Jul 5, 2015 11:09 PM
(This post was last modified: Jul 5, 2015 11:16 PM by C C.)
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/stra...?page=show
EXCERPT: There can be no denying that esotericism flourished at certain times. But Arthur Melzer’s new book "Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing", far from proving his case, has weakened it by the careless way he deals with his sources. [...] Melzer, whose title pays homage to [Leo] Strauss [...], sets it at the heart of his defense against Strauss’s cultured despisers.
They dismiss the idea of writing between the lines, or esoteric writing, as an elitist and antidemocratic practice in which access to knowledge, to the truth, is to be confined to the few who can decipher the riddling texts of their intellectual superiors. And so it was until the end of classical antiquity, writes Melzer, who professes for his own part to be anything but a fan of the practice. Rather, he depicts himself as a disinterested historian intent on reminding his auditors that around the dawn of the nineteenth century, awareness of esoteric writing faded away.
[...] Strauss’s mild, unruffled manner [...] veiled a combative streak. [...] Nowhere was that combativeness more conspicuous than in his war against historicism. Historicism was not the view that epochs succeed one another, and that it was imperative to study them. Rather, it meant that even the greatest philosophers and thinkers were the intellectual hostages of their own era’s conventions. Consider the dwellers in Plato’s famous image of the cave. Shackled so that they can only look ahead, they confuse the images cast on the wall before them with real beings. Only a few ascend to descry the real world, lit by the sun, not artificial fires.
The historicist denies that anyone can escape. Hegel, for instance, taught that the most profound thinkers are those that best captured the spirit of their own age, or rather of the age just past—the owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk. Hegel helped usher in das historische Jahrhundert, the century devoted to history. Timeless truths made way for such as were possible within a certain historical horizon. Plato’s ideas could be studied as a historical artifact; they were no longer live options. The Ideas had become just ideas. Implicit was the notion that progress, with the rise of Nazism and Stalinism, had suffered a pounding from which it could not recover.
Enter Strauss. If a feeling of decline was in the air, he seemed to offer the hope of surmounting it. A good part of his attraction came from the hope he instilled that it was possible to combine the close study of old, neglected texts with a search for the truths embedded in them. It was now possible, under Strauss’s guidance, to rediscover the wisdom of the ancients. We read, not as antiquarians, but as philosophoi, lovers of wisdom. Strauss showed the way to a much more profound way of reading, one that liberated the greats from the shackles that the historicists had imposed upon them. Why mostly old texts? The moderns had dug a pit beneath the cave, so that one first had to reach its floor if there was to be any chance of escape. With the assistance of the classic texts, we might just succeed.
The task propounded by Strauss seemed particularly urgent because a sense of unease and peril was the dominant mood, particularly on university campuses, which were buffeted by fears of Communism and McCarthyism. The euphoria of 1945 had dissipated. [...] That World War II had ended with the explosions of two atomic bombs seemed to signal the moral bankruptcy of modern science [...] Liberalism, still in the ascendant but showing signs of age, felt like a squishy sponge. [...] David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd analyzed the shift from “inner-directed” citizens in the mold of Thoreau to “outer-directed” consumers. Anyway, it wasn’t even clear that things in the past had ever been all that much better. America, it was said, had declined without even reaching a peak.
So Strauss’s message that scientific progress without attendant moral progress was a betrayal of the hopes of the Enlightenment fell on receptive ears. Might not the failings of contemporary America be symptomatic of the debility of democratic regimes as such? Strauss had only good things to say about the classical virtue of prudence. He prudently withheld radical criticism of what he called the American “regime,” but now and then he said that it was mistaken to believe that the flaws of democracy could be alleviated by more democracy. Presumably, that they might be by less was the implication.
The corrosive relativism of historicism threatened to destroy such pockets of virtue that remained. But historicism, it turned out, was itself vulnerable to attack: for one thing, it relied on a circular mode of argument. Suppose that you could understand Sophocles only if you had a firm grasp of the Greek culture from which he emerged. But the tragedies were themselves an integral part of Greek culture. Absent an understanding of the plays, Greek culture was impenetrable.
Historicism also suffered from self-reflexivity. Historicists may claim that the thought of all previous eras was confined by the historical conditions that produced it, but from where could a thinker derive suppositions of his thought if not from the world about him? Obvious examples were the Greek polis, the Roman Republic and Empire, and the mental world of feudalism. Yet this insight impales the historicist on the horns of a dilemma. Either he has to claim an exemption from his discovery that all thought is merely an expression of its age, thereby landing in a mass of contradictions, or he has to admit that this insight is as time-bound as any other. Case closed.
The esotericism that Melzer discusses is central to that case. The antihistoricist, after all, must explain why later thinkers have come to believe that past philosophers were wedded to the sub-philosophic convictions of their societies. According to Melzer, the reason is that they are no longer attuned to the hints, suggestions, even to the explicit warnings that earlier thinkers inserted into their works—that they are subverting their obvious messages. Those messages echo what the authoritative voices of the culture want to have disseminated, whether sincerely or from opportunism....
EXCERPT: There can be no denying that esotericism flourished at certain times. But Arthur Melzer’s new book "Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing", far from proving his case, has weakened it by the careless way he deals with his sources. [...] Melzer, whose title pays homage to [Leo] Strauss [...], sets it at the heart of his defense against Strauss’s cultured despisers.
They dismiss the idea of writing between the lines, or esoteric writing, as an elitist and antidemocratic practice in which access to knowledge, to the truth, is to be confined to the few who can decipher the riddling texts of their intellectual superiors. And so it was until the end of classical antiquity, writes Melzer, who professes for his own part to be anything but a fan of the practice. Rather, he depicts himself as a disinterested historian intent on reminding his auditors that around the dawn of the nineteenth century, awareness of esoteric writing faded away.
[...] Strauss’s mild, unruffled manner [...] veiled a combative streak. [...] Nowhere was that combativeness more conspicuous than in his war against historicism. Historicism was not the view that epochs succeed one another, and that it was imperative to study them. Rather, it meant that even the greatest philosophers and thinkers were the intellectual hostages of their own era’s conventions. Consider the dwellers in Plato’s famous image of the cave. Shackled so that they can only look ahead, they confuse the images cast on the wall before them with real beings. Only a few ascend to descry the real world, lit by the sun, not artificial fires.
The historicist denies that anyone can escape. Hegel, for instance, taught that the most profound thinkers are those that best captured the spirit of their own age, or rather of the age just past—the owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk. Hegel helped usher in das historische Jahrhundert, the century devoted to history. Timeless truths made way for such as were possible within a certain historical horizon. Plato’s ideas could be studied as a historical artifact; they were no longer live options. The Ideas had become just ideas. Implicit was the notion that progress, with the rise of Nazism and Stalinism, had suffered a pounding from which it could not recover.
Enter Strauss. If a feeling of decline was in the air, he seemed to offer the hope of surmounting it. A good part of his attraction came from the hope he instilled that it was possible to combine the close study of old, neglected texts with a search for the truths embedded in them. It was now possible, under Strauss’s guidance, to rediscover the wisdom of the ancients. We read, not as antiquarians, but as philosophoi, lovers of wisdom. Strauss showed the way to a much more profound way of reading, one that liberated the greats from the shackles that the historicists had imposed upon them. Why mostly old texts? The moderns had dug a pit beneath the cave, so that one first had to reach its floor if there was to be any chance of escape. With the assistance of the classic texts, we might just succeed.
The task propounded by Strauss seemed particularly urgent because a sense of unease and peril was the dominant mood, particularly on university campuses, which were buffeted by fears of Communism and McCarthyism. The euphoria of 1945 had dissipated. [...] That World War II had ended with the explosions of two atomic bombs seemed to signal the moral bankruptcy of modern science [...] Liberalism, still in the ascendant but showing signs of age, felt like a squishy sponge. [...] David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd analyzed the shift from “inner-directed” citizens in the mold of Thoreau to “outer-directed” consumers. Anyway, it wasn’t even clear that things in the past had ever been all that much better. America, it was said, had declined without even reaching a peak.
So Strauss’s message that scientific progress without attendant moral progress was a betrayal of the hopes of the Enlightenment fell on receptive ears. Might not the failings of contemporary America be symptomatic of the debility of democratic regimes as such? Strauss had only good things to say about the classical virtue of prudence. He prudently withheld radical criticism of what he called the American “regime,” but now and then he said that it was mistaken to believe that the flaws of democracy could be alleviated by more democracy. Presumably, that they might be by less was the implication.
The corrosive relativism of historicism threatened to destroy such pockets of virtue that remained. But historicism, it turned out, was itself vulnerable to attack: for one thing, it relied on a circular mode of argument. Suppose that you could understand Sophocles only if you had a firm grasp of the Greek culture from which he emerged. But the tragedies were themselves an integral part of Greek culture. Absent an understanding of the plays, Greek culture was impenetrable.
Historicism also suffered from self-reflexivity. Historicists may claim that the thought of all previous eras was confined by the historical conditions that produced it, but from where could a thinker derive suppositions of his thought if not from the world about him? Obvious examples were the Greek polis, the Roman Republic and Empire, and the mental world of feudalism. Yet this insight impales the historicist on the horns of a dilemma. Either he has to claim an exemption from his discovery that all thought is merely an expression of its age, thereby landing in a mass of contradictions, or he has to admit that this insight is as time-bound as any other. Case closed.
The esotericism that Melzer discusses is central to that case. The antihistoricist, after all, must explain why later thinkers have come to believe that past philosophers were wedded to the sub-philosophic convictions of their societies. According to Melzer, the reason is that they are no longer attuned to the hints, suggestions, even to the explicit warnings that earlier thinkers inserted into their works—that they are subverting their obvious messages. Those messages echo what the authoritative voices of the culture want to have disseminated, whether sincerely or from opportunism....