secretly assert their independence points inevitably—as the author is well, if somewhat uneasily, aware—to the Straussian thesis concerning philosophical esotericism. “The political environment in which Western political philosophy was written, seldom permits a transparency in meaning” (183n).
5. For a powerful illustration of the point from a somewhat unexpected quarter, see the most recent work on Shakespeare by the distinguished literary critic Stephen Greenblatt. As few would deny, Greenblatt yields to no one in his appreciation of the constraints of every kind laid upon an author by his times. As he emphasizes on page 1, Shakespeare “lived his life as the bound subject of a monarch in a strictly hierarchical society that policed expression in speech and in print.” Yet, in the aptly named Shakespeare’s Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), Greenblatt writes to demonstrate that, when read with some appreciation for his irony and peasant cunning, Shakespeare reveals himself to be the very “embodiment of human freedom” (1). This work is a brilliant delineation and celebration, by the very founder of the New Historicist School, of Shakespeare’s remarkable freedom from his times.
INTRODUCTION
1. Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1952), 111n46.
2. The awareness today—indeed, the open and willing recognition—of the mystical part of the esoteric tradition may to some extent be credited with helping to keep some memory of the phenomenon alive during its long period of forgetfulness. But at the same time, this recognition has also contributed to the contemporary resistance to esotericism in the fuller sense. For by closely identifying esotericism with the occult, it has made it seem, in the eyes of most scholars, a superstitious and childish practice that no serious philosopher would engage in. It has marginalized and stigmatized the phenomenon.
Partly because of this situation, perhaps, Strauss actually prefers to speak of “exotericism” rather than “esotericism.” In his usage, a book that contains an external, “exoteric” teaching and, hidden beneath it, a secret, “esoteric” teaching should be called an “exoteric book.” An “esoteric book” would be one that presents the secret teaching relatively (although never completely) openly (see Strauss, Persecution, 111, 111n45, and What Is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies [Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1959, 273). Since this is a bit confusing, I have reverted to the more common usage and call a book with both a surface and hidden teaching an “esoteric” work.
While we are on the subject of terminology, it should also be said that there is nothing essential or universal about the terms “esoteric” and “exoteric.” Many different expressions have been used in different times and places to refer to esoteric writing, including Aesopian literature, acroatic or acroamatic writings, double doctrine, twofold doctrine, twofold philosophy, pious frauds, noble lies, medicinal lies, economy of truth, disciplina arcani, discipline of the secret, enigmatical writing, defensive raillery, and others.
3. For some discussion of these different possibilities, see Miriam Galston, Politics and Excellence: The Political Philosophy of Alfarabi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 22–43; Frederick J. Crosson, “Esoteric versus Latent Teaching,” Review of Metaphysics 59, no. 1 (September 2005): 73–94; and Paul J. Bagley, “On the Practice of Esotericism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 53, no. 2 (April–June 1992): 231–47. One could quarrel with my usage and reserve the term “esotericism” for just one of these forms, say, multilevel writing. The question is not settled for us by history, since there is no precise widely accepted definition of the term. Thus, we are free to define our terms in whatever way is most useful to our purposes, so long as we are clear. I have defined esotericism very broadly—to include every form of secretiveness in the communication of thought—because that seemed to me most useful from the standpoint of our needs as readers. After all, the most fundamental thing we need to know in taking up the works of earlier philosophers is this: should we approach these writings with an essentially literal cast of mind, assuming that their authors, like contemporary philosophers, express their thought as clearly as they can? Or do we need a fundamentally different mindset with such thinkers, a hermeneutics of suspicion, as it were, through which we remain constantly alive to the possibility that—for one reason or another and by means of one technique or another—they do not openly say all that they think or perhaps think all that they say? From the standpoint of this basic practical question, it seemed most useful to place the line between the esoteric and the nonesoteric where I have.
But, as I have been emphasizing, one must also remain aware of the different forms that esotericism can take. Furthermore, these forms are not only different but unequally esoteric. For example, Enlightenment political esotericism—being less secretive, more temporary or transitional, and narrower in its motives—is less completely esoteric, one may say, than classical esotericism, which was more secretive, more permanently or essentially linked to philosophy, and broader in its purpose, combining the defensive, protective, and pedagogical motives. Therefore, while defining esotericism very broadly, I would also say that classical esotericism is esotericism in the most complete sense.
4. See the last section of chapter 9 for some suggested reading along these lines.
5. It is also possible, of course, to follow an intermediate course between these two approaches and focus on the history of esotericism within a limited historical period. Such work is also going on. For a particularly good example, see Moshe Halbertal, Concealment and Revelation: Esotericism in Jewish Thought and Its Philosophical Implications, trans. Jackie Feldman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). See also Edward Muir, The Culture Wars of the Late Renaissance: Skeptics, Libertines, and Opera (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), and Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
CHAPTER ONE
1. Samuel Formey, “Exoterique & Esoterique,” in Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, University of Chicago ARTFL Encyclopédie Project (Spring 2013 edition), ed. Robert Morrissey, http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu, translation mine (emphasis in the original). Use or mention of this distinction is also made in the articles “Aius-Locutius, god of speech,” “Ame,” “Aristotelisme,” “Asiatiques,” “Augures,” “Cabale,” “Casuiste,” “Celtes,” “Divination,” “Egyptiens,” “Eléatiques,” “Encyclopédie,” “Grecs,” “Hébraique,” “Idole, idolâtre, idolâtrie,” “Indiens,” “Ioniques,” “Japonais,” “Juifs,” “Lettrés,” “Philosophie,” “Platonisme,” “Pythagorisme,” “Samanéen,” and “Xenxus.”
2. William Warburton, The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated, in Nine Books, in vol. 2 of The Works of the Right Reverend William Warburton, Lord Bishop of Gloucester, in Seven Volumes (London: Nichols & Cadell, 1788), 3.2.14.
3. Edward Gibbon, who was greatly influenced by Warburton, asserted that “he reined the dictator and the tyrant of literature.” Quoted by A. W. Evans in Warburton and the Warburtonians: A Study in Some Eighteenth-Century Controversies (London: Oxford University Press, H. Milford, 1932), 1.
4. John Toland, Clidophorus (London: J. Brotherton & W. Meadows, 1720), 69.
5. G. W. Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, trans. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 260.
6. Pierre Bayle, “Aristote,” in Dictionnaire historique et critique, 5th ed. (Amsterdam: P. Brunel, 1740), 1:329.
7. Thomas Burnet, Archæologiæ Philosophicæ or, the Ancient Doctrine Concerning the Originals of Things. Written in Latin by Thomas Burnet, L.L.D., Master of the Charter-House. To which is added, Dr Burnet’s Theory of the Visible World, by way of Commentary on his own Theory of the Earth; being the second Part of his Archiologiæ [sic] Philosophicæ. Faithfully translated into English, with Remarks thereon (London: J. Fisher, 1736), 67 (emphasis added). First published 1692 by Gualt. Kettilby, London.
8. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. G. W. Kitchin (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2001), 132–33 (2.17.5).
9. Toland, Clidophorus, 94; John Toland, Pantheisticon (London: Sam Patterson, 1751), 99 (emphasis added).
10. G. W. Leibniz, Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, ed. Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, (Darmstadt and Leipzig, 1923–54), 2.1:506, quoted and translated by Richard Kennington, On Modern Origins: Essays in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Pamela Kraus and Frank Hunt (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004), 197.
11. Denis Diderot to François Hemsterhuis, summer 1773, in vol. 13 of Correspondance, ed. George Roth (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1955–70), 25–27. Translation mine (emphasis added).
12. Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, trans. June Barraclough (New York: Noonday Press, 1955), 46, 64, 90, 108–9, 136–38; Rousseau, “Observations by Jean-Jacques Rousseau of Geneva On the Reply Made to his Discourse,” in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. and trans. Judith Bush, Roger Masters, and Christopher Kelly (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1992), 2:45n (emphasis added); see also “Preface to Second Letter to Bordes,” in ibid., 2:184–85.
13. Erasmus to Luigi Marliano, March 25, 1521, and Erasmus to Justus Jonas, May 10, 1521, in The Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 1122 to 1251, ed. P. G. Bientenholz, trans. R. A. B. Mynors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 8:173, 203.
14. Giovanni Boccaccio, The Life of Dante (Tratatello in laude di Dante), trans. Vincenzo Zin Bollettino (New York: Garland, 1990), 40. We regard Boccaccio and the great writers he is talking about as poets, as distinguished from philosophers. But Boccaccio’s own view is that poets of the first rank must be seen as philosophers too. After quoting some lines of poetry, for example, he asks: “Is there any reader so muddled as not to see clearly that Vergil was a philosopher? . . . Or can anyone believe that he wrote such lines without some meaning or intention hidden behind the superficial veil of myth?” Boccaccio on Poetry: Being the Preface and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Books of Boccaccio’s Genealogia Deorum Gentilium, ed. and trans. Charles G. Osgood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1930), 52–53.
15. Thomas Aquinas, Faith, Reason and Theology: Questions I–IV of His Commentary on the De Trinitate of Boethius, trans. Armand Maurer (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1987), 53–54.
16. Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, ed. and trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 79 (1.34), 6 (1. Introduction).
17. Plato’s Laws, trans. Muhsin Mahdi, in Medieval Political Philosophy: A Sourcebook, ed. Ralph Lerner and Muhsin Mahdi (New York: Free Press, 1963), 84–85 (emphasis added).
18. Augustine, Letters, ed. Ludwig Schopp and Roy Joseph Deferrari, trans. Sister Wilfrid Parsons, vol. 1 (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1951), 3 (letter no. 1).
19. Cicero, De natura deorum, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library 268 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933), 11–15 (1.4.9–1.5.11); Tusculan Disputations, trans. J. E. King, Loeb Classical Library 18 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1927), 435 (5.4.11).
20. Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 152–53.
21. Denis Diderot, “Aius Locutius,” in The Encyclopedia of Diderot and d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project, trans. Stephen J. Gendzier (Ann Arbor: MPublishing, University of Michigan Library, 2009), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0001.297 (accessed October 7, 2011). See Rousseau, Collected Writings, 2:45–46n.
22. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 7 Volumes (London: George Bell & Sons, 1891), 1:38, 36, 39.
23. Schleiermacher, in his very influential critique of the idea of Platonic esotericism, tries to evade this difficulty by claiming that Plato made it clear right on the surface that he rejected “polytheism and the vulgar religion.” Schleiermacher’s Introductions to the Dialogues of Plato, trans. William Dobson (Cambridge: J. & J. J. Deighton, 1836), 11. But this is hardly the case, as many contemporary scholars acknowledge. See, for example, W. R. Connor, “The Other 399: Religion and the Trial of Socrates,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 37 (January 1991): 49–56. To be sure, here and there, Socrates speaks in passing of “the god”—as he does also of Zeus, Chronos, and many other gods of the Greek pantheon. If we seek a more weighty statement, consider the Apology where Socrates attributes the whole origin of his philosophic quest to a pronouncement of the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi. And in the Phaedo, the philosopher is depicted as devoting his dying words to an appeal to Crito to sacrifice a chicken to Asclepius. The most one could say is that the dialogues present a jumble of different religious ideas, references, stories, myths, and arguments with no views being consistently preferred. In short, Schleiermacher’s own reading of Plato on this issue is precisely an esoteric reading, if a likely one.
24. The Republic of Plato, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 14 (337a).
25. Augustine, City of God, 248. Strictly speaking neither Plato nor Xenophon invented the Socratic dialogue, an honor that belongs to certain older members of the Socratic circle like Antisthenes and Aischines. But they perfected it. See Diskin Clay, Platonic Questions: Dialogues with the Silent Philosopher (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 3–13.
26. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 41.
27. The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958), 377 (2.12).
28. Plato, Seventh Letter 341d–e (emphasis added); see also 344c, d–e; and Second Letter 312e–314c. Unpublished translation by Jenny Strauss Clay. On the reading of this passage suggested here, see Leo Strauss, “On a New Interpretation of Plato’s Political Philosophy,” Social Research 13 (September 1946): 326–67. For arguments against the Seventh Letter’s authenticity, see especially Ludwig Edelstein, Plato’s Seventh Letter (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1966). On the other side, see Kurt von Fritz, “The Philosophical Passage in the Seventh Platonic Letter and the Problem of Plato’s ‘Esoteric’ Philosophy,” in Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy, ed. John P. Anton and George L. Kustas (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1971), 408–47; and Glenn Morrow, Plato’s Epistles (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962).
29. This approach is suggested in the excellent article by Kenneth M. Sayre, “Plato’s Dialogues in Light of the Seventh Letter,” in Platonic Writings, Platonic Readings, ed. Charles L. Griswold (New York: Routledge, 1988), 93–109.
30. See also Parmenides 136d–e.
31. Alfarabi, The Harmonization of the Two Opinions of the Two Sages, in Alfarabi: The Political Writings: Selected Aphorisms and Other Texts, trans. Charles E. Butterworth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), section 12:131.
32. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 1:333.
33. See, for example, George Boas, “Ancient Testimony to Secret Doctrines,” Philosophical Review 62, no. 1 (1953): 90–91.
34. Plato’s Theaetetus, trans. Francis M. Cornford (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959), 180c–d; see 152e. See also Protagoras 316d–e; Cratylus 402a–c; Euthyphro 3c; Phaedo 62b, 69c–d; and Republic 378d.
35. Plato’s Theaetetus 152c, 155e.
36. For the purposes of the present argument it does not really matter if Plato (or his Socrates) is wrong in these attributions of esotericism to earlier thinkers—as someone will want to object. One might possibly go further. Scholars skeptical of esotericism typically argue that such attributions—for example, Neoplatonist attributions of esotericism to Plato and Aristotle—should be rejected as reflecting only the over-eager esotericism of the testimony’s source rather than anything about its subject. But if this reasoning were applied to the present case, it would follow that if Plato is indeed wrong in his attributions of esotericism to earlier thinkers—over-eagerly seeing it where it is not—that can be taken as a sign of his own esotericism.
37. This points to a general problem of circularity that tends to afflict much of the scholarly discussion of this issue. Scholars rightly demand to see the documentary evidence for esotericism, but at the same time they use the acknowledgment of esotericism as a strong indicator of the inauthenticity or bias of the source document. On the other hand, it should be acknowledged in this particular case that the Seventh Letter ranges over a number of different topics, and it is not just the esotericism discussion that some scholars have judged implausible.
38. Alexander Grant, “On the Exoterikoi Logoi,” appendix B in The Ethics of Aristotle, Illustrated with Essays and Notes (London: Longmans, 1885), 399.
39. Boas, “Ancient Testimony,” 92; see also George Boas, Dominant Themes of Modern Philosophy: a History (New York: Ronald Press, 1957), 59.
40. The great exception is Schleiermacher, who gives a very powerful description of Plato’s pedagogical esotericism. See Schleiermacher, Introductions, 17–18.
41. Eduard Zeller, Aristotle and the Earlier Peripatetics (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), 120–21.
42. Grant, “On the Exoterikoi Logoi,” 400.
43. Ingemar During, Aristotle in the Ancient Biographical Tradition (Göteborg, 1957; distributed by Almqvist & Wiksell, Stockholm), 436.
44. Adam Smith, The History of the Ancient Logics and Metaphysics, in Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. W. P. D. Wightman and J. C. Bryce (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1982), 122n. In an ironic reversal, Smith’s twentieth-century editor, Wightman, takes it upon himself to correct what he sees as an obvious historical misrepresentation in a footnote to this passage: “The coexistence of esoteric and exoteric writings is pretty well attested among men far from being ‘out of their senses.’ There are plausible grounds for believing that Plato in his later years may have been among them” (ibid., 122n9).
45. There are strong indications that, at least in his later thought, Smith did recognize the existence of certain forms of esotericism (and may even have practiced them). In his later Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. J. C. Bryce (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007), for example, he claims that both Hobbes and Lord Shaftsbury were “against every scheme of revealed religion” and indeed in their writings “sought to overturn the old systems of religion” (37, 38). But Smith surely knew that he was attributing to them motives and views that were at variance with the surface claims of their writings. And he probably also knew that Shaftesbury, in his major writing, spoke explicitly about the need to employ “irony” and “disguise” when writing about forbidden ideas (see Lord Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004], 34).
Similarly, Smith’s very close friend David Hume was widely known then, and even now, as a (thinly) disguised atheist. And Hume too spoke openly in his writings and letters about the need to employ caution and dissimulation in writing. See David Hume, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, in Hume: Moral and Political Philosophy, ed. Henry D. Aiken (Darien, CT: Hafner, 1970), 257–58; and Hume to Col. James Edmonstoune, April 1764, in New Letters of David Hume, ed. Raymond Klibansky and Ernest C. Mossner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 82–84. Indeed, Hume wrote a letter to Smith about his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, confiding that “nothing can be more cautiously and more artfully written.” And Smith seems to have wholeheartedly agreed about the necessity for Hume’s caution and art—finding it, in fact, insufficiently carried out, since he strongly opposed publication of the work, even posthumously. As Smith asserts to William Strahan, the publisher, “Tho’ finely written I could have wished [it] had remained in Manuscript to be communicated only to a few people.” Smith to William Strahan, September 5, 1776, and Hume to Smith, August 15, 1776, in The Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. Ernest Campbell Mossner and Ian Simpson Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 211, 205.
In fact, there is ample reason to suspect that Smith himself employed a good deal of caution and art in his own discussions of religion. See the excellent discussion of this—and of all the points above—in Peter Minowitz, Profits, Priests, and Princes: Adam Smith’s Emancipation of Economics from Politics and Religion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 5–9.
Finally, there is the striking fact, also discussed by Minowitz, that Karl Marx in Capital explicitly treats Smith as an esoteric writer and reads The Wealth of Nations—not without reason—as oscillating between an esoteric doctrine, which presents his descriptive, scientific analysis of the economic world, and a somewhat different exoteric doctrine, which supports a bourgeois ideology designed to promote the good functioning of that world. See Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. David Fernback (New York: Random House, 1981), 2:276, 290, 297, 448, 454, 465.
46. There are a few works by minor authors that could, at first blush, seem to be efforts to disprove the existence of esotericism. On more narrow inspection, these authors all turn out to acknowledge the reality (and even the propriety) of certain forms of esoteric writing, just not the forms favored or emphasized by the particular thinker they are attacking. See for example the critique of Warburton and his disciple John Towne by Arthur Ashley Sykes (1684–1756), an English religious controversialist, in his A Vindication of the Account of the Double Doctrine of the Ancients. In answer to A Critical Enquiry into the Practices of the Antient Philosophers (London: Printed for John and Paul Knapton, at the Crown in Ludgate-Street, 1747); see especially p. 30. See also the attack on both Toland and Warburton by the French historian Jean Philippe René de La Bléterie (1696–1772) in his The Life of Julian the Apostate: Translated from the French of F. La Bletterie. And Improved with Dissertations on Several Points Relating to Julian’s Character, and to the History of the Fourth Century. By V. Desvoeux (Dublin: S. Powell, for Peter Wilson, 1746), 258–311.
47. That is why the temptation to interpret Plato esoterically has never been completely uprooted. It lingers on even in the twentieth century, where there are a number of major scholars who, independently of Strauss and of each other, have developed powerful esoteric interpretations. See J. N. Findlay, Plato: The Written and Unwritten Doctrines (New York: Humanities Press, 1974). Also, the so-called Tubingen School, especially the writings of Hans Joachim Kramer and Konrad Gaiser. For Aristotle, by contrast, the issue of esotericism is now completely dead (outside of the Straussian circle).
48. In his theoretical studies of rhetoric, Aristotle also is known for placing strong emphasis on the importance of clarity; see Rhetoric 1400b23ff, 1404b2, 1407a33, Poetics 1458a18, and On Sophistical Refutations 165b23 ff.
49. The most thorough and influential discussions of Aristotelian (and Platonic) esotericism are Friedrich Schleiermacher’s “General Introduction” in Introductions, 8–19; Zeller, Aristotle, 105–36; Alexander Grant, “On the Exoterikoi Logoi”; Boas, “Ancient Testimony,” 79–92; and During, Aristotle in the Ancient Biographical Tradition.
I would argue that among the other difficulties to be discussed below, all five accounts share this basic defect: they tend to identify the whole phenomenon of esotericism with the mystical version of it. Thus, they approach the question very narrowly, without an appreciation of the broad history of esotericism and of the very different forms and motives that it can have. By “secret” or “esoteric” doctrines they primarily mean doctrines that are literally unpublished (i.e., not simply published between the lines) and mystical in content. With this very strict and narrow definition of esotericism, they examine the relevant texts with great learning and show, convincingly, that there is scant evidence for it. But in fact these same texts are full of evidence—which they ignore—for esotericism more comprehensively understood.
50. “Philosophies for Sale” [The Sale of Lives], in Lucian, trans. A. M. Harmon (London: William Heinemann, 1929), 2:503. This is the first known use of the word “esoteric” in ancient Greek, and it is thought that Lucian may actually have coined the term in this very play on words.
51. See Politics 1254a34, 1278b31, 1323a22; Nicomachean Ethics 1102a26, 1140a1 (consider also 1096a4); Physics 217b31; Eudemian Ethics 1217b20, 1218b32; and Metaphysics 1076a28.
52. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, ed. Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 23.
53. Translated by Grant in “On the Exoterikoi Logoi,” 402.
54. Ibid., 407–8. Even this generalization is really too broad. “Exoteric” may refer, as Grant is claiming, to an external, in the sense of superficial, treatment of a subject (or relatedly and perhaps more originally, a treatment addressed to an external audience, in the sense of uninitiated outsiders), but it may also simply mean an account that is external because outside the present topic or field of study. Thus Thomas Aquinas, in his Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, trans. C. I. Litzinger (Notre Dame, IN: Dumb Ox Books, 1993), interprets the first example given in the text in this manner. The “exoteric arguments” to which Aristotle refers the reader are labeled such because, Thomas conjectures, they are to be found in De anima which is a work “outside the scope of the immediate science [i.e., ethics]” (ibid., 76). Also consider Aristotle, Politics 1254a33, 1264b39.
55. In the writings we possess, the use of the name “exoteric” for this particular purpose first occurs in Cicero (De finibus 5.5.12; Letters to Atticus 4.16 [letter 89]), who seems to be relying on Antiochus of Ascalon (130–68 BC). But Cicero claims that this term was Aristotle’s own. While we possess no Aristotelian text expressly applying this (or any) name to the whole first category of his writings, this appellation is at any rate consistent with the usage that he does make of this term, as we have just seen. The first extant use of “acroamatic” (or “acroatic”) to name the second category of writings occurs, not in Cicero who mentions no name for it, but in Plutarch and shortly after in Aulus Gellius, both of whom are relying on Andronicus of Rhodes (c. 60 BC). They also indicate that the usage is Aristotle’s, but this word does not appear in any Aristotelian text that we possess (with the possible exception of the letter to be considered below).
56. For testimonial evidence for this distinction, consider Cicero (De finibus 5.5.12), who states that it is Aristotle’s works on the human good, as distinguished from those on nature and logic, that were of these two distinct kinds, the exoteric and (in his terms) those in “notebooks” (commentarii). In the other fields, he implies, there were no exoteric works. Regarding the acroamatic works, Plutarch in one place seems to restrict them to writings on nature and logic—but perhaps he is speaking here of what I am calling the “more acroamatic” (“Life of Alexander” 7.3–5). For in another place (Reply to Colotes 1115b–c) he distinguishes the “exoteric dialogues” not only from the writings on physics but also from the “ethical notebooks” (using upomnema, the Greek equivalent of Cicero’s commentarii)—thus acknowledging that there were acroamatic works of some sort also concerning the human good.
57. There is an earlier statement by Cicero (106–43 BC) that some scholars emphasize, but, as I will argue below, it does not really address the questions before us.
58. Plutarch, Alexander 7.3–5. Translated by Jenny Strauss Clay.
59. Attic Nights 20.5.12. Translated by Lorraine Pangle in Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 9.
60. Plutarch, Alexander 7.3–5, in The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, trans. John Dryden (New York: Modern Library, 1932), 805.
61. What remains unaddressed by Plutarch and Gellius is the second part of the second question: whether the exoteric works were also multilevel writings. While it would be nice to know the answer, it is of no great practical importance given that we do not possess these writings.
62. See Paul Moraux, Les listes anciennes des ouvrages d’Aristote (Louvain: Université de Louvain, 1951), 169–70; and Grant, “On the Exoterikoi Logoi,” 400. For possible evidence of such influence, see Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, in Moralia, trans. Frank Cole Babbitt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), 5:182–83 (382e). For a good account of Plutarch’s many discussions of Aristotle that concludes that the former had a deep and accurate understanding of the latter, see G. Verbeke, “Plutarch and the Development of Aristotle,” in Aristotle and Plato in the Mid-Fourth Century: Papers of the Symposium Aristotelicum Held at Oxford in August, 1957, ed. Ingemar During (Göteborg: Elanders, 1960), 236–47.
63. Grant, “On the Exoterikoi Logoi,” 400. See also Zeller, Aristotle, 120, for a similar view.
64. George Boas’s influential article “Ancient Testimony to Secret Doctrines” aims to settle once and for all the question of ancient esotericism by attempting to carefully and exhaustively “list and analyze exactly what the ancients said concerning this matter” (79). He claims to find that, in reality, there is no such testimony. He triumphantly declares in his conclusion: “We have seen, I hope, that not even the Peripatetic commentators attributed any secrecy to any of Aristotle’s doctrines” (92). His readers have indeed seen this, but only because all of the crucial testimony—the explicit statement from Lucian that we have just seen and those from Simplicius, Themistius, Ammonius, Alfarabi, Olympiodorus, Elias, and Philoponus to be presented below—are missing from Boas’s list. He does include the famous statement of Plutarch with which we began and does acknowledge that it “indicates that the theoretical sciences were secret,” but he goes on to dismiss this claim on the grounds that “the secrecy of the . . . sciences is not accentuated” (81).
65. Simplicius, In Aristotelis Physicorum Libros Quattuor Priores Commentaria, ed. H. Diels, in Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca (Berlin: Reimer, 1882), 9:8, quoted and translated by David Bolotin in An Approach to Aristotle’s Physics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 6.
66. Themistius, Analyticorum Posteriorum Paraphrasis, ed. M. Wallies, in Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca (Berlin: Reimer, 1900), 5.1:1. Quoted and translated by Bolotin in Approach to Aristotle’s Physics, 5.
67. Ammonius, On Aristotle’s Categories, trans. S. Marc Cohen and Gareth B. Matthews (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 9 (1.10).
68. Ibid., 15 (7.7).
69. Alfarabi, Harmonization of the Two Opinions of the Two Sages. Unpublished translation by Miriam Galston, quoted by Bolotin in Approach to Aristotle’s Physics, 6.
70. On Alfarabi’s understanding of Aristotelian and Platonic esotericism, see the excellent discussion in Muhsin Mahdi, “Man and His Universe in Medieval Arabic Philosophy,” in L’homme et son univers au Moyen Age, ed. Christian Wenin (Louvain-La-Neuve: Editions de L’Institut Supérior de Philosophie, 1986), 102–13. As Mahdi explains, Alfarabi sees the two thinkers as adopting opposite approaches to esotericism. “The secret of Plato’s books consists in concealing his occasional clear statements by means of habitual ambiguity, that of Aristotle’s consists in concealing his occasional ambiguous statements by means of habitual clarity” (110).
71. Olympiodorus in Meteor 4, 16–18. Cited and translated by Richard Sorabji in The Philosophy of the Commentators, 200–600 AD, vol. 3: Logic and Metaphysics (London: Gerald Duckworth, 2004), 46.
72. See Charles B. Schmitt, “Aristotle as Cuttlefish: The Origin and Development of a Renaissance Image,” Studies in the Renaissance 12 (1965): 60–72.
73. While all these very different thinkers agree in finding unmistakable signs of intentional obscurity in Aristotle, they of course disagree as to what lies behind that obscurity. At one extreme are certain Neoplatonists who find a mystical teaching. At the other is Montaigne, who finds a concealed skepticism: “We see him [Aristotle] often deliberately covering himself with such thick and inextricable obscurity that we cannot pick out anything of his opinion. It is in fact a Pyrrhonism in an affirmative form” (Montaigne, Complete Essays, 376 [2.12]; for elaboration, see pp. 408, 414).
74. Elias, Aristotelis Categorias Commentaria, ed. A. Busse, in Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca (Berlin: Reimer, 1900), 18.1:115.3–4. Unpublished translation by Jenny Strauss Clay. There is some uncertainty as to whether this commentary is to be attributed to Elias or David.
75. Moraux, Les listes anciennes, 171n91. A.-H. Chroust, “Eudemus, or On the Soul: A Lost Dialogue of Aristotle on the Immortality of the Soul,” Mnemosyne 19 (1966): 22–23.
76. There is a passing reference in Moraux, Les listes anciennes, 168, and Zeller, Aristotle, 113n2.
77. During, Aristotle in the Biographical Tradition, 437–39.
78. See Ammonius, Aristotelis Categorias Commentarius, ed. A. Busse, in Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca (Berlin: Reimer, 1895), 4.4:4.18; and Olympiodorus, Prolegomena et in Categorias Commentarium, ed. A. Busse, in Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca (Berlin: Reimer, 1902), 12.1:7.5.
79. Olympiodorus, Prolegomena, 12.1:7.5. Unpublished translation by Jenny Strauss Clay.
80. Elias, Aristotelis Categorias Commentaria, 18.1:125.
81. The same is also true of Philoponus (490–570), a Christian thinker, largely critical of Neoplatonism. He is in some ways the hero of During’s story, since he too strongly embraces the single-doctrine view defended by the three other commentators (see Philoponus, Aristotelis Categorias Commentarium, ed. A. Busse, in Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca [Berlin: Reimer, 1898], 13.1:3.16, 4.12), but he is untarnished by their grossly mistaken interpretation (in During’s view) of Alexander. But even Philoponus agrees that Aristotle was a multilevel esotericist:
Now, he practiced obscurity on account of his readers, so as to make those who were naturally suited eager to hear the argument, but to turn those who were uninterested away right from the beginning. For the genuine listeners, to the degree that the arguments are obscure, by so much are they eager to struggle and to arrive at the depth. (6.22–26. Unpublished translation by Jenny Strauss Clay)
82. Elias, in responding to Alexander’s embrace of the opposite view, states: “Alexander, this is not appropriate for a philosopher; for to choose the false, but to hide the truth is not lawful.” And then he quotes Achilles from the Iliad 9.312–13:
Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man
Who hides one thing in his heart, but says another.
(Elias, Aristotelis Categorias Commentaria, 18.1:115.3–4)
83. More generally, as E. N. Tigerstedt remarks: “The neo-Platonists properly speaking—Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and their disciples—do not distinguish between an exoteric and esoteric Platonism. To them, there is only an esoteric one.” Interpreting Plato (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1977), 65. The Neoplatonist view of Aristotle is similar. They affirm that his exoteric and acroamatic writings both teach the same doctrine—just as most modern scholars do. But by this affirmation, the latter mean that Aristotle has no distinct esoteric teaching. The Neoplatonists mean that he has no distinct exoteric teaching, that all his writings ultimately convey the same secret, esoteric teaching.
84. Some scholars attach great importance to a statement by Cicero that they read as affirming that the two categories of writings contain no differences of doctrine (see Moraux, Les listes anciennes, 168; Boas, “Ancient Testimony,” 83–84; Grant, “On the Exoterikoi Logoi,” 399). In Cicero’s dialogue De finibus 5.5.12, the character Marcus Piso is giving a brief account of the peripatetic school, speaking first of their writings on nature, then on logic, and finally—in the passage at issue—on the human good. In each of these three discussions he makes a point of clarifying any differences that might exist between Aristotle and Theophrastus, his immediate successor at the Lyceum.
Concerning the highest good, because there are two kinds of books, the one written in a popular style, which they call exoteric, and the other, written more carefully, which they left in notebooks, they don’t always seem to say the same thing. However, in the very chief thing, there is no difference, between those [people] whom I have named, nor any disagreement between themselves. But on the subject of the good life . . . they do sometimes seem to differ. (Unpublished translation by Jenny Strauss Clay)
This somewhat ambiguous passage can be read in a number of different ways, but none of them yield the interpretation given by these scholars. When Piso says, in the first sentence, that “they don’t always seem to say the same thing,” and then, in the second, that in fact “there is no difference, between those [people] whom I have named,” he is in both cases clearly referring not to the books—exoteric and “in notebooks” (acroamatic)—but to the men, Aristotle and Theophrastus.
What is unclear is the meaning of the further phrase “nor any disagreement between themselves.” This could be a further statement about the relation between the two men (which would be a bit repetitious), or it could refer to the relation of each man to himself: each is being consistent and not contradicting himself. If it means the latter, there are two ways this could be the case. Either, for each thinker, there is no difference between what he says in his exoteric books and what he says in his acroamatic books (as the scholars argue), or there are differences but there is no real contradiction because the exoteric statement is merely popular or provisional, whereas the “more careful” acroamatic statement is the final truth.
But even if this unclarity were resolved in favor of the scholars’ view, that still would not justify their interpretation. For what is undeniable is that the whole discussion in this passage concerns only one specific issue, “the highest good” and “the very chief thing,” that is, the summum bonum, which is wisdom. But as the passage and its sequel go on to plainly emphasize, regarding otherissues—the “subject of the good life” and whether good fortune is needed in addition to wisdom—the situation is quite different. Here there are genuine differences. So on no reading can this passage be taken to assert that on all important issues there are no differences between the teachings of the exoteric and the acroamatic works.
It should also be remarked that Cicero’s authority on this whole subject is, at any rate, not great considering that he does not seem to have had access to most of the acroamatic works including the Nicomachean Ethics. See Zeller, Aristotle, 107n1, and Rackham in Marcus Tullius Cicero, De finibus bonorum et malorum, trans. H. Rackham (London: W. Heinemann, 1914), 404n.
85. This fact itself, however, may possibly have some bearing on our question. The writings of Aristotle that we possess all derive from the authoritative edition of Andronicus. If we lack the exoteric works, that is because Andronicus made the fateful decision not to include them. Had a Neoplatonist done the editing, one feels confident he would have behaved very differently. While we do not know why Andronicus made the choice that he did, it is certainly one that harmonizes more with Alexander’s whole view of things.
86. Elias, Aristotelis Categorias Commentaria, 18.1:114.15–115.13. See Chroust, “Eudemus,” 22.
87. This observation also bears on our earlier discussion of Aristotle’s artful obscurity. There is no doubt that much of the time, especially on uncontroversial issues, Aristotle is extremely—one might even say ostentatiously—clear and methodical. But here we have one of the biggest of the big questions of life—what will happen to me when I die—and suddenly we see a very different Aristotle. He surrounds the whole issue with a mixture of silence, evasion, and obscurity. This is the cuttlefish in action. This is a clear and simple example of what that very large consensus of commentators and philosophers had in mind in attributing to Aristotle an obvious and intentional obscurity.
88. The argument is open to two major lines of criticism. The ancient commentator Themistius (in Libros Aristotelis de Anima Paraphrasis, ed. R. Heinze, in Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca [Berlin: Reimer, 1899], 5.3:106), argues that there is no ultimate discrepancy between De anima, on the one hand, and the Eudemus and also Plato’s several discussions of this issue, on the other, because, despite appearances, the latter works, just like the former, actually attribute immortality only to part of the soul, to the nous. But this argument requires an esoteric reading of the latter works (which on the surface clearly endorse a stronger concept of personal immortality) and thus concedes the main point in dispute—that Aristotle (and Plato) occasionally affirm doctrines that they do not really believe. (But, see Chroust, “Eudemus,” 24–25, for a discussion of contemporary scholars who attempt to prove the same thesis in a nonesoteric manner. See also Lloyd P. Gerson, Aristotle and Other Platonists [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005], 51–59).
Werner Jaeger, however, in his classic work Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of His Development (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948), rejects Themistius’s argument (49–51), and in general argues powerfully for the stark differences between the Eudemus and the other exoteric dialogues, on the one hand, and the acroamatic works, on the other. But he explains these differences as reflecting, not esotericism, but Aristotle’s honest changes of mind as he evolved from a young disciple of Plato into a mature and independent thinker. Jaeger’s famous developmental thesis would not account, however, for the other indications of esotericism, the evasion and obscurity, that we have found. Furthermore, as I will argue below, this same embrace of conflicting doctrines can also be found within works all written in Aristotle’s mature period.
89. Such statements are not simply confined to the ethical and political writings. Consider Topics 105a5: “People who are puzzled to know whether one ought to honor the gods or love one’s parents or not need punishment.” The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 198.
90. Sir David Ross, Aristotle (London: Methuen, 1965), 5, 179; Grant, “On the Exoterikoi Logoi,” 292.
91. One must indeed wonder what changes of thought or circumstances led Aristotle, who felt compelled to speak exoterically about the gods in the acroamatic Ethics and Politics, to speak so openly in the Metaphysics (which, for that reason, I have labeled “more acroamatic”). But whatever the reason, the existence of this difference is extremely useful in rendering plainly visible to us how willing Aristotle is to affirm views that he does not believe. (Of course, one must also wonder whether even the doctrine of the Metaphysics is Aristotle’s true and final view of the matter.)
92. Ross, Aristotle, 186. Again, “the expression ‘God and nature’ seems to be a concession to ordinary ways of thinking” (126).
93. Ibid., 126. For similar accounts, see Abraham Edel, Aristotle and His Philosophy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 66; Mariska Leunissen, Explanation and Teleology in Aristotle’s Science of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 40–42. See also Abram Shulsky, “The ‘Infrastructure’ of Aristotle’s Politics: Aristotle on Economics and Politics,” in Essays on the Foundation of Aristotelian Political Science, ed. Carnes Lord and David O’Connor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 89.
94. Once again, Ross duly points out the surprising contradiction between the claims made in the Politics and the teleological theory elaborated in the scientific writings. But in the case of this central Aristotelian doctrine, in contrast with the religious issues discussed above, Ross seems unwilling to entertain the idea that Aristotle might again be engaging in some kind of “accommodation” or salutary falsification. Concerning the extrinsic and anthropocentric teleology endorsed in the Politics, he can only bring himself to observe: “but there he is not writing biology” (Aristotle, 126n2), as if that could begin to explain why he has openly contradicted his settled view.
95. Consider also Plato, Republic 499b, where Socrates asserts that the best regime, the rule of philosopher-kings, may exist at the present time “in some barbaric place.”
96. For some examples of esoteric readings of Aristotle’s works, see Thomas L. Pangle, Aristotle’s Teaching in the Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Harry Jaffa, Thomism and Aristotelianism: A Study of the Commentary by Thomas Aquinas on the Nicomachean Ethics(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952); Ronna Burger, Aristotle’s Dialogue with Socrates: On the Nicomachean Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); and David Bolotin, An Approach to Aristotle’s Physics.
97. See Edward T. Hall, Beyond Culture (New York: Doubleday, 1976).
98. Peace Corps, Culture Matters: The Peace Corps Cross-Cultural Workbook (Washington DC: Peace Corps Information Collection and Exchange T0087, 1997), 81.
99. George Kennedy, Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Cross-Cultural Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 71.
100. Joy Hendry and C. W. Watson, An Anthropology of Indirect Communication (London: Routledge, 2001), 5–8.
101. Ibid., 2.
102. Ge Gao and Stella Ting-Toomey, Communicating Effectively with the Chinese (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998), 37, 36, 38.
103. Henry Kissinger and Clare B. Luce, The White House Years (Boston: Little Brown, 1979), 1247.
104. R. S. Zaharna, “Understanding Cultural Preferences of Arab Communication Patterns,” Public Relations Review 21, no. 3 (1995): 249, 251.
105. Milton J. Bennett, “Intercultural Communication: A Current Perspective,” in Basic Concepts of Intercultural Communication: Selected Readings, ed. Bennett (Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press, 1998), 17.
106. Sheila J. Ramsey, “Interactions between North Americans and Japanese: Considerations of Communication Style,” in Bennett, Basic Concepts of Intercultural Communication, 124.
107. Michael Slackman, “Iranian 101: A Lesson for Americans—The Fine Art of Hiding What You Mean to Say,” New York Times, August 6, 2006.
108. It would be more accurate to say that direct speech has been the cultural norm in the liberal West. Those parts of Europe that lived under Nazi or communist totalitarianism became well acquainted with the uses and ways of indirect speech, as will be seen in chapter 5 on defensive esotericism.
109. See, for example, Zaharna, “Understanding Cultural Preferences,” 249; Gao and Ting-Toomey, Communicating Effectively, 35, 75; and Ramsey, “Interactions,” 113, 121.
CHAPTER TWO
1. Diderot, “Machiavelisme,” in Encyclopédie, ed. Diderot and d’Alembert, University of Chicago ARTFL Encyclopédie Project, http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu; Spinoza, A Political Treatise, in The Chief Works of Benedict Spinoza, trans. R. H. M. Elwes (New York: Dover Publications, 1951), 315; Rousseau, Social Contract, in On the Social Contract, with Geneva Manuscript and Political Economy, ed. Roger D. Masters, trans. Judith R. Masters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978), 88 and 88n.
2. Machiavelli to Guicciardini, May 17, 1521. Quoted by Leo Strauss in Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 36.
3. Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 307 (3.48).
4. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, in Pope: Poetical Works, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 69 (lines 175–80) (emphasis added).
5. Machiavelli, Discourses, 61–62 (1.26).
6. See Strauss, Thoughts, 35–36, 48–49.
7. Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 56.
8. 1 Samuel 17:50 (RSV).
9. 1 Samuel 17:45–47.
10. See Machiavelli, Discourses 2.2. For a remarkably open expression of these “Machiavellian” views, see Rousseau, Social Contract 4.8, “On Civil Religion.” On this interpretation of the Prince, see Harvey Mansfield’s introduction in Machiavelli, Prince, xxi–xxii.
11. Plato, Republic 368b; see 362d.
12. Karl Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1978), 491.
CHAPTER THREE
1. Since I am no philosopher in the sense to be elaborated below (nor do I believe I have ever met anyone who is), it is hard to know whether this radically different way of life is actually possible. Perhaps the noble ideal of the classical philosopher is the product of illusory hopes (see, for example, Augustine’s famous argument to this effect in book 19 of the City of God). This is a crucial and extremely difficult question. But it is one—the first of many, as we will see—that present purposes allow us, fortunately, to leave unsettled. It suffices to know that, rightly or wrongly, some such ideal was broadly subscribed to in premodern times and that it radically impacts the issue of how philosophers should act and speak in the world.
2. Although Heidegger, in his own unique way, sought to restore something like the classical sense of radical dualism, his postmodernist progeny, especially in the United States, have become even more insistently monist. Thus, Richard Rorty claims that American pragmatists have become very dubious of “the idea of a distinctive, autonomous, cultural activity called ‘philosophy.’” “When Platonic dualisms go, the distinction between philosophy and the rest of culture is in danger” (Jürgen Habermas, Richard Rorty, and Leszek Kolakowski, Debating the State of Philosophy, ed. Jozef Niznik [Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996], 35; see 36, 40).
3. Plato, Republic 518c–e; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1177b27–1178a8. It should be said, however, that in Plato there seem to be two quite different accounts of the philosopher’s distinctness. In the Republic, the philosopher is said to live in the true world of ideas or universals—or what Aristotle calls the realm of the necessary and eternal (1139a6–18)—while others live in the world of particularity and change. In the more skeptical account of the Apology, however, the philosopher (or Socrates) is said only to have freed himself from the illusions and false certainties of ordinary life and thus to have achieved knowledge of ignorance.
4. While emphasizing the stark dualism of these two ideal types, the theoretical life and the practical life, classical thought was also abundantly aware that in practice all kinds of mixes and in-between positions were possible.
5. Plato, Phaedrus 275d–e, in Gorgias and Phaedrus, trans. James H. Nichols Jr. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 212. I have slightly altered the translation.
6. Xenophon, Memorabilia 4.6.15.
7. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. Hicks, 109 (1.105).
8. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1141a22.
9. See Nicomachean Ethics 1102a25–1103a10, 1166a15–25, 1178a5–8; Metaphysics 980a22–30.
10. See Politics 1252a25–1253a40; Nicomachean Ethics 1169b17, 1155a5.
11. Richard Rorty, “Solidarity or Objectivity,” in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 21 (emphasis added).
12. If we take this question back to the evolutionary level, we come across the “social brain hypothesis” (best known from the work of British anthropologist Robin Dunbar), which holds that human reason evolved not primarily to meet the challenges of the natural world but to help us manage the complexities of tightly knit social groups. Intelligence evolved as social intelligence. A thought akin to this is present in germ in the Greek word logos, which means both reason and speech (i.e., social connection).
13. Of course, there were also some nonsecular figures in the counter-Enlightenment, such as Kierkegaard, Franz Rosenzweig, and Karl Schmitt.
14. For a discussion of Burke from this point of view, see Leo Strauss, “The Crisis of Modern Natural Right: Burke,” chap. 6b in Natural Right and History, 294–323.
15. As Strauss put it: “I must make one observation in order to protect myself against gross misunderstanding. A modern phenomenon is not characterized by the fact that it is located, say, between 1600 and 1952, because premodern traditions of course survived and survive. And more than that, throughout the modern period, there has been a constant movement against this modern trend, from the very beginning.” “Progress or Return?,” in Leo Strauss, The Rebirth of Classical Rationalism: An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss, ed. Thomas Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) 242–43.
16. Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, 13.
17. It may be objected that while Rorty fits the harmonist paradigm quite neatly, other postmodernists do not, especially Foucault with his searing emphasis on conflict and oppression and the never-ending need for resistance. It must be kept in mind, however, that a “harmonist,” as I use the term, is one who expects the end not of every form of conflict and oppression (military, economic, etc.), but only of the fundamental conflict between the two elements of our nature, sociality and rationality. On this score, like all Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment thinkers, Foucault begins by denouncing the existing disharmony between the two, and, like a counter-Enlightenment thinker, he puts the primary blame on reason through his historical unmaskings of our distorting and oppressive sciences. But he engages in all this denouncing and unmasking precisely because he, unlike a conflictualist, does not see this problem as inescapable. Specifically, he does not consider the new thinking that he himself engages in to be dangerous to society. On the contrary, he expects his new insights and unmaskings—if he has found the right means to express and disseminate them—to eventually make the world a better place (no matter how pessimistically he, like many Enlightenment philosophes before him, may occasionally express himself). And (in a complex way) he finds the key to this reconciliation between science and social well-being in his central insight into the reducibility of truth to power or at least the ultimate unity of the two. But this is an emphatically harmonist view.
18. To briefly adumbrate the main points, the harmonist view holds that while heretofore philosophy and society have been at odds wherever philosophy has existed, the two can in fact be brought into unity in a new, more rational kind of society. The new political activism characteristic of modern philosophy aims at bringing that rational society into being. It is thus distinguished from the philosophical politics of premodern philosophy in at least four crucial respects. First, philosophical politics aims specifically at the class interests of philosophers, which, on the conflictual view, are understood to often differ from those of other classes or of the rest of society as a whole. Modern philosophical activism, by contrast, is more public-spirited or humanitarian (as it constantly proclaims), because activated by the belief that these conflicts of interest can be overcome. Second, philosophical politics is very limited in its goals, seeking only to manage an ill that can never be truly cured. Modern philosophical activism, by contrast, is engaged not in limited or ordinary politics, but in a “great politics” of revolutionary historical transformation. It seeks a permanent and (eventually) universal change in the relation of politics and rationality—an age of reason. Third, it seeks to bring about this change, not primarily through political or military action, but through books, through the power of publication (in the new age of printing), through universal enlightenment—a mode of action and a goal not imagined by premodern philosophers. Finally, this new activism in political philosophy goes along with a new activism in natural philosophy—the turn away from a contemplative posture toward nature to one of technological mastery.
19. Even on harmonist premises, however, pedagogical esotericism continues to be useful, if less strictly necessary. Virtually all philosophers, to one extent or another, agree regarding the utility of the “Socratic method” that withholds answers in order to force students to think for themselves.
CHAPTER FOUR
1. See Kojève, “Emperor Julian and His Art of Writing”; Leo Strauss, On Tyranny: Including the Strauss-Kojève Correspondence (New York: Free Press, 1991); Arnaldo Momigliano, “Hermeneutics and Classical Political Thought in Leo Strauss” and “In Memoriam: Leo Strauss,” in Essays on Ancient and Modern Judaism, ed. Silvia Berti (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, trans. Ralph Mannheim (New York: Schocken Books, 1965), 51; Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Philosophizing in Opposition: Strauss and Voegelin on Communication and Science,” in Faith and Political Philosophy: The Correspondence between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934–1964, trans. and ed. Peter Emberley and Barry Cooper (College Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993); also see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Continuum, 1989), 532–41; and Strauss and Gadamer, “Correspondence concerning Wahrheit und Methode,” Independent Journal of Philosophy 2, no. 10 (1978): 5–12.
2. Stephen Holmes, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 86.
3. Gregory Vlastos, “Further Lessons of Leo Strauss: An Exchange,” New York Review of Books, April 24, 1986.
4. George H. Sabine, Review of Persecution and the Art of Writing, Ethics 63, no. 3 (April 1953): 220.
5. For a more extreme account that employs Lacanian analysis to argue that Strauss’s theory of esotericism is fundamentally perverted, see Sean Noah Walsh, Perversion and the Art of Persecution: Esotericism and Fear in the Political Philosophy of Leo Strauss (New York: Lexington Books, 2012). For a perceptive discussion of the resistance to Strauss’s work, see G. R. F. Ferrari, “Strauss’s Plato,” in Arion 5, no. 2 (Fall 1997): 36–65.
6. Mark 4:34 (ESV).
7. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, vol. 3 (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1981), III qu 42, a 3.
8. John Calvin, Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, trans. Rev. William Pringle (Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans, 1949), 2: commentary on Matthew 13:1–17. See commentary on Mark 4:1–12, 4:24–25; Luke 8:1–10, 8:18, 10:23–24, section 11.
9. Hugo Grotius, De jure belli ac pacis libri tres, trans. Francis W. Kelsey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), 612.
10. Augustine, Quaestiones XVII in Matthaeum, question 14. Quoted by Thomas Aquinas in Catena Aurea, Commentary on the Four Gospels: Collected out of the Works of the Fathers by St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. Mark Pattison, J. D. Dalgairns, and T. D. Ryder (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1841–45), 1:488 (emphasis added).
11. John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity: As Delivered in the Scriptures, ed. George W. Ewing (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1965), 70 (§108).
12. Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 25 (emphasis added).
13. On this great “expense of learning” employed to deny Jesus’ esotericism, see ibid., 149n4; see also John Drury, “The Sower, the Vineyard, and the Place of Allegory in the Interpretation of Mark’s Parables,” Journal of Theological Studies 24, no. 2 (1973): 367–79; and C. F. D. Moule, “Mark 4:1–20 Yet Once More,” in Neotestamentica et Semitica: Studies in Honour of Principal Matthew Black, ed. E. Earle Ellis and Max Wilcox (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1969).
14. For the sake of simplicity and initial clarity, I am using the term “tragedy” in a somewhat loose way in labeling the classical conflictual view “tragic.” In a more precise sense, the classical philosophers, while not actively resistant to the tragic view as modern thought is, did not simply embrace it either. They were unflinchingly open to the many permanent tensions and contradictions of life—above all, that between truth and political community. They saw this conflict as posing grave problems for the stability of the political community and the psychic integrity and tranquility of the citizen. But in the end, they did also believe that there was a solution—for those rare individuals able to rise to the philosophic life. To be sure, on the practical level, the philosophic individual will actually experience increased danger owing to the heightened conflict between his way of living and thinking and that of the city. But these dangers, while grave, are still manageable in most circumstances. The decisive consideration is that, within his own soul, he will overcome the theory-praxis conflict through a wholehearted devotion to truth. He will achieve a human happiness. Thus, human life, with its grave inner contradictions, is tragic for most human beings—but not for the highest individuals. It is in this sense that the classical philosophers may be said to have rejected the tragic view of life.
15. “Mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve.” Karl Marx, preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1978), 5.
16. This powerful humanist-harmonist tendency was then reinforced by two further factors, discussed in the previous chapter. Modern philosophy, in its embrace of the harmonist view, became so caught up in the epic internecine battle between the two opposite versions into which that view logically divides—the crusading rationalism of the Enlightenment vs. the historicism of the counter-Enlightenment—that it effectively lost sight of the excluded conflictual alternative.
The fact of this exclusion, moreover, became hidden—and so perpetuated—by the tendency of the two fundamental alternatives to appear as their own opposites. The harmonist view, by inspiring political activism, temporarily heightens the tension between philosophy and society, and so looks like the very embodiment of conflictualism; whereas, the genuine conflictualist view, which renounces all hope for major improvement, seeks merely to cover over the problem, and so looks like the harmonist view.
17. P. N. Furbank, “A No-Code Zone,” Times Literary Supplement, June 4, 1999.
18. The standard critical account of Strauss’s thought is still Shadia B. Drury’s The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988). See also her Leo Strauss and the American Right (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). For a more extreme account, see Nicholas Xenos, Cloaked in Virtue: Unveiling Leo Strauss and the Rhetoric of American Foreign Policy (New York: Routledge, 2008). There are a number of excellent works offering replies. See, for example, Peter Minowitz, Straussophobia: Defending Leo Strauss and Straussians against Shadia Drury and Other Accusers (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009); Catherine H. Zuckert and Michael P. Zuckert, The Truth about Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Thomas L. Pangle, Leo Strauss: An Introduction to His Thought and Intellectual Legacy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); and Steven B. Smith, Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
19. The central issue of the conflictual vs. harmonist view of theory and praxis will be addressed in chapter 6 on protective esotericism. The more “literary” issues of obscurity and of childishness or playfulness will be taken up in chapter 7 on pedagogical esotericism. The issue of prudence or cowardice and that of cloistering vs. disseminating knowledge will be treated in the discussion of the Enlightenment in chapter 8 on political esotericism. And the issue of the hidden liberation of the philosopher from his times vs. historicist contextualism will be discussed in chapter 10, “Esotericism and the Critique of Historicism.”
20. See, for example, the work of Annabel Patterson, Perez Zagorin, Lev Loseff, David Berman, David Wootton, and Moshe Halbertal.
21. Leo Strauss, “On Classical Political Philosophy,” in What Is Political Philosophy?, 91.
22. Strauss, “New Interpretation,” 351.
23. From 1958 until his death in 1973, almost all of Strauss’s classes were taped and then transcribed. These transcripts—about forty in all—as well as the original audio recordings (where they have survived) are being made available online by the Leo Strauss Center at the University of Chicago (http://leostrausscenter.uchicago.edu). From the fifteen or so transcripts that I have read, two facts stand out about Strauss’s classes. First, unlike many of his published writings, they are extremely clear, displaying a kind of piercing Socratic simplicity. Second, they are remarkably unpolitical. All his courses are devoted to the close reading of some earlier thinker or thinkers: not one is organized around a contemporary political question, movement, or regime. (The closest he comes is a class on historicism or historical relativism.)
Furthermore, most other political theorists (myself included), when teaching earlier thinkers, tend to bring in a lot of contemporary political examples to make the discussion more concrete and relevant. It is amazing how rarely Strauss does even that. For example, of all classic political writings, perhaps Thucydides’s history of the great war between the rival empires of Athens and Sparta is the one that most cries out for the use of contemporary political parallels, most obviously the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. At the University of Chicago, Strauss devoted an entire graduate seminar to Thucydides’s history in the winter quarter of 1962—at the height of the Cold War, a little more than a month after the end of the Cuban missile crisis. But in the course of the whole semester, in a transcript that runs to four hundred single-spaced typed pages, he made only six trivial references to the Soviet Union (three of them in response to questions) and one passing mention of President Kennedy, and he spoke not a single word about the Cuban missile crisis. It would be extremely difficult, I think, for someone to read through all these transcripts and continue to believe that Leo Strauss’s intellectual activity was primarily moved by some fervent political project (especially, as some have recently maintained, a project for “American empire”).
24. Much of the suspicion directed at Strauss derives from the fact that he not only discusses esotericism but also seems to practice it. When discussing it, he addresses not only the historical question of whether earlier philosophers wrote esoterically (to which I limit myself here) but also the much harder, philosophical question of whether it was necessary and right for them to do so. He answers both questions in the affirmative. It is not surprising, then, that he would write esoterically himself, and virtually all of his followers, as best I can tell, agree that he does so. But there the agreement ends. There is much debate concerning why he does so and what his true teaching is. Catherine and Michael Zuckert, in their excellent work The Truth about Leo Strauss (115–54), present a good overview. They themselves argue that Strauss’s esotericism is simply of the pedagogical kind. For criticism of this claim see the review by Steven J. Lenzner, “Guide for the Perplexed” (Claremont Review of Books 7, no. 2 [Spring 2007]: 53–57), as well as the debate in the letters in subsequent issues. (For a very interesting elaboration of an alternative view—with which I ultimately disagree—see Laurence Lampert, The Enduring Importance of Leo Strauss [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013]). I would argue that Strauss believed in and practiced protective esotericism—for the kinds of reasons elaborated in chapter 6—as well as pedagogical and perhaps defensive esotericism. But what is most noteworthy for our purposes here is that, amid all this disagreement, none of his followers argues that he practiced political esotericism, that he was esoteric on behalf of a secret scheme for political transformation.
25. Among the theories that are not named here and that I would largely exempt from this generalization are the “reader response” and Cambridge schools. Both impose genuine interpretive discipline, the former (at least in its less subjectivist, more uniformist variants represented by critics like Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish) through meticulous attention to the text, the latter through scrupulous study of historical sources.
Furthermore, as it turns out, both theories open up a clear pathway to the recognition of esoteric writing (albeit without particularly intending to). For one way of describing the theory of esotericism is that texts can communicate more than they openly state, that what they say is not the whole of what they do, that these texts are not complete in and by themselves but rather start a process that must be completed by the reflections of the reader him or herself. But this idea, rejected as implausible by so many, is the core idea of reader response theory, which finds it at work, in one degree or another, in all texts. The theory of esotericism would simply add this further step—hardly implausible once you take the first one—that there are certain authors who, acutely aware of this phenomenon, deliberately employ it in order to convey something to one set of readers (one “interpretive community”) while excluding others.
Quentin Skinner and the Cambridge school actually begin from the same essential idea as the reader response school, albeit via the thought of John L. Austin. “In saying something we are doing something,” as Austin liked to put it (How to Do Things with Words [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962], 12). Our words have an “illocutionary force” (in Austin’s infelicitous phrase) that conveys things not contained within the simple meaning of the words, but filled in by the knowing reader. This insight naturally leads Skinner to the possibility of esoteric communication. Thus, he explicitly discusses “the various oblique strategies which a writer may always decide to adopt in order to set out and at the same time disguise what he means by what he says about some given doctrine” (“Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8, no. 1 (1969): 32). He suggests, for example, that Hobbes’s Leviathan is “replete with rhetorical codes,” especially in its discussion of religion (Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 13).
But to Austin’s theory of illocutionary force, Skinner adds the further step that the text is able to communicate its unstated message primarily by drawing upon certain background conventions that are highly localized in place and time. This is what causes him to be critical of the strong textual emphasis of the Straussian and reader response schools, and leads him to the highly contextual and historical emphasis of the Cambridge school. Thus, in Reason and Rhetoric, Skinner uses the meticulous historical study of the theory and practice of rhetoric in Renaissance England as a means for unlocking the esoteric level of Hobbes’s writings.
26. See the excellent study by Paul Cantor, “Leo Strauss and Contemporary Hermeneutics,” in Leo Strauss’s Thought: Toward a Critical Engagement, ed. Alan Udoff (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1991), 267–314.
27. Rousseau, “Preface to Second Letter to Bordes,” in Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, and Polemics, vol. 2 of The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1992), 184–85 (emphasis added).
28. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 613 (2.3.21).
29. Ibid., 479–82 (2.2.1).
30. Ibid., 535 (2.3.1).
31. Pierre Charron, De la sagesse: Trois livres, new ed. (Paris: Lefèvre, 1836), 287 (bk. 2, chap. 2, section 2). Translation mine.
32. Francesco Guicciardini, Maxims and Reflections of a Renaissance Statesman, trans. Mario Domandi (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 76 (§140).
33. Livy, History of Rome 31.34, quoted by George Boas, Vox Populi: Essays in the History of an Idea (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), 47.
34. Benedict de Spinoza. Theologico-Political Treatise. In The Chief Works of Benedict Spinoza, trans. R. H. M. Elwes (New York: Dover Publications, 1951),78.
35. De natura deorum 3.27.
36. Montaigne, Complete Essays, trans. Frame, 104 (1.25).
37. Quoted by George Hourani (from a medieval Arabic commentary on Galen) in Averroes: On the Harmony of Religion and Philosophy, trans. Hourani (London: Gibb Memorial Trust, 1961), 106.
38. Maimonides, Guide, ed. Pines, 16.
39. Horace, Odes 3.1, in The Complete Works of Horace, trans. Charles E. Passage (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983), 209.
40. Epistle 105, quoted and translated by Paul Rahe in Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 226.
41. Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Ad Lucilium Epistulae morales, trans. Richard Gummere (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1917), 1:209 (24.11). For the Epicurus quotation, see Hermann Usener, Epicurea frag. 187 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 157.
42. Julien Offray de La Mettrie, “Preliminary Discourse,” in Machine Man and Other Writings, trans. and ed. Ann Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 162.
43. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science; with a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), 343 (§381).
44. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 42 (§30; emphasis added).
45. Elizabeth A. Brandt, “On Secrecy and the Control of Knowledge: Taos Pueblo,” in Secrecy: A Cross-Cultural Perspective, ed. Stanton K. Teft (New York: Human Sciences Press, 1980), 131. See also Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956), 194.
46. The Geography of Strabo (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1969), 10.3.9.
47. Generally speaking, the phenomenon of religious esotericism has been more widely acknowledged and documented than that of philosophical esotericism. See, for example, Hans G. Kippenberg and Guy G. Stroumsa, eds., Secrecy and Concealment: Studies in the History of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Religions (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995); Kees W. Bolle, ed., Secrecy in Religions (Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1987); Mary H. Nooter, “Secrecy: African Art That Conceals and Reveals,” African Arts 26, no. 1 (January 1993): 55–70; Scholem, On the Kabbalah; Jean Danielou, “Les traditions secrètes des Apôtres,” Eranos-Jahrbuch 31 (1962): 199–215; Guy G. Stroumsa, Hidden Wisdom: Esoteric Traditions and the Roots of Christian Mysticism (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996); Alex Wayman, The Buddhist Tantras: Light on Indo-Tibetan Esotericism (New York: S. Weiser, 1973); Mohammad Ali Amir Moezzi, The Divine Guide in Early Shiism: The Sources of Esotericism in Islam (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994).
48. On the general subject of secrecy, see Simmel’s classic discussion “The Secret and the Secret Society,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950); see also H. Webster, Primitive Secret Societies: A Study of Early Politics and Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1908). See also Hans Speier, “The Communication of Hidden Meaning,” chap. 9 in The Truth in Hell and Other Essays on Politics and Culture, 1935–1987 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 206.
49. W. E. H. Lecky, History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (New York: D. Appleton, 1879), 1:138; cf. 155. See also “The Wisdom of Life,” in The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer, trans. T. Bailey Saunders (New York: Willey Books, 1935), 70–73. And see Francis Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (New York: Free Press, 1995).
50. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 232.
51. Dio Chrysostom, “On the Cultivation of Letters,” Discourses (18.16–17), quoted and translated by Robert Bartlett in Xenophon: The Shorter Socratic Writings (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 4.
52. Plutarch, On Stoic Self-Contradictions 1055e–56a, quoted and translated by Thomas L. Pangle and Peter J. Ahrensdorf, Justice among Nations: On the Moral Basis of Power and Peace (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999), 275n7.
53. Grotius, De jure belli ac pacis libri tres, trans. Kelsey et al., 610 (3.1.9.3).
54. Maimonides, Guide, ed. Pines, 79 (1.34).
55. Averroes on Plato’s Republic, trans. Ralph Lerner (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), 24.
56. Erasmus to Lorenzo Campeggi, December 6, 1520, in Erasmus, Correspondence, 8:113.
57. Burnet, Archæologiæ Philosophicæ, 53–54.
58. Rousseau, Social Contract, ed. Masters, 69–70 (2.7).
59. Encyclopédie, ed. Diderot and d’Alembert, University of Chicago ARTFL Encyclopédie Project, http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu, translation mine. A similar conclusion can be found in the preceding article, “Mensonge,” by Louis de Jaucourt.
60. Hume to Col. James Edmonstoune, April 1764, quoted in Rahe, Republics, 242.
61. René Descartes, Meditations, Second Replies, in Œuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: J. Vrin, 1964–69), 8:143, quoted by Abraham Anderson in The Treatise of the Three Impostors and the Problem of Enlightenment: A New Translation of the Traité des Trois Imposteurs (1777 edition) with Three Essays in Commentary (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), 150n22.
62. Sissela Bok, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 32–39.
63. Augustine, Letters, 1:3.
64. See Grotius, De jure belli ac pacis libri tres, trans. Kelsey et al., 607–22 (3.1).
CHAPTER FIVE
1. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, ed. Klein, 34.
2. Fifteen hundred years later, David Hume, still struck by the abiding truth of this statement, selected it as the epigraph for his first major philosophical writing. Tacitus, The Histories 1.1, quoted and translated by David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Ernest C. Mossner (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1969), 32, and cited by Paul Russell, “Epigram, Pantheists, and Freethought in Hume’s Treatise: A Study in Esoteric Communication,” Journal of the History of Ideas 54, no. 4 (October 1993): 659–60.
3. Pierre Bayle, Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet, trans. Robert C. Bartlett (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 8.
4. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 84 (emphasis added), quoted by Annabel Patterson in Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 119.
5. Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation; Fables of Power: Aesopian Writing and Political History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991); Reading between the Lines (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993). At Patterson’s instigation, an entire issue of PMLA (January 1994) was devoted to the question of literature and censorship. See also Sue Curry Jansen, Censorship: The Knot That Binds Power and Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
6. Vaclav Havel, Letters to Olga, trans. Paul Wilson (New York: Henry Holt, 1989), 8, quoted by Patterson, Censorship, 11. See also the excellent discussion of East European dissidence by the Hungarian dissident G. M. Tamas in “The Legacy of Dissent: Irony, Ambiguity, Duplicity,” Uncaptive Minds 7, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 19–34. Tamas makes explicit use of Strauss’s theory.
7. Vaclav Havel, Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvizdala, trans. Paul Wilson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 55.
8. Andrei Codrescu, The Disappearance of the Outside: A Manifesto for Escape (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1990), 38–39.
9. Lidia Vianu, Censorship in Romania (Budapest, Hungary: Central European University Press, 1998), ix–x.
10. Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonko (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953). Milosz compares the habits of speech and action in Eastern Europe to the esoteric practices or “Ketman” (in Arabic: concealment, discretion) traditionally used by the Shiites of Persia, as described by Gobineau in Les religions et les philosophies dans l’Asie Centrale, in Œuvres, ed. Jean Gaulmier, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1983).
11. Leszek Kolakowski, “Dialogue between Leszek Kolakowski and Danny Postel: On Exile, Philosophy and Tottering Insecurely on the Edge of an Unknown Abyss,” Daedalus 134, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 85 (emphasis added).
12. J. M. Ritchie, German Literature under National Socialism (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1983), 119. For other discussions of esoteric communication in the Third Reich, see: R. Schnell, “Innere Emigration und kulturelle Dissidenz,” in Widerstand und Verweigerung in Deutschland 1933 bis 1945, ed. R. Löwenthal and P. von zur Muhlen (Bonn: Dietz, 1982), 211–25; Jerry Muller, “Enttäuschung und Zweideutigkeit: Zur Geschichte rechter Sozialwissenschaftler im Dritten Reich,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 3 (1986): 289–316, and The Other God That Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).
13. Daniela Berghahn, “Film Censorship in a ‘Clean State’: the Case of Klein and Kohlhaase’s Berlin um die Ecke,” in Censorship and Cultural Regulation in the Modern Age, ed. Beate Muller (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 134.
14. Quoted by Ray J. Parrott Jr., “Aesopian Language,” in Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet Literature, ed. Harry B. Weber (Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press, 1977), 41. For other examples and discussions of Aesopian language, see Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Lauren G. Leighton, The Esoteric Tradition in Russian Romantic Literature: Decembrism and Freemasonry (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994); Lev Loseff, On the Beneficence of Censorship: Aesopian Language in Modern Russian Literature, trans. Jane Bobko (Munich: Sagner, 1984); Martin Dewhirst and Robert Farrell, eds., The Soviet Censorship (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1973); Daniel Balmuth, Censorship in Russia, 1865–1905 (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1979); Roman Jakobson, Pushkin and His Sculptural Myth, trans. John Burbank (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), 50; Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821–1849 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 220; G. A. Svirsky, A History of Post-War Soviet Writing: The Literature of Moral Opposition, trans. Robert Dessaix and Michael Ulman (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1981); Thomas Venclova, “The Game of the Soviet Censor,” New York Review of Books, March 31, 1983, 34–35; Hedrick Smith, The Russians (New York: Ballantine, 1977), 508–9; and Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts: The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), 2:407.
This view of Aesop as a classic of defensive esotericism is not unique to Russian writers. Julian the Apostate, writing in mid-fourth-century Rome, observes: “For since the law did not allow him freedom of speech, [Aesop] had no resource but to shadow forth his wise counsels and trick them out with charms and graces and so serve them up to his hearers.” To the Cynic Heracleios207c, in vol. 2 of The Works of the Emperor Julian, trans. Wilmer Cave Wright (London: William Heinemann, 1913), 81.
15. Lioudmila Savinitch, “Pragmatic Goals and Communicative Strategies in Journalistic Discourse under Censorship,” in Power without Domination: Dialogism and the Empowering Property of Communication, ed. Eric Grillo (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2005), 107.
16. Jakobson, Pushkin, 50 (emphasis added).
17. “The Party Organization and Party Literature,” in Vladimir Lenin: The Collected Works (Moscow: Progress, 1972), 10:44, quoted by Loseff, On the Beneficence, 7. So firmly entrenched were the Aesopian habits of the Bolshevik revolutionaries, habits formed during their struggle with the czar, that they continued them even after their victory. This produced the great historical anomaly of a ruling elite that communicated esoterically with itself and with the people. (This situation also grew out of the unique needs of a mass party that employed democratic centralism and claimed a monopoly on ideological truth.) Loseff gives a clear example: “a [newspaper] article may refer at considerable length and in glowing terms to agricultural advances, but make only passing mention in its next to last paragraph of the poorly organized procurement of cattle feed ‘in certain areas’; for an experienced reader, the content of the article amounts to a forewarning of immanent meat shortages” (On the Beneficence, 56). On state esotericism, see Myron Rush, “Esoteric Communication in Soviet Politics,” World Politics 11, no. 4 (July 1959): 614–20, and The Rise of Khrushchev(Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1958), 88–94; and Nathan Leites and Elsa Bernaut, Ritual of Liquidation (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1954). See also Alexander George, Propaganda Analysis: A Study of Inferences Made from Nazi Propaganda in World War II (Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson, 1959).
18. Joan Neuberger, Ivan the Terrible: The Film Companion (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 32, 30. Eisenstein completed the second part of his projected trilogy on Ivan shortly after the release of the first part, but this time the censors were on to him and it was never displayed in his lifetime.
19. Lee Siegel, “Persecution and the Art of Painting,” New Republic 219, no. 9 (August 31, 1998): 41, 39. The same suggestion is made by Milosz, Captive Mind, 80.
20. See Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (New York: Harper & Row, 1979). Questions have been raised, however, about the authenticity of this book. See Edward Rothstein, “Sly Dissident or Soviet Tool? A Musical War,” New York Times, October 17, 1998; and Terry Teachout “The Composer and the Commissars,” Commentary, October 1999, 53–56.
21. Seth Mydans, “Burmese Editor’s Code: Winks and Little Hints,” New York Times, June 24, 2001 (emphasis added).
22. J. M. Coetzee, Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 152.
23. Michael Drewett, “Aesopian Strategies of Textual Resistance in the Struggle to Overcome the Censorship of Popular Music in Apartheid South Africa,” Critical Studies 22 (2004): 193 (emphasis added).
24. Yahia Lababidi, “Empire of the Senses,” New Internationalist, May 1, 2010.
25. http://www.commercialcloset.org/cgi-bin/iowa/portrayals.html?mode=4 (accessed 05/06/2018, no longer available), the website of the Commercial Closet Association (since renamed AdRespect). On this general theme, see A. J. Frantzen, “Between the Lines: Queer Theory, the History of Homosexuality, and Anglo-Saxon Penitentials,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 26, no. 2 (1996): 255–96.
26. Peter, Paul, and Mary, “I Dig Rock and Roll Music,” from Album 1700 (Stookey/Mason/Dixon-Neworld Media Music-ASCAP, 1967).
27. See Margaret Meek Lange, “Defending a Liberalism of Freedom: John Rawls’s Use of Hegel” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2009). For similar conclusions, see Jörg Schaub, Gerechtigkeit als Versöhnung: John Rawls’ politischer Liberalismus (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2009).
28. Speier, Truth in Hell, 202. He quotes Werner Bergengruen, foreword to Rudolf Pechel, Zwischen den Zeilen: Der Kampf einer Zeitschrift für Freiheit und Recht (Wiesentheid: Droemersche Verlagsanstalt, 1948), 8–9. See also Milosz, Captive Mind, 78.
29. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 223–24. The Goethe quotation is from Faust, Part I, Scene 4, lines 1840–41.
30. Montaigne, Complete Essays, ed. Frame, 623 (3.3), 505 (2.18).
31. Sarpi to Gillot, May 12, 1609, in Lettere ai Gallicani, ed. Boris Ulianich (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1961), 133, quoted and translated by David Wootton, Paolo Sarpi: Between Renaissance and Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 119.
32. Toland, Clidophorus, 67–68, vii, emphasis added.
33. Paul Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach, Le bon sens puisé dans la nature; ou, Idées naturelles opposées aux idées surnaturelles (Rome, 1792). Translation mine (emphasis added).
34. Montaigne, Complete Essays, ed. Frame, 97 (1.25; emphasis added).
35. Voltaire, “Letters, Men of Letters, or Literati,” in Philosophical Dictionary, trans. Peter Gay (New York: Basic Books, 1962), 349 (emphasis added).
36. Faust 1.588–93, quoted and translated by Leo Strauss in Thoughts on Machiavelli, 174 (emphasis added).
37. Republic 496d; see also Phaedo 64b; Gorgias 185d–186d. For similar views of the philosopher’s danger see Isocrates, Antidosis 243, 271–73, 304–5; Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 2.4; Alfarabi, The Philosophy of Plato 22.15; Averroes, On Plato’s Republic 63.20–25, 64.23–28; Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed 2.36; Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy 1.3.
38. “Pythagorisme ou Philosophie de Pythagore,” in Encyclopédie, ed. Diderot and d’Alembert, University of Chicago ARTFL Encyclopédie Project, http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu (emphasis added). Translation mine. A more extensive and concrete account of the reasons for philosopher-hating will be given in chapter 6, which discusses protective esotericism and the necessary tension between philosophy and society.
39. Charron, De la sagesse, 289 (2.2). Translation mine.
40. Descartes to Mersenne, April 1634, in Œuvres de Descartes, 1:284–91; Ovid, Tristia 3.4.25.
41. Epicurus, Extant Remains: With Short Critical Apparatus, trans. Cyril Bailey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), 138 (frag. 86). This dictum, of course, contains multiple layers of meaning. Often it is interpreted simply to mean that honor, fame, and political position are empty pursuits. But, for Epicurus, they are empty above all because they are really deluded attempts to achieve “protection from men,” which can be achieved successfully only through withdrawal. “The most unalloyed source of protection from men . . . is in fact the immunity which results from a quiet life and the avoidance of the many” (98 [frag. 14, “Principle Doctrines”]). I have altered the translation. See also frags. 6, 7, 13, and 39; and Lucretius, De rerum natura 5.1127–28).
42. Seneca, Ad Lucilium Epistulae morales, trans. Gummere, 3:189 (103.5).
43. Alfarabi, Paraphrase of Aristotle’s Topics, MS, Bratislava, no. 231, TE 40, fol. 203, quoted and translated by Muhsin Mahdi in “Man and His Universe,” 113.
44. Pascal’s Pensées, trans. William Finlayson Trotter (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958), 94 (aph. 336).
45. Epistle 105, quoted and translated by Rahe, Republics, 226.
46. As reported by Gabriel Naudé et al., in Naudaeana et Patiniana, ou, Singularitez remarquables (Amsterdam: F. vander Plaats, 1703), 53–57, quoted and translated by Rahe, Republics, 237.
47. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, ed. Kitchin, 126 (2.14.11).
48. Baltasar Gracian y Morales, The Science of Success and the Art of Prudence, trans. Lawrence C. Lockley (San Jose, CA: University of Santa Clara Press, 1967), 43 (aph. 13).
49. George Savile, Miscellanys, in The Works of George Savile, Marquis of Halifax: In Three Volumes, ed. Mark N. Brown (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 3:281.30–31, quoted by Rahe, Republics, 241.
50. Paolo Sarpi, Opere, ed. Gaetano Cozzi and Luisa Cozzi (Milan: R. Ricciardi, 1969), 92, quoted and translated by Wootton, Paolo Sarpi, 128.
51. Montaigne, Complete Essays, ed. Frame, 86 (1.23).
52. Erasmus, The Praise of Folly, trans. Hoyt Hopewell Hudson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), 38.
53. Charron, De la sagesse, 286 (2.2). Translation mine.
54. Charles Blount, Great Is Diana of the Ephesians, or, the Original of Idolatry (London, 1695), 22.
55. Cicero, De natura deorum 1.123. My point in quoting this interpretation, as others throughout, is that it is esoteric—not that it is necessarily correct, which it is not my purpose to investigate here. It is in the nature of things that there will be far more testimony and agreement about the existence than about the precise content of any given philosopher’s esotericism. That being said, the same interpretation of Epicurus may be found in Sextus Empiricus, Against the Physicists 1.58; Pierre Bayle, Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet, para. 178; Condorcet, Sketch, 64; and Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (London: Thomas Tegg, 1845), 104–5.
56. Condorcet, Sketch, 46.
57. Rousseau, “Observations,” in Collected Writings, ed. Masters and Kelly, 2:45–46n.
58. Locke, Reasonableness, ed. Ewing, 166 (§238).
59. In the introduction to Persecution and the Art of Writing, however, Strauss writes: “The following essays may be said to supply material useful for a future sociology of philosophy” (7).
60. In what follows, I rely heavily on Strauss’s argument in the introduction to Persecution and the Art of Writing as well as the introduction to Ralph Lerner and Muhsin Mahdi, eds., Medieval Political Philosophy: A Sourcebook (New York: Free Press, 1963). Also see Paul Rahe, Republics, 219–32. See Hourani, introduction to Averroes.
61. Voltaire, “Toleration,” in Philosophical Dictionary, 485 (emphasis added).
62. Fustel de Coulanges, Ancient City, 186–93 (emphasis added).
63. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lettres écrites de la montagne, vol. 3 of Œuvres Complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, 4 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléïade, 1959–69), 705, translation mine; Geneva Manuscript, in On the Social Contract, with Geneva Manuscript and Political Economy, ed. Roger D. Masters, trans. Judith R. Masters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978), 199, emphasis added. See also Geneva Manuscript, 199, 160–61; Social Contract, ed. Masters, 124–31; Emile: or, On education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 257; Voltaire, “Religion,” Philosophical Dictionary; Locke, “Error,” “Sacerdos,” in Lord Peter King, The Life and Letters of John Locke with Extracts from his Journals and Common-place Books (New York: Burt Franklin, 1972), 282–83, 288–90; “Essay on Toleration,” in H. R. Fox Bourne, The Life of John Locke (London: Henry S. King, 1876), 194; Holbach, “Le Christianisme dévoilé,” in Premières œuvres (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1971), 118–22. And see the section “The Political Problem of Christianity” (345–50), in Arthur M. Melzer, “The Origin of the Counter-Enlightenment: Rousseau and the New Religion of Sincerity,” American Political Science Review 90, no. 2 (June 1996): 344–60.
64. Plato, Apology 19a. See Plutarch, Pericles, in Lives, trans. Dryden, 206 (sec. 32). Consider Thomas Aquinas: “all knowledge is good and even honourable,” Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, trans. Kenelm Foster, O.P., and Sylvester Humphries, O.P. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951, http://dhspriory.org/thomas/english/DeAnima.htm#11L, html edition by Joseph Kenny, O.P.), I-1:3. See Stanley L. Jaki, The Savior of Science (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1988), for a vigorous defense of the view that natural science, which was “still-born” everywhere else, ultimately succeeded in the West only because of Christianity.
65. Voltaire, Histoire de l’établissement du Christianisme, in vol. 3 of Œuvres Completes, ed. Louis Moland (Paris: Garnier, 1877–83), 72; “Toleration,” Philosophical Dictionary, 486. For a similar view, see Rousseau, Observations, in Collected Writings, 44–46. One is reminded of Nietzsche’s famous formula: “Christianity is Platonism for ‘the people’” (Beyond Good and Evil, 3). On these themes, see Allan Arkush, “Voltaire on Judaism and Christianity,” AJS Review 18, no. 2 (1993): 223–43.
66. There were of course many and important exceptions to this rule, the most famous being Tertullian (160–230). “Off with those who have put forward a Stoic, Platonic, and dialectical Christianity. After Jesus Christ, we have no need for curiosity; nor do we need inquiry after the Gospel” (Tertullian, De Praescriptione Haereticorum, 7, quoted and translated by Rahe, Republics, 221).
67. Hourani, Averroes, 2.
68. Rashi [Rabbi Shlomo Itzhaki], Chumash with Targum Onkelos, Haphtaroth and Rashi’s Commentary, trans. Rabbi A. M. Silbermann (Jerusalem: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1934), 1:2.
69. See also Rousseau: “The People chosen by God never cultivated the sciences, and it was never advised to study them. . . . Its leaders always made efforts to keep it as separate as possible from the idolatrous and learned Nations surrounding it. . . . After frequent dispersions among the Egyptians and the Greeks, Science still had a thousand difficulties developing in the heads of the Hebrews.” Observations, in Collected Writings, 2:44). And Spinoza: “None of the Apostles philosophized more than did Paul, who was called to preach to the Gentiles; other Apostles preaching to the Jews, who despised philosophy, similarly adapted themselves to the temper of their hearers, and preached a religion free from all philosophical speculations.” Theologico-Political Treatise, trans. Elwes, 1:164.
70. Hourani, Averroes, 44.
71. This is not to deny that in certain times and places—in tenth- and eleventh-century Iraq, Syria, and Persia, and in twelfth-century Spain—philosophy managed to flourish in these communities (and eventually to have a radical, liberating influence, especially in the form of Latin Averroism, on the more “protected” and co-opted philosophy of the Christian West). But in principle, it was always a more suspect phenomenon, it always had to struggle more to defend its very right to exist—and eventually it lost that struggle. Philosophical inquiry was more or less extinguished in the Islamic world by the end of the twelfth century and in the Jewish world by the end of the fifteenth. See Richard Walzer, Greek into Arabic: Essays on Islamic Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 1–28.
72. Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs (Paris: Garnier, 1963), 1:94.
73. See Fustel de Coulanges, Ancient City; E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951). For the denial or minimizing of persecution in antiquity, see also John Milton, who simply ignores the case of Socrates (see Areopagitica, in John Milton: Selected Prose, ed. C. A. Patrides [Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985], 201–3). J. B. Bury, in his classic A History of Freedom of Thought (New York: Henry Holt, 1913), 50, asserts that in “classical antiquity as a whole, we may almost say that freedom of thought was like the air men breathed. It was taken for granted and nobody thought about it.” On this whole issue see also Jansen, Censorship; Peter J. Ahrensdorf, The Death of Socrates and the Life of Philosophy: An Interpretation of Plato’s Phaedo (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995); Connor, “Other 399”; Eudore Derenne. Les procès d’impiété intentés aux philosophes à Athènes au Vme et au IVme siècles avant J.-C. (Liège: Vaillant-Carmanne, 1930).
74. See Aulus Gellius, The Attic Nights 15.11; Diogenes Laertius, “Theophrastus,” in Lives 5.38–39; Xenophon, Memorabilia 1.2.31.
75. Fustel de Coulanges, Ancient City, 223.
76. Alfarabi, in his summary of the philosophy of Plato, and Averroes, in his epitome of the Republic, goes so far as to leave out all mention of the theory of ideas. See Strauss, “Farabi’s Plato,” in Louis Ginzberg Jubilee Volume on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday (New York: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1945), 357–93; and Joshua Parens, Metaphysics as Rhetoric: Alfarabi’s Summary of Plato’s “Laws” (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).
77. Emphasis added, here and below.
78. Cicero, De inventione, De optimo genere oratorum, Topica, trans. H. M. Hubbell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949), 85–87 (1.29.46).
79. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. King, 149 (2.5). See Plutarch, Nicias.
80. Plato, Protagoras and Meno, trans. Robert C. Bartlett (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 316d–e (emphasis added). See Plato, Euthyphro 3c.
81. The passages in quotation marks are all from lost plays or poems.
82. For other discussions of the philosopher’s danger see Isocrates, Antidosis 243, 271–73, 304–5; Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy 1.3; Plutarch, Nicias.
83. Averroes, Averroes on Plato’s Republic, 78, 76.
84. Alfarabi, Aphorisms of the Statesman, trans. D. M. Dunlop (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 72; The Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, trans. Muhsin Mahdi (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962), 67. The notion of the philosopher as “stranger,” “weed,” “solitary,” and “human being living among beasts” is a recurrent theme in Islamic thought. See especially Avempace’s Governance of the Solitary and Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy the Son of Yaqzan. Among Jewish writers, see Maimonides, Guide, ed. Pines, 372 (2.36): the philosopher should “regard all people according to their various states, with respect to which they are indubitably either like domestic animals or like beasts of prey. If the perfect man who lives in solitude thinks of them at all, he does so only with a view to saving himself from the harm that may be caused by those among them who are harmful . . . or to obtaining an advantage that may be obtained from them if he is forced to it by some of his needs.”
85. To take three standard works, there is no reference to the passages at Republic 488a, 492b, 496d, and 517a (or more generally, to the theme of misology and philosopher-hating) in Nicholas P. White’s A Companion to Plato’s Republic (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1979); C. D. C. Reeve’s Philosopher-Kings: The Argument of Plato’s Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); or Terrence Irwin’s Plato’s Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
86. M. I. Finley, Aspects of Antiquity, 2nd ed. (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1977), 64. Again: “It was Politics, not Religion, that cost Socrates his life.” Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), 7:472. I. F. Stone, in The Trial of Socrates (Boston: Little Brown, 1988), takes the same view. For a good overview of the contemporary debate, see Connor, “Other 399.” Although Connor returns to the view that the impiety charge was serious and not a mask for political concerns, he continues to approach the event as a historical contingency, without larger significance.
87. Quoted and translated by Milosz, Captive Mind, 59–60 (except for the last two paragraphs, which are my translation). Gobineau, Les religions, 465–67 (emphasis added). Milosz quotes this passage because “[t]he similarities between Ketman and the customs cultivated in the countries of the New Faith [i.e., the communist bloc] are so striking that I shall permit myself to quote at length” (57).
88. Plutarch, Pericles, in Lives, trans. Dryden, 184. On Damon, see Isocrates, Antidosis 235–36: “Pericles studied under two of the sophists, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae and Damon, the latter in his day reputed to be the wisest among the Athenians” (in Isocrates, vol. 2: On the Peace, Areopagiticus, Against the Sophists, Antidosis, Panathenaicus, trans. George Norlin, Loeb Classical Library 229 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929], 317).
89. Xenophon, Memorabilia 4.6.1; Plato, Apology 19c, 26d. See Phaedo 96a6–99d2; Xenophon, Oeconomicus 6.13–17, 11.1–6; Symposium 6.6–8; and Diogenes Laertius, “Socrates” 2.45, in Lives. For an excellent discussion of the ambiguity of the original claims in the Apology, see David Leibowitz, The Ironic Defense of Socrates: Plato’s Apology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 50–52. On the other side, consider Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.6.2 and 12.4.3–5, and the quotation from Plutarch below.
90. This has not gone unnoticed by Plato scholars, of course. But unwilling to entertain the possibility that Socrates (or Plato) was lying about his avoidance of natural philosophy, they have been forced to the conclusion that Plato somehow decided, in writing his later dialogues, to attribute his own physical and metaphysical doctrines to Socrates. As Alexander Grant, for example, puts it, “The sublime developments of philosophy made by the disciple are with a sort of pious reverence put into the mouth of the master” (The Ethics of Aristotle, Illustrated with Essays and Notes[London: Longmans, 1885], 1:158). In general, it would be an odd thing for one philosopher to attribute his own greatest discoveries to another. But it would be an extremely odd form of “pious reverence,” if that indeed was the motive, to falsely attribute one’s metaphysical theories to a thinker who solemnly swore before the whole city that he had no such theories and completely avoided such studies. At any rate, whichever way this puzzle is solved, it supplies strong evidence of esotericism. Either Socrates was telling the truth in his claim to confine himself to the human things, in which case Plato was for some reason consciously falsifying his account of the Socratic life in the later dialogues. Or Plato was giving an accurate account and it is Socrates who was lying about his way of life.
91. Plutarch, Nicias 23, quoted and translated by Peter Ahrensdorf in The Death of Socrates, 12.
92. Montesquieu, Mes pensées 2097, in Œuvres complètes (Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1949), 1:1546–47, translation mine (emphasis added). Hobbes makes a similar suggestion regarding Aristotle, at the end of a discussion of the latter’s doctrine of separated essences. “And this shall suffice for an example of the errors which are brought into the Church from the entities and essences of Aristotle (which it may be he knew to be false philosophy, but writ it as a thing consonant to, and corroborative of, their Religion—and fearing the fate of Socrates).” Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: With Selected Variants from the Latin Edition of 1668, ed. E. M. Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 460 (46.18). See also Diderot: “The fear that one has of priests has ruined, ruins, and will ruin all philosophical works; [it] has made Aristotle alternately an attacker and defender of final causes.” Refutation d’Helvétius, in Œuvres complètes (Paris: Garnier, 1875), 2:398, translation mine. For a powerful presentation of the view that Aristotle’s doctrine of teleology—at least in the extreme and quasi-religious form in which Aristotle typically presents it—is merely exoteric, see Bolotin, Approach to Aristotle’s Physics.
93. Toland, Clidophorus, 75.
CHAPTER SIX
1. The strong contrast in the contemporary reception of these two forms is most clearly illustrated by Annabel Patterson, who wrote several very fine books on the practice of defensive esotericism in English literature, but who, in the introduction to the revised edition of her first book on the topic, Censorship and Interpretation (24–28), fiercely attacks the whole idea of protective esotericism (and Leo Strauss for describing and emphasizing it).
2. Montesquieu, Œuvres complètes (Paris: A. Belin, 1822), 3:450–51, quoted and translated by Pangle, Montesquieu’s Philosophy of Liberalism: A Commentary on The Spirit of the Laws (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 12.
3. Montaigne, Complete Essays, ed. Frame, 769 (3.10).
4. Aquinas, Faith, Reason and Theology, 53 (art. 4).
5. Warburton, Divine Legation, 13 (emphasis added); Formey, “Exoterique & Esoterique,” in Encyclopédie, ed. Diderot and d’Alembert, University of Chicago ARTFL Encyclopédie Project, http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu.
6. Plato, Republic 515e–516a; Exod. 33:20, 20:19, 24:1–2; Deut. 18:15–18; Isa. 6:5; 1 Tim. 6:16. See Eccles. 1:18 (AKJV): “for in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”
7. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things 1.943–50 (see 4.10 ff.), quoted from James H. Nichols Jr., Epicurean Political Philosophy: The De rerum natura of Lucretius (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972), 34. The poetic “sweetening” serves the double purpose of attracting the potentially philosophic readers while shielding or comforting “the multitude.”
8. Actually, it is only recently and against much resistance that Kabbalism has again been recognized as a serious Jewish tradition. As Gershom Scholem, the foremost scholar of Jewish mysticism, writes: “For centuries the Kabbalah had been vital to the Jews’ understanding of themselves.” But “this world has been lost to European Jewry. Down to our own generation, students of Jewish history showed little understanding for the documents of the Kabbalah and ignored them almost completely.” On the Kabbalah, 1–2.
9. See Kippenberg and Stroumsa, Secrecy and Concealment; Bolle, Secrecy in Religions; and Wayman, Buddhist Tantras.
10. Scholem, On the Kabbalah, 50–51.
11. Mishnah Hagigah 2.1, quoted by Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), 341. See Babylonian Talmud Hagigah 11b, 13a 14b.
12. Maimonides, Mishnah Torah, bk. 1, chap. 2, section 12, in A Maimonides Reader, ed. Isadore Twersky (New York: Behrman House, 1972), 47.
13. Charles G. Herbermann et al., eds., The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 5 (New York: Gilmary Society, 1909), 32 (emphasis added). See also F. L. Cross, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), 405.
14. Aquinas, Faith, Reason, 53–54 (art. 4). In this passage, Thomas is quoting 1 Corinthians 3:1–2, Saint Gregory, Moralia 17.26.38, and Augustine, De doctrina christiana 9.23. On esotericism in Christianity, see also Stroumsa, Hidden Wisdom.
15. Averroes, The Decisive Treatise, trans. George F. Hourani, in Medieval Political Philosophy: A Sourcebook, ed. Ralph Lerner and Muhsin Mahdi (New York: Free Press, 1963), 181. See Moezzi, Divine Guide.
16. Maimonides, Guide, ed. Pines, 71.
17. Emphasis added. While scholars like Grant, Boas and other proponents of the “legend” theory attempt to dismiss the historical testimony to philosophical esotericism by attributing it to the influence of Neoplatonist and other mystical forms of thinking, here we see evidence that actually events sometimes ran the other way. Sometimes it is the legend of mysticism that must be dismissed as an esoteric mask worn by secular philosophers. See also Kojève’s argument that the Emperor Julian, Sallustius, and Damascius, who have been taken to be Neoplatonists—because they present themselves as such—are in fact highly skeptical, “Voltairian” philosophers hiding under the cloak of mysticism. Kojève, “Emperor Julian,” 95–113; and Strauss, On Tyranny, 269–75. Also consider the point made by Gershom Scholem above that the (genuine) Jewish mystics borrowed the practice of esotericism from the preexisting esoteric tradition of the philosophers.
18. Augustine, City of God, trans. Dods, 706 (19.24).
19. On this interpretation of the modern revolution, see Robert P. Kraynak History and Modernity in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).
20. The general argument of this section has been inspired by Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard Trask (New York: Harper and Row, 1959), and Myth and Reality, trans. Willard Trask (New York: Harper and Row, 1963); Strauss, “Progress or Return?” and Natural Right and History; and Edward Shils, Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). See also Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1958).
21. Aristotle, The Politics, trans. Carnes Lord (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 1269a19–24. We do not tend to feel the power of this argument because the dynamic modern state is based on a strong distinction between constitutional law and regular law, which was introduced precisely in order to make it easier and less problematic to change or reform the latter. When we think about the Constitution, however, we instinctively revert to the Aristotelian argument for the necessity of relative changelessness.
22. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 202 (aph. 496).
23. Euripides, Bacchae 200–204, 1150–53, quoted and translated by Rahe, Republics, 215, 216.
24. Fustel de Coulanges, Ancient City, 352.
25. Machiavelli, Florentine Histories, trans. Laura F. Banfield and Harvey C. Mansfield (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 185 (5.1).
26. Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses, trans. Roger D. Masters and Judith R. Masters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964), 45.
27. Montaigne, Complete Essays, trans. Frame, 106 (1.25).
28. Seneca, Ad Lucilium 95.13; Montaigne, Complete Essays, trans. Frame, 103 (1.25); Rousseau, First and Second Discourses, trans. Masters and Masters, 45.
29. Lecky, History of European Morals, 1:149–50.
30. Augustine, City of God, trans. Dods, 203 (6.10).
31. Montaigne, Complete Essays, trans. Frame, 379 (2.12).
32. Diogenes Laertius, Lives 10.10.
33. Republic 520a; see 347c–d; and Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1134b4–7.
34. Pascal, Pascal’s Pensées, trans. Trotter, 93 (aph. 331). I have slightly altered the translation (emphasis added).
35. See Cicero Tusculan Disputations 2.4, 4.47, 5.11.
36. Aristotle, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, ed. and trans. Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 1172a27. Also see Aristide Tessitore, “A Political Reading of Aristotle’s Treatment of Pleasure in the Nicomachean Ethics,” Political Theory 17, no. 2 (1989): 247–65.
37. Plato, Phaedo 64c–65c.
38. Montaigne, Complete Essays, trans. Frame, 757 (3.9), 769 (3.10). The quotation from Quintilian comes from Institutes 2.17.28.
39. Cicero, Laws 1.21–39, 3.26.
40. Averroes, Averroes on Plato’s Republic, 24.
41. See the excellent discussion, on which I have relied, in Bloom’s interpretive essay in Plato, Republic, 365–69.
42. See Plato, Laws 3; Aristotle, Politics 1.2.
43. For a careful esoteric reading of Aristotle’s discussion of natural slavery, see Wayne Ambler, “Aristotle on Nature and Politics: The Case of Slavery,” Political Theory 15, no. 3 (August 1987): 390–410; and Thomas Pangle, Aristotle’s Teaching in the Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 42–51.
44. Gotthold Lessing, The Freethinker, in Lessing’s Theological Writing, trans. Henry Chadwick (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1965), 42–43, quoted by Hans Blumenberg. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 421.
45. François de La Rochefoucauld, Collected Maxims and Other Reflections, ed. and trans.E. H. Blackmore, A. M. Blackmore, and Francine Giguère (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), maxim 26.
46. Montaigne, Complete Essays, trans. Frame, 632 (3.4).
47. Epistle 105, quoted and translated by Rahe, Republics, 226 (emphasis added).
48. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, ed. Klein, 30.
49. “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant,” in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), poem 1129.
50. Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore Jr., and Herbert Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 81–123.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1. Quoted by Loseff, On the Beneficence, 11. Consider also this account by Lidia Vianu in her Censorship in Romania: Censorship brought one good thing to literature: as Paul Valéry used to say, any obstacle in front of creation is a true sun. Not being able to say what you think was an excellent school of poetic indirectness, creating its devious writers and its eager readers who were always ready to probe between the lines. The conspiracy of writer-reader was a marvel of obliqueness and dissent at the same time. (x)
2. This is not to deny that he also celebrated the advantages of press freedom. As he remarks in his memoirs:
Two or three months later, Ogarev passed through Novgorod. He brought me Feuerbach’s Essence Of Christianity [an openly atheist and secularizing work]; after reading the first pages I leapt up with joy. Down with the trappings of masquerade; away with the stammering allegory! We are free men and not the slaves of Xanthos [Aesop’s master]; there is no need for us to wrap the truth in myth. (My Past and Thoughts, 2:407)
3. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, vol. 3, pt. 3, ques. 42, art. 4, p. 2243.
4. Donald Levine, The Flight from Ambiguity: Essays in Social and Cultural Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 21.
5. See ibid., 2–8, 37–38.
6. See Gordon Wood, “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly 39 (1982): 403–41. See also Bryan Garsten, Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
7. John Milton, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, ed. Christopher Ricks (New York: New American Library, 1968), 389 (bk. 4, line 327).
8. Rousseau, Emile, trans. Bloom, 184, 450.
9. Schleiermacher, Introductions to the Dialogues of Plato, 17–18.
10. William Penn, Fruits of a Father’s Love: Being the Advice of William Penn to his Children Relating to their Civil and Religious Conduct (Dover, NH: James K. Remich, 1808), chap. 2, para. 19.
11. Montaigne, Complete Essays, trans. Frame, 101 (1.25).
12. Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Books and Reading,” in Religion: A Dialogue, and Other Essays, trans. T. Bailey Saunders (New York: Macmillan, 1899), 51.
13. Aquinas, Summa, vol. 1, pt. 1, ques. 1, art. 9, p. 6.
14. Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, ed. and trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 223 (4.61).
15. Sallustius, On the Gods and the World, in pt. 3 of Five Stages of Greek Religion, trans. Gilbert Murray (New York: Columbia University Press, 1925), 242–43.
16. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theatre, trans. Allan Bloom (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960), 6.
17. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Anne Cohler, Basia Miller, and Harold Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 186 (11.20).
18. Montaigne, Complete Essays, trans. Frame, 100 (1.25).
19. Cicero, De natura deorum, trans. Rackham, 13 (1.5).
20. Søren Kierkegaard, The Point of View for My Work as an Author; A Report to History, and Related Writings, trans. Walter Lowrie (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 39–40.
21. Ibid., 27. Kierkegaard also adds here a related but different argument for the necessity of concealment and indirection:
No, an illusion can never be destroyed directly, and only by indirect means can it be radically removed. . . . A direct attack only strengthens a person in his illusion, and at the same time embitters him. There is nothing that requires such gentle handling as an illusion, if one wishes to dispel it. If anything prompts the prospective captive to set his will in opposition, all is lost. And this is what a direct attack achieves, and it implies moreover the presumption of requiring a man to make to another person, or in his presence, an admission which he can make most profitably to himself in private. This is what is achieved by the indirect method, which, loving and serving the truth, arranges everything dialectically for the prospective captive, and then shyly withdraws (for love is always shy), so as not to witness the admission which he makes to himself alone before God—that he has lived hitherto in an illusion. (24–26)
The point Kierkegaard makes here—that a refined and delicate modesty is often what stands behind the practice of esotericism—is extremely important for us since it helps to counteract our strong tendency to recoil from esotericism as something inevitably rooted in exclusiveness and arrogance.
22. Rousseau, Emile, trans. Bloom, 183, 178.
23. Quoted by Aquinas in Faith, Reason, 52 (art. 4).
24. Augustine, Letters, ed. Ludwig Schopp and Roy Joseph Deferrari, trans. Wilfrid Parsons, vol. 3 (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1953), 34 (letter 137).
25. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 92 (vol. 1, chap. 4, aph. 181).
26. Stromata, in The Writings of Clement of Alexandria, trans. Rev. William Wilson (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1869), 254–55 (vol. 2, bk. 5, chap. 9).
27. Augustine, Letters, 1:277 (letter 55).
28. Rousseau, Emile, trans. Bloom, 137, 111.
29. Jean d’Alembert, Œuvres complètes (Paris: A. Belin, 1822), 3:450–51, quoted and translated by Pangle, Montesquieu’s Philosophy, 12.
30. Nietzsche, Human All Too Human, 92 (vol. 1, chap. 4, aph. 178).
31. Hippolyte Taine, The Ancient Regime, trans. John Durand (New York: Henry Holt, 1876), 4:260.
32. Demetrius of Phaleron, On Style, trans. W. Rhys Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1902), 222.
33. Rousseau, Emile, trans. Bloom, 248.
34. Ibid., 249.
35. Ibid., 239.
36. Translator’s preface to Vergilio Malvezzi, Discourses upon Cornelius Tacitus, trans. Richard Baker (London: R. Whitaker and Tho. Whitaker, 1642), quoted by Alfred Alvarez in The School of Donne (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961), 40.
37. Thomas Gordon, Discourses upon Tacitus: The Works of Tacitus, With Political Discourses Upon that Author (London: T. Woodward & J. Peele, 1770), 4:149–50, quoted by Rahe, Republics, 246.
38. Quintilian, Institutes 9.2.72.
39. Ibid., 9.2.79.
40. Boccaccio, Life of Dante, trans. Bollettino, 40.
41. Samuel Butler, Evolution Old and New: Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck as Compared with That of Charles Darwin (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1911), 87.
42. “A Charm,” poem 421 in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, quoted by Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge, 125.
43. Moses Maimonides, Laws concerning Character Traits, in Ethical Writings of Maimonides, trans. Raymond Weiss with Charles Butterworth (New York: Dover Publications, 1975), 33 (2.5).
44. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. Hicks, 413 (9.6).
45. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Kaufmann, 37 (aph. 26), 50 (aph. 40).
46. Irwin Straus, Phenomenological Psychology, trans. Erling Eng (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 217–24.
47. See Rolf Engelsing, “Die Perioden der Lesergeschichte in der Neuzeit: Das statische Ausmass und die soziokulturelle Bedeutung der Lektüre,” Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens 10 (1969), cols. 944–1002, and Der Bürger als Leser: Lesergeschichte in Deutschland, 1500–1800(Stuttgart, 1974); David Hall, “The Uses of Literacy in New England, 1600–1850,” in Printing and Society in Early America, ed. W. L. Joyce, 2nd ed. (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1983), 1–47. See Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 16–18.
48. John Stuart Mill, Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of St. Andrews (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, & Dyer, 1867), 34.
49. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Mansfield and Winthrop, 451 (vol. 2, pt. 1, chap. 15).
50. Ibid., 451 (vol. 2, pt. 1, chap. 15).
51. Mill, Inaugural Address, 37–38 (emphasis added).
52. Plutarch, Lycurgus, in Lives, trans Dryden, 64–65.
53. Strauss, “New Interpretation,” 351.
54. Leo Strauss, “Thucydides: The Meaning of Political History,” in Rebirth, 94.
55. For a discussion of these claims, see Strauss, “What Is Political Philosophy?” in What Is Political Philosophy?, 38–40. See also his “An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism” (in Rebirth, 43), where Strauss seems to follow Heidegger in maintaining that “to be means to be elusive or to be a mystery.” See Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964), 61–62. And see Benardete who, on this basis, attributes to the ancients what he calls “metaphysical esotericism.” Seth Benardete, “Strauss on Plato,” in The Argument of the Action (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 409.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1. In the remainder of this section, for the sake of theoretical clarity, I try to draw the distinction between political esotericism and the other three forms as precisely and starkly as possible. In practice, however, thinkers can adopt compromise positions on theory and praxis—conflictual in some respects, harmonist in others—that blur these distinctions. This fact will become increasingly obvious and important below when we explore political esotericism in its concrete, historical manifestations.
2. Pedagogical esotericism remains because, whatever their projects for political transformation, philosophers always remain vitally interested in philosophical education as well. And while this pedagogical concern does not necessarily lead to esotericism, it often does. For philosophers of virtually every era and persuasion share the general goal of inducing their students to think for themselves, and a Socratic esotericism—presenting riddles instead of answers—is often the best means of doing so. That is why, in the previous chapter on pedagogical esotericism, much of the testimony presented was actually drawn from modern thinkers.
Still we have seen two reasons why this kind of esotericism is less fully at home, so to speak, in modern times. First, on the premodern, conflictual view of theory and praxis, the philosophic life represents a radical and initially painful break with ordinary life. On this view, philosophical education has a more difficult and personal task to perform than on the modern, harmonist premise. It requires not just intellectual training but something more like a conversion. It is concerned less to teach a philosophical doctrine than to change one’s life. This is a delicate undertaking, far more in need of dialectical, esoteric management. Second, modern “progress philosophy” is largely oriented by the idea that each generation should quickly accept and assimilate the progress that came before it, in order to move forward to new discoveries. And this, in turn, requires that philosophical writing be clear and precise—not esoteric and riddling—for the sake of quick and easy transmissibility. Premodern thought was not oriented in this way by the needs of philosophy understood as a collective and progressive enterprise. It was focused on the inner state of the philosophic individual and on his personal need to think everything through for himself—radically and back to the beginning—without accepting anything merely handed down. Pedagogical esotericism is well suited to this need, precisely because it prevents the too-easy assimilation of earlier thought.
3. Michael Kinsley, “McCain and the Base Truth,” Washington Post, May 19, 2006; “Political gaffe,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_gaffe (accessed September 24, 2013).
4. Myra MacPherson, All Governments Lie: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone, (New York: Scribner, 2006).
5. George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” in All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008), 286.
6. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 227. Regarding international relations, see John Mearsheimer, Why Leaders Lie: The Truth about Lying in International Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
7. Machiavelli, Prince, trans. Mansfield, 70. Almost all leaders must sometimes behave this way in foreign policy, where there often is no common good.
8. Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James II (eBookMall Inc., 2000), 674–75.
9. Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to the Edinburgh Review, 6th ed. (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1849), 1:116.
10. Machiavelli, Discourses, trans. Mansfield and Tarcov, 35 (1.11); Rousseau, Social Contract, ed. Masters, 69–70 (2.7).
11. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in Select Works of Edmund Burke: A New Imprint of the Payne Edition (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999), 2:88.
12. Condorcet, Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain, ed. Monique Hincker and François Hincker (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1971), 215. Translation mine.
13. It bears repeating that not every chronologically modern thinker was “a modern” in the sense of participating in this project. What is more, there were important disagreements about the project among thinkers thought to be archetypal representatives of it, as will be discussed at length below.
14. Richard N. Schwab, introduction to Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, trans. Richard N. Schwab and Walter E. Rex (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), xii.
15. Burke, Reflections, 2:89.
16. D’Alembert to Voltaire, July 21, 1757, in Œuvres et correspondances inédites de d’Alembert, ed. Charles Henry (Geneva: Slatkine, 1967), 5:51.
17. “Clandestine philosophical literature has been a recognized field of research since 1912, when Gustave Lanson discovered a number of manuscript copies of ‘philosophical’ or anti-Christian texts in municipal libraries throughout the French provinces.” Antony McKenna, “Clandestine Literature,” in Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, ed. Alan Charles Kors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
18. Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 684.
19. Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), xix (emphasis added). See also Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
20. Ira O. Wade, The Clandestine Organization and Diffusion of Philosophic Ideas in France, 1700–1750 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1938); Miguel Benitez, La face cachée des Lumières: recherches sur les manuscrits philosophiques clandestins de l’âge classique (Paris: Universitas, 1996). See also Guido Canziani, ed., Filosofia e religione nella letteratura clandestina: secoli XVII e XVIII (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1994).
21. Cicero, For Archias, in vol. 2 of The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, trans. C. D. Yonge (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1874–97), 11.26.
22. On this phenomenon, see Christopher Kelly, Rousseau as Author: Consecrating One’s Life to the Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 12–13.
23. Quoted by Christopher Kelly in “Rousseau’s Critique of the Public Intellectual in the Age of the Enlightenment,” in Between Philosophy and Politics: The Public Intellectual, ed. Arthur Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, and Richard Zinman (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 56.
24. Quoted in P. N. Furbank, Diderot: A Critical Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 167.
25. See Chaninah Machler, “Lessing’s Ernst and Falk: Dialogues for Freemasons, a Translation with Notes,” Interpretation 14, no. 1 (January 1986): 1–49. And for an interpretation, see Leo Strauss, “Exoteric Teaching,” in Rebirth, 63–71.
26. See Margaret Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (Boston: G. Allen & Unwin, 1981), and Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Richard Weisberger, Speculative Freemasonry and the Enlightenment: A Study of the Craft in London, Paris, Prague, and Vienna (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1993); Bernard Fay, Revolution and Freemasonry: 1689–1800 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935).
27. Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Oxford: Berg, 1988), 62.
28. Encyclopédie, ed. Diderot and d’Alembert, University of Chicago ARTFL Encyclopédie Project, http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu. Translation mine.
29. D’Alembert to Voltaire, July 21, 1757, in d’Alembert, Œuvres et correspondances, 5:51 (emphasis added).
30. Encyclopédie, ed. Diderot and d’Alembert, University of Chicago ARTFL Encyclopédie Project, http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu. Translation mine (emphasis added).
31. Ibid.
32. Spinoza, Political Treatise, trans. Elwes, 315 (5.7).
33. Rousseau, Social Contract, ed. Masters, 88, 88n. For Spinoza’s similar reading of The Prince, see Spinoza, Political Treatise 5.7.
34. Antoine de La Salle, Preface générale, in Œuvres de Fr. Bacon, trans. Antoine de La Salle (Dijon: L. N. Frantin, 1799–1800), 1:xlii–xliv.
35. D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, trans. Richard Schwab and Walter Rex (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), 80.
36. Œuvres de Descartes, 3:297–98, quoted and translated by Hiram Caton, The Origin of Subjectivity: An Essay on Descartes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 17.
37. George Berkeley, Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher, ed. David Berman (New York: Routledge, 1993), 155–56.
38. Pierre Bayle, quoted by Jonathan Israel in Radical Enlightenment, 13n39, who cites Georg Bohrmann, Spinozas Stellung zur Religion (Giessen: A. Töpelmann, 1914), 76.
39. Edmund Burke, Thoughts on French Affairs, in The Works of Edmund Burke (London: George Bell & Sons, 1909), 377.
40. Condorcet, Esquisse, 216–17, translation mine (emphasis added).
41. Diderot to Hemsterhuis, summer 1773, in Diderot, Correspondance, 13:25–27, translation mine (emphasis added).
42. Rousseau, “Preface,” 184–85 (emphasis added).
43. Abbé Galiani, Correspondance (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1881), 1:245. Translation mine (emphasis added).
44. Œuvres complètes de Diderot, ed. J. Assézat (Paris: Garnier, 1875–77), 2:398.
45. Sarpi, Opere, 92. Unpublished translation by Christopher Nadon and John Alcorn (emphasis added). The two Latin quotations are from Seneca, Epistles 59.4 and 105.6. Unpublished translation by Jenny Strauss Clay.
46. Lord Acton, Essays on Church and State, ed. Douglas Woodruff (London: Hollis & Carter, 1952), 255.
47. Wootton, Paolo Sarpi, 3. See 2–3, 19, 27.
48. Ibid., 38, 127.
49. Ibid., 38; see 127–35.
50. As these examples suggest, the move to greater openness appears, not in the sixteenth century at the very birth of modernity, but in its maturity during the Enlightenment.
51. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things 1.943–950; Montesquieu, Lettres persanes (Paris: Garnier, 1960), 4.
52. Maimonides, Guide, ed. Pines, 415 (introduction to part 3). See 175 (1.71). And see Moshe Halbertal’s brilliant study of the long sequence of actions and reactions within Jewish thought set off by Maimonides’s open discussion of esotericism: Concealment and Revelation: Esotericism in Jewish Thought and its Philosophical Implications.
53. I believe that Strauss would make a similar argument about the loss of the awareness of esotericism in our time in partial explanation of why he himself wrote so openly about it.
54. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1172a27.
55. On this theme, see Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis trans. Elsa M. Sinclair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 79–107.
56. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Boston: Beacon Press, 1951), 182–96.
57. Warburton, Divine Legation of Moses, 144–45 (3.5).
58. Strauss too, in speaking openly and thematically about esotericism, had a “theoretical” motive of this kind, in addition to the practical, “Maimonidean” one mentioned above. The modern “historical turn” eventually culminated, in our time, in the widespread movement of “historicism” or historical relativism—the view that reason is unable to ascend to any kind of universal, transhistorical truth, but remains always imbedded in the fundamental presuppositions of a particular time and place. It was Strauss’s defining project to attempt to defend reason against the challenge of historicism, as well as of revelation. But the case for historicism, far more even than that for revelation, is rooted in the data of history, the long record of failed philosophical systems, for example, and the seemingly clear evidence linking each philosopher’s highest truths to the established beliefs and practices of his time. But this all-important historical record takes on a wholly new meaning—no longer so favorable to the historicist thesis—when interpreted in light of the practice of esoteric writing, which caused philosophers to systematically pretend to mirror their times precisely because they were so radically opposed to them. In the context of the central challenge of historicism, then, the phenomenon of esotericism becomes of fundamental philosophical importance. This (together with the practical motive) is what led Strauss to speak of it so thematically, a point that will be elaborated at length in chapter 10.
59. Regarding the puzzling tension between Fontenelle’s actions and his words on this issue, see Steven F. Rendall, “Fontenelle and His Public,” Modern Language Notes 86, no. 4 (May 1971): 496–508.
60. D’Alembert, in Œuvres de Frédéric le Grand (Berlin: R. Decker, 1846–57), 24:470–76, translation mine (emphasis added).
61. Erasmus to Justus Jonas, May 10, 1521, in Erasmus, Correspondence, 8:203.
62. Bayle, “Aristote,” 328–29 (remark 10).
63. L.-S. Mercier, Tableau de Paris (Amsterdam, 1783–89), 204–5.
64. See Voltaire to Helvétius, June 26, 1765, September 15, 1763; Voltaire to d’Argental, June 22, 1766, in Voltaire. Les œuvres complètes de Voltaire, ed. Theodore Besterman et al. (Geneva: Voltaire Foundation, 1968), vol. 110.
65. Helvétius, De l’esprit (Paris: Durand, 1758), 518 (discourse 4, chap. 4). Helvétius makes the same accusation in a letter to Montesquieu and in another to Saurin: see Montesquieu, Œuvres complètes, ed. Roger Caillois (Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1949–51), 6:313–22.
66. On this issue see the excellent study by Christopher Kelly, Rousseau as Author, 8–28. There was one big exception to Rousseau’s antipseudonymity posture: his long set piece on religion in the fourth book of Emile is attributed to a “Savoyard vicar.”
67. See d’Alembert, Œuvres et correspondances, 5:48–60.
68. D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse, 76, 80.
69. Voltaire to Damilaville, April 1, 1766, in Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, vol. 110.
70. On these themes, see Lester Crocker, “The Problem of Truth and Falsehood in the Age of Enlightenment,” in Journal of the History of Ideas 14, no. 4 (October 1953): 575–603; Harry C. Payne, The Philosophes and the People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 94–116; D. W. Smith, “The ‘Useful Lie’ in Helvétius and Diderot,” in vol. 14 of Diderot Studies (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1971), 190–92; and Peter Gay, Voltaire’s Politics: The Poet as Realist (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959), 220–27.
71. Rousseau, Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, in Collected Writings, 2:21. See also Final Reply, in ibid., 2:115.
72. Crocker, “Problem,” 575.
73. Roland Mortier, “Esotérisme et lumières,” in Clartés et ombres du siècle des lumières: Etudes sur le 18e siècle littéraire (Geneva: Droz, 1969), 60.
74. Diderot, “Divination,” in Encyclopédie, ARTFL Encyclopédie Projet, http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu.proxy2.cl.msu.edu/. Translation mine.
75. On these themes, see Christopher Kelly, Rousseau as Author, 147.
76. Toland, Clidophorus, vii.
77. Diderot to Hemsterhuis, summer 1773, in Correspondance, 13:25–27. Translation mine.
78. Diderot, Refutation d’Helvétius, 2:398.
79. Abbé Galiani to Mme d’Epinay, September 19, 1772, quoted by Mortier, “Esotérisme at lumières,” 60–103, 92.
CHAPTER NINE
1. Cantor, “Leo Strauss,” 277. Throughout this chapter I rely on this superb essay which the reader is urged to consult directly.
2. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ed. Stephen Fender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 92 (emphasis added).
3. This kind of passion and connection cannot, of course, simply be willed. One can feel them only on the basis of certain presuppositions that are increasingly uncommon. One must be a real, old-fashioned believer in books and especially in old books (old enough to have been written esoterically). One must harbor, that is, the lively hope that some of these old classics can teach one things of the first importance for one’s life that cannot so easily be found in more modern books. But if instead one is a firm believer in progress (so that later books inevitably contain all the solid wisdom of earlier ones) or, alternatively, in historicism (so that old classics are inevitably time-bound, expressing only the unquestioned assumptions of their society), then one will lack all reasonable basis for this kind of passion. With the best of intentions, one will be psychologically incapable of anything but an academic interest in these old books—which, given their difficulty, is too weak a motive and connection to enable one to unlock and truly understand them. In this way, the doctrines of progress and historicism—with their implicit but unavoidable dismissiveness toward the thought and writings of the past—become self-confirming: we expect that there is nothing truly important there, and that is what we find.
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 5 (emphasis in the original). My attention was drawn to this passage by the website of Lance Fletcher, who also has an interesting discussion of it there, from which I have borrowed freely. See http://www.freelance-academy.org.
5. See Quentin Skinner’s Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, which gives a powerful demonstration of how the careful historical study of the rhetorical practices of Hobbes’s age aid us in understanding his art of esoteric writing.
6. Montesquieu, Œuvres complètes, ed. Caillois, 1:1228, quoted and translated by Pangle, Montesquieu’s Philosophy, 13 (emphasis mine).
7. Strauss, Persecution, 30.
8. Toland, Clidophorus, 76.
9. For both of these examples, see the excellent discussion by Cantor, “Leo Strauss.”
10. See “The Literary Character of the Guide for the Perplexed,” in Strauss, Persecution, 55–78; “How to Study Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise,” in ibid., 142–201; and Strauss, Thoughts, 29–53.
11. Quoted and translated by Lester G. Crocker in Diderot: The Embattled Philosopher (New York: Free Press, 1954), 311.
12. Erasmus, Praise of Folly, trans. Hudson, 50.
13. For an excellent account, see David Berman, “Deism, Immortality and the Art of Theological Lying,” in Deism, Masonry, and the Enlightenment: Essays Honoring Alfred Owen Aldridge, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay (Newark, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1987), 61–78; and A History of Atheism in Britain: From Hobbes to Russell (New York: Croom Helm, 1988).
14. See Zagorin, Ways of Lying, 305–16; and Don Cameron Allen, Doubt’s Boundless Sea; Skepticism and Faith in the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964).
15. Loseff, On the Beneficence, 109.
16. Strauss, Persecution, 36.
17. Machiavelli, Discourses, trans. Mansfield and Tarcov, 32 (1.10).
18. Strauss, Thoughts, 33.
19. Montaigne, The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, ed. and trans. Jacob Zeitlin (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1934), 2:500–501, quoted by David Schaefer, The Political Philosophy of Montaigne (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 94.
20. Ritchie, German Literature, 119.
21. Seth Mydans, “Burmese Editor’s Code: Winks and Little Hints,” New York Times, June 24, 2001.
22. Parrott, “Aesopian Language,” 43.
23. Loseff, On the Beneficence, 65.
24. Aquinas, Faith, Reason, 53–54 (art. 4).
25. Diderot to François Hemsterhuis, summer 1773, in Diderot, Correspondance, 13:25–27. Translation mine.
26. Havel, Letters to Olga, 8, quoted by Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation, 11.
27. Rousseau, “Preface,” 2:184–85.
28. Taine, Ancient Regime, trans. Durand, 260 (4.1.4), quoted and translated by Pangle, Montesquieu’s Philosophy, 17–18.
29. Maimonides, Guide 6, quoting from Babylonian Talmud, Hagigah 11b, 13a.
30. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, ed. Kitchin, 81 (2.4.4).
31. Preface to De Cive, in Thomas Hobbes: Man and Citizen, ed. Bernard Gert (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), 103.
32. Alfarabi, Plato’s Laws, 84–85.
33. Toland, Clidophorus, 75.
34. See also 152e; and Cratylus 402a–c. For a similar view, see Sextus Empiricus, Against the Physicists 1.4–9; and Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.984b15–30.
35. Montaigne, Essays, 185 (1.40).
36. Œuvres de Descartes, 3:491–92, quoted and translated by Hiram Caton, “The Problem of Descartes’ Sincerity,” Philosophical Forum 2, no. 1 (Fall 1970): 363.
37. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, ed. Kitchen, 88 (2.7.2); see 89.
38. D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse, 76.
39. Toland, Clidophorus, 96.
40. Nicolas de Malebranche, Réponse à une dissertation de Mr Arnaud contre un éclaircissement du traité de la nature et de la grace (Rotterdam: Reinier Leers, 1685). Quoted by Pierre Bayle in Bayle, Daniel de Larocque, Jean Barrin, and Jacques Bernard, Nouvelles de la république des lettres (Amsterdam: H. Desbordes, May 1685), 794–95 (art. 8).
41. Strauss, Persecution, 32; see 169–70, 177–81, 186.
42. For a good example of this argument, see John Dunn, “Justice and the Interpretation of Locke’s Political Theory,” Philosophy 16, no. 1 (1968): 68–87.
43. Eliot Hearst and John Knott, Blindfold Chess (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009).
44. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Mansfield and Winthrop, 613 (2.3.21).
45. Tocqueville, Democracy in America 2.1.15: “Why the Study of Greek and Latin Literature Is Particularly Useful in Democratic Societies”; see also 2.1.11–14, 2.1.16–21.
46. To be sure, many scholars today write about rhetoric as a theoretical topic, but that makes all the more striking their neglect of it as a practice—as something that could teach them and others how to write.
47. Maimonides, Guide, ed. Pines, 17–20.
48. Toland, Clidophorus, 77, 85.
49. Machiavelli, Discourses, trans. Mansfield and Tarcov, 307 (3.48); Pope, Essay on Criticism, 69 (lines 175–80).
50. James Joyce, Ulysses: An Unabridged Republication of the Original Shakespeare and Company Edition, Published in Paris by Sylvia Beach, 1922 (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2009), 182. Although Stephen Dedalus is clearly Joyce’s alter ego, one cannot assume that the view expressed here is Joyce’s settled opinion.
51. Machiavelli, Discourses 61–62 (1.26).
52. On this technique, see the superb discussions by Ralph Lerner, from which I have profited, in “Dispersal by Design: The Author’s Choice,” in Reason, Faith, and Politics: Essays in Honor of Werner J. Dannhauser, ed. Arthur Melzer and Robert Kraynak (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), 29–41, and in Playing the Fool: Subversive Laughter in Troubled Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
53. Maimonides, Guide, ed. Pines, 6–7 (introduction).
54. Stromata, in The Writings of Clement of Alexandria, trans. Rev. William Wilson (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1869), 140–41 (bk. 4, chap. 2), 489 (bk. 7, chap 18).
55. Montesquieu to Pierre-Jean Grosley, April 8, 1750, quoted and translated by Paul Rahe, Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 87.
56. D’Alembert, Œuvres complètes (Paris: A. Belin, 1822), 3:450–51, quoted and translated by Pangle, Montesquieu’s Philosophy, 11–12.
57. See Strauss, City and Man, 62, 69, 110–11; and Strauss, Rebirth, 154–55.
58. Montaigne, Complete Essays, trans. Frame, 761 (3.9).
59. Pierre Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary: Selections, trans. Richard H. Popkin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), 396–97.
60. Condorcet, Esquisse, 216–17. Translation mine (emphasis added).
61. Strauss, Persecution, 184 and n82.
62. Locke, First Treatise, in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (New York: New American Library, 1965), sections 23, 8, 9, 7.
63. See the discussion of Locke’s reading and writing in Richard Cox, Locke on War and Peace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), 1–44; and Michael Zuckert, Launching Liberalism: On Lockean Political Philosophy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 33–43.
64. Gao and Ting-Toomey, Communicating Effectively, 38.
65. See Leo Strauss, “The Spirit of Sparta or the Taste of Xenophon,” Social Research 6, no. 4 (1939): 502–36. On the notorious licentiousness of Spartan women, see 504n3.
66. See Strauss, Persecution, 9–16. For further discussion of the technique of omission, see Strauss, Thoughts, 30–32.
67. See Strauss, Persecution, 62–64; and Strauss, Thoughts, 42–45.
68. See Cicero, Orator 15.50; De oratore 2.313–15; Strauss, Persecution, 185; and Cantor, “Leo Strauss,” 273–74.
69. Stanley Fish, “Georgics of the Mind: The Experience of Bacon’s Essays,” in Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 78–156.
70. W. Robert Connor, Thucydides (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). Reader response is the contemporary method that has most in common with the approach to reading being proposed here. For a brief comparison of the two, see Cantor, “Leo Strauss,” 271–72.
71. Clifford Orwin, The Humanity of Thucydides (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
72. Strauss, City and Man, chap. 3.
73. David Wootton, “Narrative, Irony, and Faith in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall,” in History and Theory 33, no. 4 (December 1994): 77–105.
74. Berman, “Deism, Immortality,” 61–78.
75. Ambler, “Aristotle,” 390–410.
76. Clifford Orwin, “Machiavelli’s Unchristian Charity,” in American Political Science Review 72, no. 4 (December 1978): 1217–28.
77. Leo Strauss, “On the Intention of Rousseau,” in Hobbes and Rousseau: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Maurice Cranston and R. S. Peters (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972), 254–90.
78. Leo Strauss and Seth Benardete, Leo Strauss on Plato’s Symposium (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
79. Allan Bloom, “Interpretive Essay,” in The Republic of Plato, 305–436.
80. Christopher Bruell, On the Socratic Education: An Introduction to the Shorter Platonic Dialogues (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999).
81. Augustine, City of God, trans. Dods, 138–40 (4.31–32), 185–201 (6.2–9).
CHAPTER TEN
1. Habermas, Rorty, and Kolakowski, Debating the State of Philosophy, ix.
2. Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason (New York: Pantheon Books, 2008); Albert Gore, The Assault on Reason (New York: Penguin, 2007). See also Todd Gitlin, “The Renaissance of Anti-intellectualism,” Chronicle of Higher Education, December 8, 2000; Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (New York: Doubleday, 2009); Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science (New York: Basic Books, 2005); Alex B. Berezow and Hank Campbell, Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left (New York: Public Affairs, 2012); Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2008); Richard Shenkman, Just How Stupid Are We?: Facing the Truth about the American Voter (New York: Basic Books, 2008); Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (or, Don’t Trust Anyone under 30) (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2008); Nicholas G. Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010).
3. See the Gallup poll taken in 2009, on the occasion of the two hundredth anniversary of Darwin’s birth: http://www.gallup.com/poll/114544/darwin-birthday-believe-evolution.aspx.
4. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xiv.
5. Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 30; see Strauss, “Giving of Accounts,” 460; and Strauss, “Preface to Hobbes Politische Wissenschaft,” 453.
6. For the omitted, religious side of Strauss’s thought, see Kenneth Hart Green, Jew and Philosopher: The Return to Maimonides in the Jewish Thought of Leo Strauss (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993); Leora Batnitzky, Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and above all, Heinrich Meier’s superb Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
7. Jameson, Political Unconscious, 9, quoted in Peter C. Herman, Historicizing Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 1.
8. Karl Mannheim, “Historicism,” in Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. Paul Kecskemeti (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952), 84.
9. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Problem of Historical Consciousness,” trans. Jeff L. Close, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 5 (Fall 1975): 8.
10. Habermas, Rorty, and Kolakowski, Debating the State of Philosophy, 1–2 (emphasis added); see 8.
11. Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 389.
12. Hilary Putnam and James Conant, Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 18.
13. Todorov, On Human Diversity, 387–88.
14. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 20.
15. Todorov, On Human Diversity, 389.
16. Benito Mussolini, Diuturna (Milan: Imperia, 1924), 374–77, quoted by Helmut Kuhn, Freedom Forgotten and Remembered (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1943), 17–18. Strauss also argues that relativism has a strong inner tendency to lead to intolerance, “fanatical obscurantism,” and fascism; see Strauss, Natural Right and History, 5–6.
17. See the brief discussion of these themes in chapter 6, the section “Do ‘Subversive Ideas’ Really Subvert?”
18. Habermas, Rorty, and Kolakowski, Debating the State of Philosophy, 69 (emphasis added).
19. Ibid., 6.
20. Strauss, “Political Philosophy and History,” in What Is Political Philosophy?, 57.
21. Ibid., 59.
22. See Strauss, Natural Right and History, 20, 24–27.
23. Leo Strauss, “Relativism,” in Relativism and the Study of Man, ed. Helmut Schoeck and J. W. Wiggins (Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1961), 155; see Strauss, Natural Right and History, 19–28; and “Introduction to Heideggerian,” 32, 35–36.
24. See Strauss, Natural Right and History, 18, 22; “Introduction to Heideggerian,” 32; Strauss, “How to Begin to Study Medieval Philosophy,” in Rebirth, 215; “Progress or Return?,” 255; Strauss, “Kurt Riezler,” in What Is Political Philosophy?, 260.
25. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 33; see Strauss, “On Collingwood’s Philosophy of History,” Review of Metaphysics 5, no. 4 (June 1952): 559–86, 585–86.
26. Strauss, “Political Philosophy and History,” 73.
27. For an excellent discussion of Strauss’s relation to Heidegger, see Richard Velkley, Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy: On Original Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
28. Strauss, “An Unspoken Prologue,” in Green, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, 450; see Strauss, “Giving of Accounts,” 458, 462–63; City and Man, 9.
29. Strauss, Persecution, 158.
30. Strauss, “Unspoken Prologue,” 450.
31. Strauss, Persecution, 158.
32. See Strauss, “On a New Interpretation,” 326; “Political Philosophy and History,” 77.
33. Habermas, Rorty, and Kolakowski, Debating the State of Philosophy, 36.
34. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 18–19; see Strauss, “Political Philosophy and History,” 62–63.
35. Strauss, “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 40–55.
36. The classic work here is Alfarabi’s The Harmonization of the Two Opinions of the Two Sages, Plato the Divine and Aristotle. See Strauss’s discussion in his “Farabi’s Plato.” See also Strauss, “On a New Interpretation,” 345–49, 354–55. And see Carol Poster, “Aristotle’s Rhetoric against Rhetoric: Unitarian Reading and Esoteric Hermeneutics,” American Journal of Philology 118 (Summer 1997): 221: “In the 15,000 extant pages of the Greek Commentaries on Aristotle, the fundamental unity of Plato and Aristotle is almost universally acknowledged.” This is also the view of Antiochus, Cicero’s teacher, as presented in the latter’s De finibus 5.3 and Academica 1.17.
37. Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 231 (emphasis added).
38. Strauss, “Political Philosophy and History,” 63 (emphasis added).
39. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), 229, quoted by Strauss in “On Collingwood’s Philosophy of History,” 575.
40. Marx, “Manifesto,” 489 (emphasis added).
41. See Strauss, City and Man, 50–138; Jaffa, Thomism and Aristotelianism.
42. Strauss, “Political Philosophy and History,” 63–64; Natural Right and History, 199n43; Strauss, “On a Forgotten Kind of Writing,” in What Is Political Philosophy?, 227; and “Persecution and the Art of Writing,” Social Research 8 (November 1941): 503n21.
43. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 23; see 32; “Political Philosophy and History,” 59–60, 69–72.
44. Strauss, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy,” in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 33.
45. Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique, 31.
46. Strauss, “Correspondence concerning Modernity: Karl Löwith and Leo Strauss,” Independent Journal of Philosophy 4 (1983): 112 (emphasis in the original).
47. See the excellent discussion of the continuity thesis and the secularization thesis in Daniel Tanguay, Leo Strauss: An Intellectual Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). On Heidegger’s reliance on Savigny and the historical school, see Richard Velkley, Heidegger, Strauss, 183–84n16, 185n40. For Strauss’s highly critical evaluation of the most famous version of the secularization thesis, Weber’s theory of the origin of modern capitalism from decayed Calvinism, see Natural Right and History, 60n22. On Hegel and secularization, see Strauss, On Tyranny, 191–92. See also “Three Waves of Modernity,” in An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays by Leo Strauss, ed. Hilail Gildin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 82–83, 95. For a very interesting defense of the continuity and secularization theses, see Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
48. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 165.
49. Strauss, Political Philosophy of Hobbes, 1–5.
50. Strauss, “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 38–39; see Strauss, “Progress or Return?,” 262.
51. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 30; Strauss, “Progress or Return?,” 262.
52. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 32.
53. Strauss, “The Problem of Socrates: Five Lectures,” in Rebirth, 169, 171, 168–69.
54. Leo Strauss, Socrates and Aristophanes (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 311. Consider Nietzsche: “there is nothing that has caused me to meditate more on Plato’s secrecy and sphinx nature than the happily preserved petit fait that under the pillow of his deathbed there was found no ‘Bible,’ nor anything Egyptian, Pythagorean, or Platonic—but a volume of Aristophanes.” Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Kaufmann, 41.
55. See Strauss, “Problem of Socrates,” 103; Socrates and Aristophanes, 3–8.
56. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 32, 33.
57. See Leo Strauss, Faith and Political Philosophy: The Correspondence between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934–1964, trans. and ed. Peter Emberley and Barry Cooper (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 65–66, 71, 75.
58. See ibid., 66, 75–76; Persecution, 7–8, 21.
59. Strauss, Persecution, 58.
60. Strauss, “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 44; see Leo Strauss, “Marsilius of Padua,” in The History of Political Philosophy, ed. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 294.
61. Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 231; Leo Strauss, “Niccolo Machiavelli,” in Strauss and Cropsey, History of Political Philosophy, 296–97.
62. Leo Strauss, Philosophy and Law, trans. Fred Baumann (New York: Jewish Publication Society, 1987), 12–13.
63. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 13–16, 33, 178; “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 40–41, 51; “Three Waves of Modernity,” 83–89; On Tyranny, 106n5, 210–12; “Progress or Return?,” 242–45.
64. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 13–16; “On the Intention of Rousseau,” 285.
65. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 13–16, 26, 252, 256–63, 302–23.
66. Not that this was the only root of the will to historicism. More fundamental was the original, underlying project of modernity: the effort to make man absolutely at home in his time and place and therefore manifestly indifferent to a religious beyond. Historicism is the ultimate expression of this original, antitranscendent modern impulse. But this impulse arrived all the quicker at its final, historicist destination because its first incarnation, Enlightenment rationalism, produced political evils that generated their own, more immediately practical motives for subordinating reason to history. Still, this latter concern does not stand on its own, because philosophers would not have been so vitally concerned with these merely political problems if the primary modern project had not first given them a fundamental stake in—a theoretical concern with—the course of political and religious history.
67. Strauss, Philosophy and Law, 112n2, 37–38; Persecution, 155; see Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss, 56–57, 57n2.
68. Friedrich Schiller, On Naive and Sentimental Poetry, trans. Julius A. Elias (New York: F. Ungar, 1966); G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 94; Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. D. Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 366–67, 373–75; Strauss, “Political Philosophy and History,” 75; “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” 31; Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, trans. Eva Brann (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968), 117–25; Jacob Klein: Lectures and Essays, ed. Robert Williamson and Elliot Zuckerman (Annapolis, MD: St. John’s College Press, 1985), 65–84.
69. Strauss, “On Classical Political Philosophy,” 49–50; “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 27–29; “Political Philosophy and History,” 73–77; Philosophy and Law, 37–38, 112n2; Persecution, 154–58; see Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought, 117–25.
70. Strauss, “Political Philosophy and History,” 76.