PART TWO
5
Censorship is the mother of metaphor.
—JORGE LUIS BORGES
Let us begin with the most readily understandable as well as most historically universal motive leading philosophers, as well as literary, political, and religious writers, to practice esoteric communication: the pressing need to evade censorship or avoid persecution. To properly appreciate the role and influence of this need, however, its scope must not be construed too narrowly. The safety to be guaranteed is often that of the writer and his family. But it may also extend to that of his writings or his philosophic movement (if he has one) or even the philosophic way of life as such—and all of this, not only in the present moment, but also with an eye to the reasonably foreseeable future.
The experience or fear of persecution thus understood routinely leads to evasive methods of writing, as Lord Shaftesbury remarks with the matter-of-factness of one who believes he is stating only what everyone knows.
If men are forbid to speak their minds seriously on certain subjects, they will do it ironically. If they are forbid to speak at all upon such subjects, or if they find it really dangerous to do so, they will then redouble their disguise, involving themselves in mysteriousness, and talk so as hardly to be understood, or at least not plainly interpreted, by those who are disposed to do them a mischief.1
This widespread and obvious literary phenomenon is difficult to dismiss. Nobody denies, after all, that through most of history most thinkers and writers have been confronted with censorship of one sort or another. In the oft-quoted words of Tacitus: “Seldom are men blessed with times in which they may think what they like and say what they think.”2 The plain consequence of this plain fact is stated by Pierre Bayle: “Those who write with a view to publishing their thoughts accommodate themselves to the times and betray on a thousand occasions the judgment they form of things.”3 They are constrained to exclude from their works certain tenets they believe true and probably include others they believe false. They must consciously falsify their writings. This is already basic esotericism. It is but a small further step to add, as Shaftesbury does: many thinkers, chafing under this accommodation, have also ventured to leave hints as to what they did and did not really believe.
How there could be so much resistance to the recognition of this phenomenon is difficult to understand—or would be, if we had not just spent a chapter exploring the long list of cultural factors predisposing us against the general idea of esotericism. But turning now to a more detailed treatment of defensive esotericism in particular, we find a further twist. Contemporary culture also contains certain other, countervailing features that actually push toward a recognition of this practice—or ought to. These latter features restore to full strength the strangeness of our continuing resistance to defensive esotericism—while also giving hope that, with a bit more evidence and discussion, this resistance might be ready to crumble.
DEFENSIVE ESOTERICISM AND CONTEMPORARY CULTURE
Consider, for example, that contemporary society is exquisitely sensitive to the plight of minorities. We not only recognize the obvious dangers of persecution but, over time, have taught ourselves to understand all the complex, subtle, and sometimes hidden consequences of marginality. That is perhaps our greatest cultural forte. It is strange, then, that we have been so slow to apply this unique sensitivity and insight to the plight of the philosophical minority (albeit a plight faced, not in our time—but in most times).
What is more, something like defensive esotericism is precisely what would be predicted by prevailing literary theories, which highlight the relationship between writing and power. If everywhere there is a cultural “hegemon” asserting its power (although more obviously in nonliberal, “closed” societies), and if always the great refuge of those without force is fraud, then surely it must be the case that a large portion of the world’s writers will have been systematically constrained to write between the lines.
To Fredric Jameson, for example, the literary world always and everywhere looks like this: “A ruling class ideology will explore various strategies of the legitimation of its own power position, while an oppositional culture of ideology will, often in covert or disguised strategies, seek to contest and undermine the dominant value system.”4 But somehow this crucial insight has not led Jameson or others to recognize the historical ubiquity of—indeed the almost structural necessity for—esoteric communication. The most notable exception is the distinguished literary critic Annabel Patterson, who has written a series of books showing with great ingenuity and detail the need to employ what she dubs a “hermeneutics of censorship” if one is properly to understand English literature from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.5
To these two points, one must add one further aspect of our times that makes our resistance to defensive esotericism so perplexing and disturbing: for most of the previous century we had totalitarian regimes right before our eyes where dissident authors boldly registered their protest and sheltered their freedom between the lines. Here we are no longer in the land of abstract literary theory or of distant historical conjecture—one need only ask any ordinary citizen of these states. In conversations with people from this part of the world, I have repeatedly been told that a book on esotericism will not sell in Eastern Europe. “Everybody already knows all about it.”
But we too might have known all about it, since lurid accounts of the experiences of major Russian and Eastern European writers have been available in the West for over sixty years. Vaclav Havel, for example, expressly tells us how, imprisoned in communist Czechoslovakia, he wrote his Letters to Olga:
The letters, in fact, are endless spirals in which I’ve tried to enclose something. Very early on, I realized that comprehensible letters wouldn’t get through, which is why the letters are full of long compound sentences and complicated ways of saying things. Instead of writing “regime,” for instance, I would obviously have had to write “the socially apparent focus on the non-I,” or some such nonsense.6
A related technique was also employed in the theater, according to Havel. In Disturbing the Peace, he states that censorship “has led the small theatres to adopt an increasingly sophisticated set of ciphers, suggestions, indirect references, and vague parallels.”7
Similarly, regarding Romania, the celebrated poet and essayist Andrei Codrescu openly states:
Against history, we developed community through the use of a subtle and ambiguous language that could be heard in one way by the oppressor, in another by your friends. Our weapons of sabotage were ambiguity, humor, paradox, mystery, poetry, song and magic.8
In Censorship in Romania, Lidia Vianu confirms this account:
Creative minds found ways to outwit censorship. . . . A strong bond between writer and reader came into being, and the writer was eager to express what he was not allowed to say. The reader avidly waited for the least hint about how to read between the lines, an art perfected under communist censorship. Censored writers joined hands with censored readers in a dance of bitter frustration.9
Again, Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish poet and Nobel laureate, devotes an entire chapter (entitled “Ketman”) in his celebrated work The Captive Mind (published in 1951) to an account of the ubiquitous dissimulation, acting, and secret communication practiced in the countries of the Soviet bloc.10His compatriot, the distinguished political philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, makes similar observations concerning the near universal practice of esotericism by the Polish intelligentsia. When interviewed in Daedalus by Danny Postel, who asked him point blank about the necessity “to resort to a certain kind of Delphic or esoteric idiom of writing under Stalinist rule,” Kolakowski replied:
When I was in Poland, all of us who were intellectuals were compelled to use a certain code language, a language that would be acceptable in the established framework. So we had an acute sense of the limits of what could be said, of censorship. . . . we tried to be intelligible without being transparent.11
Similarly, in the German context, J. M. Ritchie observes in his German Literature under National Socialism:
There was a tendency towards the veiled remark, the significant pause, the double or multiple meaning. It also involved reliance on the sensitivity of the reader to pick up a literary allusion, a biblical reference or a historical parallel with relevance to National Socialism. . . . No new forms, no new style emerged, only progressive refinement in techniques of making oblique statements.12
Thus, after the war, in an article on film censorship in communist East Germany, Daniela Berghahn states that “art was used to articulate issues that could not be publically discussed but which were, nonetheless, decoded by a public that was well versed in reading between the lines.”13
One must look to the former Soviet Union, however, to see the greatest specimen of a living tradition of esoteric writing—or of “Aesopian language,” as it has been known there for centuries. Russia, being the one part of the West that has never known a sustained period of liberal government or of freedom from censorship, is a kind of intellectual lost valley where the old practice and memory of esotericism, which died out everywhere else, still lingers on. Thus, the Soviet Concise Literary Encyclopedia, published in 1975, and even the American Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet Literature, published in 1978, contain long articles on “Aesopian language.” As the article in the latter explains, this common practice, involving “the enciphering and deciphering of a subtext,” was named for Aesop, the Phrygian slave who wrote fables because he lacked the power to speak openly. It was given this name by the writer M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826–89), who explained:
I am a Russian writer and therefore I have two slave’s habits: first, to write allegorically and, second, to tremble. For the habit of allegorical writing I am indebted to the pre-reform Department of Censorship. It tormented Russian literature to such a degree, that it was as though it had vowed to wipe it off the face of the earth. But literature persisted in its desire to live and so pursued deceptive means. . . . On the one hand, allegories appeared; on the other, the art of comprehending these allegories, the art of reading between the lines. A special slave’s manner of writing was created which can be called Aesopian, a manner which revealed a remarkable resourcefulness in the invention of reservations, innuendoes, allegories and other deceptive means.14
Thus, Lioudmila Savinitch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, writes: “The Aesopian manner of writing was the characteristic feature of Russian literature and journalism for centuries.”15 Or, as Roman Jakobson, the influential literary theorist, has put it, in reading Russian literature, it is essential that we understand “that the obtrusive and relentless censorship becomes an essential co-factor in Russian literary history . . . that a sense for reading between the lines becomes unusually keen in the reading public and that the poet indulges in allusions and omissions.”16 Even Lenin, in a prerevolutionary article, “The Party Organization and Party Literature,” speaks of the “accursed days of Aesopian talk, literary bondage, slavish language, ideological serfdom!”17
The practice of Aesopianism—which extended to fiction as well as nonfiction, poetry as well as prose—was by no means limited to writing. In the first new study of the renowned Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein written with access to his personal archives as well as the memoirs of his colleagues, Joan Neuberger has shown that his film Ivan the Terrible, which was commissioned by Stalin and awarded a Stalin Prize, was in fact an Aesopian work covertly communicating a “critique of tyranny and a brilliant challenge to the conventions of Socialist Realism.”
Eisenstein was well aware that a film with such a conception of Ivan would require a special strategy to evade the censors. “The most effective way of hiding something is to put it on display,” he wrote. . . . In Ivan the Terrible Eisenstein used several forms of subterfuge. He put “on display” a surface narrative that was politically acceptable. Then he proceeded to undercut the surface narrative with editing, style, and narrative diversions.18
Aesopianism so suffused Russian and Soviet culture that, according to one art critic, we must also interpret the best painters of the socialist realist tradition with an eye to “how diabolically wily centuries of official culture have made Russian artists and writers”: they too engaged in what he ventures to call “painting between the lines.”19 Again, in the realm of music, analogous claims on his own behalf were made by the ostensibly pro-Soviet composer Shostakovich in his posthumously published memoirs.20
It is not, of course, only in Eastern Europe and Russia that we have had ample opportunity to observe the consequences of censorship for literature. Such lessons are available from all corners of our present world. From Burma, for example. In an article in the New York Times entitled “Burmese Editor’s Code: Winks and Little Hints,” Seth Mydans, the Times Southeast Asia correspondent, describes the courageous writer and editor Tin Maung Than and his esoteric art form.
In Burma, as in other repressive states, writing under censorship is an art form in itself, for both the writer and the clever reader. Many of its rules are universal. “You cannot criticize,” Mr. Tin Maung Than said. “You have to give hints that you are being critical, that you are talking about the current system. The hints are in your choice of words and your tones and your composition. You use words with double meanings.”
This is, according to Than, “a game played by all independent-minded writers in the military dictatorship of Myanmar.”21
In still another part of our world, South Africa under white minority rule, we hear from Nobel Prize-winning novelist and essayist J. M. Coetzee that, under conditions of censorship, “writing between the lines is of course a familiar strategy.”22 Again, in an article in Critical Studies by Michael Drewett entitled “Aesopian Strategies of Textual Resistance in the Struggle to Overcome the Censorship of Popular Music in Apartheid South Africa,” we read:
Certainly, specific forms of domination give rise to corresponding forms of resistance. In particular there has been a long tradition of popular song writing using Aesopian strategies of masking lyrics and corresponding audience participation [in the act of interpretation].23
For one last example, we turn to Egypt under Hosni Mubarak. As poet and essayist Yahia Lababidi explains:
Literature under restrictive regimes has tended to develop a flair for allegory—confessing in code, or through the use of symbolism. As Borges shrewdly notes, “Censorship is the mother of metaphor.” In repressive societies, means of indirect communication tend to thrive. Egyptians have a gift for this sort of thing. Past masters at innuendo, they deftly employ double meanings to get past the censors on stage and in life. Slyly they vent their sexual (and political) frustrations in jokes, songs and video clips that manage to hint at everything without really saying anything.24
Somehow without our noticing, the esoteric assertion of freedom has been going on all around us.
ESOTERICISM AT HOME
But it is actually not necessary to look to such foreign climes and repressive regimes to observe the practice of defensive esotericism. We can just observe ourselves. For don’t we automatically revert to esoteric ways in the one domain still somewhat subject to censorship in liberal regimes: sexuality? This is most obvious where the sex is considered illicit, as for example with homosexuality. The phenomenon of “gaydar,” the attunement through which gays understand the covert signals that others put out to indicate their sexual orientation and interest, is part of a conversational (as well as gestural, sartorial, and postural) esotericism. When transferred to print and electronic media, especially advertising, this kind of signaling is known as “gay vague.” As explained on the website of the Commercial Closet Association, an organization promoting the interests of the GLBT community to the advertising industry,
“Gay Vague” is a term coined by Michael Wilke at Advertising Age in 1997 for ads that covertly speak to gays or seem to imply gayness with a wink. . . . This can include ambiguous relationships, blurred gender distinctions, wayward same-sex glances or touching, camp/kitsch, or coded references to gay culture. . . . (An older term, “gay window,” was also used before the 1990s.)25
But even where there is nothing illicit, sex is by nature a private matter that tends to be censored or restrained in the public realm. Thus, in conversation, popular music, TV sitcoms, and talk shows we automatically and almost unconsciously revert to a system of coy allusion and innuendo in sexual matters that everyone immediately knows how to detect and interpret. Similarly, most teenage listeners to rock ’n’ roll in its earlier, more censored days knew of the practice of esotericism. As Peter, Paul, and Mary would sing even in the late sixties: “But if I really say it, the radio won’t play it, unless I lay it between the lines.”26
Of course, these examples from within a modern, liberal democratic society will seem somewhat trivial in comparison with those from more persecutory environments, but they are for that very reason particularly revealing. They demonstrate something that one might otherwise never suspect: how very little adversity it takes—certainly much less than systematic or violent persecution—to move sincere and high-minded people in the direction of esoteric behavior of some kind. A correspondent for the New York Times once confided to me that when he first heard of the theory of esotericism it struck him as highly implausible—until he reflected that he himself, when faced with resistance from his editor, would frequently (and often unthinkingly) resort to various more indirect ways of communicating his point.
A more far-reaching example concerns John Rawls, widely considered the most significant American moral philosopher of the last half-century. A new study of his thought has shown that when his A Theory of Justice (1971) is read in conjunction with his later Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy (2000), as well as an unpublished manuscript containing notes for eighteen lectures on Kant and Hegel, it becomes clear that important elements of his theory derive from an elaborate and profound engagement with the thought of Hegel. But while Rawls’s enormous debts to Kant are well-known because amply elaborated in A Theory of Justice, his similar debts to Hegel—who was something of a pariah in most analytic philosophy departments of that time—are virtually unknown, because completely suppressed. In the six-hundred-odd pages of the original edition of A Theory of Justice, there are only two fleeting mentions of his name. It would seem that, fearing the disapproval or at least the noncomprehension of his primary audience, Rawls remained silent about an intellectual relationship that is ultimately crucial for the full understanding of his thought.27Needless to say, this limited act of concealment does not rise to the level of full-blown esotericism. The point, however, is that this forceful and high-minded moral philosopher, who was already safely ensconced at Harvard, was nevertheless moved to take a real step in the direction of esotericism by conditions of “adversity” that fell very far short of genuine censorship or persecution. Once you open your eyes to it, in short, you discover that defensive esotericism is so natural a phenomenon that even in the extremely open and tolerant environments of modern liberal democracies you still come across traces of it with surprising frequency.
But esotericism arises not only with ease and frequency but also with surprising spontaneity. None of the writers who testify to the use of esotericism ever speak of it as some sudden invention or clever breakthrough that they made. They talk as if it just arose naturally from the pressure of the environment: there was censorship, so of course we had to resort to hints, riddles, and allusions. Esotericism did not require inventing, for it is somehow a tool already in our toolbox, ready for use when needed. After all, the whole realm of wit and humor makes use of irony, hints, and riddles. The whole realm of sexuality and flirtation makes use of coyness and innuendo. The whole realm of poetic expressiveness makes use of metaphor and allusion. In esoteric writing, these preexisting and well-practiced techniques are simply turned to a new use. Thus, no prior agreement or planning, no formal training or official code book is necessary—not even any general awareness of the phenomenon, of its history and its name. Indeed, the decision to use it need not even be conscious. As Hans Speier postulates (reflecting on the Nazi experience):
There is much evidence to support the contention that whenever freedom of expression is suppressed, the sensitivity to allusion increases. A German writer reported about the Nazi regime that at the time “not only in reading but also in conversation the slightest allusion was understood.” . . . Several other German authors with whom I talked after the war about their experiences in writing and talking between the lines during the Nazi period spontaneously testified in the same way to the heightened sensitivity of the listeners to critical allusions in times of extreme political stress and to the loss of such sensitivity when the stress relaxed.28
Indirect communication arises naturally, as if it were an adaptive strategy deeply rooted in the instincts of the speaking animal. Thus, one does not have to be Sigmund Freud to postulate here a kind of universal law of human mots couverts].”33
Is it not reasonable to conclude, in short, that where freedom of thought is lacking—which is to say, in almost all times and places—writers will resort to defensive esotericism in one degree or another? This is exactly what our literary theories would predict (as well as common sense); it is precisely what we have seen with our own eyes in our own time; and it is abundantly acknowledged in the historical record. In every age, the powerless, the colonized, the endangered minorities, the captive minds have spoken in fables of one kind or another. Persecution begets dissimulation.
PHILOSOPHERS: THE “NATURAL” MINORITY
To understand the defensive esotericism of philosophers in particular, however, some further distinctions are needed concerning the kinds, motives, and subjects of persecution. One must distinguish, to begin with, between persecution that is historically contingent and that which is more enduring, perhaps even natural. In the long, turbulent course of history, chance has made now one group, now another into a persecuted minority—Christians, Jews, African Americans, kulaks, Gypsies, Kurds. But there has been one relative constant, with deep roots, it would seem, in the nature of things: the persecution of philosophers. To be sure, no one would argue that philosophers’ sufferings have been the most severe: they are nothing as compared with those of slavery or the Holocaust. But they have arguably been the most constant. In the roughly two-thousand-year record of Western philosophy prior to, say, 1800, it is difficult to name a single major thinker who did not, at some point in his life, experience persecution or at least witness it close at hand.
It can be difficult for us, who live in a world where philosophy has become so narrowly technical, as well as so venerable and well-intentioned, to take fully seriously the idea of persecuting it. Little remains of the daring, transgressive, outlaw quality of the philosopher (unless one chances to read Nietzsche). But as we have seen, the earlier, especially the classical understanding of theory and praxis, assumed that the philosopher transcended ordinary practical life in a way that put him in tension with it and with the long-standing customs, myths, and prejudices of his society. He is fundamentally different, strange, suspect—like a follower of some alien god. And since the attainment and practice of this way of life require both rare genius and extraordinary strength of soul, the philosopher, where he exists at all, will necessarily form the smallest and most vulnerable of minorities. Almost by definition, then, the philosopher is alone in society, without party or clan, a stranger and misfit by nature and not merely by historical accident or convention.
That is why we find Montaigne speaking of “the natural incompatibility that exists between the common herd and people of rare and excellent judgment and knowledge, inasmuch as these two groups go entirely different ways.”34 And, as Voltaire adds: “Our miserable species is so constructed, that those who walk in the beaten path always throw stones at those who teach a new path. . . . every philosopher is treated as the prophets were among the Jews.”35 Similarly, Goethe’s Faust remarks: “the few who understood something of the world and of men’s heart and mind, who were foolish enough not to restrain their full heart [i.e., not to practice esotericism] but to reveal their feeling and their vision to the vulgar, have ever been crucified and burned.”36 In Plato’s (or his Socrates’s) even more extreme formulation, the philosopher in the city is “just like a human being who has fallen in with wild beasts.”37 The very powerful fears voiced here are not groundless. The human species surely has an amply documented proclivity for killing its sages and wise men.
So whereas the accidents of religious history in the West produced what is known as “the Jewish problem,” and the contingencies of American history created “the race issue,” something closer to the nature of things has produced what might be called “the philosopher problem.” It is an inherently dangerous thing to be wise among so many who are foolish, to be adults in a world of overgrown children. Philosophers reside in society like alien and suspicious characters: wary, nervous, and with one eye always on the exit. As the Encyclopedia asserts, “the condition of the sage is very dangerous: there is hardly a nation that is not soiled with the blood of several of those who have professed it.” And it continues: “What should one do then? Must one be senseless among the senseless? No; but one must be wise in secret.”38 One must wear a mask, play a role, employ a concealing rhetoric. As Pierre Charron puts it in his great work On Wisdom, the wise man is typically constrained
to act outwardly in one way, to judge inwardly in another, to play one role before the world, and another in his mind. The common saying universus mundus exercet histrioniam [all the world plays a role] should strictly and truly be understood of the wise man. . . . If he were on the outside what he is on the inside, people wouldn’t know what to make of him, he would offend the world too much.39
This is a perennial problem with an equally perennial solution. Philosophy and secrecy naturally go together.
Thus we find that the general imperative “be wise in secret” has been something of a commonplace throughout the ages. When Descartes, for example, deeply shaken by the recent condemnation, imprisonment, and recantation of Galileo, expressed his desperate longing (in a letter to Mersenne) “to live in peace and to continue the life [of philosophy] I have begun,” he added that he would do so by following Ovid’s ancient dictum: bene vixit, bene qui latuit (he has lived well who has remained well hidden).40 He looks upon his particular predicament, that is, as part of an old story with an old solution—just as Ovid himself was looking back three centuries to the famous motto of Epicurus and his followers: “live unseen.”41
Such advice is found among the Stoics no less than the Epicureans. Seneca urges philosophy to conceal her differences with the world: “Let her not hold aloof from the customs of mankind, nor make it her business to condemn whatever she herself does not do. A man may be wise without parade and without arousing enmity.”42 The best way to live unseen, in other words, is to blend in, to speak and act like the people.
Alfarabi, the tenth-century Islamic Platonist, gives a similar admonition: the philosopher must strive to address the many “with arguments that are generally accepted among them, well known to them, and well received among them.” Through this means “the philosopher associates with the public and becomes well protected so that he is not found burdensome or engaged in an objectionable business; for the public is in the habit of finding what is strange to them burdensome and what is out of their reach objectionable.”43
Similarly, we read in Pascal: “We must keep our thought secret, and judge everything by it, while talking like the people.”44 Synesius of Cyrene speaks of the need “to love wisdom at home [and] to embrace fables abroad.”45 Again, Cesare Cremonini: “within, as you please; out of doors, as custom dictates.”46 Francis Bacon: “A man should speak like the vulgar and think like the wise.”47 Gracian: “Think with the few and speak with the many. He who would go counter to public opinion is as unlikely to establish truth as he is likely to fall into danger.”48 The Marquess of Halifax: “we should hearken to the fewest to learn what to think, and to the most, to learn what to speak.”49 Paolo Sarpi: “Your innermost thoughts should be guided by reason, but you should act and speak only as others do.”50 Montaigne: “the wise man should withdraw his soul within, out of the crowd, and keep it in freedom and power to judge things freely; but as for externals, he should wholly follow the accepted fashions and forms.”51 Erasmus: “As nothing is more foolish than wisdom out of place, so nothing is more imprudent than unseasonable prudence. And he is unseasonable who does not accommodate himself to things as they are, who is ‘unwilling to follow the market.’”52 Pierre Charron: “In all the external and common actions of life . . . one should agree and accommodate oneself to the common ways; for our rule does not extend to the outer and the action, but to the inner, the thought, and the secret, internal judgment.”53 And finally, Charles Blount: the philosophers “are too wise to hazard their own ruin for the instruction of foolish men. . . . Therefore, the wisest amongst the Heathens followed this rule in their Converse, Loquendum cum vulgo, sentiendum cum sapientibus; & si mundus vult decipi, decipiatur [Speak with the vulgar, think with the wise; and if the world wants to be deceived, let it be deceived].”54 It would seem that the art of hiding one’s wisdom has long been considered one of the most basic needs—and surest signs—of the philosopher.
When it has suited their purposes, however, philosophers have also openly reported on the caution and esotericism of their kind. Cicero stated (following Posidonius) that “Epicurus does not really believe in the gods at all, and that he said what he did about the immortal gods only for the sake of deprecating popular odium.”55 Condorcet, speaking of the ancient Greeks in general, asserts: “The philosophers thought to escape persecution by adopting, like the priests, the use of a double doctrine, whereby they confided only to tried and trusted disciples opinions that would too openly offend popular prejudice.”56 Similarly, Rousseau maintains:
Pythagoras was the first to make use of the esoteric doctrine. He did not reveal it to his disciples until after lengthy tests and with the greatest mystery. He gave them lessons in Atheism in secret and solemnly offered Hecatombs [sacrifices] to Jupiter. The philosophers were so comfortable with this method that it spread rapidly in Greece and from there to Rome, as may be seen in the works of Cicero, who along with his friends laughed at the immortal Gods to whom he so eloquently bore witness on the Rostrum. The esoteric doctrine was not carried from Europe to China, but it was born there too with Philosophy.57
Again, Locke states that Socrates opposed and laughed at [the Athenians’] polytheisms and wrong opinions of the Deity, and we see how they rewarded him for it. Whatsoever Plato, and the soberest of the philosophers [Aristotle] thought of the nature and being of the one God, they were fain, in their outward professions and worship, to go with the herd and keep to the religion established by law.58
This evidence notwithstanding, however, someone might still object that the danger to the philosopher seems to be greatly overstated in the above account. To be sure, many great thinkers were persecuted, but many others were not. And when it is claimed that philosophers are alone in society, without party or clan, that neglects the fact that many were protected by powerful patrons or attained to high positions themselves. Is there not an element of wounded vanity, not to say persecution complex, in this whole melodrama of the lonely and endangered philosopher?
No doubt we are tempted to think so. But it would be strange to dismiss so cavalierly the explicit, insistent, and repeated testimony of philosophers themselves concerning the danger of their condition. Perhaps, then, there is some bias or prejudice conditioning our own instincts in this matter.
Indeed, it is likely that the above objections seem powerful to us only because, for two centuries now, we have formed all our views of what the world is like in ignorance of all the furious defensive maneuvering that was going on behind the scenes. We see, for example, that Epicurus experienced no persecution and naturally conclude that he faced no danger. The truth, however, is that he faced grave danger, which he successfully managed to avert through the esoteric rhetoric described above by Cicero. Because we do not see all of his effective defensive efforts, we assume, wrongly, that his safety was effortless, that he was never in danger. We would seem to be in the position of people who look out into the world and conclude that it is a naturally safe and peaceful place—because they do not see all of the vast defenses and maneuverings that make it so. If the whole record of persecution were reexamined in full awareness of the elaborate and widespread use of esoteric defenses, then what would emerge as truly noteworthy is not the few philosophers who managed to escape this danger, but the many who, despite all their sophisticated defensive efforts, still fell prey to it. Ironically, our ignorance of the practice of esotericism causes us systematically to underestimate the danger facing philosophers—and thus to discount the need for esotericism. This is one of the ways in which the forgetfulness of esotericism, once it has become established, becomes self-sustaining.
Similarly, it is true that philosophers often found safety through the patronage of those kings, tyrants, or aristocrats who happened to have intellectual interests and pretensions or, in later centuries, who sought the aid of philosophy in their struggle against the church. But again what has been forgotten is that philosophers were able to forge and maintain these crucial alliances only by virtue of their esoteric efforts. They did not speak openly or show themselves as they were, but had to serve—or, at the very least, refrain from contradicting—the ambitions, prejudices, or ideological interests of their nonphilosophic patrons. One has only to read some dedicatory letters to get a feel for this. By definition, philosophers do not cherish what other men cherish; their deepest interests are necessarily different from those of all others. They may indeed manage, by artfully disguising their true beliefs, to find patrons or form other kinds of alliances; but this proves nothing against the thesis that the philosopher prior to any mask or esoteric defense is the most isolated and vulnerable of men.
In sum, through most of history, philosophers believed themselves to be—and were—endangered beings. It is in the very nature of the philosopher to be radically exposed. To survive in such circumstances, they were forced to develop—as standard equipment for the philosophic way of life—a protective mask and an art of esoteric speech.
NOTES FOR A HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHICAL POLITICS
To appreciate the true spirit of philosophic esotericism, it is necessary to begin by emphasizing, as I have tried to, the natural and inherent vulnerability of the philosopher: what I have called “the philosopher problem.” Once that is seen, however, it is equally necessary to emphasize that the danger confronting philosophers has varied greatly over time in its source, manifestation, and extent—and correspondingly, so has the rhetorical strategy for dealing with it.
Ultimately, it comes down to a question of politics. As naturally weak and isolated, the philosopher, more than any other type of human being, must be politic or political in order to preserve himself and his kind. Every philosophical rhetoric presupposes and serves a philosophical politics: an assessment of who, under prevailing political and religious conditions, are philosophy’s enemies, who are its friends or protectors, and how each of them is to be managed. At different times and places, philosophers have sought to ally themselves with aristocratic patrons, with ancient tyrants, with the Catholic Church, with modern enlightened despots, with the bourgeois-liberal order. Philosophers are like hermit crabs: they are exposed by nature, but they can and do borrow shells from other creatures—whatever happens to be available under local conditions.
It would require a wonderfully learned and subtle work of history to describe all the myriad forms that changing times and circumstances have given to the relations between philosophers and the religio-political communities in which they have lived. Such a work—“A History of Philosophical Politics” or “A Comparative Sociology of Philosophy”—has never been undertaken. Yet such an analysis is essential if we are to gain an authentic understanding of the history of Western philosophy.59
Every minority is misunderstood. A special effort is required to see the world through its eyes and understand its particular plight. In recent years, in our multicultural age, many minority histories have been written. But not yet for this minority. We have, to be sure, no lack of “class analyses” of history, but the philosophic class is always arbitrarily assimilated to some larger social or economic class. All sense of its unique interests, needs, and dangers has been forgotten. Again, ever since Karl Mannheim, or perhaps Emile Durkheim, we have had the “sociology of knowledge,” but it explores the function that thought performs for society, while ignoring the danger that society poses to philosophic thought. After two centuries of free speech, we take this curious cultural growth—philosophy—and the social status of the philosopher more or less for granted. We no longer have any feel for the questions that would drive a history of philosophical politics.
In the absence of such a work, let us consider a few illustrative, if very provisional, generalizations that might help awaken us to the issues at stake.60 Censorship and persecution of thought have stemmed not only from political but also from religious authorities. Let us briefly compare, then, the situation of the philosopher in the premodern Christian world, the premodern Jewish and Muslim worlds, and the world of classical antiquity. (But given this focus on the religious dimension, it should be kept in mind that the following discussion is incomplete, leaving out, for the sake of simplicity, the sources of persecution deriving from the needs and interests of political authorities.)
Voltaire, expressing the common Enlightenment view, claims that “of all religions, the Christian should of course inspire the most toleration, but till now the Christians have been the most intolerant of all men.”61 Rousseau, while a bitter opponent of Voltaire’s on many other issues, wholly agrees with this particular observation and tries to explain it in terms of three crucial doctrines that have made this religion of love uniquely persecutory.
First, Christianity (like Judaism and Islam) replaced the pluralism and toleration inherent in pagan polytheism with monotheism—with the claim that there is one God, one moral and religious truth to be acknowledged by all the world. Second, the extreme Christian emphasis on the afterlife with eternal rewards and punishments raised the stakes of salvation to such an infinite height that it tempted men to employ even the most violent measures to convert others or to protect the faith.
The third and most important doctrine in this context is that of salvation by belief or faith. Greek and Roman paganism was a highly “political” religion in that the gods were seen as the source and supporters of the city and its fundamental laws. This political element is also present in Judaism and Islam, which are both religions of divine law: God has given His people the Torah or the Sharia—an elaborate and minute code of behavior—and one’s primary religious obligation is to follow and study this law. But Christianity broke with Judaism precisely by abolishing or transcending the old law as well as the attachment to a particular political group or “chosen” people. This extraordinary change, this separation of religion from the nation and its law, is well described by Fustel de Coulanges:
Among all ancient nations the law had been subject to, and had received all its rules from, religion. Among the Persians, the Hindus, the Jews, the Greeks, the Italians, and the Gauls, the law had been contained in the sacred books or in religious traditions. . . . Christianity is the first religion that did not claim to be the source of law. . . . Men saw it regulate neither the laws of property, nor the orders of succession, nor obligations, nor legal proceedings. It placed itself outside the law, and outside all things purely terrestrial. Law was independent; it could draw its rules from nature, from the human conscience, from the powerful idea of the just that is in men’s minds. It could develop in complete liberty.62
Now, in taking the unparalleled step of abolishing or transcending the law of the Torah, what did Christianity put in its place? A very inward and abstract injunction: to believe in and love God as well as to love one’s neighbor. Thus, as compared with paganism and even with the other monotheistic religions, Christianity is above all a religion of inner faith or belief; and as the official content of that belief became more elaborate over time, Christianity became a doctrinal or dogmatic or theological religion that made salvation contingent on the acceptance of certain often obscure or controversial dogmas (e.g., creation of the universe from nothing). And “who does not see,” asks Rousseau, “that dogmatic and theological Christianity is, by the multitude and obscurity of its dogmas, above all by the obligation to acknowledge them, a field of battle always open among men?” Again: “You must think as I do in order to be saved. This is the horrible dogma that desolates the world.”63 According to Rousseau, then, the combination of monotheism, eternal punishments and rewards, and the centrality of sacred dogma is what has made Christianity uniquely persecutory.
But there is another side to this familiar Enlightenment story. Under the reign of Christianity, philosophers were typically under very close scrutiny and were persecuted for specific doctrines deemed heretical—but not for being philosophers as such. Galileo, to take the most famous example, was tried and imprisoned by the church for embracing a proscribed doctrine, heliocentrism, but not for being a natural philosopher, that is, not simply for daring to “investigate the things under the earth and the heavenly things.” But this, of course, is one of the crimes for which Socrates was tried and executed.64 During the Christian Middle Ages, astronomy was part of the quadrivium, the established curriculum for the liberal arts, whereas in Periclean Athens, at the very height of the Greek Enlightenment, it was a capital crime.
Precisely because Christianity was a uniquely doctrinal or theological religion, it had need of philosophy to help elaborate and clarify its dogmas. So, far from being forbidden, philosophy became part of the official and required training for students of theology. Voltaire goes so far as to claim that “it was the philosophy of Plato that made Christianity.” “When at last some Christians adopted the doctrines of Plato and mixed a little philosophy with their religion, they separated from the Jewish cult and gradually won some eminence.”65 Not only did Christianity need philosophy or metaphysics as a handmaid to theology, it also needed political philosophy. For the New Testament, in withdrawing the divine code from the realm of law and politics, freed these areas to be governed by man’s natural lights. As Fustel states in the above passage, “law was independent; it could draw its rules from nature”—in the best case, from the public interest or natural law as discovered by philosophy.
Thus, Christianity’s strong tendency to persecute certain heretical philosophical doctrines—so emphasized by the Enlightenment—is just the flip side of the emphatic Christian embrace and need of philosophy. Christianity is a uniquely philosophical religion. Yet, in a further twist, that embrace could be even more dangerous to philosophy than persecution, since it threatened to co-opt it. Christianity kept philosophy alive, but subdued and under house arrest.
In sum, the situation of the philosopher living under Christianity was complex. He faced the twin dangers of co-optation and of persecution for particular doctrines. But his way of life was not fundamentally suspect. The very idea of philosophy or rationalism was not anathema. “Philosopher” was, for the most part, a term of honor in the Christian world.66 (Modern scholarship, which arose in a Christian world, has, partly for this reason, tended to understand the whole “philosopher problem” only in these less radical terms characteristic of the Christian world.)
The situation was quite different—to us more strange, but in itself perhaps more understandable—under (premodern) Judaism and Islam, where “philosopher” was typically a term of derogation. These are religions of divine law and not of sacred doctrine, and, as such, they hold jurisprudence—the minute study and interpretation of God’s law—and not theology to be the highest human science and the proper approach to the divine. In such an environment, philosophy could not so easily establish its legitimacy. As George Hourani writes of the intellectual culture of the Islamic world:
The right and the wrong for man were to be determined primarily by reference to the Koran supplemented by the Traditions; doubts about their interpretation were to be settled by the consensus of learned opinion; while independent reasoning by the lawyer was to be held as the last resort, and then only to be exercised in interpretation of Scripture, not in deducing the right or the wrong from the public interest, natural law, or any other standard independent of Scripture.67
The only legitimate use of independent reasoning is for the interpretation of Scripture—jurisprudence.
Similarly, Rashi, the most revered Jewish exegete of the Torah, in the very first line of his commentary on Genesis, poses a question that no Christian theologian (and no modern person) would ever think to ask: why has this account of God’s creation of the universe been included at all? It is no proper concern of ours. The divine origin of the universe, so far from being a necessary dogma of the faith, as in Christianity, is something man has no clear business investigating. “The Torah, which is the Law book of Israel,” writes Rashi, ought to have begun with the first verse of Exodus 12, for this is “the first commandment given to Israel.”68 Rashi’s eventual answer to his question is that we need to know of God’s creation of the earth in order to understand his legal right to transfer the promised land from the Canaanites to the people of Israel. The Jewish religion, as understood and represented by Rashi, is so resolutely unmetaphysical or antiphilosophical that the pursuit of even the most basic speculative or cosmological knowledge is justifiable only to the extent that it has a direct bearing on the law.69
Thus, the great burden of Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed is to show that the study of philosophy is, in fact, permitted by the law. Similarly, the contemporaneous Decisive Treatise of Averroes has the stated purpose “to examine, from the standpoint of the study of the Law, whether the study of philosophy and logic is allowed by the Law, or prohibited or commanded.”70 This is precisely the reverse of the situation in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica—the Christian counterpart to these works—the very first article of which is: “Whether, besides philosophy, any further doctrine [i.e., divine revelation] is required.” Thus, in the Jewish and, to a somewhat lesser extent, in the Islamic world, the danger to the philosopher was different in kind and usually greater in degree than in the Christian world: a danger directed not merely at particular doctrines or particular philosophers, but at the philosophic enterprise or way of life as such.71 Here we see the “philosopher problem” in its fullest and most radical form.
If we turn to the world of Greek and Roman antiquity, we find the danger different still. There exists nothing like the extraordinary mixture of doctrinal persecution and official embrace that preserved and co-opted philosophy under Christianity, on the one hand, or the organized, orthodox hostility that endangered, invigorated, and finally destroyed philosophy under Judaism and Islam, on the other. Still, all things considered, the situation resembled the Jewish/Islamic one a good deal more than the Christian. But this suggestion—that philosophy faced fundamental danger in the ancient world—is resisted by modern classical scholarship, not only because the latter tends to take for granted the paradigm that existed within the Christian world, but also because it is heir to the Enlightenment and its “polemical” use of classical antiquity as a weapon with which to attack Christianity.
Since the Enlightenment, the image of ancient Greece as a lost Golden Age of philosophy, toleration, and freedom has played a crucial role in inspiring and arming the modern struggle for liberation. Most important was the assertion that there was little or no persecution of thought or belief in ancient Greece—a claim used to demonstrate that Christian persecution was both unprecedented and unnecessary. “Athens,” proclaimed Voltaire, “allowed complete liberty not only to philosophy, but to all religions.” The most obvious obstacle to this theory, the trial and execution of Socrates, Voltaire dismisses through the then novel (but now widespread) thesis that he was executed for partisan, political reasons and not at all on account of his opinions or alleged impiety.72 This image of antiquity has maintained a firm hold on the imagination and scholarship of the West despite the impressive efforts of writers like Fustel de Coulanges, E. R. Dodds, and others to correct it.73
There is certainly an element of truth to it. In ancient Greece and Rome, there was no persecution for heresy—for deviations from an elaborate, obligatory, orthodox body of sacred doctrines—which came into being only under Christianity. (There was, however, much prosecution for impiety—for unholy actions or general atheistic beliefs.) Similarly, there was no religious sectarian conflict or holy war waged to convert the nonbelievers to the one true God. There also seems to have been no organized and systematic attempts at the censorship of thought: no public office for literary censorship, no licensing of publication, no prior restraint or preventive censorship, no index of proscribed books, no Inquisition.
But all of this did not add up to freedom or security for philosophy. Even if one grants all the Enlightenment arguments regarding the unique character of Christian intolerance, the persecutory tendencies of Greek polytheism must not be underestimated. The latter contained at least one powerful seed of persecution that Christianity, with its moral individualism, removed: fear that the gods would punish the whole city for the offenses of one individual. (Consider, for example, Sophocles’s Oedipus tyrannus which depicts the ruinous plague afflicting Thebes owing to the past actions of Oedipus.)
Moreover, the ancient polis—small, unified, homogeneous, deeply, if fitfully, pious, with no separation or even distinction of church and state, and no principled recognition of individual rights, whether of thought or anything else—could be far more totalitarian and dangerous than the loose and disorganized states of Christendom (at least until the consolidation of the modern nation-state). The city could and did closely regulate not only public behavior and economic relations but also family life, education, public worship, and popular entertainments. True, these cities did not practice systematic review and censorship of individual works—our paradigm for intellectual persecution. But official censorship of individual writings is the flip side of official recognition of the general literary enterprise, of its necessity or legitimacy. In the ancient polis, the latter was often lacking along with the former. Thus, the very presence of a permanent theater in Rome was forbidden until the time of Augustus. On several occasions in Rome and even, for a short while, in Athens, all philosophers as such were summarily expelled.74 Here and there, freedom of thought was relatively protected; but it was never secured in principle, as a permanent, constitutional right of the individual, but only politically. It came and went with the political fortunes of particular groups or individuals. Thus, despite—or rather because of—the fact that there was no official, institutionalized censorship in Athens, there was a great deal of ad hoc accusation, denunciation, and prosecution. Socrates, Anaxagoras, Damon, Euripides, Diagoras, and Protagoras—all were indicted in Athens, and all within the lifetime of Socrates. “It is a singular error,” writes Fustel de Coulanges, “to believe that in the ancient cities men enjoyed [individual] liberty.”75
But there is no need for modern, scholarly speculation concerning the security or vulnerability of the philosopher in the ancient world: we can consult the testimony of the philosophers themselves. This was an issue that clearly preoccupied them, although this is seldom observed today. If one examines Plato from this perspective, for example, one sees that the dialogues are concerned less to present a settled philosophical doctrine or system—the famous “Platonism”—than to investigate the foundations of the philosophic way of life in every sense: its goodness for our nature, its theoretical possibility, its moral legitimacy, and not least its precarious political situation in the city. One notices, for example, that everything in Plato, even the most abstruse, metaphysical discussion, is placed in a political context.76 And in all the dialogues, there are constant echoes of and allusions to the trial and death of Socrates. The opening scene of the Republic, for example, depicts a playful arrest of Socrates by Polemarchus and his entourage—a scene also recapitulated at the beginning of book 5.
So what is the political situation of the philosopher, according to Plato? While a full and adequate analysis is beyond the scope of the present discussion, a general sketch can be drawn from a few explicit statements, mainly in Republic books 6 and 7. Plato’s Socrates asserts there quite openly that “so hard is the condition suffered by the most decent men [the philosophers] with respect to the cities that there is no single other condition like it” (488a). And he likens the philosopher’s situation to that of “a human being who has fallen in with wild beasts” (496d).
In all ordinary cities—as distinguished from the best regime, ruled by a philosopher-king—the philosopher grows up “spontaneously and against the will of the regime in each” (Republic 520b).77 He is surrounded by enemies. The primary danger comes from the uneducated and superstitious multitude. For it is “part of the ordinary beliefs of mankind,” according to Cicero in De inventione, that “philosophers are atheists.”78 Thus, as he states elsewhere: “philosophy is content with few judges, and of set purpose on her side avoids the multitude and is in her turn an object of suspicion and dislike to them, with the result that if anyone should be disposed to revile all philosophy, he could count on popular support.”79 The people hold strong beliefs, especially religious beliefs, and assert them vehemently, according to Plato’s Socrates, and “they punish the man who is not persuaded with dishonor, fines and death” (Republic 492b–d).
The many also hate the philosophers for their detachment. The great majority, taking themselves and the particulars of their lives with infinite seriousness, are unable to achieve any detachment from their individuality and from the arbitrary particulars that they see with their senses, so as to perceive the universal, necessary, and suprasensible. Therefore “it is impossible . . . that a multitude be philosophic. . . . And so those who do philosophize are necessarily blamed by them . . . as well as by all those private men who consort with the mob and desire to please it” (Republic 494a; see Timaeus 28c). Neither can the many achieve detachment or acceptance in the face of death; so when Socrates asserts in the Phaedo that the philosopher studies “nothing but dying and being dead,” his interlocutor replies: “I think the multitude . . . would say you were quite right, and our people at home would agree entirely with you that philosophers desire death, and they would add that they know very well that the philosophers deserve it” (64b; see 65a). In the allegory of the cave, therefore, when the philosopher, having seen the truth, returns to the cave, the people, “if they were somehow able to get their hands on and kill the man who attempts to release and lead up, wouldn’t they kill him? No doubt about it, he [Glaucon] said” (Republic 517a).
There is danger not only from the multitude but also from the political class, especially those, mentioned above, “who consort with the mob and desire to please it.” Such a man is Callicles in the Gorgias, a lover of the many (481d). He is plainly threatened and angered by the passive and unmanly posture of philosophic detachment, declaring ominously: “whenever I see an older man still philosophizing and not released from it, this man, Socrates, surely seems to me to need a beating” (485d). More generally, the ambitious political men in the city, who assert various claims to rule, while lacking the true claim—the art of ruling—insist that this art “isn’t even teachable and are ready to cut to pieces the man who says it is teachable” (488b). In a similar vein, Plato has Protagoras declare, in the dialogue that bears his name, that the art of “sophistry”—using the term here in its original, nonpejorative, literal sense of education in “practical wisdom”—naturally arouses great hostility because it implicitly asserts that families and fathers lack the wisdom to educate their own children.
Now I tell you that sophistry is an ancient art, and those men of ancient times who practiced it, fearing the odium it involved, disguised it in a decent dress, sometimes of poetry, as in the case of Homer, Hesiod, and Simonides; sometimes in mystic rites and soothsayings, as did Orpheus, Musaeus and their sects; and sometimes too, I have observed of athletics . . . ; and music was the disguise employed by your own Agathocles. . . . All these, as I say, from fear of ill-will made use of these arts as outer coverings.80
Finally, there was danger not only from the ignorant multitude and from the politically ambitious and powerful, but also from the philosopher’s rivals in wisdom, the poets.
There is an old quarrel between philosophy and poetry. For [the poets speak of] that “yelping bitch shrieking at her master,” and “great in the empty eloquence of fools,” “the mob of overwise men holding sway,” and “the refined thinkers who are really poor” and countless others are signs of this old opposition. (Republic 607 b–c)81
In the Apology (18a–d), Socrates implies that the oldest and most dangerous prejudice against him arose from the poet Aristophanes’s attack on him in the Clouds.82
It seems perfectly clear, then, that in the view of Plato—and who could dare claim to know the situation better than Plato—the position of philosophers in fifth-century Greece was precarious. They were not the venerable institution they have become for us. They lived dangerously.
As suggested above, philosophy’s situation in Greece was most akin to that within the Jewish and Islamic worlds, where thinkers were continually forced to confront the most grave and radical challenges—both theoretical and practical—to the whole philosophic way of life. And indeed, if one consults Plato’s medieval Islamic commentators, one finds that they were very much alive and attuned to the passages I have quoted above. Averroes, in his epitome of the Republic, repeats even more forcefully than Plato: “If it happens that a true philosopher grows up in these cities, he is in the position of a man who has come among perilous animals. . . . Hence he turns to isolation and lives the life of a solitary.” A few pages earlier, when summarizing a passage in which Plato likens the philosophers to physicians (489b–c), Averroes goes beyond the text to add: “If the physicians tell [the multitude] that they can be healed, they stone them to death.”83 Similarly, Alfarabi asserts in his own name that, outside the best regime, the philosopher “is a stranger in the present world and wretched in life.” And he holds this also to be the view of Plato, who “stated that the perfect man, the man who investigates, and the virtuous man are in grave danger” from the multitude.84
This major and clearly stated Platonic theme, which was understood and emphasized by Plato’s Islamic commentators, has gone virtually unnoticed by modern Western scholars. Modern commentaries on the Republic, for example, make little or no mention of the striking passages quoted above.85 Stranger still, in contemporary interpretations of the trial of Socrates—the central symbol of this theme—the Voltairian view has won out almost completely: “it is the common view today,” according to M. I. Finley, “that Socrates was tried and executed as an act of political vengeance by the restored democracy.”86 The inveterate fear and hatred of philosophy, so emphasized by Plato, had nothing to do with it. This extraordinary event that has reverberated down through the centuries was just a regrettable incident of local Athenian politics, nothing more. Modern thought in its harmonism has a kind of tone deafness to the conflictualist idea. Plato, at any rate, took precisely the opposite view. The trial and execution of Socrates was the local manifestation of a fundamental and permanent problem of the human condition, a problem, therefore, that Plato treats not only in the Apology but as a central theme throughout the dialogues: the principled resistance and natural hostility of the religio-political community to the life of reason.
Now that we have briefly indicated some differences in the situation of the philosopher in these three religio-political environments, it remains to discuss the consequences that these differences had for the defensive esotericism or the philosophical politics practiced by the philosophers so situated. Under Christianity, that uniquely philosophical religion, philosophers could often find safety merely by disguising certain particularly unorthodox opinions that they held. But under Judaism and Islam and in the ancient world, philosophers were often compelled to disguise the fact that they were philosophers at all or, alternatively, to disguise the true character and meaning of philosophy.
Some sense for this greater degree of imposture can be gotten from this remarkable account of Mullah Sadra Shirazi, a disciple of the philosopher Avicenna, who attempted a restoration of philosophy in seventeenth-century Iran. The account is given by Arthur Gobineau, who lived in Iran as a French diplomat for about six years in the middle of the nineteenth century. He describes here “the great and splendid expedient of Ketman,” in Arabic, concealment, discretion.
He [Sadra] too was afraid of the mullahs. To incite their distrust was inevitable, but to provide a solid basis, furnish proof for their accusations, that would have been to expose himself to endless persecutions, and to compromise at the same time the future of the philosophical restoration he meditated. Therefore he conformed to the demands of his times and resorted to the great and splendid expedient of Ketman. When he arrived in a city he was careful to present himself humbly to all the moudjteheds or doctors of the region. He sat in a corner of their salons, their talars, remained silent usually, spoke modestly, approved each word that escaped their venerable lips. He was questioned about his knowledge; he expressed only ideas borrowed from the strictest Shiite theology and in no way indicated that he concerned himself with philosophy. After several days, seeing him so meek, the moudjteheds themselves engaged him to give public lessons. He set to work immediately, took as his text the doctrine of ablution or some similar point, and split hairs over the prescriptions and inner doubts of the subtlest theoreticians. This behavior delighted the mullahs. They lauded him to the skies; they forgot to keep an eye on him. They themselves wanted to see him lead their imaginations through less placid questions. He did not refuse. From the doctrine of ablution he passed to that of prayer; from the doctrine of prayer, to that of revelation; from revelation, to divine unity and there, with marvels of ingenuity, reticence, confidences to the most advanced pupils, self-contradiction, ambiguous propositions, fallacious syllogisms out of which only the initiated could see their way, the whole heavily seasoned with unimpeachable professions of faith, he succeeded in spreading Avicennism throughout the entire lettered class; and when at last he believed he could reveal himself completely, he drew aside the veils, repudiated Islam, and showed himself the logician, the metaphysician that he really was.
It was above all necessary that the care he used to disguise his speech he also use to disguise his books; that is what he did, and to read them one forms the most imperfect idea of his teaching. I mean, to read them without a master who possesses the tradition. Otherwise, one penetrates them without difficulty. From generation to generation, the students of Mullah Sadra have been the heirs of his true teaching and they have the key to the terms of which he makes use, not to express, but to indicate to them his thought. It is with this oral corrective that the numerous treatises of the master are today held in such great esteem and that, since his times, they have formed the delight of a society drunk on dialectic, eager for religious opposition, enamored of secret boldness, enraptured by artful imposture.
In reality, Mullah Sadra is not an inventor, nor a creator, he is only a restorer, but a restorer of the great asiatic philosophy, and his originality consists in having clothed it in such a way that it was acceptable and accepted in the time in which he lived.87
In the ancient world, we find related forms of behavior. Indeed, certain well-known but puzzling facts of classical thought take on new meaning when interpreted in the context of this problematic. We find philosophers sometimes hiding the fact that they are philosophers altogether, sometimes acknowledging only part of their philosophical activity, and sometimes admitting they are philosophers but inventing a new “clothing” for philosophy that makes it more acceptable.
In the passage quoted above from Plato’s Protagoras, Protagoras claims that in earlier times “sophists” (by which he means “wise men”), fearing popular odium, disguised themselves as poets, soothsayers, mystics, and teachers of athletics and music. Plutarch makes a similar claim: “Damon, it is not unlikely, being a sophist, out of policy sheltered himself under the profession of music to conceal from people in general his skill in other things.”88
Alternatively, Socrates, in the public account of his life depicted in Plato’s Apology, openly acknowledges that he is a philosopher, but categorically denies that he is a natural philosopher, claiming that in his mature period he has always confined himself to the human things (ethics and politics) and to the public-spirited effort to make his fellow citizens better. But from various passages in Plato and Xenophon, it seems clear that this is not the case. While Socrates does grant a new importance to human or political philosophy, he by no means abandons natural philosophy. In Xenophon’s words, “he never ceased examining with his companions what each of the beings is.”89 This is also obvious from Plato’s Republic among other dialogues where Socrates is shown presenting a metaphysical account of the whole, involving the theory of ideas and the idea of the good.90
What is new and daring in Plato is that he openly thematizes and celebrates the philosophic life without any such reservations. All of his dialogues, whatever their specific philosophical topic, are ultimately about philosophy itself. His whole corpus seems to have the purpose of presenting a new and more effective “apology” to finally legitimize this marginal and endangered activity. And among the primary ways he seeks to do this is by dressing philosophy in religious clothing. According to Plutarch, it was precisely through these efforts—this radical transformation in the public appearance of philosophy—that Plato became the first to win some lasting security for the philosophic way of life.
The first man to set down in writing the clearest and boldest argument of all about the shining and shadowing of the moon [i.e., lunar eclipses] was Anaxagoras. And neither was he ancient nor was the argument reputable, but it was still secret and proceeded among a few and with a certain caution or trust. For they [the many] did not abide the natural philosophers and the praters about the heavens [meteorolesches], as they were called at that time, because they reduced the divine to unreasoning causes, improvident powers, and necessary properties. But even Protagoras went into exile, the imprisoned Anaxagoras was barely saved by Pericles, and Socrates, who did not concern himself with any of such things, nevertheless died on account of philosophy. But later the reputation of Plato shone forth, on account of the life of the man and because he placed the natural necessities under the divine and more authoritative principles, and took away the slander against these arguments and gave a path to these studies to all men.91
It is true that Plutarch, not wishing to undo what Plato did, implies but does not state explicitly that this religious account of philosophy was a cloak fashioned for the express purpose of protecting philosophy from society. But here is how Montesquieu read this all-important passage:
See in Plutarch, Life of Nicias, how the physicists who explained the eclipses of the moon by natural causes were suspect to the people. They called them meteorolesches, persuaded that they reduced all divinity to natural and physical causes. . . . The doctrine of an intelligent [i.e., divine] being was found by Plato only as a preservative and a defensive arm against the calumnies of zealous pagans.92
One might object to this account that there is nothing new in Plato in this regard since all pre-Socratic philosophers of whose writings we have any knowledge presented themselves as believers in a god or gods. But this was apparently a rather thin disguise; for in the Laws (967a–d), Plato’s Athenian Stranger openly states that most if not all of them were in fact atheists, that they were eventually viewed as such even by the many, and that this is the precise problem that led to the ancient attack upon philosophy by the poets.
Plato seems to have devoted himself to responding to this crucial problem. His writings are fairly steeped in religiosity—and of various kinds. Not only are the dialogues full of references to the Olympic gods, of religious stories and myths, and of semimystical metaphysical discussions, but philosophy is presented as a necessary precondition of genuine piety and indeed as itself an essentially religious activity. In the Apology, for example, Socrates is presented as having undertaken his philosophical activity in obedience to the command of the Delphic Oracle. It is a divine mission of sorts. Similarly, in the Phaedo (69c) and again in the Symposium (210a), the ascent to the philosophic truth is presented in terms borrowed from the Eleusinian Mysteries. And finally, as depicted in the Phaedo (118a7–8), Socrates’s dying words—the final thoughts of this great philosopher—are to urge Crito to pay their debt to Asclepius by sacrificing a chicken. As John Toland, the eighteenth-century Deist, puts it in his essay on esoteric writing:
Plato wisely providing for his own safety, after the poisonous draught was administered to Socrates . . . wrote rather poetically than philosophically . . . by epically transforming the nature of things, the elements, and the celestial globes . . . into Gods, Goddesses, Geniuses, and Demons.93
In sum, the great accomplishment of Plato was, through his uniquely poetic and religious portrait of philosophy, to have transformed it from a fringe activity that was viewed as unholy by the people—somewhat like vivisection or black magic—into something fairly respectable that would now become an abiding feature of Western culture. This great feat of transvaluation would seem to explain two other remarkable facts about Plato. His were the first ancient philosophical writings to be preserved in more than fragmentary form. And he was the first philosopher who was able, in broad daylight, to open a philosophic school or academy—a school that remained in existence uninterruptedly for the next eight centuries.
It should go without saying, however, that these various quotations do not begin to settle the whole immense question of Plato’s religious thought, for it is certain, at a minimum, that he took the theological question extremely seriously. But what these passages do indicate is that, in the view of a long tradition adhered to by a wide variety of thinkers, much of what Plato and the other ancient philosophers asserted regarding the traditional gods of the city must be understood in terms of the perennial need to manage the mutual opposition of philosophy and society.
DEFENSIVE ESOTERICISM: ANCIENT AND MODERN
The most fundamental change, however, in the shifting history of defensive esotericism and philosophical politics occurred with the transition from premodern to modern thought in the period of the Enlightenment.
Above, we distinguished between persecution that is accidental or historically contingent and a kind that is more natural. This distinction needs to be reexamined in connection with the issue of theory and praxis and the divide between the ancient, conflictual view and the modern, harmonist one.
On the conflictual understanding of theory and praxis, all societies have a fundamental need for illusions of certain kinds, while philosophers have a fundamental need for freedom from illusion. Thus, what is a crucial good for the one is necessarily a great evil for the other. That is why they are in conflict—and why that conflict is not contingent, but “natural.”
This conflictual view has three consequences for the premodern practice of defensive esotericism. First, it means that philosophical persecution is seen as a permanent problem: it can be controlled or managed in different ways in different times, but never completely uprooted and eliminated. On this understanding, then, the purpose of esotericism and philosophical politics is essentially passive or defensive: to hide from persecution or hold it at bay. There is no thought of going on the offensive—to confront and permanently abolish it.
Second, from the conflictual perspective, the persecution of philosophers is understood to stem not simply from ignorance and misunderstanding or from crude intolerance (although these play an important part), but also from an accurate intimation that philosophy is genuinely dangerous to society. This produces a somewhat different attitude toward intolerance and persecution than we are familiar with. While classical philosophers, no less than modern, have a life-and-death interest in combating and escaping persecution, they do not, for all that, regard it as pure viciousness and irrationality. They do not pronounce the very word “persecution” with the lipcurling rage and disgust that the Enlightenment thinkers feel. For in the end, they cannot altogether blame people for trying to protect themselves from something truly harmful to them.
On the contrary, they feel called upon to help society protect itself by shielding it from their subversive reflections. The third point, then, is that defensive esotericism, when thought through from the conflictual perspective, points to the need for protective esotericism. These esotericisms are two sides of the same coin. Philosophy and society being in conflict, esotericism is needed to protect each from the other. Thus, in turning now to explore protective esotericism—and in particular, the character of the danger that philosophy poses to society—we will also be continuing and deepening our exploration of defensive esotericism.
But as we have seen, a very different take on all of this emerged in modern philosophy with its commitment to the potential harmony of theory and praxis. On this view, the endangered condition of philosophy within society is not really a natural and necessary phenomenon, as the ancients believed, although it is not quite a historical accident either. All traditional societies did indeed incline to the persecution of philosophy, which tendency was, if you like, “natural” to such societies. But it is possible, the Enlightenment thinkers argued, to construct a radically new kind of society, one based on reason, in which the tension between society and philosophy would be permanently overcome and, with it, the deepest cause of persecution.
On this harmonist view, the three characteristics of defensive esotericism described above become transformed. First, modern thinkers go beyond the primarily passive, preservative stance of defensive esotericism to an activist, transformative rhetoric—what I am calling “political esotericism”—that aims to subvert and rebuild society in a way that, among other things, would finally eliminate persecution. Second, viewing intolerance and persecution as unnecessary and wholly irrational, they give themselves over unreservedly to vilifying them as the great evil, in a way that the ancient thinkers never did. And third, this whole subversive, activist project for the elimination of persecution becomes itself—temporarily—a new stimulus to persecution and thus a new source of the need for defensive esotericism.