I'm not sure about the claim that "Melzer is not himself a Straussian": I read the Melzer a few years ago and I thought he was *very* Straussian (although I admit that most of my knowledge about Strauss is second-hand, for reasons: https://stephenfrug.blogspot.com/2006/07/on-not-reading-leo-strauss.html). Melzer certainly does more than Strauss to assemble evidence that people wrote esoterically, which is a challenge that I think later interpreters ought to rise to. But he also falls prey, I think, to one of the chief pitfalls of Straussianism: he makes every philosopher sound alike. The exoteric doctrines are all different but in the end the esoteric doctrines all sound the same. Aside from anything else, it can (ironically) make for pretty dull readings.
Another review of Melzer's book is the one by Bernard Yack in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews; I recommend it. (https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/philosophy-between-the-lines-the-lost-history-of-esoteric-writing/) He walks a good careful line, not denying Melzer's (genuinely quite impressive) accumulated evidence (he literally writes "case closed", which is, I think, fair), but also not agreeing with some of Melzer's more outlandish conclusions. Here's a bit of it:
[Meltzer's book] "fails to distinguish between two different kinds of esoteric communication: the extremely common practice of distancing oneself from the explicit meaning of a specific argument or authoritative citation, and the far rarer practice of working out arguments as a continuous undercurrent and corrective of the explicit claims made in a text. Most skeptics, I suspect, might be ready to acknowledge that Machiavelli and Montaigne, Plato and Aristotle, even Montesquieu and Rousseau, do not tell you everything that they want you to take from their writing, that they sometimes plant reasons in their texts to look beyond the more explicit meaning of their words. But few are likely to swallow the notion that all these authors, let alone playwrights like Shakespeare and Sophocles, produce works that continuously subvert their most prominent arguments in ways that help readers construct an alternative, esoteric argument to take their place. And with good reason. For this kind of esotericism is extremely rare. In fact, I do not think that Melzer provides us with a single good example of such an argument. Nevertheless, he leaves us with the impression that the lost continent of esoteric writing he has discovered is teeming with them… In other words, Melzer uses the massive evidence of a relatively limited kind of esoteric writing to convince us of the value of searching for a different, very rarely encountered form."
I would love to see just one example of a convincing explanation of a philosopher’s esoteric message. Without that, I don’t feel inclined to spend my time on what seems like an unpromising thesis. (I did read a bit of Leo Strauss once and thought he was obviously bonkers. Wish more Americans would get their history of political thought from Quentin Skinner instead.)
“What exactly are they saying esoterically” is a separate question from “are they trying to write esoterically,” but the briefest example of esoteric reading that Melzer gives is of 3.48 of Machiavelli’s Discourses. You can find it on pages 55-58 if you track down a copy.
ETA: Reading esoterically is A LOT OF WORK and frankly in my opinion doesn’t sound like very much fun, but that’s a different claim from “it’s not necessary to understand the text.”
If this thesis is true—and I find the argument compelling—then it is also a serious argument for why ancient texts cannot reliably be understood in translation. If subtleties of word choice key us into esotericisms, then a translator must himself be thoroughly initiated into the hidden layers, and make creative decisions to encode them. And as we have established, Anglo intellectuals haven't even searched for or believed in esoteric meanings for centuries. This makes modern translations, the kind nearly all of us are exposed to, very dubious vessels for transmission.
Perhaps this is why I so often hear that ancient texts have esoteric meanings, but am never told what those esoteric meanings are.
Even in the original, were we to learn ancient Greek, it seems possible we are too distant culturally to ever understand them. We have not been trained on their default corpus of terms, on their hundreds of thousands of everyday Athenian linguistic interactions. Nor are we fluent in their background beliefs, assumptions, worldviews.
Esoteric readings of a love letter or a social interaction require this fluency I think. We are much better readers of our own loved ones than of strangers, even strangers who are very culturally similar to us.
Exactly what I was thinking through the “Dear John” passage. I don’t doubt that people will obfuscate intentionally, leaving crumbs (intentionally or not) that reveal meaning. But if you didn’t love the writer (or know the language, or trust the translator, or know that Amelia is an egregore) you are gonna miss the hidden message.
This is excellent explanation of the theory of the case. One quibble: the claim can’t be that it was universally understood that writers wrote esoterically. Then esotericism wouldn’t fool society and the censors! Rather, the idea is that it was universally understood among those who have been inducted into understanding (philosophers). I think if you imagine philosophers as a trans-historical mystery cult, where the inducted need to be protected from the forces of the city, custom, and religion, you get a good idea of the general interpretation of history by Straussians (at its most schizophrenic, St. Thomas Aquinas is an atheist cloaking Aristotle in the nomos of medieval Europe)
While I have no idea if the ancient philosophers wrote esoterically or not, I think if they did then it's pointless to study them. How are we, thousands of years later, supposed to be able to catch all the subtle ways in which they talked around whatever it was they were really trying to say? Could that kind of writing survive translation into different languages, over and over as those languages themselves change, and still preserve the hidden meanings within the text? I seriously doubt it.
I get the comparison to a conversation, but hidden meanings in conversations only work if the people involved know each other well enough to recognize there's something that is not being said. Even if that's obvious, there's a big gap between knowing that a hidden message exists and knowing what that message is.
Now if it's just like the math textbook example, where it's made clear what has been left out as an exercise for the reader, maybe that's different. In that case it might be worth trying to fill in the missing knowledge. But if it's a case of ignoring the plain text while you add up the clues to get to 42, count me out.
The archetypical format for exoteric writing is the dialogue, because a dialogue reflects the partiality of the speaker’s arguments in its very form. On this view, the primary justification for exoteric writing is protreptic rather than defensive. A dialogue forces the careful reader immediately to consider whether an argument is sound and the reasons for advancing a fallacious one, which must be traced to the setting within which the conversation takes place. The protreptic function of exoteric writing is more evident when presented dialogically than with a work like, say, The Guide of the Perplexed, which is avowedly pedagogic but which does not draw attention to the stumbling blocks Maimonides sets up for his intended reader.
substack's been around for like a decade now, and on my time here i've read my fair share of pieces that seem deliberately written to minimize attack surface for twitter dunks, to the point where it says nothing at all and what's meant by it can only be gleaned by implication. and those sometimes make me throw up my hands and go "oh come on", because the not-so-secret esoteric message is something very generic that i didn't think was worth all the pomp and circumstance.
does that make it bad esotericism, if most people with a brain can figure out the actual claim? i'm not sure. certainly it's harder to write a cancellation piece about, and maybe that's the actual point? and without the, uh, threat of death or torture, i think probably the incentives are relaxed enough such that one can simply obfuscate instead of going further into actively misdirecting the readership.
i think it would be confusing for a hypothetical 23rd century freshman to then come across one of these substack pieces in an intro to 21st century blogging class, and wonder why it's saying nothing at all. but it certainly isn't confusing for us.
on a slightly different tack, in "antimemetics", nadia asparuhova claims that her previous book "working in public" was an implicit argument for why democracy doesn't scale, written entirely esoterically. and i threw up my hands and went "oh come on" at that too, but for a different reason. certainly i didn't get that specific message; my takeaway from "working in public" was that there are some pretty bad incentive structures in the open source world, and a lot of these incentive structures are very similar to others we find in the broader world, and we don't have good solutions. but it felt like a stretch to expect me or anyone to then hone in on democracy as the specific system to then subject the analysis to. so you can go too far and lose even the audience that's supposed to be the most dialed in.
lastly, jane writes: "it’s hard enough getting people to understand the things you explicitly wrote on the page, let alone the things you clearly implied but didn’t quite state." this is true, people are bad at reading! and i think with feedback and practice, one can somewhat calibrate the level of implication that is in their writing to select for what % of the readership can actually understand what they're saying. i'm sure you two do this to some degree, since you're writing about dense and complex topics, and so you necessarily have to contend with the tradeoffs between conveying the interesting difficult things, and clarity to readers, and length. there are varying levels of difficulty in math textbooks too; some hold your hand more than others and maybe even provide an answer key in the back.
when you're writing these pieces, do you also think about what qualities in a reader will make them more sensitive to what you are actually saying (e.g. through references to other writers that only a portion of your audience would have familiarity with)? if so, i kind of feel like you're halfway to esoterica too :P
anyways i think my observation is that it kind of seems to me like esoteric writing/reading isn't an on/off switch, but rather one of those knobs that can be dialed. perhaps there are two dials, one for obfuscation and one for pedagogic merit/filtering; those aren't necessarily the same dials. and at some point it might sort of seamlessly shade into normal "this is a dense text that rewards careful reading" territory?
anyways, i say all this because i sort of get the impression from your review that melzer is making a more provocative point about the old masters doing something materially different from what we're doing nowadays. if he really does think there's a sharp distinction, do you feel like his arguments for that have merit? might pick up the book if so.
"Anyway, as I think I’ve signposted pretty clearly, I think the conflictual view is the right one"
Hmm....
At this point in your writing I was waiting for some more elaboration on why life must rest on something beyond reason, which I'm predisposed to agree with, but instead it seems that part was skipped over without examples. Just an interesting incongruency given the topic!
Anyway, I'm sure the Psmiths would never try to impart process knowledge immediately after discussing the value of process knowledge.
Based on the subsequent passage, I wonder if the actual conflict is reason against reason, or rather, where it can be through reason that people come to lover power, and something else may cause people to love truth the most instead. And indeed that's where it seems like this is going. But what is this thing that causes some to prize truth first and foremost?
Okay, now we near the end with discussion of turning around of the soul and philosophers educating tyrants. Is that where reason leads us? Or is there a more difficult challenge beyond rationality, of developing and inculcating virtue? Given the prior discussion of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, I'm inclined to believe there is.
the best reason to explicitly write esoterically, is to tell your reader: "listen to what I'm showing, you, but if you believe me blindly, you just might be a complete dunce". It's a master move from a writer who holds influence, but doesn't want to be worshipped as a holder of truth.
1. Even if Aristotle or Spinoza meant something completely different from what they wrote, or didn't really know their own minds, so what? Rather than play psychological whackamole, we can engage with what is actually written on the paper.
Sort of like a contract. It says what it says. Or voting - humans like to excuse themselves by saying "I held my nose as I voted for corporate imperialist muppet X!" as if that changed anything. It doesn't matter why you voted. Your vote counts the same as any other similarly situated vote. It's not like True Believers and Kool Aid Chugging Cultists' votes get special treatment and normie votes don't.
2. "Now remember that we’re not dealing here with the relatively minimalist modern liberal nation-state (yes, in historical context even the hand of Western proceduralist bureaucracy rests remarkably light) but a totalitarian ancient society with no conception of individual rights or even independent individual moral worth."
I never understood how anyone ever got punished in the ancient world, unless caught in the act. Just bugger off to the next town over, adopt a new name and identity and lie low. If they ask if you are that Dorkius, the dude who was involved with that scandal with that goat on the altar of Hermes in Absurdicum, you'd say I never heard of the guy and I have no idea what you're talking about.
I'm not sure about the claim that "Melzer is not himself a Straussian": I read the Melzer a few years ago and I thought he was *very* Straussian (although I admit that most of my knowledge about Strauss is second-hand, for reasons: https://stephenfrug.blogspot.com/2006/07/on-not-reading-leo-strauss.html). Melzer certainly does more than Strauss to assemble evidence that people wrote esoterically, which is a challenge that I think later interpreters ought to rise to. But he also falls prey, I think, to one of the chief pitfalls of Straussianism: he makes every philosopher sound alike. The exoteric doctrines are all different but in the end the esoteric doctrines all sound the same. Aside from anything else, it can (ironically) make for pretty dull readings.
Another review of Melzer's book is the one by Bernard Yack in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews; I recommend it. (https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/philosophy-between-the-lines-the-lost-history-of-esoteric-writing/) He walks a good careful line, not denying Melzer's (genuinely quite impressive) accumulated evidence (he literally writes "case closed", which is, I think, fair), but also not agreeing with some of Melzer's more outlandish conclusions. Here's a bit of it:
[Meltzer's book] "fails to distinguish between two different kinds of esoteric communication: the extremely common practice of distancing oneself from the explicit meaning of a specific argument or authoritative citation, and the far rarer practice of working out arguments as a continuous undercurrent and corrective of the explicit claims made in a text. Most skeptics, I suspect, might be ready to acknowledge that Machiavelli and Montaigne, Plato and Aristotle, even Montesquieu and Rousseau, do not tell you everything that they want you to take from their writing, that they sometimes plant reasons in their texts to look beyond the more explicit meaning of their words. But few are likely to swallow the notion that all these authors, let alone playwrights like Shakespeare and Sophocles, produce works that continuously subvert their most prominent arguments in ways that help readers construct an alternative, esoteric argument to take their place. And with good reason. For this kind of esotericism is extremely rare. In fact, I do not think that Melzer provides us with a single good example of such an argument. Nevertheless, he leaves us with the impression that the lost continent of esoteric writing he has discovered is teeming with them… In other words, Melzer uses the massive evidence of a relatively limited kind of esoteric writing to convince us of the value of searching for a different, very rarely encountered form."
🚨 Bernard Yack mentioned 🚨
I would love to see just one example of a convincing explanation of a philosopher’s esoteric message. Without that, I don’t feel inclined to spend my time on what seems like an unpromising thesis. (I did read a bit of Leo Strauss once and thought he was obviously bonkers. Wish more Americans would get their history of political thought from Quentin Skinner instead.)
“What exactly are they saying esoterically” is a separate question from “are they trying to write esoterically,” but the briefest example of esoteric reading that Melzer gives is of 3.48 of Machiavelli’s Discourses. You can find it on pages 55-58 if you track down a copy.
ETA: Reading esoterically is A LOT OF WORK and frankly in my opinion doesn’t sound like very much fun, but that’s a different claim from “it’s not necessary to understand the text.”
Maimonides- read his 7 reasons for contradiction in his intro (one of which is explicitly about hiding things).
there is a tradition from his generation until now identifying contradictions and his intention.
spend 20 minutes on this, its fascinating.
If this thesis is true—and I find the argument compelling—then it is also a serious argument for why ancient texts cannot reliably be understood in translation. If subtleties of word choice key us into esotericisms, then a translator must himself be thoroughly initiated into the hidden layers, and make creative decisions to encode them. And as we have established, Anglo intellectuals haven't even searched for or believed in esoteric meanings for centuries. This makes modern translations, the kind nearly all of us are exposed to, very dubious vessels for transmission.
Perhaps this is why I so often hear that ancient texts have esoteric meanings, but am never told what those esoteric meanings are.
Even in the original, were we to learn ancient Greek, it seems possible we are too distant culturally to ever understand them. We have not been trained on their default corpus of terms, on their hundreds of thousands of everyday Athenian linguistic interactions. Nor are we fluent in their background beliefs, assumptions, worldviews.
Esoteric readings of a love letter or a social interaction require this fluency I think. We are much better readers of our own loved ones than of strangers, even strangers who are very culturally similar to us.
Exactly what I was thinking through the “Dear John” passage. I don’t doubt that people will obfuscate intentionally, leaving crumbs (intentionally or not) that reveal meaning. But if you didn’t love the writer (or know the language, or trust the translator, or know that Amelia is an egregore) you are gonna miss the hidden message.
Which is the point. ‘Nuff said (wink, wink.)
This is excellent explanation of the theory of the case. One quibble: the claim can’t be that it was universally understood that writers wrote esoterically. Then esotericism wouldn’t fool society and the censors! Rather, the idea is that it was universally understood among those who have been inducted into understanding (philosophers). I think if you imagine philosophers as a trans-historical mystery cult, where the inducted need to be protected from the forces of the city, custom, and religion, you get a good idea of the general interpretation of history by Straussians (at its most schizophrenic, St. Thomas Aquinas is an atheist cloaking Aristotle in the nomos of medieval Europe)
While I have no idea if the ancient philosophers wrote esoterically or not, I think if they did then it's pointless to study them. How are we, thousands of years later, supposed to be able to catch all the subtle ways in which they talked around whatever it was they were really trying to say? Could that kind of writing survive translation into different languages, over and over as those languages themselves change, and still preserve the hidden meanings within the text? I seriously doubt it.
I get the comparison to a conversation, but hidden meanings in conversations only work if the people involved know each other well enough to recognize there's something that is not being said. Even if that's obvious, there's a big gap between knowing that a hidden message exists and knowing what that message is.
Now if it's just like the math textbook example, where it's made clear what has been left out as an exercise for the reader, maybe that's different. In that case it might be worth trying to fill in the missing knowledge. But if it's a case of ignoring the plain text while you add up the clues to get to 42, count me out.
The archetypical format for exoteric writing is the dialogue, because a dialogue reflects the partiality of the speaker’s arguments in its very form. On this view, the primary justification for exoteric writing is protreptic rather than defensive. A dialogue forces the careful reader immediately to consider whether an argument is sound and the reasons for advancing a fallacious one, which must be traced to the setting within which the conversation takes place. The protreptic function of exoteric writing is more evident when presented dialogically than with a work like, say, The Guide of the Perplexed, which is avowedly pedagogic but which does not draw attention to the stumbling blocks Maimonides sets up for his intended reader.
substack's been around for like a decade now, and on my time here i've read my fair share of pieces that seem deliberately written to minimize attack surface for twitter dunks, to the point where it says nothing at all and what's meant by it can only be gleaned by implication. and those sometimes make me throw up my hands and go "oh come on", because the not-so-secret esoteric message is something very generic that i didn't think was worth all the pomp and circumstance.
does that make it bad esotericism, if most people with a brain can figure out the actual claim? i'm not sure. certainly it's harder to write a cancellation piece about, and maybe that's the actual point? and without the, uh, threat of death or torture, i think probably the incentives are relaxed enough such that one can simply obfuscate instead of going further into actively misdirecting the readership.
i think it would be confusing for a hypothetical 23rd century freshman to then come across one of these substack pieces in an intro to 21st century blogging class, and wonder why it's saying nothing at all. but it certainly isn't confusing for us.
on a slightly different tack, in "antimemetics", nadia asparuhova claims that her previous book "working in public" was an implicit argument for why democracy doesn't scale, written entirely esoterically. and i threw up my hands and went "oh come on" at that too, but for a different reason. certainly i didn't get that specific message; my takeaway from "working in public" was that there are some pretty bad incentive structures in the open source world, and a lot of these incentive structures are very similar to others we find in the broader world, and we don't have good solutions. but it felt like a stretch to expect me or anyone to then hone in on democracy as the specific system to then subject the analysis to. so you can go too far and lose even the audience that's supposed to be the most dialed in.
lastly, jane writes: "it’s hard enough getting people to understand the things you explicitly wrote on the page, let alone the things you clearly implied but didn’t quite state." this is true, people are bad at reading! and i think with feedback and practice, one can somewhat calibrate the level of implication that is in their writing to select for what % of the readership can actually understand what they're saying. i'm sure you two do this to some degree, since you're writing about dense and complex topics, and so you necessarily have to contend with the tradeoffs between conveying the interesting difficult things, and clarity to readers, and length. there are varying levels of difficulty in math textbooks too; some hold your hand more than others and maybe even provide an answer key in the back.
when you're writing these pieces, do you also think about what qualities in a reader will make them more sensitive to what you are actually saying (e.g. through references to other writers that only a portion of your audience would have familiarity with)? if so, i kind of feel like you're halfway to esoterica too :P
anyways i think my observation is that it kind of seems to me like esoteric writing/reading isn't an on/off switch, but rather one of those knobs that can be dialed. perhaps there are two dials, one for obfuscation and one for pedagogic merit/filtering; those aren't necessarily the same dials. and at some point it might sort of seamlessly shade into normal "this is a dense text that rewards careful reading" territory?
anyways, i say all this because i sort of get the impression from your review that melzer is making a more provocative point about the old masters doing something materially different from what we're doing nowadays. if he really does think there's a sharp distinction, do you feel like his arguments for that have merit? might pick up the book if so.
"Anyway, as I think I’ve signposted pretty clearly, I think the conflictual view is the right one"
Hmm....
At this point in your writing I was waiting for some more elaboration on why life must rest on something beyond reason, which I'm predisposed to agree with, but instead it seems that part was skipped over without examples. Just an interesting incongruency given the topic!
Anyway, I'm sure the Psmiths would never try to impart process knowledge immediately after discussing the value of process knowledge.
I'm commenting as I read.
Based on the subsequent passage, I wonder if the actual conflict is reason against reason, or rather, where it can be through reason that people come to lover power, and something else may cause people to love truth the most instead. And indeed that's where it seems like this is going. But what is this thing that causes some to prize truth first and foremost?
Okay, now we near the end with discussion of turning around of the soul and philosophers educating tyrants. Is that where reason leads us? Or is there a more difficult challenge beyond rationality, of developing and inculcating virtue? Given the prior discussion of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, I'm inclined to believe there is.
the best reason to explicitly write esoterically, is to tell your reader: "listen to what I'm showing, you, but if you believe me blindly, you just might be a complete dunce". It's a master move from a writer who holds influence, but doesn't want to be worshipped as a holder of truth.
1. Even if Aristotle or Spinoza meant something completely different from what they wrote, or didn't really know their own minds, so what? Rather than play psychological whackamole, we can engage with what is actually written on the paper.
Sort of like a contract. It says what it says. Or voting - humans like to excuse themselves by saying "I held my nose as I voted for corporate imperialist muppet X!" as if that changed anything. It doesn't matter why you voted. Your vote counts the same as any other similarly situated vote. It's not like True Believers and Kool Aid Chugging Cultists' votes get special treatment and normie votes don't.
2. "Now remember that we’re not dealing here with the relatively minimalist modern liberal nation-state (yes, in historical context even the hand of Western proceduralist bureaucracy rests remarkably light) but a totalitarian ancient society with no conception of individual rights or even independent individual moral worth."
I never understood how anyone ever got punished in the ancient world, unless caught in the act. Just bugger off to the next town over, adopt a new name and identity and lie low. If they ask if you are that Dorkius, the dude who was involved with that scandal with that goat on the altar of Hermes in Absurdicum, you'd say I never heard of the guy and I have no idea what you're talking about.
3. Catnip?