6

Dangerous Truths: Protective Esotericism

’Tis real Humanity and Kindness to hide strong truths from tender eyes.

—SHAFTESBURY

Of the four forms of esotericism, protective esotericism is the one that raises the profoundest issues and the profoundest resistance.

No one denies the reality of persecution—the threat to philosophy posed by society. But almost everyone today denies the reality of “dangerous truths”—the threat to society posed by philosophy. Thus, very few people can be found who believe that philosophers of the past ever engaged in protective esotericism to any significant degree.¹

But there is plenty of evidence to show that in the past, people saw this phenomenon in a very different light. We must try to look through their eyes.

THE THREE PREMISES OF PROTECTIVE ESOTERICISM

Jean d’Alembert, for example, in his Analysis of the Spirit of the Laws remarks on what he calls Montesquieu’s “voluntary obscurity” and “pretended lack of method.” He gives the following simple and approving explanation:

Montesquieu, having to present sometimes important truths whose absolute and direct enunciation might wound without bearing any fruit, has had the prudence to envelope them, and by this innocent artifice, has veiled them from those to whom they would be harmful, without letting them be lost for the wise.²

This kind of literary prudence is described more generally by Montaigne: “It is not new for the sages to preach things as they serve, not as they are. Truth has its inconveniences, disadvantages, and incompatibilities.”³ It is clear from this that he considers protective esotericism a well-founded as well as long-standing practice. It may be said to rest on three premises, implied in this brief statement.

First, there are some important truths that are “inconvenient”—dangerous to society or to ordinary life. Human rationality and human politicality are often in conflict at the highest level.

Second, all human beings are not equal in their capacity to handle such difficult truths: there are such things as “sages” for whom truth may be simply good, indeed the greatest good; but for the vast majority truth can, in one degree or another, be harmful.

Third, it is morally permissible for the former group to lie to the latter—or at least to conceal or dilute the truth—for the latter’s own benefit.

Should these three points be granted, it would follow that philosophers may—perhaps they must—hide certain truths from those who would be seriously harmed by them, just as we routinely protect children or the sick from exposure to more than they can handle. Aquinas states the issue very simply: “A teacher should measure his words that they help rather than hinder his hearer. . . . There are matters, however, that would be harmful to those hearing them if they were openly presented.” He concludes: “These matters, therefore, ought to be concealed from those to whom they might do harm.”⁴ This is how virtually all classical thinkers reasoned, according to Bishop Warburton in his brief history of esotericism:

that it was lawful and expedient to deceive for the public good. This all the ancient philosophers embraced: and Tully [Cicero], on the authority of Plato, thinks it so clear, that he calls the doing otherwise Nefas, a horrid wickedness.

Indeed, in Warburton’s view, this desire to protect society from dangerous truths—and not the avoidance of persecution—has historically been the primary motive for the practice of philosophical esotericism. The Encyclopedia article “Exoteric and Esoteric,” repeats the same claim: “the goal of these secret instructions was the public good.”⁵

What seems so obvious, straightforward, and commonplace to a Shaftesbury, d’Alembert, Montaigne, Aquinas, or Warburton, however, appears to us in a very different light. As we have already seen, these premises strikes us as both implausible and repugnant. The first—the conflictual view of theory and praxis—violates our deep humanistic and Enlightenment faith in the harmony of reason and society. The second—the belief in “sages”—offends our democratic egalitarianism. The third—the permissibility of lying to someone for his own benefit—transgresses our moral attachment and scholarly commitment to honesty. So with the issue of protective esotericism, we are definitely heading into alien territory.

To ease the journey, it is important to remind ourselves that our purpose here is not to defend these earlier views (or to attack them). It is not to give any answer to the difficult philosophical question of whether these three premises grounding protective esotericism are correct. Our purpose is solely to answer the historical question of whether these premises were widely believed and acted upon by past thinkers, especially in the pre-Enlightenment period.

We have already investigated this question with respect to the latter two premises—concerning inequality and salutary lying—and answered strongly in the affirmative. In the present chapter, we will see still more evidence in support of these conclusions, especially signs of the inegalitarianism of most earlier philosophical thought.

It remains here to explore the first and crucial premise, that the truth can be harmful or dangerous. This is the deepest issue at stake in the matter of philosophical esotericism; it is the core of the conflictual view of theory and praxis; and it is also the deepest ground of the modern resistance to esotericism. Our goal is to try to relax the grip of that resistance and to achieve some genuine and sympathetic understanding of this premise. To succeed, we need to see not only that earlier thinkers embraced this alien view, but also something of the why. We need to gain some idea of its experiential basis and theoretical plausibility, some concrete sense of what this idea looks like from the inside. I will try to present it in as positive a light as possible. This view may well prove false in the end (or perhaps true regarding some societies, such as traditional ones, and false regarding others, like modern, liberal ones). But as a major philosophical alternative, it is unlikely to be wholly or uninterestingly false. It is a foreign country worth visiting.

THE BASIC IDEA OF DANGEROUS TRUTHS

To start from some very general reflections, it is clear that the idea of dangerous truths has, for a very long time, been commonplace, not to say a cliché. “A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.” “Curiosity killed the cat.” “Ignorance is bliss.” “What you don’t know won’t hurt you.”

On a deeper level, one need only reflect on the story of the Tree of Knowledge and the Tower of Babel, or the myths of Prometheus, Daedalus, and Oedipus, or the story of the Sirens, or the argument for the “noble lie” in Plato’s Republic, or the stories of Faust and Frankenstein to see that the notion of dangerous or forbidden knowledge has had a long and venerable history in the West. Indeed, of the two originary sources of Western culture, Socrates and the Bible, the one teaches that the idea of the good, the highest being and truth, is like the sun, which we can barely stand to look at directly, and the other teaches that if we should gaze upon the face of God, we would surely die.⁶ Somehow the highest truths strain our human capacity not only to understand but to endure.

But why in the world should the truth be dangerous?, we persist in asking. If one is not unduly Pollyannaish or optimistic about how nicely the world fits together, couldn’t one simply reply: Why shouldn’t the truth be dangerous? Why would anyone expect the world to be all that we fervently wish or need it to be? Is there some reason why the truth must somehow always turn out to coincide with the fond hopes and comforting assumptions of ordinary life? Denial, wishful thinking, self-deceit, prejudice, delusion, myth—why do these phenomena play the central role that they do in human affairs if not because bare reality seldom conforms to the deepest demands of the human heart? Indeed, who among us is so bold as to claim to live without illusion? And where is the nation that is wholly able to justify its founding, its borders, its class structure, and its political legitimacy without recourse to myth of some kind?

Conversely, when we imagine to ourselves the serious pursuit of truth, we do not think of it as simply pleasant and untroubled. We revere truth, Veritas, as a great and noble ideal, precisely because we know and feel that it is something difficult, something that demands from us the greatest courage, firmness, and sacrifice, and therefore something necessarily threatening to those who lack the strength to recognize and adjust to it.

These very general considerations suggest that the idea of dangerous truths is not so outrageous as we incline to think, and that there may well be more basic common sense to the conflictual view than to the harmonist one. Indeed, perhaps the latter is just the product of Enlightenment hyper-rationalism, which is to say, precisely one form that illusion or superstition tends to adopt in the modern period.

TRUTHS THAT ARE TOO HIGH AND TOO LOW

If the truth, then, should sometimes fail to coincide with the presuppositions of ordinary life, it will do so, generally speaking, either because it falls too far beneath or rises too high above the latter. These two opposite possibilities give rise to a basic divide among esoteric writers: there are those who would hide the truth for fear that it is too harsh or disappointing for most people and those who would veil or dilute it for fear that it is too exalted and sublime.

In the first camp, for example, is Lucretius, who himself acknowledges that his austere materialism, undercutting all lofty human hopes and moral/political pieties, “seems rather too grim to those who have not dealt with it, and the multitude shrinks back away from it with a shudder.” That is one reason why, as he explicitly states, he has chosen to present his brutally prosaic doctrine in an artfully sweetened poetical form.⁷

In the opposite camp are to be found the mystics as well as those religious and metaphysical thinkers who, seeing the truth as something exalted far above most men’s capacity to comprehend, fear that if it were openly expressed, it would disorient or corrupt them because it would undercut the approximate truths and goods that are within their reach without putting anything else in their place.

This version of esotericism is of course a good deal more respectable than its subversive counterpart, and consequently it has, historically, been far more open in acknowledging its secretive ways. People are generally quite willing to accept the idea that there are exalted truths that are above their ability to comprehend. Thus, the long and influential tradition of Jewish mysticism known as Kabbalah made little secret of the fact that it engaged in esoteric writing and reading. Equally well known is that the Neoplatonists were—and explicitly declared themselves to be—esoteric writers and readers. These two sects were so open about their secretiveness that even scholars hostile to the whole idea of esotericism do not deny its existence in these two cases. But such scholars typically argue that the phenomenon was essentially confined to them (and to other, even less reputable practitioners of the occult), and they often mock those who suggest otherwise by calling them “Kabbalist” and “Neoplatonists.”⁸ But the fear that the highest truths may overwhelm or at least confuse most people is not so strange or unreasonable—so why should it be so rare? And, in fact, it is very easy to show that these sorts of concerns led to esoteric practices even in mainstream Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and other religions, as well as in mainstream philosophers.⁹ (Indeed, esotericism is so far from being confined to the mystics that Gershom Scholem claims that the Kabbalists actually borrowed the practice from the Jewish and Islamic philosophers.)¹⁰

It is not, for example, in any mystical writing but in the Talmud itself, the primary text of Judaism after the Bible, that one reads these words:

The Laws of incest may not be expounded to three persons, nor the Story of Creation before two persons, nor the subject of the Chariot before one person alone unless he be a Sage and comprehends of his own knowledge. Whoever puts his mind to these four matters it were better for him if he had not come into the World.¹¹

Similarly, Maimonides, surely no Kabbalist, writes:

The ancient sages enjoined us to discuss these subjects privately, with only one individual, and then only if he be wise and capable of independent reasoning. In this case, the chapter headings are communicated to him, and he is instructed in a minute portion of the subject. It is left to him to develop the conclusions for himself and to penetrate to the depths of the subject. These topics are exceedingly profound; and not every intellect is able to approach them.¹²

In Christianity, a similar tradition of protective esotericism—known as “the discipline of the secret” (disciplina arcani)—was once very widespread. An article devoted to it in the Catholic Encyclopedia describes it as “the custom which prevailed in the earliest ages of the Church [i.e., at least through the sixth century], by which the knowledge of the more intimate mysteries of the Christian religion was carefully kept from the heathen and even from those who were undergoing instruction in the Faith. The custom itself is beyond dispute.”¹³ This practice was modeled on the words and actions of Jesus himself, who told the apostles that he would speak to them plainly but to the people only in parables (Matt. 13:10–17).

Thus, even in the thirteenth century, when Aquinas in his commentary on Boethius addresses the article “Should Divine Realities Be Veiled by Obscure and Novel Words?,” he responds unhesitatingly in the affirmative. For “when abstruse doctrines are taught to the uneducated they take an occasion of error from what they do not fully understand.” He goes on to support his view first with the example of the Apostle Paul who told the Corinthians that he could not reveal to them the highest wisdom concerning God. It is only the truly spiritual man who is able to understand, “[b]ut I, brethren, could not address you as spiritual men, but as men of the flesh, as babes in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food; for you were not ready for it.” Aquinas then adds the testimony of Saint Gregory. “Commenting on Exodus 21:33 . . . Gregory says: ‘Anyone who now perceives the depths in the sacred words, should hide in silence their sublime meaning when in the presence of those who do not understand them, so that he will not hurt by interior scandal an immature believer or an unbeliever who might become a believer.’” Finally, appealing to the authority of Augustine, Aquinas writes:

Certain things can be explained to the wise in private which we should keep silent about in public. Thus Augustine says: “There are some passages which are not understood in their proper force or are understood with difficulty, no matter how great, how comprehensive, or how clear the eloquence with which they are handled by the speaker. These should be spoken to a public audience only rarely, if there is some urgent reason, or never at all.” In writing, however [as distinguished from speaking], this distinction does not hold because a written book can fall into the hands of anybody. Therefore, these matters should be concealed with obscure language, so that they will benefit the wise who understand them and be hidden from the uneducated who are unable to grasp them.¹⁴

In Islam, there is also a very strong tradition of protective esotericism, which is openly discussed by virtually all the major Islamic philosophers. Averroes, for example, explains that if one reveals the deeper interpretation of a Koranic passage, one that goes beyond the apparent meaning, to someone who is “unfit to receive” it, one will lead him into unbelief.

The reason for this is that the interpretation comprises two things, rejection of the apparent meaning and affirmation of the interpretation; so that if the apparent meaning is rejected in the mind of someone who can only grasp apparent meanings, without the interpretation being affirmed in his mind, the result is unbelief.¹⁵

In sum, protective esotericism tends to veil the truth for two essentially opposite reasons, one as too subversive, the other as too sublime. The latter type, being more respectable, has typically been fairly open about its practices, the former, far more secretive.

But this rather neat distinction produces a further complexity: the existence of a lofty and publicly accepted esotericism provides the other sort with a natural way of disguising itself. Thus, it may be easy to distinguish the two forms of esotericism, but not so easy to say which thinker is of what sort. This difficulty may be illustrated by a statement of Maimonides. He asserts that the “true opinions [of the divine science]” have been “hidden, enclosed in riddles, and treated by all men of knowledge with all sorts of artifice through which they could teach them without expounding them explicitly.” But why have they been hidden in this way? “Not because of something bad being hidden in them, or because they undermine the foundations of the Law, as is thought by ignorant people who deem that they have attained a rank suitable for speculation. Rather have they been hidden because at the outset the intellect is incapable of receiving them.”¹⁶ The “ignorant people” may be wrong in this particular case, but it is certainly reasonable and necessary to entertain the suspicion they hold: that the sublime sort of esotericism may sometimes be a front for the other kind.

The classic example would seem to be Averroes. Assimilating himself to a long tradition of Islamic religious esotericism, he wrote openly and at length about the concealment that he and other philosophers practiced. But a long tradition of interpretation suggests that what Averroes was in fact concealing was his rejection of most if not all of the claims of religion.

In this connection, consider one more time the passage from Plato’s Protagoras (316d–e) where Protagoras claims that in ancient times the practitioners of skeptical philosophy or “sophistry” 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.¹⁷

SOCIETY: TRADITIONAL AND MODERN

Now that we have seen this broad distinction and considered at some length the exalted or religious form of protective esotericism, it remains to examine more closely the other kind. For the idea of subversive truth has little plausibility today. We citizens of the enlightened, secular, liberal, pluralist, multicultural society have dared to open our doors to every idea and doctrine and have discovered, at length, that all the supposed dangers of doing so were greatly exaggerated. So we are inclined to ask with some skepticism, not to say condescension: exactly how is it that truth or philosophy is a threat to society?

To address this question in a clear and nonparochial manner, it is useful to spend a few moments considering some of the consequences of the fact that for nine-tenths of recorded history people lived not in enlightened, secular, liberal, pluralist, multicultural societies like our own but in what we loosely call “traditional societies.” For whereas the former may be relatively impervious to the dangers of philosophic rationalism, the latter certainly were not. By examining the differences between traditional society and our own, we will see why, to the former, the conflictual view seemed so obviously right, while to us so obviously wrong.

SOCIETY: “CLOSED” AND “OPEN”

Human beings are political animals, everywhere united in societies. But for the sake of what do they unite? What do they share and hold in common in their communities? Wherever one looks in premodern history—whether at primitive tribes or ancient Greek city-states or medieval villages—the most prevalent way for human beings to unite was not on the minimal basis of the desire for life, liberty, and property (as in the limited, liberal state), but on the basis of shared traditions and mores: a communal conception of the right way to live, a shared view of the moral and the sacred. This would seem to be only natural, for a number of interrelated reasons. First, since the political community is, as Aristotle puts it, the most sovereign or authoritative community, the one that ultimately controls all the others, the one demanding our highest obedience and devotion, shouldn’t it concern the highest and most important things in life, that is, the moral and the sacred? Second, if we, as social animals, seek to form a community in the fullest and deepest sense—seek to share one another’s lives—then mustn’t we be joined together at the level of our fullest and deepest concerns? Mustn’t we hold in common the things that we hold most dear? And third, even aside from these higher things, even judging from the elemental standpoint of producing basic obedience, stability, and nonoppression, can these minimal ends ever be adequately secured through force alone, through the police? Don’t they require the social pressure of a moral and religious consensus? Prior to the rise of the liberal state, all of this was basic political common sense. The very definition of a political community, as Augustine put it, is a group of people “bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love.”¹⁸

That certainly does not mean, of course, that all or even most traditional societies were successful in producing this kind of moral and religious agreement, but this was what they aimed at and sought to build upon. And to the extent that societies fell short of it, they did indeed experience a loss of high purpose along with a loss of community and of basic stability. Traditional society, in sum, relied upon the moral and religious consensus of the community for the attainment of both its most basic necessities and its highest aspirations. It staked its all on that consensus, on “agreement as to the objects of their love.”

Now, this traditional approach to communal life is profound, high-minded, and humanly comprehensive, but it is also extremely perilous, since such consensus is inherently fragile (at least in civilized states). Difference and disagreement, especially about such grand and uncertain issues of life, easily assert themselves. Therefore, an essential concomitant of the traditional approach to community is the need to protect the community’s shared commitments or foundational beliefs. Hence we find that virtually all traditional societies were hostile, at least in principle, to the mixing of diverse religions, mores, and cultures in one society (just what we today celebrate). And we find that the censorship of ideas was, in one degree or another, practiced in all such societies. In a word, having staked everything on shared, settled, and authoritative answers to inherently uncertain fundamental questions, traditional society was and needed to be a closed society, that is, hostile, as a matter of structural necessity, to freedom of thought. And that is why traditional society necessarily looked upon the activity of philosophy—the most resolute and radical questioning of all established ideas—as its precise antithesis, as a direct threat to its very core.

Today, we scorn this fear of ideas as timid and benighted, because it does not apply to our own form of society. But this reaction of ours, obviously anachronistic, is also quite ironic. For, our modern society was largely founded by thinkers who were reacting to the wars of religion. They were primarily moved, that is, by this very fear concerning the fragility of moral and religious consensus. They felt it even more than earlier thinkers.

One could say that the simple, tragic flaw of political life is this. Whereas the lowest goods of life—food, shelter, clothing, safety—are self-evident to all, the higher goods, precisely in the degree to which they are more elevated and more important to us, are less clear and less available to general understanding. And this fact makes the higher things not only elusive but positively dangerous. For, given this obscurity, the discussion and pursuit of all the loftier goods of life are inherently prone to sectarian conflict, fanaticism, and obscurantism, as well as to skepticism, hypocrisy, and corruption. Therefore, traditional societies, which nobly attempt to unite men around some settled view regarding these highest questions, run a great risk of being infected, sooner or later, by these ills, especially since the rise in the West of philosophy, the Reformation, the printing press, and other historical circumstances that have weakened the hold of local certainties and rendered a stable moral-religious consensus almost impossible.

With these precise fears in mind, early modern thinkers such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke endeavored to find a form of politics that could do without such consensus. They deliberately set out to subvert traditional society and to replace it with a fundamentally new kind of social organization, one that would openly renounce the ever precarious attempt to define the truth about life’s highest goods. Instead, it would unite men on the promise of preventing the most obvious and basic evils—the violation of elemental “rights,” the loss of life, liberty, and property, the return to the “state of nature.” For whereas the highest good, the summum bonum, is inextricably caught up in metaphysical and religious dispute, the summum malum—violent death—is a metaphysically and religiously neutral fact, a “self-evident truth” known to and felt by all human beings, regardless of their larger theoretical opinions. Thus, by standing traditional society on its head, by openly switching the purpose and moral basis of the state from our highest to our lowest end, they attempted to separate politics from the whole disputed sphere of morality and religion, to lift the state off its traditional foundations and to place it on its own self-evident ground, independent of and impervious to all larger theoretical issues.¹⁹

This does not mean, of course, that modern societies have completely succeeded in this effort. In practice, they continue to preserve many aspects of traditional society. Indeed, no state can truly be neutral with respect to every question of personal morals and way of life (and almost all liberal thinkers themselves have recognized this fact). Still, modern society represents a decisive shift away from political reliance on moral and religious consensus.

This radical innovation is what made it possible to establish, for the first time, an officially and intentionally “open society”—a tolerant, secularized, morally neutral, heterogeneous, pluralistic, modern state that was dedicated to freedom of thought as a matter of principle. In such a society, the flourishing of diversity of opinion, radical doubt, and philosophy, which in the past had existed only as by-products and symptoms of political decline—could be embraced for the first time as a form of social health. For the modern state is so structured that it is, as much as possible, a community of interests instead of beliefs—and therefore it no longer has the same vital stake in what its citizens believe. It can afford a certain intellectual permissiveness and easygoingness.

Again, traditional society—because it aimed at men’s perfection or salvation more than their security, their duties more than their rights—often required its citizens to make strenuous exertions and painful sacrifices. And these are possible only on the basis of strong, intense beliefs, which society must therefore foster and protect. But modern society, with its more limited ambitions, asks much less of its citizens—don’t steal, get a job, pay your taxes, support your children. Consequently, it can afford the luxury of a certain indifference to the content and pitch of its citizens’ beliefs. Thus, it loses all real need to fear the freedom of thought—a fear that it soon comes to regard as simply foolish and cowardly.

One can go further: modern society, based on material interests, not only can afford openness, enlightenment, and freedom of thought, but positively requires them. For ultimately it is not quite true that the protection of life, liberty, and property is a metaphysically neutral and self-evident end, embraced equally by all worldviews. There are many views of life—medieval Christianity or contemporary Islamic fundamentalism, for example—that praise sacrifice, subservience, and asceticism and that condemn the sort of materialism prevailing in the modern Western state as sinful and decadent. In order to work as promised, then, the modern state requires the weakening of such beliefs. It requires a “rational” and “enlightened” citizenry that can be counted upon to follow its long-term material self-interests. For this reason, the modern state not only tolerates but actually requires philosophical skepticism—a polar reversal of the situation within traditional society. The natural antagonism between philosophy and society has been replaced by an artificial harmony.

Again, the modern state may be said to be built on an “agreement to disagree” regarding religion and the ultimate ends of life. But this agreement must constantly be protected against the resurgence of the longing for homogeneous community—protected through the ever-renewed demonstration of the impossibility of settling the larger questions of life in a way convincing to all. Thus, the modern state is not, after all, so indifferent to its citizens’ state of belief. It requires a critical mass of citizens who cling to a skeptical, tolerant, “who’s to say” worldview. It laughs at the traditional fear of philosophy and freedom of thought, but it fears traditional religion and the longing for consensus. In traditional society, it was common to ask, “Can an atheist be an honest man?”; in modern society, the question has become “Can a believer be a tolerant man?” Just as the former society demands unity and strength of belief, so the latter tends to demand pluralism and skepticism.

In sum, we are the offspring of modern society; and it has shaped all our instincts regarding the age-old conflict between philosophy and politics, theory and praxis. Specifically, we have a systematic tendency to misunderstand—or rather, to dismiss and forget—that conflict because the whole form of state in which we live was invented precisely in order to obscure or eliminate it. Modern, liberal society unites us, no longer on the basis of an ever-fragile agreement about morality and religion, but on the basis of a shared fear of our tendency to fight over these issues. Such a society is no longer in tension but in harmony with philosophic openness because it requires not the protection but the measured subversion of higher certainties. It thrives on popular enlightenment and the proliferation of intellectuals and artists whose perceived duty and social function is to épater le bourgeois, to shock society out of its “complacency,” to be iconoclastic. Given this specific role, modern intellectuals are almost constitutionally incapable of appreciating the point being argued here: the legitimacy and necessity, within traditional society, of the fear of “dangerous truths.”

But traditional society was fundamentally different. It had not yet invented the modern art of turning uncertainty and disagreement regarding the highest matters into a source of cooperation and obedience. It knew of no acceptable way to settle the basic political question—who has the right to rule—except by answering the largest moral and religious questions. Such a society, unable to separate political from intellectual stability, was necessarily a closed society—and therefore in essential tension with the radical openness of philosophy. To use a more contemporary term, traditional society was and had to be fundamentally “anti-intellectual.”

There is, then, a crucial problem here that our present social environment has caused us to forget but that shaped all premodern philosophy. The realm of practice requires settled answers; the realm of theory, unsettling questions. There is both a closed and an open aspect to human nature—because we are both political animals and rational ones—and each is necessarily a danger to the other.

CUSTOM AS THE BASIS OF SOCIETY

If the idea of this fundamental tension has a certain plausibility, let us consider it in greater detail. We have seen that philosophy, which is a restless and irreverent quest for truth, is in conflict with traditional political community, which is an authoritative settlement regarding the fundamental questions of life. They are antithetical, as open is to closed. Now, obviously, reason is the source of the open, dynamic aspect of life, but what is it that produces and maintains the closing? What force or human faculty creates the authoritative settlement? What is the bond or foundation of society, and how does this bond relate to the faculty reason?

In traditional society, as the name implies, the authoritative settlement is rooted in tradition, in the weight and authority of custom. And tradition is a force not only different from reason but also—for a variety of reasons that we must now try to spell out—in fundamental tension with it. Thus, the conflict of philosophy and society stems, not only from the general opposition of open and closed, but also from the specific conflict of reason and custom—two rival sources of human guidance. Let us approach this dichotomy by beginning with some basic reflections on the human condition as it relates to practical wisdom, to the knowledge of how to live.

Human beings are rational animals. Part of what this ambiguous formula means is that we are not fundamentally guided by instinct. It would seem that as the power of reason evolved, the power of instinct receded to make way for it. Thus, unlike the other animals, whose basic “way of life” is determined by instinct, human beings possess very few true instincts and these leave the human way of life essentially undetermined. That is why, whereas the other animals are “unhistorical”—a lion today lives in pretty much the same manner as lions lived ten thousand years ago—the way of life of human beings varies dramatically from one time and place to another. Human beings are samurai warriors, American businessmen, Christian ascetics, aristocratic epicures, Buddhist monks, and classical philosophers. In short, the rational animal is the free, the uninstinctive, the historical or socially constructed animal.

Let me pause to emphasize, however, that from this famous variety of ways of life and this relative freedom from instinct, it does not necessarily follow that there is no human nature and no natural standard for human conduct (although it is common today to assume that it does). We are not led by instinct, for example, to any particular food or diet, as other animals are, and consequently the human diet has varied greatly over time and place. But it nevertheless remains true that we have a natural constitution that is nourished by some foods and poisoned by others. It is even possible to speak of an optimal diet or of a diet most “in accordance with our nature,” even though we are not led to this diet by nature, i.e., by instinct. So also in a larger sense we have a natural constitution—certain natural faculties of body and mind, along with certain natural needs, inclinations, and pleasures. Our natural constitution, for example, includes the capacity to walk upright, to reason, to speak and communicate our thoughts, to love, and to procreate. And it is reasonable to assume (until proven otherwise) that some ways of life develop, strengthen, enliven, and gratify our natural constitution while others stunt, weaken, shut down, and distress it. It is also possible that there is an optimal life that brings our various faculties and yearnings to their greatest harmony, flourishing, and satisfaction—what we mean by “happiness.”

Properly understood, then, the unique freedom and indeterminacy characteristic of the rational animal consists in this: we are not led by nature to the life that is in accordance with nature, to the good and happy life. Indeed, we are not led by nature to any particular way of life at all. The human animal, “rational” and “free,” is characterized above all by a radical ignorance, unknown to any other animal, an ignorance of itself and of what is good for it. Free of instinct’s guidance, we are abandoned to ourselves to try to answer the most fundamental and inescapable question: What is the right way of life for us? What is our constitution and what will cause it to flourish?

Of course, the situation would not be so bad if this question were fairly easy to answer, but this turns out not to be the case. The human constitution is rather complex, and on top of that, it is always covered over and distorted by various kinds of prejudice and illusion. We have within us many different parts, faculties, and desires that compete to be regarded as highest or most important, as the true goal that should organize our lives, both individually and communally.

A quick survey. Is the good life the life of the hedonist, the lover of pleasure, on the theory that this good—pursued universally, even by infants and beasts—is the only real and truly natural good? Or perhaps we should rather be security lovers because our most fundamental need—and the object to which our natural pleasures and pains seem designed to steer us—is self-preservation. But there are things for which human beings will voluntarily risk pleasure and even life itself: Isn’t the clearest test of what we should live for that for which we are willing to die? One such thing is love. Is love, then, the answer—or is it “blind,” just a romantic illusion? And what exactly does it want? Among the various human ends, the other thing for which we are clearly willing to die is honor or the noble. But these two ends, almost always conjoined, need to be distinguished. Honor is just the external recognition and reward of nobility or moral excellence; and mustn’t that to which men pay honor be of more value than the honor itself? Indeed, if we ask ourselves what we most admire—and not just, as above, what we desire—the life of moral excellence seems to come to light as the most attractive. This is what makes us rational, human, and superior to the animals. But moral actions—deeds of courage, moderation, justice, and prudence—must ultimately be in the service of some end beyond themselves. Courageous action must further some worthy purpose beyond merely acting courageously; otherwise it is simply foolhardiness. Yet what can this further purpose be? If the dignity of morality is to be preserved, it cannot be something lower than morality, like mere pleasure or security, but must be something higher. Is it the welfare of the community, the common good? But in what does this consist? If it is the mere security and prosperity of the community, this would again subordinate morality to something lower. But if it is the virtue or morality of the citizens, then this only returns us to the question of the ultimate end of moral excellence. Mustn’t our ultimate end be found in the purest and fullest development of what we are, of our “humanness,” that is, of the rational faculty that defines us? Mustn’t the end be knowledge or philosophy or the detached contemplation of the cosmos? Yet how could the true fulfillment of human nature consist in something that very few human beings are ever seen to pursue? And is the human mind actually capable of understanding the cosmos? Is there even an unchanging cosmos out there for us to understand?

From this last step, we see that these questions about human nature and happiness cannot be fully answered without knowing the larger natural or supernatural whole of which human nature is a part and product. Certain metaphysical questions are unavoidable. Are we, like everything else, composed of mere matter, following its deterministic laws? Or does the world contain a second element—freedom or spirituality—that allows for moral responsibility and that explains the true yearnings of the human soul? And could this enable the soul to exist independently of the body? Do the dead, therefore, live on somewhere, unseen? And are there then other unseen beings—gods? Many serious people claim knowledge of a God and that he has revealed his will and wisdom to man and told him how to live, backed by divine rewards and punishments. Is this true? Yet there are many differing accounts of the divine; which is the true one—that of the Jews, the Christians, the Muslims, the Hindus, the Buddhists?

Difficult as they are, these issues cannot be dodged. They are not academic questions that the practical man, repelled by their abstractness and seeming futility, can simply walk away from. They must be addressed and—most of them—answered if we are to settle the urgent and inescapable human question: what way of life should I follow? Infinite things are at stake. But clearly, most people do not have the genius, the education, the experience, the energy, or the time to engage in such a vast philosophical and theological quest. It is an impossible burden. Thus, if the rational animal—in its lack of instinct, its radical freedom, its desperate ignorance—had only reason to guide it, it would have died out long ago, crippled by uncertainty, confusion, indecision, and disagreement, paralyzed before a world of questions that it cannot answer and cannot leave unanswered. In reality, what enables us to live—to find some kind of surety and agreement—is the existence of a second faculty within us, something more closed and blind than reason, but more open and searching than instinct: custom or tradition, social convention, culture, mores, law, nomos. It is custom that makes life possible—for the individual and the community—by authoritatively settling the question that (for all but a few philosophers) we cannot settle using our reason: the question of how to live.

Reason and custom—human life is largely a product of these two very different forces. To a considerable extent, of course, they work together: often what reason discovers becomes imbedded in custom, so that culture is preserved and transmitted, without having to be rediscovered by each individual. But in a deeper sense the two are opposite and antagonistic powers—a fundamental conflict within human souls and societies.

From the standpoint of reason and philosophy, custom is the great obstacle. Custom is the natural counterpoison to reason: it is what enables us to stop reasoning, to cease questioning, doubting, and searching. It does this by providing an alternative ground of belief—an alternative source of closure and decision, of certainty, confidence, and consensus—independent of reason.

What is more, it preemptively protects this alternative belief from being undermined by reason by putting the latter to sleep, as it were. Reason is set in motion by the awareness of arbitrariness or contingency. It is driven to wonder at and to question everything accidental or ungrounded—driven to seek the cause, the explanation, the underlying necessity. “Why this and not something else?” But custom is precisely the power to bestow upon the contingent the appearance of necessity. It makes us feel that what is and has been must be, that it simply cannot be otherwise. It thus settles all important questions invisibly, before they are raised, hiding the very possibility of alternatives that would have to be compared. By closing off the occasion for wonder or doubt, custom puts reason to sleep. There is nothing left to think about. Custom surely does not cure our radical ignorance; rather, it covers it over, seducing us to live unexamined lives. In the slumber world of customary society, it requires a great feat of defamiliarization—definitive of the philosophic effort—to wake up and recover knowledge of our ignorance.

Conversely, from the standpoint of custom or customary society, reason and philosophy necessarily pose a grave danger. They threaten to uncover the arbitrariness, the groundlessness, the false necessity of custom, of the whole belief system that grounds society and ordinary life. And what is more, they threaten to reveal that beneath the false floor of custom—covered over by it—lies, not a clear and obvious natural or instinctive ground, but a terrifying (if also bracing and alluring) abyss of ignorance regarding the most important things.

THE THREE ELEMENTS OF CUSTOMARY AUTHORITY

The radical opposition between reason and custom, which we have seen in a general way, can be made more concrete and vital if we stop to ask the question: How does custom work? What hold does it have over us? How does it get us to believe its claims and obey its strictures? The great power that custom exercises over human minds and hearts seems to stem from three distinct forces. And each of them will be seen to be in fundamental tension with reason.²⁰

The force of custom is, in the first place, the force of habit. Free of instinct, the human animal is instead a creature of habit: we develop an inclination, fondness, and loyalty for that to which, over a long period of time, we have become “accustomed.”

But this role of habituation leads to an essential tension between custom or customary law and reason, as Aristotle states in his classic reply to those who assert that the laws should be as open to change and reform as are the crafts or arts, the most elementary manifestation of reason.

The argument from the example of the arts is false. Change in an art is not like change in law; for law has no strength with respect to obedience apart from habit, and this is not created except over a period of time. Hence the easy alteration of existing laws in favor of new and different ones weakens the power of law itself.²¹

Since custom works through habituation, which requires changelessness, a healthy traditional society is an essentially static society. It is sleepy and conservative. It stubbornly resists change—a fact much noted and deplored by modernizers—and by its nature it must do so. But this puts it in necessary conflict with reason, the arts, and philosophy, which are essentially dynamic phenomena, thriving on diversity, change, daring, innovation, and progress, and which naturally despise the arbitrary and stifling fixity of custom.

A custom is the habit not merely of an individual, however, but of a whole community. Customs are “our ways.” Thus, the power of custom over our minds derives not merely from “force of habit” but also from “social pressure.” It is reasonable that the near-unanimous judgment of society and especially of its oldest and most respected members should carry a great authority. But this rational deference to collective wisdom is further enforced by the unreasoning weight of public opinion, of honor and disgrace, which reward conformity and punish deviance. Custom, in other words, draws much of its power from a certain natural inclination within groups toward conformity, closed-mindedness, and intolerance. This is an inclination that modern culture deplores and fights against as senseless but that would seem to be essential (within measure) to the self-preservation of a traditional society, since its authority and worldview are supported, not by rational, objective demonstration, but only by the brute fact of long-standing agreement. “This is how it should be done, because . . . this is how we have always done it.” Outside the communal consensus lies an abyss. Therefore, the very demonstration that it is possible to be different is deeply threatening. Hence people naturally fear the stranger and hate what is foreign. They rally to the defense of “our ways” with clannish, ethnocentric, xenophobic fervor. “Our ways are right and good because they are ours.” Loyalty—the love of and belief in what is one’s own simply because it is one’s own—is the foundation of all wisdom.

But philosophy (as it was classically understood) is, by its nature, in conflict with this whole mode of thinking: it is fundamentally disloyal, a traitor in our midst, indifferent and even hostile to what is our own as merely our own. It looks beyond our own to the intrinsically good, beyond custom to nature. It gazes upon the foreign with wonder and delight, seeking to liberate itself from the familiar, from the shared commitments and unquestioned assumptions of the community. It hungers for de-immersion and defamiliarization. It seeks to stand outside the community, detached and objective, resting on the impartial ground of rational argument and empirical evidence. Nietzsche is particularly struck with this point and sees it clearly expressed in the writings of Plato:

Plato has given us a splendid description of how the philosophical thinker must within every existing society count as the paragon of all wickedness: for as critic of all customs he is the antithesis of the moral man, and if he does not succeed in becoming the lawgiver of new customs he remains in the memory of men as ‘the evil principle.’²²

But a habit that is shared by the whole community is still not all that is meant by a custom or tradition. It must also be very old—and more: ancestral. This is the third and greatest source of its power. Things that are very old, like those that are very large, naturally inspire awe, since they dwarf our own limited extension in time and space. The ancient customs come to us from the distant past—a haunting “beyond,” forever inaccessible to us. We also revere such customs because they represent the consensus of long generations of men, as well as the product of a searching test of time.

But the key point here is that the customs are not merely old but ancestral: they are the “ways of our fathers and forefathers.” The authority of the old is related to that of parents over children. The customs are not impersonal: they are the commands of our most ancient fathers—the highest authority in a traditional, patriarchal society.

Yet if this ancestral authority (and all these other factors) stood alone, without further support, it could not hold out against the debunking of ancient custom contained in the following reflection:

The first [human beings], whether they were earthborn or preserved from a cataclysm, are likely to have been similar to average or even simpleminded persons [today] . . . so it would be odd to abide by the opinions they hold. (Aristotle, Politics 1269a3–8)

Were not the ancestors ignorant primitives? Isn’t the old actually inferior to the new, the past inferior to the present? The idea of progress threatens to subvert the hold of tradition. Thus, what ultimately vindicates the reverence for custom (and for patriarchal authority in general) is the traditional belief—essentially religious—that our ancestors were not primitives but somehow vastly superior to ourselves. We have not progressed beyond them; we are fallen from their elevated status.

There is a sort of logic to this view. Just as parents are stronger and wiser than children, so the ancestors are still greater than the parents. In general, what comes earlier must be superior to what comes later, since the former has created or begotten the latter. Indeed, thinking one’s way back to the very beginning of the world, one realizes that the divine beings of the first age, who, without being the offspring of any earlier generation, generated the world itself, must have been absolutely the most powerful. In our own late and feeble age, this power has either diminished or withdrawn from the world since changes of such magnitude—the formation of great mountains and seas—no longer occur. But our earliest ancestors were close to this power, in the high-water mark of the world, a golden age when heroes strode the earth and men conversed with gods.

The ancient traditions, then, handed down by the ancestors to us poor, fallen epigones are to be cherished and revered as deriving from a divine source far greater and wiser than ourselves. Custom, then, in its fullest meaning, is not merely a parental or patriarchal idea, but a religious one: custom is the divine law. Customary society is in its essence a religious society, a sacred community. It is necessarily sacred, not only because the customs and laws, making strenuous demands upon the citizens, need to be enforced by divine rewards and punishments, but also and more fundamentally because the wisdom and superiority of the ancestral are ultimately intelligible only on a divine basis. The whole orientation of society by custom—the trust we place in it, the security we find in it—makes sense, in the end, only if it is sacred. That is why no premodern philosopher—no thinker before Pierre Bayle, to be exact—ever openly argued that society could be separated from religion. Traditional society is a religious phenomenon.

This foundational belief in the divine character of the past, of the customary law, and of the community founded upon it represents the third and greatest source of inescapable tension between philosophic rationalism and traditional society. Reason threatens not only the fixity needed for habituation and the loyalty needed for communal agreement, but also and above all the crucial attitude of faith in and reverence for the gods and the divine law.

In other words, what it means, on the deepest level, for a society to be “traditional” is not merely that its subjects happen to follow old habits and customs, but that, on some level, they understand themselves to be fallen from the originary fullness of the world, from the divine era; that they live in remembrance and repentance, in hunger for the past; that they cleave to tradition—to that which has been given them by their ancestors—with sacred awe as their sole, tenuous link to the ever-receding, life-giving, divine source. Conversely, they shrink in horror from everything that might cause them to forget or turn away from their ancestral ways. Novelty and innovation are essentially betrayal. The arts, while necessary, are deeply suspect—eternally gnawed upon by anxiety and guilt, as Prometheus would discover. The proud claim to a knowledge of good and evil independent of the divine law is the fundamental sin. For all man’s wisdom is fear of the Lord. And the pseudo-wisdom of the philosophers—which recklessly refuses to accept and revere the ancestral, to accept anything that cannot be made present here and now to our own unassisted human faculties—is altogether unholy and insane.

Owing to this third, religious dimension, the fundamental conflict between the philosophic way of life and traditional society was also known in classical times as the “old quarrel between philosophy and poetry,” as Plato puts it (Republic 607b; see Laws 967c–d). For the poets were, if in a complex way, the spokesmen for and defenders of the sacred customs and the gods. Sophocles’s classic tragedy Oedipus tyrannus, as well as Aristophanes’s great comedy the Clouds, portray the destructive consequences of seeking forbidden knowledge, of allowing reason to venture beyond the bounds of sacred custom—consequences that culminate, in both plays, in the violation of the basic precondition of patriarchal authority and traditional society: the sacred taboos against father beating and incest. The danger of knowledge is extreme and ultimate. Euripides in the Bacchaestates the moral: “The ancestral traditions, which have been ours time out of mind—no argument [logos] can cast these down: not even if invented by the cleverness of the most exalted minds.” And therefore: “Moderation and reverence for that which pertains to the gods—this is best. And I think it the wisest practice in use by mortal men.”²³ But this is the very opposite of what the philosophers practice.

Today, of course, the “old quarrel between philosophy and poetry” sounds as alien and opaque to our ears as does the conflict between reason and society, with which we are trying to reconnect. But the former does at least have a close analog of which we do have immediate understanding: the famous conflict of “reason vs. revelation.” According to the latter, the philosophic life, constituted by the principled refusal to accept anything of importance on faith, stands in necessary conflict with—in violation of—the life based upon faith or revelation. The one seeks autonomy and self-reliance; the other, reverent devotion and obedience. The “reason vs. revelation” formula is useful for bringing out the essentially religious character of the conflict we have been discussing here, as well as for showing its absolute, unbridgeable character. It involves a fundamental either/or that does not allow of genuine escape or compromise.

Yet for all its usefulness in this context (and its inherent profundity), the Christian formula “reason vs. revelation” does also somewhat distort the original meaning of the “reason vs. society” conflict we are trying to clarify. For Christianity tends to sever or obscure the intimate connection between the new term it introduces, “revelation,” and the term it replaces “society.” “Reason vs. revelation” leaves out the political dimension of the original conflict, or, more precisely, it obscures the way in which the political dimension is inseparable from the religious, the way in which society is a religious phenomenon and religion a political one.

“Revelation,” as understood within Christianity, is a remarkably apolitical phenomenon: it concerns certain abstract and ultimate truths or principles, but not the concrete social customs, mores, and usages and not the political regime that orders everyday social life. In striking contrast to Greek and Roman paganism and even to Judaism and Islam, Christianity does not claim to be the source of the law, of the local traditions and mores. Indeed, Jesus broke with Judaism precisely by abolishing or transcending the Mosaic law as well as the attachment to a particular people or nation. Christianity is a transcendent or universal religion of faith that, as such, has detached itself from the specific mores, customs, laws, and political constitutions existing within a particular society. Thus, in principle, it separates religion from politics, what is God’s from what is Caesar’s, the church from the state, and so divides—or rather complicates and obscures—the essential unity of what might properly be called the theologico-political realm. (This crucial separation of politics and religion was then later reinforced and deepened by the modern, liberal state.)

Pagan religion, by contrast, was highly political. In the classical city, according to Fustel de Coulanges, “all political institutions had been religious institutions, the festivals had been ceremonies of worship, the laws had been sacred formulas, and the kings and magistrates had been priests.”²⁴One might add that these institutions were also “moral” institutions. Our unique modern tendency to separate out the concepts and the realms of “morality,” “politics,” and “religion”—a product partly of Christianity and partly of modern philosophy—profoundly alters these phenomena and certainly is untrue to (pre-Christian) traditional society. The term “ancestral customs,” for example, refers—as we are still able to sense—to something necessarily moral and religious at the same time, and also political. And it is doubtful whether these inner connections are ever fully broken: all moral ideas contain within themselves, however deeply buried, certain background beliefs about how the world works, about what should and does rule, both politically and cosmically.

Thus, the familiar formula “reason vs. revelation” is very helpful in giving us an immediate and intuitive grasp of what is ultimately at stake in the conflict between philosophy and traditional society—the religious aspect—but it does so at the price of obscuring the inner relation between the theological and the political dimensions of that conflict. (It turns out, in other words, that it is not only modern political thought or the liberal Enlightenment but also to some extent Christianity that is responsible for our modern estrangement from the issue we have been discussing.) The formula “reason vs. custom” is somewhat more revealing and comprehensive. For custom, in its full sense, is the ancestral and divine law—it is “revelation”—but, at the same time, it extends to the concrete mores, usages, and institutions that shape every aspect of daily social and political life.

Yet, to push the matter still further, one could say that the word “custom,” which we have been using all along, like “revelation,” is still too narrow and insufficiently political. In the vocabulary of classical political thought, the polis (city) is the name given to the comprehensive and indivisible whole we have been discussing: the moral-theological-political community. The classical polis—which is the fullest development of what I have been calling “traditional society”—is the complete association. It brings moral, political, and religious life to their peak. It is the natural home and chosen vehicle, as it were, of the sacred, the primary manifestation of the will and power of the gods on earth. With this in mind, the most philosophically adequate formulation of the conflict under discussion (which subsumes that between reason and revelation) is: “the philosopher vs. the city.” By resolutely sticking to his own, autonomous reason as the sole ground of his beliefs, the philosopher immediately places himself outside and in subversive opposition to the sacred city—to the comprehensive customary world of religious reverence, political loyalty, and moral duty, to the moral-theological-political whole. In other words, philosophic rationalism stands in opposition not merely to “revelation”—if that means certain abstract, suprapolitical theological and moral principles—but to the whole sacred communal fabric of traditional life from top to bottom.

And just as philosophy necessarily threatens the city, so also conversely. Philosophy first arose out of traditional society through (among other factors) the subversive realization that different societies have different and even contradictory traditions, mores, and accounts of the origins. Struck by this conflict of views, the philosopher resolves to seek the one, true account. But he knows that his mind is not a blank slate, that he begins not from ignorance but from prejudice and ethnocentric illusion. To seek the truth, then, he must begin by freeing himself from that which blocks the truth, from the “cave.” And he has seen that the primary source of illusion is the world of tradition—the customs, mores, and myths—sustaining and sustained by each culture or society. Therefore, in his pursuit of truth, he must struggle with all his might to free himself from the city, the cave, the community of sacred custom. Society along with its most essential beliefs are, in a sense, his greatest enemy. In other words, philosophy emerges as the pursuit of phusis or nature, which is understood in contradistinction to nomos—law, custom, convention. Therefore, there is something necessarily—and literally—antinomian and outlaw about the philosophic way of life.

REPUBLICAN VIRTUE

Thus far, we have discussed, in its multiple aspects, the systematic conflict between reason and custom as such (regardless of the particular content of that custom). We turn now to consider the concrete opposition between philosophy and certain specific customs, those relating to what used to be called “republican virtue.”

In traditional society, a crucial element of the social bond is the moral commitment of the citizens to the welfare of the community. This is especially emphasized by the classical republican tradition, to which most premodern thinkers and many moderns subscribed. It held that the indispensable precondition of political liberty and social health is “republican virtue,” an austere, strenuous, and selfless patriotism. (This, of course, is a claim foreign to the modern world of large, individualistic, commercial republics based on enlightened self-interest. Once again, a great effort is required to reconnect with the experiences and inner problematic of a vanished world.)

There was an ancient art of republican morals, now lost, and it taught that to cultivate and protect this ardent public-spiritedness, it is necessary to eliminate everything that softens and “privatizes” men—materialism, luxury, hedonism, inequality, idleness, sedentary ways—and to promote everything that hardens and mobilizes them: “Spartan” austerity and simplicity, discipline, continuous and vigorous activity, a martial spirit, and a healthy dose of xenophobia.

But the contemplative or philosophic life, if seen openly for what it is, is diametrically opposed to virtue understood in this activist and militantly patriotic way. By drawing the mind upward to the eternal cosmos, philosophy withdraws the heart from the city, which, from such a height, suddenly looks small, particular, imperfect, and ephemeral. As the quest for the universal and permanent, philosophy is necessarily at odds with the particular and transitory, with the here and now, with loyalty to one’s own. Philosophy conflicts with the city as cosmopolitanism conflicts with patriotism.

Furthermore, it substitutes the contemplative for the active posture, undermining patriotic mobilization and promoting leisure and idleness. It legitimizes and even ennobles the private, sedentary life and self-indulgence—heretofore the most shameful things—by showing a private pleasure that can claim to be even loftier than public duty. It also encourages gentleness, understanding, and a contemplative passivity that sap the martial spirit. Nothing, in sum, could be more destructive of republican virtue and the outlook of the patriotic citizen. Sparta and philosophy do not go together.

Thus, Machiavelli, reflecting on the historical cycle of regimes, the law of the rise and fall of states, observes:

Virtue gives birth to quiet, quiet to leisure, leisure to disorder, disorder to ruin; and similarly, from ruin, order is born; from order, virtue; and from virtue, glory and good fortune. . . . For as good and ordered armies give birth to victories and victories to quiet, the strength of well-armed spirits cannot be corrupted by a more honorable leisure than that of letters. . . . This was best understood by Cato when the philosophers Diogenes and Carneades, sent by Athens as spokesmen to the Senate, came to Rome. When he saw how the Roman youth was beginning to follow them about with admiration, and since he recognized the evil that could result to his fatherland from this honorable leisure, he saw to it that no philosopher could be accepted in Rome.²⁵

Eventually, of course, Cato lost the struggle to keep philosophy out of Rome. The result is described by Rousseau in his famous Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, a radical restatement, from the heart of the Enlightenment, of the classical republican view:

Rome was filled with philosophers and orators; military discipline was neglected, agriculture was scorned, [philosophic] sects were embraced and the fatherland forgotten. The sacred names of liberty, disinterestedness, obedience to laws were replaced by the names Epicurus, Zeno, Arcesilas.²⁶

A similar argument was made in the Athenian context by Aristophanes, who attacked and ridiculed Socrates, Euripides, and the whole fifth-century Greek enlightenment for having corrupted the morals and sapped the political and military strength of Athens. Again, Montaigne reports:

When the Goths ravaged Greece, what saved all the libraries from being set afire was that one of the invaders spread the opinion that this item might well be left intact to the enemy, to divert them from military exercises and keep them busy in sedentary and idle occupations.²⁷

All of this strikes modern ears as strange and overwrought. But to the traditional and especially the classical republican world, it was only moral common sense: contemplation and citizenship—the life of thought and the life of action—are fundamentally different and opposed. As Seneca testified, in a sentence quoted approvingly by Montaigne and again by Rousseau: “Since learned men have begun to appear among us, good men have disappeared.”²⁸

Some empirical support for this conflictual view of theory and praxis can also be found in certain basic facts of history. It is a common observation that the political peaks of nations and their intellectual peaks rarely coincide (particularly in premodern times). Where political health is at its height, especially as defined by the classical republican tradition—in the early Roman Republic, for instance, or in Sparta—philosophy is essentially excluded. Only as political health and republican virtue begin to decay do philosophers and other intellectuals begin to thrive. As W. E. H. Lecky writes in his classic History of European Morals:

It is one of the plainest of facts that neither the individuals nor the ages most distinguished for intellectual achievements have been most distinguished for moral excellence, and that a high intellectual . . . civilization has often coexisted with much depravity.²⁹

To be sure, this is a complicated issue with many special cases, but throughout most of history, the owl of Minerva, in Hegel’s famous phrase, has spread its wings only at dusk.

To sum up, the conflict between philosophy and the city, as we have thus far examined it, consists not simply in the opposition of certain specific philosophical theses (“dangerous truths”) to certain particular dogmas or laws of the city—although such oppositions do also exist, as we will see momentarily. Rather, it consists in a conflict between two incompatible ways of life. The city requires authoritative settlement and closure; philosophy demands openness and questioning. The city necessarily bases itself on custom, the philosopher seeks to base his life on reason—and these two foundations, custom and reason, are fundamentally opposed as fixity is opposed to innovation and dynamism, as loyalty to group belief is opposed to shameless, independent thinking, as humble and reverent obedience is opposed to autonomy and self-reliance, and as revelation is opposed to reason. Finally, the active, patriotic, self-sacrificing life of the classical, martial republic is contrary to the detached, cosmopolitan, gentle, and self-indulgent life of philosophic contemplation.

ON PIETY, PATRIOTISM, AND PLEASURE

In view of this systematic conflict, it would be surprising indeed if philosophers did not routinely make what efforts they could to manage and minimize its effects. Many of the maneuvers, described in the previous chapter, that philosophers undertook to escape persecution they undertook also to avoid harming society. In general, they sought to speak like the many, while thinking like the few. In their outward behavior, they endeavored to follow prevailing customs whatever these might be.

But to be more specific, foremost among these accommodations, as we have already seen at some length, was a certain level of religious imposture. As Augustine puts it, drawing upon writings of Seneca and Varro that we no longer possess:

[W]ith respect to these sacred rites of the civil theology, Seneca preferred, as the best course to be followed by a wise man, to feign respect for them in act, but to have no real regard for them at heart. . . . [Seneca] worshipped what he censured, did what he condemned, adored what he reproached, because, forsooth, philosophy had taught him something great—namely, not to be superstitious in the world, but, on account of the laws of cities and customs of men, to be an actor, not on the stage, but in the temples.³⁰

Similarly, Montaigne, speaking of the ancient philosophers in general, writes:

Some things they wrote for the needs of society, like their religions; and on that account it was reasonable that they did not want to bare popular opinions to the skin, so as not to breed disorder in people’s obedience to the laws and customs of their country.³¹

Even Epicurus, the ardent materialist and hedonist, respected prevailing mores in his outward behavior. As Diogenes Laertius asserts: “His piety towards the gods and his affection for his country no words can describe.”³²

Beyond the religious question, however, there are also certain other basic issues—pointed to in our analysis of the conflict of reason and society—that also typically called forth the philosopher’s protective esotericism. I will briefly touch upon two here.

The most obvious is mentioned in Diogenes’s statement about Epicurus, which emphasizes his “affection for his country,” his patriotism. For within most traditional societies—but especially the martial republics—if the philosopher is to avoid doing and receiving harm, he must show himself a lover not only of God but of country. Certainly Plato makes great efforts to present Socrates as a citizen-philosopher who, if he has alienated his fellow countrymen, has done so only through an excess of zeal for their virtue and for the welfare of Athens. Yet in other places, he lets us see a Socrates who acknowledges that even in the very best regime, the philosopher would not be willing to rule unless compelled.³³ In the Laws (803b–804b), Plato’s most political writing, the Athenian Stranger (the stand-in for Socrates) indicates his complex posture toward politics and human affairs as follows:

Stranger: Of course, the affairs of human beings are not worthy of great seriousness; yet it is necessary to be serious about them. And this is not a fortunate thing. . . .

Megillus: Stranger, you are belittling our human race in every respect!

Stranger: Don’t be amazed, Megillus, but forgive me! For I was looking away toward the god and speaking under the influence of that experience, when I said what I did just now. So let our race be something that is not lowly, then, if that is what you cherish, but worthy of a certain seriousness.

The philosopher takes politics and his city seriously, yet not because he cherishes it as a noble thing, inherently worthy of that seriousness, but merely as a practical necessity—especially as a concession to what nonphilosophers insistently cherish. This philosophical attitude toward politics was described by Pascal, who spoke of Plato and Aristotle as follows:

[W]hen they diverted themselves with writing their Laws and Politics, they did it as an amusement; it was the least philosophic and least serious part of their lives. . . . If they wrote on politics, it was as if to bring order into a lunatic asylum; and if they presented the appearance of speaking of a grand thing, it is because they knew that the madmen to whom they spoke believed themselves kings and emperors. They entered into the latter’s principles in order to make their madness as little harmful as possible.³⁴

One sees an element of this dissimulation even in Cicero, the most politically active of ancient philosophers. In his Laws and De finibus, he defends the highly political and moralistic Stoic doctrine; indeed he personally plays the role of the Stoic in these dialogues. And in his Republic, he—or rather the character Laelius—argues for a version of Stoicism that goes so far in its patriotism as to defend Rome as the best regime possible and its far-flung empire as completely in accord with natural law. But it is clear from his Tusculan Disputations and other writings that in reality Cicero is not a Stoic at all but an Academic Skeptic—that is, a member of the highly skeptical New Academy, which wholly rejected Stoicism, which questioned the validity of natural law, and which had no illusions about the defects and depredations of Rome as indeed of all political regimes.³⁵

This mask of citizenship—this exaggerated patriotism and republican virtue—worn by many of the ancient philosophers points, in turn, to the third very common item of protective esotericism: antihedonism or the extreme condemnation of pleasure. As we have seen, in traditional society and especially in the classical republics, the question of moral character was seen primarily in terms of the dichotomy “virtue vs. pleasure”: either one lives the strenuous life of duty, virtue, and public-spirited devotion, as the healthy republic requires, or one gives in to sensuality, hedonism, and self-indulgence. And it was believed that the majority of men, the “many,” are only too prone to the latter course, always ready, if one gives them so much as an inch of encouragement, to take a foot. Thus, many philosophers—knowing this tendency of the many and also fearing that the philosophic life, which itself involves a kind of higher self-indulgence, inevitably presented a dangerous and corrupting example—sought to counter this danger through an exaggerated, absolute condemnation of pleasure. In the Nicomachean Ethics, for example, Aristotle reports:

For some say pleasure is the good, others that pleasure is, to the contrary, an altogether base thing—some of these latter perhaps because they have been persuaded that pleasure is such in fact, others because they suppose it to be better with a view to our life to declare that pleasure is among the base things, even if it is not. For the many, they suppose, tend toward it and are in fact enslaved to pleasure. Hence one ought to lead them toward its contrary, since in this way they might arrive at the middle.³⁶

Aristotle goes on to say that he will not follow this practice, since it does not work in the long run, but he seems clearly to believe—from the critique of Plato that follows—that the latter did. Certainly, it has long been noticed that the Platonic dialogues combine many strong condemnations of pleasure with some curiously favorable discussions of it.³⁷ More generally, according to Montaigne:

In all the barracks of ancient philosophy you will find this, that the same workman publishes rules of temperance, and publishes at the same time amorous and licentious writings. . . . It is not that there is any miraculous conversion stirring them by fits and starts. Rather it is this: that Solon represents himself now as himself, now in the shape of a lawgiver; now he speaks for the crowd, now for himself. . . .

For delicate stomachs we need strict and artificial diets. Good stomachs simply follow the prescriptions of their natural appetite. So do our doctors, who eat the melon and drink the new wine while they keep their patient tied down to syrups and slops.

We must often be deceived that we may not deceive ourselves, and our eyes sealed, our understanding stunned, in order to redress and amend them. “For it is the ignorant who judge, and they must frequently be deceived, lest they err” [Quintilian]. When they [the sages] order us to love three, four, fifty degrees of things before ourselves, they imitate the technique of the archers who, to hit the mark, take aim a great distance above the target. To straighten a bent stick you bend it back the other way.³⁸

Again, in Cicero’s dialogue the Laws, we are surprised to see Atticus—Cicero’s old friend and a lifelong Epicurean—agreeing here to the Stoic moral doctrine, with its condemnation of pleasure. Cicero seems clearly to suggest that whatever one’s private views of pleasure (as of the gods), it is necessary to play the Stoic in public.³⁹

Similarly, Averroes, in his commentary on Plato’s Republic, emphasizes the political need for noble lies, and he connects this above all to the question of pleasure:

The chiefs lying to the multitude will be appropriate for them. . . . Untrue stories are necessary for the teaching of the citizens. . . . Above all, they ought to reject statements that conduce to [preoccupation with the] pleasures. . . . They will listen to statements warning them to shun them.⁴⁰

It is important to reemphasize, before concluding, that the few passages cited here cannot begin to settle the question of where Plato or Aristotle or anyone else finally stood on the complex issues of piety, patriotism, and pleasure. (And the clear examples of Xenophon and Cicero suffice to show that, whatever the theoretical basis, philosophers can be first-rate generals and statesmen.) But they do strongly suggest that a philosopher’s surface assertions on these particular issues—issues vitally important to the health of the classical republic—may owe a lot to his dual effort to protect society and defend philosophy.

NOBLE LIES

Thus far, we have examined the general conflict between philosophy as a way of life and the way of life of traditional society, especially the classical republic. But beyond this, or rather as a part of it, one can also point to certain specific philosophical theses—certain “dangerous truths”—that are threatening to society. Or, to put it the other way around, there are certain salutary myths necessary to society.

The most obvious examples are quietly alluded to in Plato’s infamous account of the “noble lie” in the Republic (414b–415d).⁴¹ Here Plato, or his Socrates, is engaged in the effort to describe the best and most just society possible. It comes therefore as a great shock when Socrates declares that it is necessary to convince this society of a great myth or noble lie. That unjust regimes need to cover their crimes with lies comes as no great surprise. But the implication of Socrates’s claim is that somehow political life itself is flawed in such a way that even the best possible regime will be radically defective, will need to lie to itself about itself, will need to hide from certain dangerous truths. The noble lie may be said to contain four crucial claims—four lies that every traditional society must tell itself.

The first element of the noble lie—an assertion common in early societies—is that of “autochthony”: all of the citizens were originally born from the earth, which is their common mother. Traces of this primitive belief linger on even today when we find ourselves speaking of the motherland or fatherland. On the simplest level (and the one emphasized by Socrates), such a myth is obviously useful for motivating citizens to love and defend the motherland. But if that were the myth’s only purpose, it is not clear why it would be so absolutely necessary. Is patriotism impossible without it? Do not the natural forces of habituation and of gratitude lead us to love our homeland, just as they lead us to love our homes?

But there is a further, deeper issue here: the citizens cannot wholeheartedly love and defend their homeland unless they feel that it is theirs by right. But is it? While our maps have lines and boundaries on them, the earth does not. It has not been parceled up and distributed to the various peoples by nature or by any principle of deserving—but only by force and chance. Human beings are territorial land animals, and they possess the land they live on in the same way that other such animals—the lions of a given pride—possess their territory. Whatever may have been the case, say, fifty thousand years ago, before the earth was well populated, through all of recorded history there has scarcely been a people on earth that has acquired its land through any means other than forcibly displacing the previous inhabitants—who, however, had no just complaint since they, in turn, displaced the inhabitants before them. In short, virtually all existing societies are founded in conquest, though for some fortunate peoples, these events may be lost in the mists of time. This is the harsh reality that must be covered over by a myth of just origins: we were born from this land—or it is the Promised Land given to us by God, or we are owed it by Manifest Destiny.

To appreciate this issue, we must keep in mind that the originary violence at the beginning of society posed a much more obvious and powerful problem for traditional societies than for our own. The former, rooted in custom, are based on the belief in the superiority of the past to the present, on reverence for the ancestors or founders and for the traditions they bequeathed us. The fact of originary crime or usurpation therefore constitutes a direct challenge to the whole orientation by tradition. Thus, just as a supernatural event is needed, as we have seen, to account for or vindicate the wisdom of the ancient customs or laws, so also one is needed to explain and ground the rightful possession of the motherland.

Modern states, by contrast, are based, not on reverence for the sacred, ancestral order, but on fear of our original disorder, fear of return to the savage “state of nature,” and pride in our human conquest of this defective natural condition. They rest, in a word, on the faith in progress, not belief in tradition—on myths of the future, not of the past. That is why modern thinkers like Machiavelli and Hobbes go out of their way to emphasize and even exaggerate the originary violence, while ancient thinkers like Plato and Aristotle do their best to hide it (while pointing to it between the lines).⁴²

The second tenet of the noble lie, following directly from the first, is that the citizens, born of the common motherland, are all brothers—as, again, citizens even today will often rhetorically assert. And again, the purpose is not merely to express or heighten patriotism but, more important, to cover over another politically troublesome truth of the human condition: just as the earth has no natural boundary lines, so the human species is not divided up by nature into specific political groups—although we must live as if it were. Humanity is one, justice is universal—but states are particular. Human life is political life, which consists in arbitrarily separating off some portion of the human species and uniting it, largely through opposition to other such arbitrary units. Our moral and political existences are essentially organized around the distinction between insiders and outsiders, citizens and foreigners, although this distinction is ultimately arbitrary and false. Nature has not made Athenians and Spartans. The state would be truly just and rational only if it were universal, a world-state, but that is impossible (especially in premodern times). Reason demands cosmopolitanism; political life demands patriotism.

To be sure, we feel this problem less acutely in our modern, polyglot, globalizing society, where the distinction between citizens and foreigners daily becomes less significant (at least, during peacetime). Indeed, the modern social-contract state openly acknowledges its artificiality. Yet even today, we feel that if some people are starving or oppressed in, say, San Diego, that is terribly wrong, a great injustice, a scandal, and a moral reflection on all of us. We say: these are Americans! But should these very same people chance to live just a few miles to the south, in Tijuana, we think: well, it’s unfortunate, but it’s not our problem; that’s just the way the world is. The event has a fundamentally different moral status. The one is a matter of justice; the other, at most, of generosity or compassion.

This phenomenon—the connection between morals and borders—was far more pronounced through most of history, and especially in the classical republics. The operative morality was necessarily “citizen morality”: do good to friends and harm to enemies. And this moral orientation is fundamentally in tension with the fact that it is only by chance that this particular person is a fellow citizen to whose rights and welfare I dedicate my life, instead of a foreigner to whose interests I am indifferent or hostile. As Pascal writes in the Pensées:

Why do you kill me?—What! do you not live on the other side of the water? My friend, if you lived on this side, I should be an assassin, and it would be unjust to slay you in this way; but since you live on the other side, I am a hero, and it is just. (No. 293)

Outside the world-state, political life can never wholly escape this need to transmute certain accidental differences into morally essential distinctions. In the Republic, this problem is indicated also in the following manner. In book 1 (331e–335e), when Polemarchus defines justice as helping friends and harming enemies, Socrates, through a somewhat playful and ultimately aporetic argument, brings him momentarily to admit that true justice consists in helping all human beings and harming no one. Yet later, in book 2 (375a–e), when Socrates is engaged in constructing the best possible regime, he is compelled to reinstate the citizen morality that he earlier rejected: the ruling “guardians” must be like “noble dogs” who are friendly to citizens as such and hostile to foreigners as such. Political life requires a myth that hides the cosmopolitan truth, the fact of our common humanity, and justifies the arbitrary exclusivity of the political community: we citizens are a race apart, we are all brothers born from this land—or a single family, the seed of Abraham, or a distinct “nationality” with its own Volksgeist or “general will,” or a unique “culture” with group rights.

What we have seen so far is that political life unites by dividing: it cuts off a piece of the earth and a piece of humanity and then uses a noble lie to give this arbitrary cut the appearance of a moral unit and a natural whole. But a political community also requires an internal “cut”: the distinction of rulers and ruled. Perfect unanimity, the rule of all, is not possible; and therefore, within every society, some part of the whole—one, few, or many—must rule over the rest. The choice of rulers, then, is in need of justification, and that is the purpose of the third tenet of the noble lie. When the citizens were formed beneath the earth, Socrates’s tale continues, the god mixed iron and bronze into those naturally destined for the farmer and artisan class, silver into those naturally fit for the auxiliary or military class, and gold into those individuals who were naturally meant to rule.

Yet one may ask why a myth is needed to justify this hierarchy. At least on Plato’s principles and those of most classical thinkers, it is true that certain individuals have a natural right to rule. Human beings are not all the same, not all equal, not all fit for the same jobs. Some are far more wise and virtuous than others, and these most admirable individuals, they argued, are the natural rulers, for they alone can rule well, that is, justly and wisely. Rational rule is rule of the rational. So if there is a natural, rational basis for the ruler/ruled division, what need is there of a myth?

The need arises from still another basic defect of the human condition that undermines the political power and relevance of the true “natural rulers.” Although wisdom and virtue are indeed essential for the proper exercise of rule, and although they are genuine, objective qualities, they are not externally obvious, they are not readily visible to others, especially to those who, lacking them, most need to recognize and defer to them. Owing to this crucial problem of invisibility, the truly natural or rational principle of rule—“The wise and virtuous should rule the foolish and vicious”—will, in practice, almost always result in a chaotic free-for-all, as various possessors and pretenders to excellence advance their claims. If only nature were better arranged, if only the internal excellence of the mind and character were unfailingly correlated with some clear and easily measured external expression—say, height—then the rights of wisdom and virtue would have effect in the world, then political authority could be directly based on reason and truth. But as it is, the only fully rational ground for rule is politically unusable, and therefore all actual rule must legitimize itself through some recourse to convention and myth: the rulers are a golden race, or of superior blood, or descendants of the gods, or anointed by divine right. In virtually all traditional societies, the government’s claim to legitimate authority was based in one way or another on myth.

The fourth part of the noble lie addresses and justifies a fourth necessary but highly problematic division among the inhabitants of every developed society. The rise of civilization—of an economic surplus, leisure, and the higher development of reason and the arts—is made possible only by the division of labor. But, as we have already seen, this leads to the grave problem that certain jobs that are necessary to society are harmful to the individuals who must do them. The rise of civilization is purchased at the price of social justice. This crucial, “civilizing” institution can be justified only if traced to nature or the gods. Thus, according to the noble lie, the citizens, when born from the earth, emerged together with the tools of their particular trade. Human beings, like bees, are born and naturally suited for all the particular jobs that society needs and in just the right numbers. There are natural garbage men and natural coal miners.

Also natural slaves. The problem of the division of labor taken in its most extreme and obvious form is the problem of slavery. The economic precondition for the high level of freedom and civilization of the ancient Greek and Roman republics was an enormous slave class. Prior to the industrial revolution, in fact, highly civilized societies were unavoidably built on the existence of serfs, slaves, or some other form of economic exploitation. That is why, when Aristotle, at the beginning of the Politics (1253b15–1255b40), makes his classic argument for the naturalness of the polis, he is under the plain necessity of arguing—as his version of Plato’s noble lie—that of course we human beings come in two kinds: natural masters and natural slaves.⁴³ The plain fact is, all developed traditional societies were built on massive, manifest, and unavoidable oppression, and they required myths to justify this.

THE MYTHS OF ORDINARY LIFE

The above discussion has emphasized the conflict between rationalism and politics strictly understood. But many other aspects of practical life involve a similar conflict with reason. Consider a few obvious examples.

The passion of romantic love is famous for its rootedness in illusion. It calls upon us to embrace an exaggerated view of the virtues of our beloved, of the power of love, and of the indissolubility, even the eternity, of the romantic bond.

The institution of the family, especially the traditional, aristocratic family, rests on certain necessary illusions such as the heritability of worth or nobility (the belief in “blood”) and such as the inherent superiority of the ancestors to the present generation, of old to young, of the oldest son to the rest of the children, and of men to women. It also rests on the hope that when we are dead, we somehow truly live on in our progeny.

The passion for fame or glory rests on the illusion that our name can live eternally and that, if it did, this could somehow matter to us when we are dead.

The limitless desire for money grows from the illusion that there are limitless pleasures or that there is some amount of wealth that can bring us absolute security.

We also embrace illusion in our opinions of ourselves—our estimate of our worth and rank within society and ultimately within the universe.

Ordinary life is suffused with “noble lies.” As Lessing, in an early comedy, has one of his characters state: “We are meant to live happily in the world. . . . Whenever the truth is a hindrance to this great final purpose, one is bound to set it aside, for only a few spirits can find their happiness in the truth itself.”⁴⁴ Indeed, where is the person who lives without illusion, whose life could withstand the scrutiny of Socratic examination? This question, in fact, forms the core of the Platonic defense of philosophy: the philosophic life is better than others not simply because more satisfying, but because it is the only truly honest, self-consistent, and “disillusioned” life. In one manner or another, all others embrace “the lie within the soul.”

What is it in human nature that shrinks from the truth and courts illusion? Perhaps only a true philosopher in the above sense could be in a position to address this question fully and conclusively. But it seems fairly clear that an important part of the answer concerns the problem of mortality. On this telling, the stubborn dualism within human life ultimately derives from the fact that every instinct and longing of our nature pushes us toward preservation and life, but our unique faculty of reason shows us that we and everything that we love must die. This is why every subphilosophic soul is in some way at war with itself and with the truth. We live in denial of death.

Presumably for this reason, Plato’s Socrates, in the Phaedo (64a), does not define philosophy as knowledge of the ideas or of the metaphysical truth: “Those who pursue philosophy aright study nothing but dying and being dead.” Psychologically, this is the hardest thing for a human being to do. As La Rochefoucauld remarks: “Neither the sun nor death can be looked at fixedly.”⁴⁵ Again, Montaigne states:

It is only for first-class men to dwell purely on the thing itself [death], consider it, and judge it. It belongs to the one and only Socrates to become acquainted with death with an ordinary countenance, to become familiar with it, and play with it. He seeks no consolation outside the thing itself; dying seems to him a natural and indifferent incident. He fixes his gaze precisely on it, and makes up his mind to it, without looking elsewhere.⁴⁶

But very few are able to fix their gaze in this way, staring reality in the face. In the Platonic metaphor, which has become a standard trope, the light of truth is too strong for most eyes.

Whatever the full reason for this fact, the natural response to it, to say it one last time, is clear: protective esotericism. As Synesius of Cyrene puts it:

Philosophic intelligence, though an observer of truth, acquiesces in the use of falsehood. Just consider this analogy: light is to the truth as the eye is to the intellect. Just as it would be harmful for the eye to feast on unlimited light and just as darkness is more helpful to diseased eyes, so, I assert, falsehood is of advantage to the demos and the truth would be harmful to those not strong enough to peer steadfastly on the clear revelation of that which truly is.⁴⁷

Similarly, Shaftesbury writes:

’Tis the same with Understandings as with Eyes: To such a certain Size and Make just so much light is necessary, and no more. Whatever is beyond, brings Darkness and Confusion. ’Tis real Humanity and Kindness to hide strong truths from tender eyes.⁴⁸

Finally, consider Emily Dickinson:

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth’s superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind—⁴⁹

DO “SUBVERSIVE IDEAS” REALLY SUBVERT?

I have been laboring to give some inner plausibility to the classical view that an inherent tension between reason and ordinary life makes protective esotericism necessary. It could be argued, however, that even if one acknowledged the reality of this tension, the need for such esotericism would still not necessarily follow.

People today will incline to make the following objection. The whole theory of protective esotericism exaggerates the power of reason or truth. Precisely if the classical thinkers are right in stressing the great psychological force and social necessity of illusion, these illusions are likely to have the strength and staying power to withstand the contrary opinions of a few philosophers. Our illusions are not brittle like glass, ready to shatter at the mere touch of truth. No nihilistic abyss will open up beneath our feet. People will not run wild in the streets. Given the psychological weakness of reason, “dangerous truths,” in practice, are not truly dangerous, and thus esoteric protection is not really necessary.

It is very true, as this objection suggests, that the manner in which illusion and truth interact within the human mind and within society is a question demanding some delicacy. There is no precise science of human irrationality, no accurate sociology of false beliefs. It can sometimes happen in certain individuals that illusion does indeed shatter like glass, that the scales fall from one’s eyes. But that is rare. Particularly within societies, beliefs tend to change gradually and one must track their mutations in terms of generations.

Still, there is nothing implausible in the classical supposition that if philosophers, the most impressive minds of their times, always spoke openly about their rejection of prevailing beliefs, then over time these beliefs would, not indeed shatter, but weaken or decay or be distorted in some important manner. In different historical conditions, of course, this weakening of fundamental beliefs will involve very different consequences. It can certainly lead to the weakening of restraints—moral and social—upon our baser impulses and thus to an increase in lawlessness or antisocial behavior. But even where it does not unleash our worst impulses, it can lead to the weakening of our best ones; that is, to the decline of idealism, commitment, and striving and thus to listlessness and apathy or to a degraded concentration on narrow self-indulgence.

Again, the undermining of fundamental beliefs can lead to uncertainty and anxiety, which in turn produce depression, withdrawal, and hopelessness. Or this same uncertainty can produce the fanatical embrace of new, more dogmatic certainties that are more hardened against the questioning power of reason. Under very favorable circumstances, the undermining of existing beliefs can lead to the formation of new ones that are healthier. There is no general rule. It is a matter of political judgment. Therefore, just as philosophers, in their strategies to protect themselves from society, had to assess the unique dangers and resources existing in their particular time and place, so also in their efforts to protect society from their philosophic activity they had to determine which of the prevailing myths and prejudices could be openly questioned without long-term ill effects and which could not.

Even in the face of this more nuanced statement, however, contemporary thinkers are still likely to remain skeptical. People today, shaped by the unique intellectual conditions prevailing within modern liberal democracies, are strongly inclined to doubt that protective esotericism was ever really necessary in any historical circumstances. For our constant experience is this: we see that opinions long considered outrageous and subversive eventually get openly expressed and yet the nation prospers. It seems an empirical fact: so-called harmful truths simply do no harm.

The clearest and most extreme example of this phenomenon concerns the now widespread doctrine of historicism or cultural relativism—the view that moral values and social norms have no objective or universal validity but derive from the arbitrary commitments of one’s culture, which are not intrinsically superior to the different or opposite commitments of other cultures. As this doctrine was developing over the last two hundred years, it was accompanied by dire warnings that, if accepted, it would produce a condition of nihilistic angst and paralysis and destroy all firm sense of right and wrong. But today in America a large proportion of the population has come to embrace some version of historical relativism, and yet life goes on pretty much as before. We have become a nation of cheerful nihilists and moralistic relativists.

Thus, our very experience of ourselves—and of the most radical doctrines—has taught us firsthand that somehow subversive ideas do not subvert. Reason is superficial; talk is cheap; ideas hardly matter. That is ultimately why we find it so hard to take seriously the argument for protective esotericism. In the end, we actually agree with the classical view that all social life is based on illusion or myth or commitments without foundation. We disagree—strangely—only by asserting that this momentous fact does not really matter.

That is how we are given to see things today. Thus, in order to judge accurately of the attitudes and esoteric practices of past ages concerning “dangerous ideas,” we need to appreciate just how historically atypical is our whole experience of the role of ideas. Unfortunately, an adequate analysis of this phenomenon would require more space and a better sociology of beliefs than are available. Some brief suggestions will have to suffice.

I have already argued that, from the beginning, the modern liberal state was invented with the express purpose of transforming our posture toward ideas, of making large moral and religious beliefs—the great source of instability and conflict—as politically irrelevant as possible. The state was placed on a new foundation. Liberal citizens would unite, no longer on the basis of moral and religious agreement, but on the basis of a shared fear of disagreement. The community of beliefs would be replaced by a community of interests. A new world of practice was thus created that was remarkably “ideologically neutral” and impervious to large ideas. And over time, such a world naturally tended to generate citizens who were similarly impervious, whose every observation and experience taught them that ideas mattered less, did less work in the world, than earlier ages had for some reason supposed.

To be sure, this world suffered a major shock in the twentieth century with the rise of fascism and communism and the deadly serious battle of ideas that ensued. But these battles over, we soon settled back into “the end of ideology” if not “the end of history.” (It is still too soon to tell how the struggle with Islamic fundamentalism may alter this situation.) The rapid spread of postmodernism in the post-cold-war period can be said to represent the ultimate fulfillment (if by different means) of the original early modern intention to drain all “grand narratives” of their seriousness and weight.

This attitude toward ideas has been further reinforced by the effect on people of the extreme openness and freedom of speech that the new ideologically neutral state made possible. When people grow up in an environment where everything is openly disputed and questioned, with shocking and contrarian opinions on constant display, a common result is that they eventually throw up their hands in despair and adopt a “who’s to say” posture toward all fundamental questions. As I hear all the time from my students: “Some people think this, others think that. It’s all a matter of opinion. You can believe whatever you like. It’s all good. Whatever.” As Marcuse put it in a famous essay, we suffer from “repressive tolerance”: amid all the constant chatter, everything gets talked to death, all edges are blunted, opposites are neutralized, and the mind anaesthetized.⁵⁰ At a certain point, a degree of mental numbness is reached where nothing sinks in, where ideas simply lose their power to shock or move us.

It is not that people today have no real or heartfelt beliefs, but under the pressure of an environment of great skepticism and dispute, they shelter these beliefs by pushing them underground. This too is a way to protect oneself from dangerous ideas. Thus, a gulf has opened up between what we think and what, deep down, we really believe. Our true beliefs have become increasingly unreachable, while our thinking has become increasingly insincere. As many observers of our condition have maintained, ours is the great “age of inauthenticity.” We no longer reason with our whole souls. We don’t connect. Some such account would seem to be necessary to explain the most remarkable intellectual phenomenon of our time: the proliferation of cheerful relativists and smiley-face nihilists who, as such, do not really believe what they think or think what they believe.

I have been arguing—very loosely, to be sure—that if our world has scorned and abandoned protective esotericism with no apparent ill effects, that is primarily because it has found new forms of protection against threatening ideas in the combination of political liberalism and personal inauthenticity. In our ideologically neutral and intellectually insincere world, subversive ideas have lost the power to subvert. We can no longer be shocked. So protective esotericism has become largely superfluous for us.

But if we understand how anomalous this state of affairs is, then we will not allow it to mislead us into the anachronistic conclusion that the situation was the same in the past and that people have always been as impervious to dangerous ideas as we are. The long history of persecution, if nothing else, testifies to the fact that past ages felt and feared the power of ideas. And thus philosophers of the past felt a powerful impulsion to embrace protective esotericism.

INAUTHENTICITY VS. ESOTERICISM

One further conclusion follows from the suggestion I have been making that, in the strange intellectual climate of late modernity, inauthenticity has largely replaced esotericism as our main intellectual defense mechanism. It powerfully illustrates the importance of the third motive for esoteric writing to which we now turn: the pedagogical motive.

We must keep in mind that while philosophers seek to protect people in general from the loss of their illusions, they also seek to help potential philosophers to escape theirs. That is indeed their primary task—philosophical education. Now, if illusion tended to shatter like glass at the touch of truth, the latter task at least—intellectual liberation—would be easy. But this is not the case. On the contrary, as we have just seen, when people are constantly confronted with more questions or more troubling ideas than they can handle at the moment, they will protect themselves in various ways, including a kind of intellectual withdrawal and numbness that prevents them from really feeling their thoughts. It may well be the case that, in our time, this condition of inauthenticity serves just as well as esotericism to protect society from subversion. But what it can never do is serve the needs of philosophical education. One might argue that inauthenticity, arising from the great openness and neutrality of liberal society, poses a far more elusive and stubborn obstacle to genuine philosophical liberation than the earnest provincialism characteristic of more closed societies.

For the sake of the liberation from illusion, then, even more than for the maintenance of it, some restraint in the communication of truth is necessary. That, at any rate, is the thought behind pedagogical esotericism.