3
Man is the rational animal.
—ARISTOTLE
Man is the political animal.
—ARISTOTLE
The empirical evidence for esotericism—this large collection of quotations—indicates that esoteric communication was a nearly universal practice among Western philosophers prior to the late modern era. Yet this evidence would carry greater plausibility if it made sense—if we understood the motives or theoretical rationale behind these reported facts. What feature of the human condition could have induced so many philosophers in such different times and places to engage in this same strange behavior? As we have briefly seen, there are actually four related but distinct motives behind philosophical esotericism. Each is different and needs to be discussed separately. But first they need to be discussed together. Before immersing ourselves in the details of its variants, we need to understand what esotericism is in itself, in its underlying unity and theoretical core—if it has one.
Perhaps it does not. Esotericism is just a particular technique of communication, and different people can make use of it for totally unrelated purposes. Throughout history, as we have seen, the technique of esoteric communication has been a surprisingly widespread phenomenon, and if all these instances are included, it is very unlikely that there is any fundamental underlying unity to be found.
But our subject is philosophical esotericism, and here there is more reason to expect a unifying core. To anticipate, I will argue that philosophical esotericism in all its forms ultimately grows out of a single, enduring problem of the human condition: the fact that we are not pure minds, the essential dualism of “theory” and “praxis,” of reason and its nonrational preconditions. In its philosophical use, the technique of esotericism—which is dualistic in its effort to send two messages at once—is an outgrowth of the essential dualism of human life.
THE TWO LIVES
Esotericism, as it first comes to light, is simply a somewhat offbeat manifestation of the art of writing. It is a particular form of rhetoric. And, as such, it seems to be a purely practical and literary matter—not a philosophical one.
But rhetoric, as employed by philosophers, is never simply a literary matter, a mere question of taste, style, or effectiveness. For the ultimate ground of rhetoric is something more fundamental: the whole relationship that subsists between the writer and the reader. This crucial issue is most often invisible because one takes for granted that the writer and the reader are not fundamentally different. It comes into play when they are—as when an adult tries to explain something difficult to a child (to take the starkest case), or a Buddhist sage addresses a beginning student, or a philosopher speaks to nonphilosophers. Thus, the overriding issue and determinant of philosophical rhetoric, at work in all the older books of philosophy, is this crucial question: how should the theoretical human being relate to (and thus address) the practical human being?
This statement requires some unpacking. For starters, it rests on a premise that rings strangely in our ears: that there exist fundamentally different types of human beings or ways of life—and they are unequal. This is an idea that, in our relatively egalitarian and homogeneous world, people incline to dismiss, if they raise it at all. One powerful indication of this tacit rejection is that the various competing hermeneutical theories prevalent today, however much they may disagree in other respects, mostly agree in this, that they speak about “the reader”—as if it should go without saying that all readers are essentially the same and, what is more, that all past writers have proceeded on this assumption. This unspoken assumption effectively excludes from the start all serious consideration of the core idea structuring philosophically esoteric rhetoric: the multiplicity of human types and thus of reader types. This core belief may of course be incorrect—the misguided attitude of an inegalitarian and heterogeneous world. It is certainly distasteful to us, but that cannot detain us. Precisely our purpose here is to achieve a sympathetic understanding of the historical practice of esotericism, and therefore it is important to put ourselves in mind of the conception that prevailed in the earlier “esoteric ages,” especially in the classical period.
The crucial point concerns what is meant by a “philosopher.”1 In the older view, it is not simply a person like “you and me,” only with a particular interest in philosophy (although there are such people too, of course), any more than a saint is a person with a peculiar liking for religion. Again, philosophy is not a specific subject matter like botany or geology, or a particular technique or expertise, as in the contemporary phrase “a professional philosopher.” It is above all a distinct way of life—something that makes one a different type of human being. One is a philosopher not so much because of what one does or is able to do as because of what one most fundamentally loves and lives for. The philosopher is the person who, through a long dialectical journey, has come to see through the illusory goods for which others live and die. Freed from illusion—and from the distortion of experience that illusion produces—he is able, for the first time, to know himself, to be himself, and to fully experience his deepest longing, which is to comprehend the necessities that structure the universe and human life as part of that universe. This is the famous vita contemplativa, an ideal of life found, in one form or another, among virtually all classical and medieval thinkers and still powerful among many modern thinkers as well.
We of course know all about this contemplative ideal but have a tendency to misunderstand by assimilating it to the intellectual models that dominate today, such as the scientist, the scholar, and the intellectual. In some important respects, the classical philosophical ideal has more in common with certain Eastern conceptions, such as the Buddhist sage, than with modern Western ones. Today, we admire the great scientist, scholar, and intellectual primarily for their extraordinary ability, for what they can do, not for their unique way of living and being. The emphasis is on their external achievements, not their attainment of an inner enlightenment, their reaching some higher or purer state of being. Such claims make us suspicious. We believe in intelligence but not in “wisdom”—not in a use of the mind that leads to the transcendence of ordinary life. We greatly respect experts but no longer speak of sages and wise men.
Thus, what we tend to exclude from serious consideration, to say it again, is the crucial idea that the philosopher is a fundamentally different type of human being. To be sure, we are multiculturalists and love to celebrate diversity, but precisely on the premise that these picturesque cultural differences do not go all that deep. For deeper levels, we tend to revert to our older principle: “underneath, we’re all the same.” We are, as it were, existential monists: there is only one kind of human life. Let me try, then, to make this earlier claim of fundamental difference or existential dualism more precise.2
If one person lives predominantly for honor and another for money, they live different lives, but not yet in the radical sense in which the philosopher’s life is different from both of theirs. For (typically) the honor-lover has not arrived at his life through the examination and transcendence of the money-lover’s life. But that is the case with the philosopher who—much like the Buddhist sage—becomes what he is only by undergoing a wrenching “turning around of the soul” (in Plato’s phrase, Republic 521c), a kind of philosophic “conversion” or “rebirth,” by coming to see the unreal character of the goods on which all nonphilosophic lives are based. Thus, the philosophic life is “different” from other lives, not because it is one alternative among a number of equally valid alternatives, or even because it represents a higher stage of development along the same, continuous path of life. It is the product of a radical break with nonphilosophic life, a discontinuity—a turning around of the soul. In the famous discussion of the cave in the Republic, Plato depicts the philosopher as living in an entirely different world from the nonphilosopher. Aristotle’s account is no less extreme, suggesting that the philosophic life stands to the nonphilosophic as the divine to the human.3 This is the classical theory of “the two lives”: the vita contemplativa and the vita activa, the lives of theory and praxis.4
Now, whether correct or incorrect, this strong dualism obviously has a number of important consequences concerning the communication of philosophical understanding, especially through writing. Impressed by the radical distinctness of the philosophic life, earlier thinkers were particularly appreciative of oral communication since it allows one to say appropriately different things to fundamentally different types of people as well as to those in different stages of their development. But these same concerns obviously point to a grave difficulty with written communication.
Writing is a remarkably useful invention, but it involves a fateful trade-off: it makes it possible to address people distant in place and time, but at the price of losing strict control over whom one addresses. It typically forces one to say the same thing to everyone. This is the point that Socrates, who refused to write, most emphasizes in his famous critique of writing in the Phaedrus, “every [written] speech rolls around everywhere, both among those who understand and among those for whom it is not fitting, and it does not know to whom it ought to speak and to whom not.”5 Today, although we can certainly understand this claim, we do not see much of a problem here. Socrates does—the univocity of writing is in tension with the duality of lives.
When a philosopher publishes a book—even if it is with the primary intention of addressing other philosophers—he inevitably crosses an essential divide. He displays his life and thought to lives fundamentally different from his own. A “philosophic book” is, as it were, a perpetually open door connecting two alien worlds. It is thus not at all a natural or obvious thing, to be taken for granted (“of course philosophers will write books”). It is strange, a combining of things naturally distinct—a sort of hybrid being, the healthiness of which is a great and open question.
In the end, to be sure, most philosophers have made the choice to engage in publication, but not without protracted and profound reflection about whether to do so, and for what precise purpose, and then finally: how—with what rhetoric. And each philosopher’s answer to this series of questions has ultimately depended on his particular understanding of the relationship—harmonious or antagonistic—subsisting between the two different lives. All the famous books of philosophy lining our shelves were conceived and rhetorically crafted, each in its own unique way, on the basis of some answer to the inescapable “literary” question: what is the proper posture of those who live for truth toward those who live for something other than truth?
Over the last two centuries, philosophers have increasingly moved toward the view that the lives of theory and praxis are ultimately harmonious and—more—essentially the same (our “monist” tendency), and therefore that a philosopher should write openly about all matters, saying the same things to all people. This has now come to seem normal.
But in earlier centuries and especially the classical and medieval periods, thinkers tended strongly to the opposite view: there are certain important truths that those not living a purified, philosophic life will find useless, or harmful, or intolerable. Thus, it is important to avoid saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. One must be a “safe speaker” (as Xenophon called Socrates)—a concept that sounds strange in our garrulous and loose-lipped age.6 As Diogenes Laertius reports in his “life of Anacharsis”: “To the question, ‘What among men is both good and bad?’ his answer was ‘The tongue.’”7 In general, philosophers have tended to agree with Socrates that the great problem of writing is that it is univocal: it says the same thing to all people. And the only solution to this problem—other than the avoidance of writing—has been to write multivocally, to develop a special rhetoric that enables a writing to say different things to different people. Esoteric writing.
We have traced the rhetorical art of esotericism back to the underlying issue of the two lives, the dualism of theory and praxis (especially as it confronts the univocity of writing). But this issue itself is in need of elaboration, for it is something that we imperfectly understand. The dualism of theory and praxis is, for some reason, rarely recognized and thematized today as one of the basic “problems of philosophy” that should structure our thinking—and our reading of earlier philosophers. There is not even a generally accepted understanding of what “the issue of theory and praxis” is. But if we have proved to be blind to esotericism, that is probably because we do not see clearly the problem to which it is the response.
Let me hazard a quick outline of the issue, tracing it from its most obvious and elementary beginnings through its historical transformations in order to see how it gives rise to the practice of philosophical esotericism in its four distinct forms. This very broad-brush discussion will prepare the chapters to follow, where it will be fleshed out and substantiated. For the whole book is essentially an effort to redescribe the history of Western philosophical thinking and writing as it appears when viewed from the standpoint of this fundamental but neglected problematic of theory and praxis.
THE DUALISM OF HUMAN NATURE: THEORY AND PRAXIS
To begin at the beginning: we all seek to know what is good for us, what will make us happy. But to pursue this question, it is above all necessary to ask what we are, how we are put together. “What is healthful and good,” says Aristotle, “is different for human beings and for fish.”8 What is good for a being is relative—to its nature or constitution. So what is our nature as humans? That is a famously problematic question. Without aspiring to an answer (or even a full defense of the question), we can review certain classic first moves in an effort to clarify the structure of the issue—which is our limited purpose here. We just want to see how this most basic question leads directly to the problem of theory and praxis.
Aristotle states the classic answer: “Man is the rational animal.” This means, not that we are perfectly reasonable, of course, but that we possess the faculty of reason. And to this much, presumably, everyone will agree. Beyond this, the formula means that we naturally incline to make use of this faculty, and that we take inherent delight in doing so, just as we delight in the use of our faculty of sight for its own sake, independent of utility. Still further, it means that we identify our very existence with this faculty. If, through some accident, a person were to lose his opposable thumbs or his ability to walk on two legs, his life as a human being would still remain. But if he were to lose all higher mental functioning, then we would say that the human being we once knew is no longer there. His life—his human existence—is gone, even if his body thrives, all his practical needs are met, and he is rich and famous. For human beings, being truly alive is inseparable from awareness and understanding. I am because I think. Accordingly, Aristotle’s formula also means or at least suggests that our highest aliveness and flourishing is to be found in the greatest actualization of this faculty that is most us—in the life of fullest rational awareness, of greatest awakeness, of pure “theory.”9
But, true as all of this (or some of this) may be, Aristotle’s classic answer is manifestly incomplete, because there is more to us than our minds and more to life than thinking. Do we not have bodies, do we not eat, work, fight, and make love? We are not gods. If a mindless body is not a human being, neither is a disembodied mind. Thus, the same philosopher announces with equal pregnancy: “man is the political animal.” This is his term for all the rest of us—the part that is not pure mind (which includes the practical or noncontemplative uses of reason). To be sure, in the narrowest sense, it refers to only one particular need: we naturally seek and delight in the company of other human beings for its own sake. But more important, it refers to our general way of approaching all of our needs. As social animals, we pursue our needs not directly, as separated, self-sufficient units, but indirectly and communally, through the formation of cooperative groups where we divide labor for production and join forces for defense.
On a still deeper level, we are political beings because the fullest development of society—which is political society, the polis or city—not only helps us to satisfy these preexisting, bodily or economic needs but stimulates within us the growth of new and higher needs, it summons us to our higher selves. Political society comes into being for the sake of mere life, according to Aristotle, but exists for the sake of the good life. In the beginning, we create it; after that, it creates us. It turns us from primitive hunter-gatherers into civilized human beings. Rousing us from tribal slumber, it causes the mind to develop and the heart to expand. It transforms us from bodily, economic creatures and clannish family beings into moral beings and citizens. It opens us up to a new world of realities, teaching us to seek honor, love justice, and long for noble and sacred things. The polisconstitutes the lifeworld within which civilized humanity can fully unfold. We are deeply political animals, then, because only in and through the political community—this new, moralized, and sanctified world—can we truly become all that we are and experience our full human potential.10
It would seem, then, that the full Aristotelian view of human nature is dualistic (although not necessarily in a metaphysical sense): two related but quite distinct and potentially rival things make us human: rationality and politicality, that is, knowing and belonging, contemplation and citizenship, thought and action, intellect and morality—theory and praxis. We are human by virtue of reason, a unique capacity to connect with objective reality—but also through a unique capacity to connect with our fellow human beings. We humans are strangely composite beings, combining together two different natures—like centaurs or, perhaps, schizophrenics.
If this simple account strikes the reader as too Aristotelian or essentialist, let me cite a passage from Richard Rorty’s classic essay “Solidarity or Objectivity,” which presents the same basic idea of human dualism in a more postmodern idiom:
There are two principal ways in which reflective human beings try, by placing their lives in a larger context, to give sense to those lives. The first is by telling the story of their contribution to a community. . . . The second way is to describe themselves as standing in immediate relation to a nonhuman reality [i.e., some objective truth]. . . . I shall say that stories of the former kind exemplify the desire for solidarity, and that stories of the latter kind exemplify the desire for objectivity.11
“Objectivity and solidarity” or “rational animal and political animal”—for our general purposes these may be equated. Indeed, in different times and philosophical circumstances, thinkers have employed a wide variety of vocabularies pointing to a fundamental dualism of human life: pure reason and practical reason, mind and body, reason and existenz, knowing and doing, truth and life, or, in Strauss’s terminology, the philosopher and the city. These dualisms are all different but have a certain fundamental base in common. We are clearly rational beings; and just as clearly, we are not purely rational—not disembodied minds with nothing but theoretical thoughts and contemplative needs. Our minds come attached to something very different: to bodies, which give us practical needs, which then drive us together with our fellow human beings in a social solidarity that ultimately stimulates our development as moral and political beings. I use the purposely general term “theory and praxis” to refer to this very broad dualism.
THE PROBLEM OF THEORY AND PRAXIS
From this basic human duality, there arise a number of abiding philosophical questions—I would emphasize five in particular—which form the core of “the problem of theory and praxis.”
The most obvious and fundamental concerns the question with which we began. If we are double beings, then in what does our true good consist: theory or praxis (or some mix of the two)? Is happiness to be found in the fullest actualization of our rationality or of our politicality, in the detached quest for theoretical truth for its own sake or in active participation within the moral/political/religious community, in the vita contemplativa or in the vita activa? The primary issue for almost all classical political philosophers is the exploration of this question—an exploration that culminates, for almost all, in a clear preference for the philosophic life. Ultimately, we do not think in order to act, but act in order to think. In modern thought, there is a strong (but not always dominant) tendency toward the reversal of this conclusion, toward the supremacy of practical life in some sense—which one sees most clearly in Hobbes, in the form of bodily security, Marx, in the form of productive life, and Kant, in the form of moral life.
But there is also a second, closely related question that necessarily arises from our natural duality: Regardless of which element is primary for our happiness, how do the two distinct elements fit together? How does our rationality relate to our politicality, the theoretical human being to the practical human being? What function can philosophic reason perform in the world of practice? As we say today: “what is the proper role of the intellectual?” or “what influence do ideas have in history?”
But the real question here is much larger than the ones we are accustomed to ask. Above all, the issue is: Are the two elements of our nature essentially antagonistic or harmonious? Do they somehow conflict with one another—within either the individual or society—so that humans need to combat one part of their nature (or one part of society) in order to fulfill the other? Does the dualism of theory and praxis constitute, in this way, a tragic flaw in the human condition, a natural obstacle to harmony and happiness in the individual or society? Or, conversely, do the two elements ultimately complement and aid one another, perhaps even merge together, resolving the dualism into monism, so that the human problem, although a bit messy and complex, is in principle capable of harmonious resolution?
Third, this latter, harmonistic possibility produces an important subquestion: If unity is ultimately achievable, is that primarily due to the conformity of praxis to theory or of theory to praxis? Does reason somehow come to rule over political life, bringing it into harmony with its rational demands, or, conversely, does our sociality, being deeper and more powerful than reason, mold the latter in accordance with its needs? To put it simply, does thought shape history or history shape thought (assuming that they do not go their separate, antagonistic ways)?
Fourth, if the latter should prove to be the case, if theory and praxis are harmonious because praxis or history shapes thought, then we get this further question: Is what we mean by “theory”—the capacity for “rationality” or “objective truth”—really possible in the end? If all thought is conditioned by and relative to our particular practical interests or the concepts and assumptions posited by the practical sphere—such as the local language, economic structure, or power hierarchy—then can human reason ever escape historical or cultural relativism? The status of reason, the whole possibility of knowledge is, in this way, ultimately at stake in the question of theory’s relation to praxis. If we are not disembodied minds, then how can thought ever be “unconditioned”?
Fifth and finally, these issues also lead to a crucial practical question. If theory and praxis are fundamentally antagonistic, then one of the central issues of political philosophy must be to find the best means through which this conflict, which can never be eliminated, may at least be managed and mitigated. Conversely, if the two elements are ultimately complementary, then the crucial issue becomes rather to find the best means for realizing this potential harmony.
These five precise questions follow with fairly strict necessity once you grant the basic premise that we are not pure minds but dual beings of some sort. But all major philosophers grant that premise. Thus, it makes sense to try to approach the history of political philosophy as, in major part, an effort—explicit or implicit—to answer these five questions. This approach is certainly necessary in order to understand esotericism. The second, third, and fifth questions, in particular, will eventually lead us back to our main topic here, the motive for philosophical esotericism. (The fourth will be crucial to the effort, pursued in the last chapter, to understand the philosophical consequences of esotericism.) Let us try, then, in the space of a few pages, to elaborate these questions and the history of reply to them, starting with the second: how do rationality and sociality relate to each other?
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN OUR RATIONAL AND POLITICAL BEING
Obviously on the most elementary level, reason and sociality depend on and support each other, even to the point of being inseparable. Reason cannot flourish or even develop at all without society, for reason requires language and it greatly benefits from the knowledge imbedded in society’s technical, moral, and political traditions and transmitted through its educational practices. Conversely, political life cannot develop and flourish without reason, since it requires a high development of the productive arts and of moral and political understanding.12
But as these two elements develop over time, the relation between them does not necessarily remain the same. When and where reason finally comes fully into its own, when it conceives the radical project of relying entirely on its own powers in making sense of the universe without taking anything on faith or tradition, when, in short, it rises to the level of philosophy, rationalism, or science, then this harmony finally turns to opposition. Reason, nurtured in its initial stages by society, now finds its primary obstacle in the fundamental conventions, traditions, and prejudices of society. Conversely, society, initially provisioned and counseled by reason, now finds a primary danger in philosophy’s relentless drive to question all of the dogmas upon which it is based. In this second stage, then, philosophy appears essentially antinomian or antisocial, and society seems fundamentally anti-intellectual, antirational, or, in Plato’s term, misological (“reason-hating”). There is a head-on collision between the two elements.
But what happens next? That is the crucial question.
Is this second stage the final one—because based on the full development of both reason and society—so that, tragically, the fundamental conflict between the two elements constitutes their true and permanent condition? This conflictual view is the one taken by most classical thinkers. Versions of it can be found expressed (with important differences) in such ancient texts as Sophocles’s Oedipus tyrannus, Aristophanes’s Clouds, Plato’s Apology, the myths of Prometheus, the Sirens, and Pandora, and even in the biblical tales of the Tree of Knowledge and the Tower of Babel. On this view, the two defining elements of human life do not fit together.
Alternatively, perhaps there is a later historical stage—rooted in some further progress of reason or society or both—in which these warring elements return to mutual support and harmony. That is the harmonist view dominant within modern thought, with its humanist optimism and faith in progress.
Notwithstanding its fundamental importance, however, the revolutionary character of this modern shift in philosophical orientation became obscured in later centuries. Indeed, the whole classical, conflictual alternative has largely become lost to view—and with it the relevance and drama of this (second) question of theory and praxis. And all of this for a variety of reasons.
First, the humanistic and progressive character of modern thought not only pushes it toward the harmonist view but eventually causes it to lose all sense of the alternative (as will be seen at greater length in the next chapter). In addition, the conflict between the modern view and the classical alternative has been hidden by the noisy and diverting subconflict that the modern view has generated from within itself. For, as we have just seen, the harmonist view logically divides into two opposite versions. The harmony of the two elements can be established by either the rule of theory over praxis or the reverse. And the whole history of modern thought has largely been driven by the riveting battle centering on this very issue—the “third question” of theory and praxis, which has eclipsed the second.
RATIONALITY AND POLITICALITY IN MODERN THOUGHT: THE ENLIGHTENMENT VS. THE COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT
The battle referred to is the familiar conflict between the Enlightenment and the counter-Enlightenment, which may be understood as a contest between the two rival elements of our nature to be the dominating element that restores unity. The Enlightenment champions reason as the controlling phenomenon, and the romantic counter-Enlightenment (in its many incarnations) gives primacy to our social being, our profound political or historical imbeddedness. In other words, just as the medieval period was dominated by the great struggle between reason and revelation, so the modern period has been largely characterized by the battle between reason and various kinds of secular antirationalism, all of which ultimately stem from the needs of our nonrational nature, the needs of our practical existence.13 The battle has gone something like this.
Starting with Bacon, Hobbes, and Descartes and continuing through the Enlightenment even to the present day, the dominant strain of modern philosophy has embraced reason and rationalism, but of a new kind—one that has moved an important step closer to praxis, having sacrificed the more detached and contemplative claims of reason in favor of a more activist as well as more instrumental or technological understanding of rationality. But this modern reform of rationalism was made for the express purpose of rendering it more able to conquer and rationalize the realm of practice, that is, the political world (through enlightenment and revolution) and the physical world (through scientific technology).
This whole strain of thought, which we may loosely call “Enlightenment rationalism,” holds, in the first place, that reason, although initially overpowered by the superstitions and prejudices imbedded in the realm of praxis, is able progressively to free itself. As in Plato, philosophic reason possesses the power to escape the cave of social illusion and ascend to an objective, universal, and timeless truth.
But this new Enlightenment rationalism goes decisively beyond Plato and classical rationalism by claiming that theory can not only free itself from praxis but ultimately return to, rule, and rectify praxis. The philosopher, once liberated from society and its prejudices, can, through a process of popular enlightenment, eventually liberate society itself from its illusions and bring it into final harmony with reason, including the public embrace of the philosophic or scientific enterprise. The Enlightenment, broadly construed, includes a number of alternative accounts of how reason might come to rule the world in this way: it might be through the direct action of enlightened rulers, tutored by philosophers, or, more indirectly, through the gradual spread of popular enlightenment promoted by a large new class of “intellectuals” united in the “republic of letters,” or, finally, through the impersonal and automatic unfolding of the inherently rational historical process. But, through whatever precise means, philosophers can eventually create an “age of reason” where the dual demands of rationalism and social existence are finally in complete, monistic harmony—unified by and around reason.
But this modern, crusading rationalism soon gave rise, of course, to a reaction—a powerful and continually recurring reaction: the so-called counter-Enlightenment, which, in successive and increasingly radical waves, has been termed “romantic,” “pragmatist,” “existentialist,” “poststructuralist,” or “postmodern.” The counter-Enlightenment, in its various manifestations, primarily emphasizes the power and value of the other, nonrationalist side of our nature: our life as social and amorous beings, our world of particular attachments, our longings for the noble and the beautiful. And from this nonrational standpoint, it highlights the many ways in which human reason is often a corrosive and destructive force.
Reason is universal, but life is particular. This is especially the case with political life with its basis in local traditions, accidental circumstances, arbitrary practices, and historical memories and legends. Thus, reason’s abstract universalism alienates us from the particular attachments that ground communal loyalty and give life all of its sweetness and depth. Again, reason can be dry, analytical, abstract, and static. It puts us out of touch with concrete reality in its irreducible specificity and constant flux. Real life involves a world of intuitions, sentiments, and feelings that reason knows nothing of. Furthermore, reason often tends to a dangerous skepticism that paralyzes action, undermines shared dogmas, and debunks our loftiest ideals. On the other hand, as the French, Russian and other modern revolutions powerfully demonstrate, rationalism in its crusading, Enlightenment form also tends to an opposite danger: to a rigid doctrinairism, dogmatic universalism, ideological imperialism, political fanaticism, and ruthless totalitarianism. Finally, the manipulative, conquering, technological aspect of Enlightenment rationalism has its “Frankenstein” aspects, unleashing forces that then escape its control, creating military and environmental dangers. And, more deeply, it disrupts the posture of grateful acceptance and receptivity necessary for the proper relation toward nature or being.
This counter-Enlightenment critique of reason as harmful to practical life could seem like a return to the classical, conflictual view of theory and praxis, but at bottom it is very different. First, the specific criticisms are somewhat different, since the dangers of Enlightenment rationalism, which is activist and technological, differ from those of classical rationalism, which is detached and contemplative.
More fundamentally, the modern critique of reason (at least in its dominant strain) still recoils from conflictualism. It continues to be driven by the modern assumption that theory and praxis must somehow be harmonious. Therefore, from the harm that Enlightenment rationalism does to society, it concludes, not that there is a tragic and incurable conflict, but that the Enlightenment simply embraced a false—a distorted and defective—form of rationalism. And this conflict of distorted rationalism and society is only temporary and will be cured when we achieve a deeper understanding of the character of true rationality, some kind of “new thinking,” especially through what may be called the politicization or historicization of reason.
The counter-Enlightenment, like the Enlightenment it counters, is still reformist and harmonist, only it sees the primary need as the reform, not of society, but of philosophy.
Edmund Burke, for example, writes in order to combat the new dangers brought into the world by the French Revolution and the abstract Enlightenment rationalism that stands behind it. He does so, partly by accepting the Enlightenment mode of reasoning and simply urging the practical inapplicability of its abstract conclusions. But he also goes further, suggesting the need for a kind of new thinking, one more historically imbedded. He argues that the philosopher, in the derivation—and not merely the application—of his principles, must be far more respectful of the local mores and established customs of society. He must take his standard not from abstract, universal reason but from “prescription,” from the genuine moral legitimacy that accrues to an established practice, simply because it is established, however arbitrary it may be from the standpoint of abstract reason.14
Later, in its more radical, historicist forms, the counter-Enlightenment extends this effort to subordinate reason to society, theory to praxis. It denies to the philosopher any escape from the communal cave. It holds that proud reason is in fact entirely a creature of society—conditioned by and relative to it—so that there are no timeless, culturally independent meanings or truths. Thus, it fully reverses the Enlightenment view: not only is reason incapable of ruling society, it cannot even escape or transcend it; and this means that ultimately it is social life that rules reason. Society determines what will count as “rationality.” For reason is a manifestation of life and not the reverse. All philosophy, even the most abstract and airy theorizing, is ultimately rooted in practical life. It is “ideology” of one kind or another, responding to the social needs, the shared commitments, the unthought assumptions of the political community. Thus, not reason but sociality is the deepest and strongest thing in us, and, when this lesson is properly assimilated, the latter can become the true basis for harmonizing thought and action.
Although today, in our postmodern era, this historicist view seems clearly ascendant, the battle very much continues. Yet amid all this conflict, everyone today seems at least to agree on this: these Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment positions (or rationalist and antirationalist, or modern and postmodern) are opposites that, together, exhaust the possible views on the crucial question of reason and social life. If the answer is still open to debate, at least the question is certain. No important alternative has been neglected.
Yet, as I have been arguing, this view involves a considerable blindness, for in the heat of this subconflict something crucial has indeed been largely neglected. If the camera pans back, suddenly these “opposite” modern positions, locked for centuries in momentous battle, stand revealed as belonging together on the same side of a larger dichotomy: harmonist vs. conflictual. The two modern positions agree in excluding the conflictualist view, in embracing the humanistic imperative that somehow theory and praxis must be reducible to harmony. They disagree only as to how: the Enlightenment camp standing for the rationalization of political life, the counter-Enlightenment for the politicization of reason. But this noisy disagreement has served to hide from view the more fundamental alternative—the classical, conflictual view. In other words, in modernity, the third question of theory and praxis (the intraharmonist battle) has tended to eclipse the more fundamental second one (harmonist vs. conflictual), so that we barely raise it anymore.
TWO QUALIFICATIONS
I have elaborated this general schema concerning theory and praxis in the belief that it is essential for rendering fully intelligible the theoretical basis of philosophical esotericism in its four forms as well as in its historical mutations. Before employing it for that purpose, however, it is necessary to record some qualifications as well as to address an obvious objection.
I have argued that the dualism in our nature (rationality vs. politicality) gives rise to a duality of views concerning their relationship—conflictualism vs. harmonism (with the latter itself then dividing in two). I then identified these theoretical views with historical periods of thought: conflictualism with classical and medieval philosophy, harmonism, in its two forms, with modern philosophy in its two forms of Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment thought. Having painted this picture with stark precision, for the sake of a clear theoretical overview, I must now point to the most important ways in which, in practice, these distinctions become blurred or compromised.
The first concerns the harmonist-conflictual distinction. The question of how philosophic rationality and politicality fit together is a complex one, not easily reducible to a binary opposition. Since the tensions between these two things are subject to degree, there will naturally be a continuum running from the extreme conflictual to the extreme harmonist position. Moreover, a given thinker may occupy one point on that continuum regarding some issues of potential conflict and another regarding other issues. It must be kept in mind, then, that although these two broad categories are reasonably coherent theoretically and also practically useful for understanding the general posture of a philosopher toward the world of practice and toward the act of writing, nevertheless each contains a good deal of room for internal variation.
That is why even among those in the same broad camp, no two thinkers employ exactly the same practical posture and rhetoric (consider Plato and Aristotle, for example). Furthermore these differences can easily ripen into conflict, as becomes particularly clear in the modern period (as will be seen at length in chapter 8). There is considerable tension, for example, between those, like Condorcet, who think the harmonist project of “universal enlightenment” can be genuinely universal and those, like Voltaire, who think it must be limited, in practice, to the middle and upper classes; or, again, between those, like Holbach, who believe that society can get beyond the need for religion of any kind and those, like Rousseau, who think that some sort of bare bones, rationalized religion will always be necessary.
The second qualification concerns the ancient-modern distinction. This too must not be understood in too rigid a manner. First, as with the previous distinction, each of these broad categories contains a world of variation and disagreement. But furthermore, not every chronologically modern thinker was “a modern” in the sense of participating in the very broad but still far from universal movement of the Enlightenment (or the counter-Enlightenment). There were certainly ancients among the moderns.15 What is less clear is if there were genuine moderns among the ancients—thinkers, for example, who favored a philosophical movement to promote something like universal enlightenment as well as the technological conquest of nature.
Having registered these qualifications, we turn to an obvious objection concerning the claimed connection between these two distinctions.
THE PREVAILING IMAGE OF CLASSICAL AND MODERN THOUGHT
Someone will object that to call the modern period harmonist and the classical one conflictual is, in fact, to reverse the long-prevailing conceptions of both of these eras. We think of the modern age as decentered and turbulent in comparison with the serenity of the classical era, the age of order and harmony, of “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur,” in Winckelmann’s famous phrase. Certainly it was in the modern period and not the classical that the conflict between reason and society came most to the fore. It was the Enlightenment philosophes, after all, who established the well-known paradigm of the modern philosopher or intellectual who is defined precisely by his opposition to society, his culture criticism, his bold adversarial stance. This reaches its peak in Marx: “Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains.” A philosophical call to violent social revolution—now that is real conflict between philosophy and society. And it is characteristically modern. It is not a sentence one could ever imagine Aristotle or any major premodern philosopher uttering. It is obvious, then, that it is actually classical thought, with its famous emphasis on order, balance, and harmony, that has tended to exclude the conflictual view of theory and praxis. Modern thought is guilty of no such neglect: the conflictual view is rather its particular specialty.
All of this is very true, in a sense, but misleading. It is true that the Enlightenment philosophers believed reason and truth to be in conflict with existing society, but—unlike the classics with their genuinely conflictual view—not with society as such. They viewed this conflict not as natural and permanent, as did the classics, but as historically contingent, solvable, and so ultimately reducible to harmony.
What is more, it is precisely this underlying harmonism that produced the appearance of great conflictualism. The Enlightenment philosophers pushed their rationalist critique of existing society so openly and aggressively only because they expected, through this temporary heightening of conflict, to bring about a future society that would be in genuine harmony with reason. Enlightenment intellectuals are indeed against their times, but only because ahead of them. Thus, their famous emphasis on conflict and bold opposition and even their call for violent revolution all derive from a powerful new harmonism (as is particularly obvious in Marx). Modern “conflictualism” is really a consequence and sign of its opposite: it is war heightened precisely by a new hope to end all war. It is pseudo-conflictualism. The real thing conducts no such crusades because it entertains no such harmonist hopes. It is quietly resigned to (measured) conflict as something that can never be overcome.
This same structure of thought—a temporarily heightened conflict deriving from increased faith in harmony—also characterizes the alternative camp within modernity, the counter-Enlightenment. From Burke to Foucault, it emphasizes and heightens the conflict between reason and society, although now putting primary blame on the former instead of the latter. In its different incarnations, we have seen, it attacks rationalism for such varied social evils as political doctrinairism and utopianism, the uprooting of tradition and inheritance, violent revolution, intolerance, persecution, colonialism, and totalitarianism. But, again, it engages in this political critique of reason, heightening the conflict between rationalism and society, precisely because, rejecting classical dualism, it is moved by the powerful monist faith that this conflict is somehow an aberration, a mistake, another problem to be solved. Harmony is possible. But it will be achieved, not in Enlightenment fashion by changing society to match the demands of reason, but rather the reverse: by forcing reason to realize that its fundamental principles have no other source or ground than the conventions or shared commitments of the particular society in which fate has placed it. As Rorty puts it, this movement “reinterprets objectivity as intersubjectivity, or as solidarity.”16 Thus, all its noisy confrontations notwithstanding, the counter-Enlightenment camp holds that, properly interpreted, rationality and social consensus or solidarity are so far from being in fundamental conflict that they are, at root, the same thing.17
Furthermore, just as the harmonist modern period in both its forms is in this way broadly misunderstood as conflictual, so the conflictual classical period is commonly misinterpreted as harmonist. Genuine conflictualism tends to be rather quiet and understated. Since it sees no solution, since it entertains no activist hopes for overcoming the opposition of reason and society, it does nothing to call undue attention to the issue, to provoke confrontation, to raise consciousness, to rally the troops—all of the steps, so familiar to us, of modern movement politics. And since we “solutionists” tend to believe that where there is a problem, there will be a movement, when we see no movement, we suspect there is no great problem. But here the opposite is more nearly the truth: the classics speak and act with more reserve concerning the conflict between theory and praxis precisely because they regard it as so great a problem. In their eyes, it is a permanent flaw in the human condition that can never be overcome but must simply be lived with, managed, endured. And one obvious aspect of managing it is not to constantly call people’s attention to it, but rather, when possible and useful, to keep it quiet and under the rug.
This curious tendency of the two rival views of theory and praxis to appear as their opposites is responsible for a great deal of confusion concerning the true spirit of classical and modern thought. But above all, the pseudo-conflictualism of modern thought has helped to conceal—and so perpetuate, by sheltering from criticism—the modern tendency to ignore the genuine conflictual alternative.
THE PRACTICAL MEANS FOR MANAGING THE THEORY/PRAXIS TENSION: “PHILOSOPHICAL POLITICS”
Having discussed how our rationality and politicality relate to one another—as posed by the second and third questions—we turn to the fifth and more practical issue: How is that relation to be handled in practice? If the relation is antagonistic, how is the conflict to be managed? If potentially harmonious, how is the potential to be realized? These very general questions quickly translate into a myriad of smaller ones of every kind.
The classical, antagonistic view, to start there, leads directly to such questions as these. While the philosopher is in tension with “society” as a whole, he will presumably be in more conflict with some of its parts than others. With what elements in society, then, should he seek to ally himself: the aristocrats, the oligarchs, the middle class, the demos? And what does he have to offer such people? What form of government is best from the standpoint of the interests of the philosophical life? Should he engage in politics himself? What should be his posture toward the prevailing religion and its authorities? What other institutions and movements are around at the time—religious, political, moral—that might constitute particular opportunities or dangers for him and his kind? How should he make a living? How can he win over the most talented of the young to the philosophical life without enraging the city? Should he attempt to establish a philosophical school, as Plato was the first to do with the Academy? Should he write books? And with what form and rhetoric? What places are available to go into exile if necessary? Should he cultivate friendly tyrants or monarchs for this purpose? Obviously the answers and even the questions will vary considerably from one time and place to another.
To give a name to this wide-ranging set of questions, one might call it “philosophical politics,” which may be defined as the effort to secure the practical interests of the theoretical life—the safety and the propagation of philosophy—in the face of the natural hostility of the nonphilosophical community. Among other things, this concept helps one to understand how even those classical philosophers who most celebrate the apolitical ideal of pure contemplation may still be found engaging in political activity (either directly or through their writings and teaching). For the more a contemplative philosopher understands his own life to be based on the radical rejection and transcendence of the ordinary, political life of those around him, the more he must feel isolated and fear the potential hostility of that community, and thus the more he will be brought around to the practical necessity of philosophical politics. But this political activity, as real as it is and as elaborate as it may sometimes become, still remains very different from the sort of political activism by philosophers that emerges in the modern period under the influence of the harmonist idea, as will become clear in chapter 8.18
The modern, harmonist view leads to a basic transformation in the philosopher’s practical aim: it is no longer to manage but to overcome the tension between theory and praxis, to actualize their potential unity. But here, as we have seen, there are the two rival camps, and they have very different, almost opposite practical concerns. Enlightenment philosophers seek the best ways to address and transform the political world, in order to bring it into harmony with reason. Counter-Enlightenment philosophers seek the best ways to address and transform other philosophers, in order to bring them and their reasoning into harmony with the political world.
From a practical standpoint, the latter project is much more straightforward. Such thinkers just need to teach and write books. Their highest practical need is for a new rhetoric that is somehow able to penetrate and humble the Enlightenment mind.
By contrast, Enlightenment philosophers, since their target is the political world, have many more practical concerns. Most of the questions raised by premodern thinkers continue to be relevant for them, but important new issues also arise, especially concerning how they can give their philosophical ideas increased practical effect. In different times and circumstances, they will confront such questions as these. Can the effort of modern natural philosophy to “conquer nature” and generate new technologies useful to ordinary life finally win for the philosophic life a broad respectability and status—even among the suspicious masses—that it never dreamt of in the past? Has the particular invention of printing changed in significant ways the situation of the philosopher or the power of philosophical doctrines in the world? Are there also significant lessons to be learned from the example of the Christian church, which has achieved great power in the world through nonpolitical and nonmilitary means—and largely through the power of a book? Should the philosopher try to strengthen his position by uniting somehow with other philosophers, as the clergy did in the church? Given the systematic danger that the Christian church has posed to the power of the state, does this give the philosophers new opportunities—lacking in antiquity—to make themselves useful to the latter? Can philosophers hope to transform the world through this sort of influence over enlightened rulers, like Frederick II of Prussia and Catherine the Great of Russia? Or should they rely, instead, on the power they possess to shape the world indirectly, enlightening it through their books and through the dissemination of their ideas by a large new class of intellectuals and men of letters? Has the rift within the church created by the Protestant Reformation given them still other new ways to make themselves useful and powerful? Are there other movements around, like Freemasonry, that can help them spread their ideas and influence? Or is it rather the case that there is a rational “historical process,” operating behind the scenes, that will bring about the triumph of reason in history? And in that case, what becomes of the role of the philosopher and intellectual? Are they reduced to being the “vanguard’ of this impersonal process, announcing, explaining, and clearing the way for it?
Entire books could be written about any of these questions. The present book is about this one: How should the philosopher communicate his thought? In particular, how should he write?
PHILOSOPHICAL ESOTERICISM IN ITS FOUR FORMS
If we return, with this question in mind, to the classical, antagonistic position, the answer is pretty obvious. The conflictual view of theory and praxis leads directly to the need for esotericism—and in three distinct ways.
First, on this view, philosophy or rationalism poses a grave danger to society. For reasons that we have partly seen and that will be elaborated in chapter 6, all political communities are ultimately based, not on reason, but on some form of unexamined commitment or illusion. A fully rational and enlightened society is not possible. Thus, there is a fundamental tension between truth and political life—a conflict that no reform can ever cure. To manage this conflict and protect society from harm, then, the philosopher must conceal or obscure his most subversive ideas, while also, perhaps, promoting salutary ones—practicing protective esotericism.
Second, society likewise poses a grave danger to the philosopher. There are a great many sources of intolerance and persecution in the human heart, and the philosopher, being particularly strange, skeptical, aloof, exposed, and superior in intelligence, can easily trigger all of them. But given the point we have just considered—the genuine danger that philosophy poses to society—the hostility of society to the philosopher is also not entirely unreasonable. It is not simply a product of vulgar ignorance and misunderstanding that might be dispelled someday by greater education and familiarity, as the harmonist Enlightenment view would maintain. The danger of persecution is structural and permanent. To defend himself against it, the philosopher must conceal his more provocative or heterodox ideas, while possibly also seeking positive ways to make himself seem more acceptable—engaging in defensive esotericism.
But if philosophical publication is thus dangerous to both the writer and the general reader, what is the point of writing at all? Since the conflictual view excludes any hope for fundamental political transformation through the genuine and lasting enlightenment of the general population, that cannot be the purpose (although more limited hopes for partial and temporary reform might be an aim). Thus, the primary purpose of writing philosophical books is reduced to this: the education of the gifted, potentially philosophical individual.
But the conflictual view also has important implications for how this philosophical pedagogy must be carried out. A philosophical education is not simply intellectual, a pure matter of learning. It involves facilitating a transition from one way of life to another—indeed, to a life that is, on the conflictual view, fundamentally different from and opposed to the life one starts with. It requires a difficult conversion that shakes one to the core. If that is the case, then an open and straightforward approach to education that simply lays out the truth will not work. The student must be moved along gradually, artfully, in appropriate stages. This dialectical process will require withholding or managing the truth, so that the student is compelled to find it for himself, at his own pace, and in a form he can, at each stage, digest. In this way, the conflictual view naturally leads to the necessity for pedagogical esotericism. In other words, the same thing that makes protective esotericism necessary for the general reader—the tension between truth and ordinary life—makes pedagogical esotericism necessary for the potential philosophers.19
These three forms of esotericism, flowing as they do from the same premise, are typically found together. And thus united, they constitute what I will call classical esotericism, meaning, not only the esotericism characteristic of the classical thinkers, but also the fullest, “classic” development of the phenomenon of philosophical esotericism.
When we turn to the modern, harmonist view of theory and praxis in its Enlightenment form, the consequences for writing are quite different, but equally unmistakable. The harmonist premise, by holding out the hope for a convergence of reason and society, inspires the philosopher to take a more activist stance, to promote the creation of a rational world. This activist stance, in turn, leads directly to esotericism—if of a more limited, less thoroughgoing kind—and in two ways.
First, in becoming engaged in a project for fundamental political transformation, philosophy inevitably takes on in some degree the political tendency to prefer powerful ideas to true ones, to shape public doctrine in accordance with what people in a given time and place will be willing to believe and follow—in a word (if a later one) to become propagandistic. But the new rhetorical demands on the Enlightenment philosophers concern not only their quest for power and political efficacy, but also the responsible use of that power. They seek to subvert and transform traditional society, but in a gradual and orderly way, and this too requires the careful management of what they say and of how and when they say it. In switching from primarily pedagogical goals to political ones, in short, Enlightenment philosophers replace pedagogical esotericism with a political esotericism.
Second, as we have already seen, the activist, rationalizing stance of the Enlightenment philosophers inevitably led to a great, if temporary, increase in the tension between philosophy and society and therewith to a great increase in the danger of persecution, and thus to a heightened need for defensive esotericism.
It is not without irony, of course, that the belief in the potential harmony of theory and praxis should lead to a new form of esotericism as well as to the intensification of an old one. But both are made necessary, not by the existence of that harmony, but by the political activism needed to bring it into being. Thus, over the last two centuries, as that activism has slowly approached its goal, this esotericism has inevitably faded away.
In conclusion, if the historical testimony presented earlier showed esotericism to be, not an occasional or ad hoc practice, but one of the most constant features of the philosophic life, the present chapter shows why. Philosophical esotericism, especially in its classical but even in its modern, Enlightenment form, is a practical response to one of the most fundamental features of human life, the dualism and potential conflict of theory and praxis. Philosophical esotericism is a “doublespeak” elicited by the doubleness of life itself.
ESOTERICISM, ENLIGHTENMENT, AND HISTORICISM
The foregoing discussion not only helps to clarify what philosophical esotericism is in itself, but also to situate it in relation to other intellectual movements. Specifically, it shows the surprising inner connection among esotericism, historicism, and Enlightenment.
The connection of the first two will play a crucial role in chapter 10, where we explore the philosophical consequences of the theory of esotericism and in particular the central use that Strauss makes of this theory in his efforts to mount a new response to the challenge of historicism. What we have seen here is that these two seemingly unrelated phenomena are closely connected, for both are responses to the same problem of theory and praxis. In one sense, they are opposite responses, in that historicism is a form of the harmonist view and esotericism (in its premodern form) is an outgrowth of the conflictual view. The former claims that philosophy is necessarily a manifestation and support of the society in which it is imbedded, the latter that it is necessarily antagonistic to that society.
In another sense, however, the two stand together in opposition to the third alternative, the other form of the harmonist view—the universalistic rationalism of the Enlightenment. Both regard the latter as dangerous to the political world. But esotericism would render philosophic reason less dangerous through rhetorical means, by simply hiding some of its conclusions or adjusting the expression of them to local circumstances, whereas historicism would do so through epistemological means, by attacking reason itself and its aspirations to universal validity. From this point of view, historicism comes to light as a kind of radical replacement for esotericism.
OUR RESISTANCE TO THE CONFLICTUAL VIEW—AND TO ESOTERICISM
One further set of conclusions emerges from this discussion. In the effort to clarify and defend the foregoing account of theory and praxis—especially the history of the rival views of their relationship—it has been necessary to briefly discuss the ways in which modern thought has turned away from and ignored the conflictual view of theory and praxis, the view that forms the essential basis of esotericism (in its classical form). We have also seen how this modern neglect of the antagonistic view has itself become hidden from view. These points will play a crucial role in the next chapter, on the phenomenon of our blindness and resistance to esotericism.