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.
Yes, I think the real takeaway of this, if it's true, is that we should just stop reading ancient philosophy, that it's worse than a waste of time.
1) As you say, we have no hope whatsoever of deciphering the esoteric meaning through translation and cultural drift.
2) There's no reasonable way to assess one's own or others' esoteric readings; everyone will just read into it whatever they want.
The slavery example is good here: if you like Aristotle it seems hard to believe he was such a dumbass about slavery, so the esoteric reading is tempting, but his dumbass arguments are also in line with the dumbass arguments in favour of slavery always and everywhere, which tend to be exceptionally bad even *as arguments*, let alone regarding the underlying matter. The more straightforward interpretation here is that it's unpleasant to think about slavery so people thought about it as little as possible to justify themselves.
To be clear, I'm not just saying this because I think slavery is bad (NB: it is though), but I could easily make better arguments. This isn't true for lots of things I disagree with (God, monarchies, and abortion, to name a few) where I think the people making the arguments have thought deeply about the issue and carefully crafted their takes.
I suspect this is also why the arguments in favour of factory farmed meat are generally so laughably bad; much better arguments exist, but people don't use them because that would involve thinking seriously about the horrors of factory farming.
>Even in the original, were we to learn ancient Greek, it seems possible we are too distant culturally to ever understand them.
It is even worse. If we were living in ancient Greece, there would be no way to prove one esoteric reading over another. It's excellent fodder for navel gazing but very low ROI for actually coming to a firm understanding of anything.
Come to think of it, that might describe philosophy as a whole.
This would make understanding ancient philosophical texts much more difficult but not necessarily impossible. The cultural context of Plato and Aristotle, 5th & 4th century Athens, is one of the parts of the ancient world from which relatively many texts have been preserved: many of the philosophical works of Aristotle & Plato, the histories of Thucydides & Xenophon, the political & legal speeches of the ten Attic orators, & (though less useful for linguistic training because poetically stylized) some of the plays of Aristophanes, Menander, Sophocles, Aeschylus, & Euripides. Perhaps one could, through immersion in this ancient literature sufficient to become fluent in the language, also gain enough fluency in their culture to make a decent attempt at this sort of subtle reading of ancient philosophy. (Not only by learning the language, of course: parts of the context of the culture, especially regarding material culture & economics, can be understood only through modern academic studies, though these also inevitably introduce their own biases.) Indeed, something like this used to be part of the training of academic classicists (not just wide reading, but teaching of 'prose composition' i.e. being able to write in idiomatic Greek or Latin), though I expect standards have fallen as the field has lost prestige.
You point to one of the main reasons why so many of Strauss' students learned Greek and also worked to produce literal translations of Greek philosophical texts. Allan Bloom and Seth Benardete are two such examples, but there have been many more over the years.
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.
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."
Without the second kind of esoteric communication as distinguished by Yack, there doesn't seem to be much left that would be surprising for a modern scholar. In particular, everyone understands that writers sometimes had to tread carefully. But if that second kind was common, and if this was generally understood, then there could have been no rival schools arguing against each other in classical antiquity, it seems. Yet there were, or not?
Regarding your first point: I think that's Yack's point: that there is a sort of motte and bailey structure here: the motte is the less dramatic sort of esoteric communication (which, as you say, is not surprising), but he keeps suggesting that he is settling the bailey of the more extreme sort of esoterica, and glossing over the fact that his evidence could simply point to type one and not type two. Yack is giving Melzer due credit for his evidence while still showing how it could result in a deflationary reading that would not overturn our understanding of the history of philosophy.
As to your second point: yes, if the second type of esoteric reading *is* true, it suggests (or might suggest, clearly there are alternate versions, but I think that both Strauss and Melzer would say it *does* suggest) that the seemingly rival schools of classical philosophy are cover for a deeper agreement. This is what I was getting at when I said that one problem with Straussian/Melzerian readings is that they make all philosophers sound alike. It makes for dull readings.
So, against Strauss and Melzer, on the Wikipedia page for „Infinite Monkey Theorem“ I found an argument by Cicero (a winning one, since this was before the Darwinian revolution) against Epicurean atomism and atheism: „Is it possible for any man to behold these things, and yet imagine that certain solid and individual bodies move by their natural force and gravitation, and that a world so beautifully adorned was made by their fortuitous concourse? He who believes this may as well believe that if a great quantity of the one-and-twenty letters, composed either of gold or any other matter, were thrown upon the ground, they would fall into such order as legibly to form the Annals of Ennius. I doubt whether fortune could make a single verse of them.“ Am I to believe there was secret deeper agreement between the schools?
(Perhaps what is going on here is a big misunderstanding? See Sandy Ryza’s comment. There was a lot of respect for ancient philosophical authority, so instead of saying „this is wrong“ people would prefer to say „this is meant not literally but allegorically“ etc.)
In case I've not made it clear, I am not a fan of the stronger sort of esotericism in philosophy, which is not to say I feel confident it's definitely never been used but that I am biased against it as an interpretive school. Which is to say that, basically, I think Yack is correct about what to make of Melzer's evidence. So are you to believe there was a secret deeper agreement? I myself wouldn't say so, no.
But I don't think your evidence shows that. I don't think any such example is actually evidence against Strauss and Melzer: after all, the *whole point* of strong esotericism is to mislead casual readers about what the writers believe. If it *was* the case that they were strong estotericists, if they were in fact all holding a similar secret doctrine, than you would *expect* to see remarks that make it sound like it couldn't be true! This means that on some level its unfalsifiable; you can always imagine you're simply missing the point. (That's one reason I don't like it!)
If they were all holding a similar secret doctrine, then I would expect them to talk about it in a coded way, in order to keep it secret. But I wouldn't expect it to really occur to them that arguing about doctrine is something one might practice. (Well, perhaps they would argue about some finer details of their shared doctrine in their coded way.) By contrast, what *you* would expect in such a hypothetical world is that they would not only be aware that arguing about doctrine itself is a thing but that they would also go to the length of constructing different fake doctrines and launching insightful arguments against each other's fake doctrine, such as Cicero's argument against atomism, just to make the deception more convincing?
Great review. In some ways I think the classical world is a more interesting example for us than Christian Europe prior to (and during) the Enlightenment, where there's a state and church apparatus for punishing treason or heresy, so it's trivially easy to demonstrate that at least some of the time, people are hinting at but not saying things that will get them burnt at the stake or their hands cut off. It's almost always just "there is no god" or "the king / monarchy sucks" but they get to it by different methods.
The funny thing is that these esoteric sentiments are often not really very esoteric. For Machiavelli, the Straussian reading is in some ways closer to the naive reading than the Cambridge School reading. Everyone in sixteenth century Europe thought Machiavelli was an atheist with a radically novel, instrumental understanding of politics! ("I count religion but a childish toy / And hold there is no sin but ignorance.") You really have to work to assimilate him to the more mainstream currents of his age. Melzer expends a lot of ingenuity on the Discourses to show that he's an atheist (and I was taught to read that passage in that exact way by a Straussian, Nathan Tarcov) but a more vibe-based reading will get you to exactly the same place.
The Straussian esoteric reading—as I understand it—is not that Machiavelli was an atheist. That much was obvious. It’s that exoterically he encouraged men to conquer chance through cunning and strength and win immortal glory for themselves by doing great things as rulers of nations, while esoterically he taught there is no such thing as immortal glory and that even what glory there is to be had will always owe more to chance than to strength or cunning. The reason, according to Strauss, for this particular exoteric/esoteric pairing is interesting but a little in-depth for a blog comment. I sometimes suspect that even Strauss didn’t believe Machiavelli was doing this, but was using him to advance his own ideas.
Thanks. It's been a long time since I read Thoughts on Machiavelli; my memory was that his thesis was that Machiavelli was a "teacher of wickedness," radically opposed to Christianity and all that it stood for, bent on destroying it, and also opposed to the classical tradition--in contrast to the scholars of classical republicanism who attacked Strauss, and who still seemed to think he was a teacher of virtue (after a distinctive fashion, admittedly). Maybe I should revisit; that's intriguingly bizarre.
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.”
When writers and sophisticated as the Psmiths talk about how everyone writes esoterically, the question arises: what esoteric messages are they including in their reviews?
For example, in a footnote (a classic vehicle for esoteric content) John Psmith says that he had included an analogy about RPGs in his original draft but deleted it “because it would only be meaningful to those readers who are NERDS..” Yet the analogy he does use involves chess, hardly a non-nerdy pursuit. I would submit that this is a clue that a critical point has been deliberately suppressed. What other obvious analogy has not been used here?
The "two examples here, carefully calibrated" could hardly be a stronger invitation to read esoterically to the beginner reader. I'm still trying to figure out if they're conveying the obvious esoteric meaning or something even more hidden.
OK but is this just because later philosophers like to interpret earlier philosophers as agreeing with them? "I believe X. Plato said Y, but what he _really_ meant was X".
The average philosopher 200 years ago had more respect for the ancients than the average philosopher does now, so cared more about consonance between their beliefs.
I worry about giving too much ground to Orthodox polemicists here. I think that Catholic Church teaches and has always taught that contemplation is higher than discursive reasoning, and that therefore scholastic theology is not an end in itself, but a means of getting closer to God.
Also, though he is far from mainstream, I find the Catholic philosopher Rosmini so valuable because he explicitly describes reason as an operation that is inextricably voluntary, the consent to affirm what exists as being what it in fact is.
And in general I think this orientation towards praxis is less explicit in Catholic theology, but it's still there.
Part of it is that, very gradually over time, I think our definition of the term reason has contracted and changed. I wrote about it here:
Christianity, ironically, seems to be responsible for this invisible change in our thought, along with many others (from assuming esotericism to assuming exoterism).
In the Republic Plato writes something along the lines of what you are saying, that in almost all times and places the person who sincerely cares about truth has to tread carefully [withdrawing from public life as a traveler seeking refuge from a storm], as the imperfect nature of most states means that most mental processing power in a given society will be captured by the sophists, including that of any bright young man who comes up in a society that has not been blessed by God or fate to be a genuinely philosophical one.
One problem with "esoteric reading" is that I've seen many cases of esoteric readings of texts are clearly just the reader projecting or even hallucinating, in the sense of AI hallucinations, the esoteric meaning into it.
I'm reminded of the stories of Jungian mystics pouring over medieval alchemical texts in search of their "psychological inner meanings". Then some medievalists and chemists got together and discovered that the texts were descriptions of chemical procedures using metaphorical terminology, that indeed worked.
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.
You should break out the part starting with “The moment the scales fell from my eyes” into a separate essay. You do an excellent job describing the schizophrenia I have felt since 2020. It even extends to seeing the Republicans and Democrats flip flop positions entirely and only a few appear to have noticed
Considering the idea that this extreme level of esotericism might be accurate makes me sad.
Sad that we've lost the historical context to understand most esoteric meanings in most historical texts.
Sad that studying these texts for all they're worth actually costs more time and effort. I read Plato, Aristotle, etc. in high school and again in undergrad. I like to think I learned something from the process even if I knew there was a lot I was missing. If scholars at all levels are experiencing many more misunderstandings from these texts than we thought, that makes such study less likely to be worth the bother.
Thank you so much for pointing me towards Thinking Orthodox. You’ve alluded in your writing to profound differences between eastern and western Christianity. While I have always believed there was a truth to Christ’s life, neither Protestant or Catholic teachings made any impact. I am looking forward to Orthodoxy hopefully opening this door to Christ for me.
I got about a third of the way into this review and almost dropped it there but I'm glad I kept going. I would not have connected esoteric writing with "the way we subtly try to disagree with people on NextDoor without making the rest of the neighborhood turn on us." Well done! That example also clearly illustrates the "iykyk" aspect. After all, if something can be read from your writing by people who agree with you, surely it can also be ready by those who don't. But in many cases those people literally cannot understand what you're saying because it's not part of their worldview.
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 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.
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.
Yes, I think the real takeaway of this, if it's true, is that we should just stop reading ancient philosophy, that it's worse than a waste of time.
1) As you say, we have no hope whatsoever of deciphering the esoteric meaning through translation and cultural drift.
2) There's no reasonable way to assess one's own or others' esoteric readings; everyone will just read into it whatever they want.
The slavery example is good here: if you like Aristotle it seems hard to believe he was such a dumbass about slavery, so the esoteric reading is tempting, but his dumbass arguments are also in line with the dumbass arguments in favour of slavery always and everywhere, which tend to be exceptionally bad even *as arguments*, let alone regarding the underlying matter. The more straightforward interpretation here is that it's unpleasant to think about slavery so people thought about it as little as possible to justify themselves.
To be clear, I'm not just saying this because I think slavery is bad (NB: it is though), but I could easily make better arguments. This isn't true for lots of things I disagree with (God, monarchies, and abortion, to name a few) where I think the people making the arguments have thought deeply about the issue and carefully crafted their takes.
I suspect this is also why the arguments in favour of factory farmed meat are generally so laughably bad; much better arguments exist, but people don't use them because that would involve thinking seriously about the horrors of factory farming.
LLMs are polyglots as a matter of course; I wonder if Claude loves Aristotle enough to see through the veil. Might be a fun way to pass an afternoon
>Even in the original, were we to learn ancient Greek, it seems possible we are too distant culturally to ever understand them.
It is even worse. If we were living in ancient Greece, there would be no way to prove one esoteric reading over another. It's excellent fodder for navel gazing but very low ROI for actually coming to a firm understanding of anything.
Come to think of it, that might describe philosophy as a whole.
This would make understanding ancient philosophical texts much more difficult but not necessarily impossible. The cultural context of Plato and Aristotle, 5th & 4th century Athens, is one of the parts of the ancient world from which relatively many texts have been preserved: many of the philosophical works of Aristotle & Plato, the histories of Thucydides & Xenophon, the political & legal speeches of the ten Attic orators, & (though less useful for linguistic training because poetically stylized) some of the plays of Aristophanes, Menander, Sophocles, Aeschylus, & Euripides. Perhaps one could, through immersion in this ancient literature sufficient to become fluent in the language, also gain enough fluency in their culture to make a decent attempt at this sort of subtle reading of ancient philosophy. (Not only by learning the language, of course: parts of the context of the culture, especially regarding material culture & economics, can be understood only through modern academic studies, though these also inevitably introduce their own biases.) Indeed, something like this used to be part of the training of academic classicists (not just wide reading, but teaching of 'prose composition' i.e. being able to write in idiomatic Greek or Latin), though I expect standards have fallen as the field has lost prestige.
You point to one of the main reasons why so many of Strauss' students learned Greek and also worked to produce literal translations of Greek philosophical texts. Allan Bloom and Seth Benardete are two such examples, but there have been many more over the years.
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.)
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 🚨
As someone outside the community: who is Bernard Yack and why are alarms going off?
My husband is a fan. https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-the-longing-for-total-revolution
Without the second kind of esoteric communication as distinguished by Yack, there doesn't seem to be much left that would be surprising for a modern scholar. In particular, everyone understands that writers sometimes had to tread carefully. But if that second kind was common, and if this was generally understood, then there could have been no rival schools arguing against each other in classical antiquity, it seems. Yet there were, or not?
Regarding your first point: I think that's Yack's point: that there is a sort of motte and bailey structure here: the motte is the less dramatic sort of esoteric communication (which, as you say, is not surprising), but he keeps suggesting that he is settling the bailey of the more extreme sort of esoterica, and glossing over the fact that his evidence could simply point to type one and not type two. Yack is giving Melzer due credit for his evidence while still showing how it could result in a deflationary reading that would not overturn our understanding of the history of philosophy.
As to your second point: yes, if the second type of esoteric reading *is* true, it suggests (or might suggest, clearly there are alternate versions, but I think that both Strauss and Melzer would say it *does* suggest) that the seemingly rival schools of classical philosophy are cover for a deeper agreement. This is what I was getting at when I said that one problem with Straussian/Melzerian readings is that they make all philosophers sound alike. It makes for dull readings.
So, against Strauss and Melzer, on the Wikipedia page for „Infinite Monkey Theorem“ I found an argument by Cicero (a winning one, since this was before the Darwinian revolution) against Epicurean atomism and atheism: „Is it possible for any man to behold these things, and yet imagine that certain solid and individual bodies move by their natural force and gravitation, and that a world so beautifully adorned was made by their fortuitous concourse? He who believes this may as well believe that if a great quantity of the one-and-twenty letters, composed either of gold or any other matter, were thrown upon the ground, they would fall into such order as legibly to form the Annals of Ennius. I doubt whether fortune could make a single verse of them.“ Am I to believe there was secret deeper agreement between the schools?
(Perhaps what is going on here is a big misunderstanding? See Sandy Ryza’s comment. There was a lot of respect for ancient philosophical authority, so instead of saying „this is wrong“ people would prefer to say „this is meant not literally but allegorically“ etc.)
In case I've not made it clear, I am not a fan of the stronger sort of esotericism in philosophy, which is not to say I feel confident it's definitely never been used but that I am biased against it as an interpretive school. Which is to say that, basically, I think Yack is correct about what to make of Melzer's evidence. So are you to believe there was a secret deeper agreement? I myself wouldn't say so, no.
But I don't think your evidence shows that. I don't think any such example is actually evidence against Strauss and Melzer: after all, the *whole point* of strong esotericism is to mislead casual readers about what the writers believe. If it *was* the case that they were strong estotericists, if they were in fact all holding a similar secret doctrine, than you would *expect* to see remarks that make it sound like it couldn't be true! This means that on some level its unfalsifiable; you can always imagine you're simply missing the point. (That's one reason I don't like it!)
If they were all holding a similar secret doctrine, then I would expect them to talk about it in a coded way, in order to keep it secret. But I wouldn't expect it to really occur to them that arguing about doctrine is something one might practice. (Well, perhaps they would argue about some finer details of their shared doctrine in their coded way.) By contrast, what *you* would expect in such a hypothetical world is that they would not only be aware that arguing about doctrine itself is a thing but that they would also go to the length of constructing different fake doctrines and launching insightful arguments against each other's fake doctrine, such as Cicero's argument against atomism, just to make the deception more convincing?
Great review. In some ways I think the classical world is a more interesting example for us than Christian Europe prior to (and during) the Enlightenment, where there's a state and church apparatus for punishing treason or heresy, so it's trivially easy to demonstrate that at least some of the time, people are hinting at but not saying things that will get them burnt at the stake or their hands cut off. It's almost always just "there is no god" or "the king / monarchy sucks" but they get to it by different methods.
The funny thing is that these esoteric sentiments are often not really very esoteric. For Machiavelli, the Straussian reading is in some ways closer to the naive reading than the Cambridge School reading. Everyone in sixteenth century Europe thought Machiavelli was an atheist with a radically novel, instrumental understanding of politics! ("I count religion but a childish toy / And hold there is no sin but ignorance.") You really have to work to assimilate him to the more mainstream currents of his age. Melzer expends a lot of ingenuity on the Discourses to show that he's an atheist (and I was taught to read that passage in that exact way by a Straussian, Nathan Tarcov) but a more vibe-based reading will get you to exactly the same place.
The Straussian esoteric reading—as I understand it—is not that Machiavelli was an atheist. That much was obvious. It’s that exoterically he encouraged men to conquer chance through cunning and strength and win immortal glory for themselves by doing great things as rulers of nations, while esoterically he taught there is no such thing as immortal glory and that even what glory there is to be had will always owe more to chance than to strength or cunning. The reason, according to Strauss, for this particular exoteric/esoteric pairing is interesting but a little in-depth for a blog comment. I sometimes suspect that even Strauss didn’t believe Machiavelli was doing this, but was using him to advance his own ideas.
Thanks. It's been a long time since I read Thoughts on Machiavelli; my memory was that his thesis was that Machiavelli was a "teacher of wickedness," radically opposed to Christianity and all that it stood for, bent on destroying it, and also opposed to the classical tradition--in contrast to the scholars of classical republicanism who attacked Strauss, and who still seemed to think he was a teacher of virtue (after a distinctive fashion, admittedly). Maybe I should revisit; that's intriguingly bizarre.
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.
It is more than a little amusing that nobody can lay out an esoteric reading and instead tell you to read something else.
When writers and sophisticated as the Psmiths talk about how everyone writes esoterically, the question arises: what esoteric messages are they including in their reviews?
For example, in a footnote (a classic vehicle for esoteric content) John Psmith says that he had included an analogy about RPGs in his original draft but deleted it “because it would only be meaningful to those readers who are NERDS..” Yet the analogy he does use involves chess, hardly a non-nerdy pursuit. I would submit that this is a clue that a critical point has been deliberately suppressed. What other obvious analogy has not been used here?
The "two examples here, carefully calibrated" could hardly be a stronger invitation to read esoterically to the beginner reader. I'm still trying to figure out if they're conveying the obvious esoteric meaning or something even more hidden.
OK but is this just because later philosophers like to interpret earlier philosophers as agreeing with them? "I believe X. Plato said Y, but what he _really_ meant was X".
The average philosopher 200 years ago had more respect for the ancients than the average philosopher does now, so cared more about consonance between their beliefs.
I worry about giving too much ground to Orthodox polemicists here. I think that Catholic Church teaches and has always taught that contemplation is higher than discursive reasoning, and that therefore scholastic theology is not an end in itself, but a means of getting closer to God.
Also, though he is far from mainstream, I find the Catholic philosopher Rosmini so valuable because he explicitly describes reason as an operation that is inextricably voluntary, the consent to affirm what exists as being what it in fact is.
And in general I think this orientation towards praxis is less explicit in Catholic theology, but it's still there.
Part of it is that, very gradually over time, I think our definition of the term reason has contracted and changed. I wrote about it here:
https://8014543.substack.com/i/69721375/part-2
Christianity, ironically, seems to be responsible for this invisible change in our thought, along with many others (from assuming esotericism to assuming exoterism).
In the Republic Plato writes something along the lines of what you are saying, that in almost all times and places the person who sincerely cares about truth has to tread carefully [withdrawing from public life as a traveler seeking refuge from a storm], as the imperfect nature of most states means that most mental processing power in a given society will be captured by the sophists, including that of any bright young man who comes up in a society that has not been blessed by God or fate to be a genuinely philosophical one.
One problem with "esoteric reading" is that I've seen many cases of esoteric readings of texts are clearly just the reader projecting or even hallucinating, in the sense of AI hallucinations, the esoteric meaning into it.
I'm reminded of the stories of Jungian mystics pouring over medieval alchemical texts in search of their "psychological inner meanings". Then some medievalists and chemists got together and discovered that the texts were descriptions of chemical procedures using metaphorical terminology, that indeed worked.
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.
“Do not give what is holy to the dogs; nor cast your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you in pieces.”
You should break out the part starting with “The moment the scales fell from my eyes” into a separate essay. You do an excellent job describing the schizophrenia I have felt since 2020. It even extends to seeing the Republicans and Democrats flip flop positions entirely and only a few appear to have noticed
Considering the idea that this extreme level of esotericism might be accurate makes me sad.
Sad that we've lost the historical context to understand most esoteric meanings in most historical texts.
Sad that studying these texts for all they're worth actually costs more time and effort. I read Plato, Aristotle, etc. in high school and again in undergrad. I like to think I learned something from the process even if I knew there was a lot I was missing. If scholars at all levels are experiencing many more misunderstandings from these texts than we thought, that makes such study less likely to be worth the bother.
You know what doesn't make me sad? Reading Scott Alexander's analysis of the alchemical allegories in My Immortal. Treat yourself. https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/26/my-immortal-as-alchemical-allegory/
Thank you so much for pointing me towards Thinking Orthodox. You’ve alluded in your writing to profound differences between eastern and western Christianity. While I have always believed there was a truth to Christ’s life, neither Protestant or Catholic teachings made any impact. I am looking forward to Orthodoxy hopefully opening this door to Christ for me.
I got about a third of the way into this review and almost dropped it there but I'm glad I kept going. I would not have connected esoteric writing with "the way we subtly try to disagree with people on NextDoor without making the rest of the neighborhood turn on us." Well done! That example also clearly illustrates the "iykyk" aspect. After all, if something can be read from your writing by people who agree with you, surely it can also be ready by those who don't. But in many cases those people literally cannot understand what you're saying because it's not part of their worldview.
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 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.