Arthur Melzer: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing

[Music] hi I'm Bill Kristol welcome to conversations I'm pleased today to be joined by my friend longtime friend Arthur Melser distinguished professor of political science at Michigan State for quite a long time right well more than I care to say okay we won't even talk about that we were together in grad school at Harvard and that's began our friendship author of a verified book on Rousseau earlier in your career and now of this really terrific book philosophy between the lines which everyone I encourage everyone to to get and which will be the basis of our discussion today or your your arguments and discoveries in this book so thank you for joining joining me my pleasure so what is it philosophy between the line it's kind of a weird time in my opinion uh yeah so the full title this philosophy between the lines the lost history of esoteric writing now that second part of it but that's what made it a best-seller lost history they like they like that is right yeah they're dinosaurs in it and so well the first first thing to explain is esoteric writing that's a form of writing not so much in favor now but used in the past and it means writing as the title suggests between the lines that is to say speaking in hints and riddles instead of us straight-out exposition of one's thought in a clearer way and doing that because the author is trying to hide and conceal the more unorthodox parts of his thought behind a veneer of conventional piety x' and accepted opinions and so the that that's the phenomenon that is the subject of the book but the phrase lost history refers to the fact that this is a practice that at least in the thesis of the book was engaged in by philosophers basically from the beginning of Western philosophy until about 1800 and went through many changes it's you know identically practice doesn't necessarily have the same motives at every point but it was almost ubiquitous around 1800 and late enlightenment it starts to disappear a little bit later it gets forgotten and then later than that which is our time for the about last century and a half not only was it forgotten but the whole idea is ridiculed and dismissed as as preposterous yeah I think what's interesting about the book I just is I mean the argument is is not just like a few people did this and here's one here's another but it's really central to understanding most maybe the huge majority of important thinkers philosophers but maybe also beyond philosophy to some degree you know Dante Adam you get people who consider literary thinkers to I would say could this could fall into to that category a huge number of these people until at least 1800 so you really are talking about you're providing a kind of revisionist history of political philosophy at least in this book I think right yes ya know the idea is that it's not idiosyncratic yeah I think that's I mean everybody Allah even philosophers who scholars who dismiss the idea in general will say well there's certain people who engaged in this like Maimonides it's so you're living in a religious type of religious persecution you won't say everything you think perhaps if you're right but but but there's certain only certain people that sort of you know are given a pass regarding having done this so Maimonides because he's so explicit about it they include and more generally there is no denial or no resistance to the idea that throughout history mystics engaged in this and even now if if you google or you you know you use Wikipedia under the term esotericism the oh sure you know you'll find lots of references and they're all to mysticism so what is new or and and again this is getting back to the title philosophy between the lines that's that's the controversial thing everybody's willing to grant yes mystics alchemists astrologers did this but precisely because they they associated with them that's part of the revulsion at the idea well that that what Plato Aristotle Descartes I mean people you know real philosophers did this that's that's the controversial claim so it's philosophy between the lines that's the lost history that's what's been lost that they did that and it basically remained lost and until you know basically the work of Leo Strauss in the late 1930s started you know uncovering this and and returning it and and what I'm doing in the book is a spelling out to a large extent and elaborating of what he did I think what's out of conversation where I remember sitting with why I mean straps purposely to have chosen a term that was in bad odor if you go around there I've ever was once in a city I came across and there was a bookstore S&O like esoteric books and it was entirely with you know astrology and you know sort of nonsense of various kinds and I think that I suppose he chose to use the term maybe to provoke but also because I mean I guess the main reason is because it is actually a term in from Greek philosophy right esoteric and exoteric or I mean right was a word well actually first of all so Strauss himself often talks about esotericism but more often he he actually avoids the word he uses EXO terrorism just to say a word about it right so I mean it's so an esoteric book is one where one writing has two doctrines so multiple level writing is another term for it also the theory of two doctrines these are terms that throughout history have been used for it and the idea is that there's a surface teaching that's the exoteric teaching which is the one that the is is the veneer is the conform you know falsely conformist view and then and then beneath that be the esoteric it's literally secret I mean exoteric is right sir except tarik extra it means exterior outside and esoteric means inner innermost exoteric cause and and I suppose why you say it's the conventional Orthodox I mean normally that would be the case Justin for obvious reasons but I suppose literally didn't didn't need to be the case right I mean you could have a daring teaching on the surface enough on Derek it's hard to know why you could do that I suppose you right yeah but it would strictly speaking just exoteric lean surface that Derek means correct yeah right okay so yeah it for some reason and is not meld together if you're invited for most of the time Strauss prefers the term exoteric right instead of esotericism perhaps to to distance himself from the conventional use of esotericism which was that it's missus to mysticism and sometimes he just says have forgotten or doesn't right obsess on the term research yeah and there is I mean if you look at the whole history there is no particularly standardized vocabulary here different writers it like for example Francis Bacon talks about it and he distinguishes instead of esoteric and exoteric he says the enigmatical and they disclosed you know it's good oh so it you know different they were there there wasn't a settled vocabulary so okay so why is the central to this trio philosophy I mean what's the what's the you for well right um well maybe you wonder then do you orders and why we see what your evidence I guess why is it central okay well it's okay let's start with this what why does this matter what then why is it important and to some extent it's very obvious if as I'm claiming I mean what's crucial to the importance claim is that it's not idiosyncratic that getting back to the point you made earlier it's not even your syncretic it's kind of standard equipment that goes with the philosophic life you know when you get your your philosophy license you know you get this - and it's and and it just follows philosophy wherever philosophy emerges historically something like this pop up as well Rousseau makes this point and and the disc Rousseau and others and the Enlightenment are talking about it and they and they say for example in India that there's an esoteric and exoteric version of Hinduism of Buddhism and so on so they see it as a kind of very standard it just goes with the territory of being philosophic so that's that's the first point in terms of its importance that it's very it's it's almost ubiquitous but then secondly I mean if if somebody has written this way if someone is a book is written esoterically and you don't read it as so terribly it sort of follows almost by definition that a very important part of the doctrine and especially the most controversial than therefore perhaps most original and liberating part of the doctrine is something you're going to miss or you'll be too much obsessed with the surface doctrine and miss that there's a complicated interplay of teachings and suggestions and so forth under the surfer I mean that seems to be one problem with people who've read for my limited knowledge some of these thinkers in a sort of non without being aware of the complicated art of writing they realize what a funny way this is plato's doctrine of acts the ideas or something right right as opposed to seeing well this is actually at a dialog where it said it's problematic and Socrates shows you would everywhere all the usual you know the things that one might say if you read it in a more right complex way and and I would say that just put it in a different way than just I mean so yeah so for scholars or people who are trying to understand these thinkers the argument would be you know the you you haven't understood them if you have only the exoteric doctrine and so you're missing a large piece of it as if as if there were a whole you know raft of writings that they had that you didn't possess and so secondly it it seems to me to some extent does that I mean we have great reverence for these ancient writings and and and in the whole history of Western philosophy it's always under five various people for one reason or another they're dead white males or whatever but there still is a lingering reverence but at the same time I would guess that most people who you know say when they get to college and they start reading these things that they've heard of they're excited on but there's also a vague sense of disappointment that hovers over the experience of reading these wrong books and that's you know they seem I don't know in some ways conventional they seem in some ways lacking in logic leaps of faith where did he get this you know why Socrates talking about Zeus you know what I suppose he's supposed to be a philosopher you know is you know could he really be believing in Zeus and so on so so I think that the books are basically just disappointing and more boring if you don't see that they have greater depths that that if you don't have this premise that when somebody says something in the in this whole period of Western philosophy doesn't mean that they that they completely believe it that when you see a contradiction all right you're seeing something they saw and they intended and I planted yeah like they exactly probably wasn't smart enough to realize that he contradicts themselves two chapters apart or something right and and then the third point I make is that it seems to me that if you engage in this practice as we have for basically two centuries our whole scholarly history a whole you know our culture or scholarly culture is built on non esoteric readings so to speak and it has a distorting a more global distorting effect on a scholarly culture and I would argue that you know if you asked me what is sort of the most characteristic vice of contemporary reading you know across across the spectrum of disciplines I'd say a kind of hyper contextualism by which I mean everybody wants to take a writing and and instead of just wanting to understand it for so they're saying well how does this relate to his background how does it relate to his biography to his time to his religion his time you know his race there's this effort to assume and to and to understand an author by reducing them to their context now some degree of contextualism is necessary and crucial and always interesting but but hyper contextualism is to really reduce a person to their thought and therefore in the end means to not take them seriously and this is what Strauss you also talked about under the name of historicism that everyone is a prisoner of their time and place so why is our culture so much why is our scholarly culture so drawn to this and I would argue it's the constantly there's many reasons but one is the the the consequence of spending two centuries in ignorance reading esoteric books as if they were exoteric and the reason is that what what does it mean to be esoteric it means to pretend to be trapped in your time in place right it means that these are geniuses you know this using every you know bit of the ounce of their intelligence to create the facade of conformity to their time and place and so if you don't know about us a terrorism inevitable you take that facade seriously and that leaves you thinking you know and it's somewhat dispirited Lee this is how it is for humans and even our great geniuses they're they're trapped you know they're the greatest geniuses are just giving the hometown ethnocentrism polished up that's that's all they can claim for themselves or we can claim from them so it it it's a distorting it has a general distorting effect that say on on our literary and intellectual culture and that's so actually I had this experience a little bit so you read like one book of Plato's Republic in senior of high school you know the way we books and and I remember reading it and of course it was clay - oh and so you're supposed to think wow this is one of the greatest thinkers ever her greatest writer several but even I and I was not reading costly or carefully I was just goofing around like you do in high school but even I saw like some of these arguments are just bad arguments I mean that's not like that one thing doesn't follow from the next and it's a this part of the arguments used to be very different from that part and what Socrates doing there I suppose in had us read book ten I think of the Republic and until you write it it's kind of dissolute like well I guess he's a great thinker for someone says he is and he bought a lot of books and stuff but dialogues maybe those are hard to write because they're dramatic or something but it's not really something important to you if it's us seventeen year old could already say this seems wrong and I remember what a wakening it was when I got to Harvard and studied public my first or my good luck with Markowitz and red blooms commentary that's in the translation and whoa okay this is not what I thought you know so there's a kind of awakening which i think is genuine it's not you know - to the depths and to the questions that right so it's alright the awareness of esotericism suddenly makes these books much more interesting you know and and and and you know shows you why they're trying to be boring you've experienced them as maybe a little boring they were trying to in certain respects and it enables you to see past that yeah this subscribers generations afterwards they were also understood at that time right esotericism exercises that's right knew that it was a great thinker but if there's a 17 year old kid can see the problems that's not a great right actually the classic example of this phenomenon is Xenophon which was a great love so to speak of Strauss because most of its Plato even when he's not telling you some daring esoteric you know thesis that he holds truly the surface is pretty exciting I mean it's it's a he's a wild man I mean it's just it's just full of interesting characters interesting argument see even if it seems you know a little incoherent and contradictory so Plato chose to make his surface be entertaining in a variety of ways - is one of the few esoteric writers who chose was a contemporary contemporary of Plato but but and Road dialogues like Plato but made them very Placid and so once the phenomenon of esoteric writing was forgotten and so everybody just sees every book for its surface Xenophon was a big loser from that and he was dismissed sudden he was regarded as a great philosopher the Eagle of Plato through most of history and suddenly this great contempt for Xenophon which is necessary if you if he's if Ollie if he's really just about his surface then don't read him you know because he's boring and that's and they just regarded him as an old general telling war stories right and so yeah that that that shows house does use Santa fine as part of his rediscovery and right I guess his first company published in the United States on tyranny is a commentary on set of funds right obscure dialogue it was out of fun yeah and in fact that's the book shows you like whoa yeah and that's a book that Strauss uses as the one book that he wrote that was that tried to sort of say to teach people how to read I mean then it was more instead of just giving his results or so on he's saying here you're you know read Xenophon in this way and you'll see it'll it'll start opening up for you so yeah he chose that a fun because he is really in a way the Great Wave it's like if you can prove it on the toughest case you can prove it on all right on the others yeah okay so why do this I mean what you mentioned sort of well you vaguely want to look conventional orthodox but why right okay so actually before we get to let me just say I've been I mean we're both of us or believers in this phenomena and as I've been saying it's so it's a lost history because the vast majority of scholars in philosophy and across all all literary disciplines don't believe in this philosophic esotericism as distinguished from the mystical and so I think I should put on the table at least a little bit of minutes before we would go on I know so that people don't wonder if we were just making this all up as we go along so actually this is this is how I got started in this business you know I wasn't worried about that yeah I was just you know I had been you know working on Russo in particular and written a book about him and in the course of doing that I was reading his context I was looking at Diderot and other thinkers around and I was very much struck by the fact that there was a lot of very open reference to esotericism at that time I think that the the ancient thinkers in some ways that was the heyday of and height of esotericism but because of that they didn't actually openly speak about it very much whereas in the Enlightenment although they continued to use it if in a slightly different form they they were very chatty about it and so I started coming across very explicit statements and I started thinking to myself you know somebody ought to collect all this stuff because you know people have their doubts and it's reasonable that they have their doubts just somebody could collect all the stuff that would be useful thing and the way of course that it is with these things eventually I got to a point where I said all right I'll do it myself and so I started working and I thought I would just publish basically a compendium of such stuff but then the more I worked on it the more interesting at God and there was philosophical aspects to the whole thing that drew me in and so what ended up the result was this book but uh I there's an appendix to this book which University of Chicago Press did not wish to include because it would even fatter and jack up the price and so we agreed that I would do an online appendix and in fact I've printed out the online appendix and as you can see it's not thin ah this thing is about a hundred pages long now that's a little deceptive because some the passages that are important I are in here twice once under the person who wrote it so if say Rousseau is saying something about another thinker it'll appear once under Rousseau and once under the other thinker so let's say it's 70 pages but on the other hand I've been updating it I haven't put the updates online yet that'll get it back up to 100 pages so let's say hundred pages of this stuff so it's there's a lot of this stuff out there so these are quotes from different thinkers at different times about the phenomenon right you're discussing in this correct either saying I wrote esoterically or more commonly X wrote esoterically or thirdly just is talking about esotericism in general and acknowledging the phenomenon and and also usually praising or but anyway let me people can go look at this appendix without even selling out for your book that's maybe a questionable blood I did marketing to say but how do they I didn't mean to reveal that yeah yeah so the appendix is online absolutely free and it's got a very long link title but the easiest thing to do is to just Google my last name Melzer mlz er Melser comma appendix and that will take you not to my youtube home video of my appendectomy but rather yeah to this and you need to leave through it and and and pick your favorite philosopher it's it's a it's a chronological and see if there's something in there about him or by him on the subject but I'll just read a few passages that were sort of what got me started you know that really said yeah somebody's got to collect this stuff and and the first is a statement by Diderot and he writes the famous french enlightenment right girl close friend of Rousseau until they parted ways and the editor of the famous encyclopedia he says the condition of the philosopher is very dangerous there is hardly a nation that is not soiled with the blood of several of them what should one do then must one be senseless among the senseless no but one must be wise in secret so that's that's one passage and then the other is by my guy Rousseau and there's another place which I won't take the time to read where he says very explicitly and it's first writing the first discourse that he wrote it meaning to you know conceal certain things and to display others and now here he's saying that everybody does that so here he refers to quote the distinction between the two doctrines and as I say this is a phrase for you know esotericism and EXO terrorism the distinction between the two doctrines so eagerly received by all the philosophers by which they professed in secret sentiments contrary to those they taught publicly so this is kind of what got me started and I think it's understandable this is you know pretty open and explicit stuff and it really showed that that you know somebody's somebody's got to do something about this so sort of that's how I got started and I and it was an effort to also maybe to sort of free the country from the inordinate fear of Strauss and ISM yeah I'd rather you succeeded in that but maybe that's it has been people don't read things as simple mildly as they did 50 years ago right even the ones who don't want to quite acknowledge a lot of Strauss's reading or agree with them what your readings or anyone else's this sort of us there's more sense of yeah maybe I think I think that's fair anyway so so but you had asked me about so why did they do that's obviously the big question and what I would say is that that you know there's not just one reason they had multiple reasons that were interconnected I sort of distinguish between four different motives or kinds of esotericism and as they say they go together so it's not like a thinker is either doing one of these or the other most of them who are doing the first are gonna do it with the second and the third that I'll describe at least but the first is the most obvious and that is that you know through most of history there was no First Amendment there was no free speech and it was dangerous to come up with unearth unorthodox ideas I mean people are always saying even today we need to think outside the box but most of the time you know they'll kill you if you if you think outside the box - too far outside and so in short a fear of persecution is the the first and the most obvious the most compelling reason for writing esoterically that's why Strauss's book on the subject is is entitled persecution and the art of writing that you write differently if you're in an environment of persecution so I call that defensive esotericism you're defending yourself against persecution but then the second one which trials makes the point just on the persecution point that and even there is even in a liberal regime which we live in there's of course persecution short of killing you the way scientist was killed and would have its own incentives so we shouldn't feel like what we've gone beyond that right oh yeah absolutely and and you know we people self-censor all the time I yeah nobody wants to be you know hectored and canceled and put it in contemporary terms and so yeah it still exists the persecution and therefore some in some mild manner this kind of esoteric you know toning it down being watching what you say say it in an indirect way but one time a writer for the New York Times you know it was at a conference that I was at and we got to talking and I mentioned what I was working on and he said yes you know the fur I've heard of that the first time I heard of esotericism I thought gee that's that's nuts and then he thought to himself wait a minute you know when his editor doesn't like where he's going with something he without thinking about it with putting a name to it he automatically you know thinks about well how can I do this more indirectly or indicated between the lines so it's it's something that you know nobody has to teach you to do it's something that people do automatically and I suppose a lot of us were just okay I won't bother making this controversial point I guess why should I take the grief and I guess your point is if you're a philosopher you do want to teach you don't want to simply supposed to give up I'm trying to tell the truth or as much of the truth as you can write or help educate people to say I offer the truth so you do need somehow to do it indirectly you can't just write not which a journalist really just decided I'm just gonna leave out this but if I mean this guy was saying is that he just tried to do yeah I mean yeah compulsion to write you know if you've got some backbone to you and your editor no one likes to be you know no one likes their editor you know he's trying to get me to say this dammit I'm gonna do that and so you know I'm just saying yeah yeah and this is I've had this experience now many many times where people spontaneously say especially people in publishing that yeah that they do this and they and they do it kind of as I say they don't need to have read about esotericism learned it somewhere it just happened spontaneously or if you think about other ways in which we talk I mean let's say you know people are diplomatic all right so you know somebody running for office they want you know they have a certain view but they realize it's not gonna go down so easily so they find a way of you know just signaling it a little bit signaling without saying hey I mean it the phenomenon is all around us have you started looking for it and so there's nothing so strange that philosophers would engage in it it's a persecution as the first and the most obvious mode right and then the second one second one is is this that if the first is you're gonna be esoteric for fear for your own safety the second is fear for the safety and well-being of society of you know not of the writer but of the audience of the writer and again just as you need to remember that for the respect to to persecution that there was no free speech through most of history so what was there through most of history there was you know not a modern liberal dynamic open society but a traditional society and that means you know quite literally based on accepted inherited traditions and customs from the ancestors and presumably ultimately from from God or the gods so every society had its customs in its ways and its and its myths it didn't claim societies didn't claim to be based on reason and they weren't and therefore it follows from that that reason you know a certain kind of resolute rationalism would be a destroy you know a highly disruptive phenomenon in in in any conveyancer vut of or other traditional society and so there's a philosophy is the resolute unwillingness to stop in your pursuit of the truth wherever it takes you it's a subversive activity in the context of a traditional society and you know so everybody I mean the philosophers felt that were you know a threat to society which they were so and this relates back to the to the first point the first point again is fear of persecution but why was there so much persecution and the Philosopher's were open to the idea that it wasn't just a vise in a narrowness and a redneck you know nastiness on the part of society but it was also the case that yeah what we're doing is questioning everything society in order and most people believe of course they should be you know upset at that and so they so the point is that motive number two is they were esoteric for the sake of the good of society to not subvert it to not you know undermine its foundational beliefs if those beliefs were sort of reasonably healthy and reasonably necessary you might say further just for the society to function right right well if they weren't they did philosophers for the most part didn't think that they were in a position to improve it and to improve things I mean occasionally they would and I mean it is the case that there's a some element of a reformist concern in in all of these philosophers and they're trying to make little revisions on the margins but by and large they take society as they find it and they and and they don't want to cause it any unnecessary trouble and so that's motive number two which I call protective they're protective towards society and they think it's their duty you know not to be too open about what they're thinking which sounds like it's just close this off the tension between philosopher you know the philosopher in the city or right Socrates in Athens there are million formulations for this that is pretty common sensical either right and incidentally wouldn't you say the modern societies also we have our self-evident truths and maybe aren't quite as self-evidently true as we assert in our public documents right and if you were you might not want to you know you might want to indicate the limitations of some of those truths if you were writing in America without yes missing them right yeah I mean we are political correctness as a term that funded you know funny way captures this right right every society and every polity has political correctness right yeah we want yeah the things that shouldn't be fought and shouldn't be said and and we're we're adding to the list every day these days philosophers are about thinking things not right not noting anything right I mean again they want to be outside the box so okay so we got defensive and we got protective and they're just the flip side of each other really so on to the third the third you can get to in this way so on the basis of the first two you're saying well it's dangerous to me the writer it's dangerous to others the readers so why write at all I mean maybe so dangerous to everybody what's the purpose of writing a philosophical book and primarily the purpose I mean as we just said you know around the margins it's or some reformist concern for society but that's not the major purpose and if that were their only concern they just keep their mouths shut and live safe and not by you know trouble Society but they they they believe in the philosophic life they believe this is a you know the greatest life and they want to propagated they want to keep it alive they want to spread it to the next generation so through most of the early period of philosophy in the West the primary purpose of all philosophic books was education philosophical education for the few individuals who had the gifts and the kind of strength of character to follow that path and so then that brings up the question okay so if these are mainly educational texts and they're written by people with a great deal of thought about pedagogy and how how they pay themselves wound up as philosophers so there's an art to writing from a pedagogical standpoint and that art is it turns out is also got the character of esotericism in the sense that you want something like the Socratic method by which even today we appreciate that idea and and and that's in perfectly good odor and the idea is that when you teach you don't do all the work for the student you don't hey the worst thing you can do is to spoon-feed them or hand them the answer's no you want to pepper them with questions about what they believe right now and let them work their way out so you want them to do the work point one and number two you want to begin with them you want to start with them not from where you want them to get to you don't start with your destination and your answer you start with where they are now if you want to give somebody directions you the first thing you say is well where are you now and then I'll tell you how to get there so a philosophically a philosophical pedagogy has to begin with where people are now so they begin with the accepted conventions of their society and create a slow Road out that it through that that involves hints and and and riddles because you want the the student to do the work so in short there's a there's a kind of nice harmony between the pedagogical demands of your book and the safety demands of your book both for you and for society so the three esotericism Zanna code the third one pedagogical esotericism kind of all fit together yes and I think even if you were and I sneaked the indicator this is even if you were totally protected and some fortress for the King loved you and you didn't know you could say whatever you wanted your there's no red shoe of persecution and you were kind of Croft anyone to guess or or ruin society because maybe you were just teaching twenty people in your own little classroom even so in the actual teaching part of it you don't here's the doctrine here's the truth about X right you want it's not like them you want people to work their own way through the questions and riddles you may end up not with a doctor but with a set of questions and so forth so right I think that is a very yeah and I think that's a key part of maybe the resistance to it don't you think that people don't like I mean in the last hundred years people have gotten used to X's doctrine of Y you know Locke believed in the state of nature and Plato believed in the idea it's always sort of reduced to a kind of formulaic thing whereas this writing it seems to be really cuts against that I mean that's what I personally felt when I started understanding a little bit about how this might work it yeah that's right right and it's it's got to do even in a way with the understanding what philosophy in the philosophic life is I mean ancients philosophy isn't a subject matter like botany or you know whatever it's a way of life it's it's it's a it's a the way of life of somebody who at least in in the presentation of these ancient thinkers has thought his way out of the aims the purposes and the goods that most people follow in life they've seen that they're not adequate or contradictory or illusory and of you know ascended to a view that that thinking and knowing without necessarily coming to a final doctrine that that is somehow the good life and if that's the case then the book you're writing isn't it it's it's even if there weren't the issue of making somebody think for him or herself it's just that it's the thinking itself you know and not the doctrine and so if you think of philosophy as that then a much more open-ended book that is frustrating you know frustrating to somebody who thinks no philosophy is knowing the doctrine and so why in the world are they writing their books in such a frustrating way well it's less frustrating if the purpose of philosophy is not knowing the doctrine but you but you know knowing a practice you know and a way of life so once again it all fits together in the context of if you get beyond certain contemporary or modern assumptions about what philosophy is it makes it makes more sense yeah that's good Bellamy the book you have a43 yeah yeah number four so as I was arguing number old that the first three go together and form a unit and basically that's the purpose of esotericism is practiced by pre-modern philosophers and by pre-modern I mean let's say before 1500 before the Renaissance and the Enlightenment excuse me in the modern period the whole purpose of philosophy begins to change and that has to do with this the thing that you were alluding to before that that the premise of the ancient thinkers is that look this this thing the philosophic life this is definitely you know a rare thing it's not for everybody and not only that but when you when you've achieved this way of life you live very differently from other people and there's a gulf there's a distance between the Philosopher's and what Strauss calls the city meaning you know everyone who is living the active life the the citizens life moral political religious life and there's a gulf there and that gulf can't be bridged it's not like you could take the city and make it philosophize and live this way this philosophic way of life so so even though in their books to some extent there's some reformist intention at end intention around the edges of these ancient thinkers they don't seriously entertain the idea that that these two worlds the world of philosophy in the world of citizen life can really be bridged that there's harmony between this in fact conflict between them because the philosoph philosopher's to do what he does must essentially question all the things that the citizens are believing so so there's no hope to bring those two things together and so there's not a real activism in short in in the Philosopher's attitude towards society improvements are all around the edges but no transformation no changing of the world and so the purpose of their books is just to educate a few people to philosophy ultimately so fast-forward to the modern period for a variety of reasons that view will I call it the conflictual view that these two kind of ways of life the philosophic life and practical life the citizens life those two things are necessarily in in conflict and that esotericism is in a way the thing that smooths over that that conflict in that difference in the modern period there's this idea of no we can bring these two things together that if the philosophers would get off their mountaintops and they would start writing in a more accessible and popular manner they can slowly transform society and britain create and go beyond traditional customary mythical bound societies and create a rational society and obviously this is the the whole project you know that led to let's say the United States and it's very clearly a scene as such a new thing and say the Federalist Papers so now you have a new purpose for doing philosophy and especially for writing philosophy and the new purpose is social change is political change is rationalizing the world of these two things that don't fit together the philosopher in the city this is to make the city philosophic in the sense of rational so that calls upon a very different kind of book and as it turns out it still involves esotericism but of a different kind now what they're trying to create is a world where finally it's some future point we'll have a rational world and society will based on reason and then there'll be no need for us or terrorism or at least no need other than the pedagogical but but these Enlightenment thinkers don't think they're there yeah they're there what's new is that they're aiming for this not that there's some of them think you may never get there or only get there for a few people so it's not as if the oil and light with the cursor right pure rational there's a yeah there's a whole but the that would be better if the more rational it is I guess right and so to the extent the more rational they think the place where you can get the more they think that eventually there'll be no need for esotericism because the Gulf will have been narrowed or eliminated so so the the Enlightenment thinkers on the one hand have a certain hostility to ancient esotericism because they thought that that there were things that that could have been done you know by the philosophers to to improve their societies that weren't done so on the one hand there's a certain hostility to it at the same time they themselves need to practice a different kind of esotericism namely this you want your book to change the world if you want your book to change the world you need to write it in a certain way you need not just true ideas because truth is just alone isn't that powerful you need powerful ideas so this is a shift in the in the direction of power the love of powerful ideas and so that that leads them to slightly Dorian sometimes more than slightly distort what it is they really believe in order to put forward doctrines that will have power and in later in the modern world they invented a word for this and it's propaganda so propaganda is the fourth kind of esotericism which i call political esotericism a way of writing that distorts or hides it doesn't the deviates from what you think is strictly true on behalf not of of coddling and keeping society safe in its in its foolish traditions and myths but rather one that empowers the philosophic class and the intellectual class that glow grows up in its shadow to have a power over society and to move it in irrational direction yeah that's interesting so it's quite different though from the exercise yeah in some ways it's opposite I mean in the sense that the protective esotericism is let's let's protect society from flying and and protect their their their traditions and their myths maybe just trim them a bit and and and modern esotericism wants to subvert society wants to subvert the customs and the Tricia's slowly in a measured and calculated way let's slowly subvert that and then create and then refound society on a rational basis but getting people there requires a certain amount of oversimplification probably I mean that's sort of the propaganda thing employees and doctrines that everyone agrees to and of course when you think hard about the state of nature or these other doctrines they're a little more complicated or problematic or right more like a social contract yeah now did Locke really or Hobbes did they really think that in the state of nature people got together and said wait a minute let's make a contract that's not where societies come from and they know that that's a myth it's a myth that has a certain core truth to it that if it were explained it would be more complicated it wouldn't be very catchy so social contract theory is a kind of of you know oversimplification that's that creates a powerful doctrine that you can you know can it can have force in the world and what do you call that fourth kind that's sort of more practical political oh yeah yeah so yeah the chiefing a certain reform agenda which as you say some people might believe you at some point the reforms go so deep that you don't need it anymore but even the Federalists found was 14 I think you need to have reverence for the Constitution I mean you could have a partial enlightenment right I mean not every Enlightenment thinker thought you could just everyone would be fully enlightened I mean it is a fundamentally different way of thinking about the world then we're all stuck in a cave and one philosopher can leave it's the opposite right you're bringing the light all right into the cave right but it doesn't mean it gets fully lit so to speak or it's right although there were no word that people have different capacities and that's right but but I mean it does seem that yeah I mean I mean it's simply the point you're making is important if you want to understand that period because right I mean you know there's a kind of slightly cartoonish version of Enlightenment rationalism which empowers somewhat unreasonable unfair attacks on it and the counter enlightenment and so on but the truth is that there was an array of an array there were degrees among different thinkers and one of the curious things is very often in a movement things get more radical over time but in the in the Enlightenment period it seems to me went the other way that is people like Hobbes and Machiavelli are more radical then the thinkers that come after them so I believed that Hobbes not only it was an atheist for all of the talk that he gave about Christianity this would be one example of an esoteric reading he was an atheist but furthermore that he I think really did think that atheist society was possible and that was his goal mm-hmm and it's hard to say for Machiavelli it's someone like hellacious somewhat less well known Enlightenment figure again at the same time as Rousseau and Diderot I think he is also regarded as you know someone who wants an atheistic society and so these people are are more sanguine about real real rational foundations for society others are not so Voltaire clearly didn't think you could you needed to reform religion radically reformed Christianity but that we always needed religion I think he did believe in though I think he himself was not a believer same thing for Rousseau that would be a psychological judgment or empirical judgment as it were about people's character I mean today people want to believe and so you give them Locke does this right but a reasonable version of Christianity and right as opposed to it yeah what they were regarding to some more that's damaging one to civil peace and exactly yeah I mean or two things yeah number one does society need it you know will people really obey and be good citizens it can an atheist be an honest man the old question and and so Kate does society need for order and obedience does it need religion but then what you said more deep question of you know does the human soul really not long for something like that well they're related some society needs it as far as human beings needed or longford or without well it's a little different question I guess either they'll become they'll do bad things if they don't think this right divine reward and punishment or there's a more subtle I guess version of that which is they just people watch it Nietzsche says that doesn't if people want to believe I mean you know yeah and and right so here's what they believe right and today I mean half the atheists are just religious in a different way right so it's not something easily uprooted right but anyway so the point is yes you're right that there was a pretty wide array of thinkers with respect to the question of all just how rational do you expect to make society but but nevertheless everybody was on board with that project in in one form or another it seems so that's running up us up into late eighteenth century and we're so and there and you could probably read some other thinkers but they do seem to talk about it a lot more for some reason that may be because people other people are more skeptical at that point yeah and it seems to stop so you should say well read a couple things first and then say what happens I mean why is this just not Chuck ahead for the through the 19th century and right into the 20th okay so this is just back to you know another interlude where I try just lay some stuff on the net so again folks know that this is real now I've already displayed my list of examples and testimonial evidence and I should say the book is full of X itself it's full right examples and testimony and so you should order the book in addition to right let me get this free appendix right and it does explain everything but the point is I'm so I mean to really I think if if we extended this conversation for just another say four and a half hours and I I don't know what your schedule looks like but it's great um you know we're not my schedule it's our viewers in it I could go through 100 pages but plan B would be to try and do it we can with just a few examples let's say three and one way to I think get the most bang for the buck is to do it this way let's try and think about the thinkers who would be the least likely to have been practicing esotericism and then if it should turn out that there's testimonial evidence of one kind or another to them then you know we could say okay if they were then I can believe that anybody was and so it you can do a lot of a lot of work with just a few examples so let's play that game and let me suggest for starters the clearest example in this in this list and that is what is the single least likely place in the world for you to find the acknowledgement of esotericism the embrace of esotericism even the practice of esotericism I think it's clearly going to be something in the Enlightenment since that's you know adopted the project of of you know being open and and and and rational and bringing reason and philosophy precisely into the public and what is the focus you know ground zero for that enlightenment endeavor to to bring philosophy you know out into into the open and it's obviously the encyclopedia right this this project of Diderot and Dalembert and other Enlightenment thinkers to create this vast encyclopedia of human knowledge it would be available in jet you know to people generally in order to you know work towards the age of reason and and and and and and to popularize rationality and philosophy so I think that that's that's a good candidate right for the least least likely place in the world where you would find esotericism but we've already actually heard that statement that I read from Diderot that was it published in the encyclopedia right so they're already you have some minutes but let's stick with the cyclopædia for a second and to show that that wasn't just a hideous synchronic thing that statement about being wise and secret but that in the encyclopedia there is a mention of the practice of esotericism in over 25 different articles by different people and so also the nice thing about this being in encyclopedia is it shows that the awareness and of this is it was you know an encyclopedia is where you expect to find something that's general knowledge and that you've got these 25 articles by different people sort of testifies the idea that yeah of course everybody knew about this so 25 articles and if you look at them one of them is about esotericism is actually an article about esotericism in the encyclopedia entitled exoteric and esoteric and among other things it says quote the ancient philosophers had a double doctrine the one external public or exoteric the other internal secret or esoteric so that's that's pretty clear now it's of course a statement about what the ancients were doing so that reasons raises the question well what about more modern people so there is another article in the encyclopedia entitled encyclopedia this is to say there's a there's a discussion of encyclopedias in the encyclopedia so it's sort of like an 18th century self meta and and this was written by dieter ownself and in it he says quote he says that some articles were written to quote secretly attack unsettle and overturn certain ridiculous opinions which one would not dare to insult openly talking about the articles in the yes in fact what he's what he's referring to in particular is this you know what he's claiming and it's amazing that he lays this out so openly but he says that in writing the encyclopedia after every entry there is as in most encyclopedias now you know a you know a reference a part where it says C and then it lists other articles that you should see in connection with with this one and so what they did is if there is some issue you know like there's an article on the Bible or whatever so they'll have an article dedicated to the Bible and that one will be very respectful but then they'll say see and they'll lead you to other articles that maybe on trivial some you know I don't know on on count on on baby carriages who knows I mean some some innocuous and irrelevant sounding article in which it is indicated in one way or another you know a critique of you know certain the views presented in in the manuals miracle baby characters don't a pot so to appear out of nothing and write a way of saying that's exactly yeah God didn't create whatever that's right so I said there's not actually an article on baby characters however incorrect look at things like media such a famous thing but it's oh yeah no it's full good stuff yeah it's not a great not baby carriage um but it entered this shows not only are they embracing or not for so not only they recognizing yeah there is this thing esotericism is very widespread not only are they saying we're practicing it but in a way he's kind of saying almost as if the whole thing is set up it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a systematic aspect of the structure of the encyclopedia as such that aims at you know a sort of esoteric act him you know it's good so I think that's that's a big winner for the Pro esotericism camp the my second candidate for a very unlikely person to be doing this when you especially when you consider that esotericism involves a kind of dishonesty and a kind of playfulness and gravity and playfulness as opposed to philosophic gravity so you think about those things in anything okay well what about st. Thomas Aquinas huh you telling me that this saintly man at the center of of Christian theology you know certainly he wouldn't be messing around playing games of hide-and-seek you know with his books but you would be wrong so he writes somewhere in the Summa certain things can be explained to the wise in private which we we should keep silent about in public therefore these matters should be concealed with obscure language so that they will benefit the wise who understand them and be hidden from the uneducated who are unable to grasp them so remarkable yeah so it is pretty striking and it also just incidentally parenthetically it shows you that this whole idea of kind of basically what we're talking about is proving the existence of esoteric writing not only by what I began by doing is explaining the motives for it and say look doesn't it make sense they would be doing this but also you know empirically yeah and empirically by relying on explicit testimony now you could say well wait a minute how can there be explicit testimony if you're esoteric you're supposed to be keeping secrets you know why would you spill how could you also be spilling them and the point is is that it's one thing to say I am writing esoterically it is another thing to say what you're hiding what your secrets are and that proves to be an operative distinction in the history of all this that lots of people are willing to be are willing to say that I or some other philosopher wrote esoterically and hid things what they don't by and large do is say what they were hiding so you can be open about secrecy in that sense and and so yeah so Thomas it's it's really quite striking so my third and finally is Aristotle now Plato as I was saying before he's kind of a wild man and his surface is full of you know jokes and games and and and puzzles and and it's a lively play it's like it's like Shakespeare images metaphors right everything poems I mean it's just it's a whole three-ring circus and so I think most people even you know very stern Plato's scholars can appreciate that you know almost anything is possible with Plato yeah I mean I don't think people people would be willing to say yeah Plato's pot capable of that and after all he does talk about the noble lie and that's necessary and good in in society in the perfect society so okay not Plato but Aristotle Aristotle is a straight man sober sober grave serious and also literal-minded I mean he seems so eager in his texts to be clear precise method methodical and so on and so for reasons like that it's fair to say that in the literature on these things and of a scholarly literature on Aristotle everybody regards him is the last person in the world you would you know who who could be accused of having ridden esoterically but it turns out that if you look at the long history of commentary on Aristotle and there is no philosopher in the Western tradition about whom there is more commentary than Aristotle I mean it's there are you know thousands and thousands and thousands of pages written in in Aristotle commentary so that secondary literature is it is older and larger than on any other thinker and a lot of that commentary by philosophers themselves not just by the right just scholars or ya know by almost all of Amos yeah almost all of it by by you know philosophic individuals so it turns out that it's almost absolute unanimity that he's writing esoterically so one writer for example sin luckiest a lesser known ancient commentator on aristotle states that his works quote in that in his words quote he deliberately introduced obscurity repelling by this means those who are too easygoing and similarly there's a long discussion of this in Plutarch to look too long to read but but really fascinating about a letter that that our städel wrote to his his best to pupil or at least his most famous pupil Alexander the Great and the reply of Alexander and and basically Aristotle is saying you know I've published I published some books on philosophy and Alexander's writing back saying no that's bad I didn't know this stuff Gani you can't reveal this stuff and then he our style writes backs it and says well don't worry they're published and not published and it's a famous phrase that echoes through the commentary on him you know taking it very clearly to mean that you know that it's published but not in a way that can be easily seen but but let me get to the best source on this there is a Greek satirist named Lucien in living in Roman times in Rome and he writes a comic dialogue entitled the sale of lives and this depicts a slave auction of philosophers arranged by Zeus with Hermes as the auctioneer and so let me read you a quick section on this when we pick up the action after the sale of pythagoras Heraclitus and some other lesser lights and finally he puts Aristotle on the block so Hermes come now by the height of intelligence the one who knows absolutely everything buyer what's he like Hermes moderate gentlemanly adaptable in his way of living and what is more he's double buyer what do you mean Hermes viewed from the outside he seems to be one man and from the inside another so if you buy him be sure to call the one self exoteric and the other esoteric well so again you know pretty explicit and it just helped deep the tradition wasn't one hundreds of years later in rome right tossed off almost play yeah i mean not as a revelation just as a character and uh whatever that it's a dialogue or a play or something right yeah sang it right yeah so in some i think that again my scheme is that you know if if these three hardest cases are so very clearly i mean it's i don't think there's any ambiguity i think there's so much evidence for each of these three that they were esoteric it just it seems to me you know greatly increases the likelihood that well you know basically anybody could have been if they were and and that this was really a very widespread practice okay so in the few minutes since we don't have four def our conversation maybe we should though they were philosophic didn't know you know they spoke all night and then republicans right suppose but briefly uh so what why did this just get lost i mean why did you why did Leo Strauss have to do his work and make his very astonishing discoveries which are he was astonished by when he discovered them if you look at the letters from the thirties and right and then you had to write this book and stuff so give us the brief version of the okay let me just rattle off some quick points and then stick with one another for a little more if you think it through you realize that esotericism pretty much this practice pretty much violates every cherished value we have in the modern period for example we're egalitarians this is a very elitist practice right hyper elitist secondly we believe in honesty telling the truth especially scholarly you know scholars of a duty to tell truth and this is plainly dishonest thirdly the whole meaning of philosophy in the Enlightenment period is for demystification but this is this is mystery you mrs. mystification another issue is that for a variety of reasons you know we've evolved in the modern period into a period of very great one I could call hermeneutical scepticism there's very great skepticism that one can even use the phrase the correct interpretation as if there could be the correct interpretation of something I mean it's if you use that phrase in modern you know in the modern academy you're looked upon as a kind of somewhat backward and B'nai did Sol you know we know we know know that there's no such thing so this hermeneutical pessimism because obviously this the idea of esotericism presupposes that people are able to tease out very subtle things and but still in an accurate way but the I think most important thing one more before we get to that it's easy its seen as cowardly because again the modern enlightenment understanding the philosopher is you're supposed to change the world you're supposed to speak truth to power not hide from power but you know ultimately an underlying all this is there's a certain the basic premise of ancient political esotericism is what I call this conflictual view that these two kind of peeks of human life and and and that human life is dualistic and it has these two peaks one is philosophy one is citizenship and and that they are in tension with each other and that's tragic I mean that's that means life is fundamentally flawed if what perfects one person puts another person's way of life you know in some jeopardy I mean it's it's a very and and we're humanists we're in the human in the modern world and so the opposite view the beginning of the Enlightenment is this is this what I call a Harmonist view that life fits together in the end maybe not at first but we can make it fit together we solve human beings can solve every problem that nature throws up to them were solutionist s-- and the ancient view is in the esoteric view is very you know anti solutionist it's rather resign yourself to a certain necessity that there's flaws in the human condition that cannot be overcome death is a big one but another one is this that the human that the perfections of our nature are such that they don't that they don't fit together so I think that there is this just repugnance that they feel for the attitude that lies behind this practice yeah that's interesting I mean I guess that could be tragic or comic I mean anyway because comedy is often about the disproportion of things or what is show comic depending on where your you fit into this but yeah but neither is congenial to this modern my view yours you know either a kind of resigned comic view of life you know our stopping is I suppose and this is the way it is you know and then or or kind of resigned tragic view of life I suppose you know yeah it's interesting hadn't thought of it that way and so that so that and I guess I mean who's the last thinker I don't remember you sight whose explicit about I mean does it is there a moment where we can see it disappear I mean there there are thinkers assembly I believe in the 19th century who quietly make clear they understand this you know if you look at they just don't talk about it much I mean that they've read they read other previous thinkers the way you would want them to but they don't make it big deal of it and yeah it because it's so I fast I don't think it's ever completely disappear I've I mean right doing what you're saying yeah I don't think it's ever completely disappeared and Strauss is the one well let me say it hasn't completely different disappeared but even among you know just scholars who in general scoff at the idea they'll all of them say you know except for this guy yeah if somebody that they've worked on because it turns out that if you dig deep enough regarding almost anybody you'll come across this stuff and so it turns out that lots of scholars who reject you know this Strauss II and obsession with Ritz and so on nevertheless they think well but this guy actually you know did so a Diderot scholar here so scholar there even Quentin Skinner the the the the leader of the Cambridge school of interpretation which emphasizes all the contextualism and historical grounding that I was talking about earlier he has a book on hobbes and he thinks hobbes was an atheist yeah so the pieces of it never disappeared but but the whole picture and it would it's deeper philosophical significance that is what has disappeared it's hard to say who's the last person who had that but you know there's a letter from Goethe who is lamenting the decline that he sees taking place before his very eyes and that's our the turn of the 19th century right I mean yeah so yeah I suppose where you get to Conte goal etc it's much less right they still know that people did this but they don't approve of it and they don't really believe that it could have worked they kind of reject the larger meaning and significance and philosophical roots of it all but that people did it I mean there's a piece by Cod where he's criticizing somebody in his time who was doing this and basically on the grounds that it's not telling the truth it's interesting that's so interesting so this book your book came out what three five years ago 2015 basic and I'm curious reaction to it I mean on the one it you're taking on you're defending what's sort of in a popular position maybe not as a populist or once was and so you have all this evidence a little different from right interpreting one text where people can say well either that interpretation is wrong or that's that maybe that person had this quirky idea that he should write this way but it's not really central to 2,000 years of major major major philosophers I mean so what what what I'm curious what the reaction well in what surprised the other fairly broadly reviewed got something like 30 35 reviews and I would say for the most part they were all positive and even the person people who were criticized you know obviously all always people have criticisms and maybe it deserves the sum of some - but still they were all admitting well yeah I did open my eyes a bit as to how widespread this phenomenon was nobody sort of said this is just fake news that was before we had that useful phrase but at the same time what I was hoping for was a kind of larger engagement with it and you know people you know the people who are you know scholars involved and you know what we call hermeneutical questions questions of interpretation and reading people from the cambridge school and so on that there would be some kind of attacks or at least some kind of assessment and engagement and that if least so far hasn't happened so that's been disappointing well I guess maybe that's a good sign if they don't really it's easy to ignore them to it that's it criticize if you don't have good criticisms right or as I like to think but I'd prefer being in a scholars to whoever they have a big investment and you know this is the big problem I was struck with Strauss I'm such a huge figure there are a few people who mid-career or early career we didn't think oh my god you know I did not know this I didn't understand this I've been doing things wrong one more Kendall I think talked about a great thinker but still smart very much I always thought to his credit that he no I don't know what how old he was but I mean he's already written a important book I think I lock oh yeah yeah sort of says well this house put me back to school yeah I mean I have money scholars you can say yeah that's what strikes me that there's so maybe it's just the next generation they really has to decide you know this is pretty compelling and I need to whatever my professor in my you know political science 101 class I need to read these books with more suspicion and and I think we're fun I guess I'll just close with this maybe this for me at least I mean we discussed this we've discussed in several times I mean you didn't really you came to this from your studies in ruse or as you said here your your unhappiness with the what was there in terms of just your reading these statements and that one else is commenting on them a lot of people don't get intrigued I think with this just because so much more fun and exciting to read a book in the way this would suggest right it can lead you off of course also you go yeah so much you know be playing so many games at once that you sort of lose track what what you're doing or you go off at some tangent or you misunderstand what's hints and so forth but yeah there's something so much more I found this just as a student I mean haven't done this in years I would see but you know that I don't know I don't know I'm just curious when you teach and when you you know with students do people have a taste for that kind of the the playfulness of it I mean I think that's what strikes me certainly your teacher Allan bloom did right I mean yeah I think the day I'd say they don't enjoy the idea or the prospect of having to read esoterically because it's daunting yeah and it's difficult and this is a mess a lot of downside which we haven't talked about to this whole phenomenon downside in the sense that you know if it's if it's true that you need to interpret these books esoterically that that's hard to do and hard you do write in a hundred ways to go wrong so it increases the level of nonsense out there as well as the possibility of you know something that goes deeper than things had previously so yeah I think that people feel daunted and it could even discourage people from wanting to read these people why not read and just stick to contemporaries I don't do this on the other hand it does make these thinkers more interesting so you're more asking about the process the way yeah but so that I find that I mean there are certain people who love a gnat knack for this and the funny thing is that I never thought I'd be writing on this cuz I don't and I don't I don't much like esoteric interpretation myself I mean I mean the act of it right I'm just very literal-minded person and so I'm a little you know to some experiments a I wish this weren't true but on the other hand and what we talked about earlier is it does make them more interesting and that initial disappointment that a lot of people feel when they pick up these famous books that hope to be blown away by them and or not I think it's it makes them more interesting when they realize it well you know there's more here than meets the eye and in that you know you know one can pursue these things and think about them more deeply with the help of these books and that's more interesting so that's the way I would describe the upside yeah I've always been struck I mean I've always wondered always when I was in this business we flee as a student and a student in a professor a couple of years yeah it was sort of why aren't more people attracted us both other scholars and professors but also just students and you know just as so obviously to be more interesting then you know the kind of doctrinal deductive you know working things out that's fine for something it's important but but I think I have always underestimated the what you what's the core of your argument really which is the resistance to it for what should we call it ideological reasons or for you know the once you accept this is you're not just accepting a method of reading right you're accepting a certain understanding of how philosophers think the relationship of a philosopher in societies you said write gap between the few of the many he has all these quotes many of these quotations explicitly say otherwise and the and the unwise and and that's a hard thing maybe for people to get over so to speak right yeah I think yeah I think it galls people on so many levels right you could yeah but but I did yeah but I I think that they see I mean but on the simplest level it's as one scholar said and when in reviewing Australia one estas his book it it's an invitation to perverse ingenuity you know and it you know and Strauss in these drowsy ins that they use think they have a key you know that nobody else has and they have secret truths that we don't the whole thing is just obnoxious and so I think I think it just galls people on a certain level and you know and again it has to be confessed that it is an invitation to perverse and ingenuity in the wrong hands I think Strauss is one of the most dependable and sober and reliable of esoteric interpreters but the cast and can't be said for every one of his students or everybody who gets involved in this game it's you know hundred ways to go wrong once you start interpreting esoterically and so it's not unreasonable to want it not to be true so I don't know there's just a whole thing yeah a little raft of good and bad reasons for resisting it but resisting it we have right but overcoming the resistance we have so congratulations on your book and like and thank you for taking the time for this conversation it's been a pleasure and thank you for joining us on conversations

Channel: Conversations with Bill Kristol

Views: 7,887

Rating: 4.8742137 out of 5

Keywords: Leo Strauss, Straussianism, Political Philosophy, Ancient Political Philosophy, Michigan State University, Ancients and Moderns, Diderot, Rousseau, Maimonides, Interpretation, Intellectual History, History of Political Thought, History of Ideas, Bill Kristol, Arthur Melzer, rhetoric, Esotericism, Early Modern Political Philosophy, The Enlightenment

Id: lM68Lccwglg

Length: 85min 45sec (5145 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 04 2020