Melzer makes the case that many pre-modern philosophers, for various reasons, practiced esotericism in their writings. “An esoteric writer or writing would involve the following characteristics: first, the effort to convey certain truths—the “esoteric” teaching—to a select group of individuals by means of some indirect or secretive mode of communication; second, the concomitant effort to withhold or conceal these same truths from most people; and third (a common but not strictly necessary characteristic) the effort to propagate for the sake of the latter group a fictional doctrine—the “exoteric” teaching—in place of the true doctrine that has been withheld.” Esoteric writing is a mode of communication that hides its true, deeper meaning so that it is not obvious to all.
This tradition of esoteric philosophy started at least as far back as Plato. In the Phaedrus, Plato reports Socrates as saying that “a written text is too univocal, it says the same things to all people whether they can understand and appreciate it or whether they would be corrupted by it.” In the Theaetetus, Plato’s Socrates explains that this mode of esoteric explanation goes back even further in time, “a tradition from the ancients who hid their meaning from the common herd in poetical figures.” Aristotle, as well, is reported to have written to his pupil, Alexander the Great, “You have written me about the acroatic discourses, thinking that they should be guarded in secrecy. Know, then, that they have been both published and not published. For they are intelligible only to those who have heard us.” In other words, if one was not tutored personally by Aristotle on the nature of his true meaning, his philosophy would be obscure and not be understandable.
Melzer next relates the Christian tradition. In Matt 7:6, Jesus states, “Give not that which is holy to dogs; neither cast ye your pearls before swine.” Later in Matt 13:10-12, “Then the disciples came and said to him, “Why do you speak to [the people] in parables?” And he answered them, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For to the one who has, more will be given, and will have an abundance, but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and they do not hear, nor do they understand.” This form of esoteric teaching was taken as a given by later Christian philosophers. Aquinas states that the common people were “neither able nor worthy to receive the naked truth, which He revealed to His disciples.” Calvin wrote, “Christ declares that he intentionally spoke obscurely, in order that his discourse might be a riddle to many, and might only strike their ears with a confused and doubtful sound.” Augustine stated, “the Lord’s meaning was therefore purposely clothed in the obscurities of parables.”
Because today so many modern philosophers have come to doubt that their predecessors wrote esoterically, Melzer collects even more evidence that this was a common feature of pre-modern philosophy. Epicurus wrote, “I have never wished to cater to the people; for what I know they do not approve, and what they approve I do not know.” Cicero claimed that the faculty of reason was “disastrous to the many and wholesome to but few.” Spinoza wrote of “the masses whose intellect is not capable of perceiving things clearly and distinctly.” Nietzsche stated, “One does not only wish to be understood when one writes, one wishes just as surely not to be understood. It is not by any means necessarily an objection to a book when anyone finds it impossible to understand: perhaps that was part of the author’s intention—he did not want to be understood by just “anybody.””
Melzer posits that the entire purpose of philosophy took a great turn with the Enlightenment. For the ancients, there was a renunciation of the political sphere for the life of the mind and personal truth. “For the more a contemplative philosopher understands his own life to be based on the radical rejection and transcendence of the ordinary, political life of those around him, the more he must feel isolated and fear the potential hostility of that community.” There is an inescapable tension between the City and Man (the philosopher). On the contrary, modern philosophy seeks to harmonize the political and the personal. It seeks “to overcome the tension between theory and praxis, to actualize their potential unity…. Enlightenment philosophers seek the best ways to address and transform the political world, in order to bring it into harmony with reason. Counter-Enlightenment philosophers seek the best ways to address and transform other philosophers, in order to bring them and their reasoning into harmony with the political world.” However, on both scores, there is the purpose of bringing philosophy and politics together, one way or another. The ancients believed this was an unresolvable tension, which never could be bridged. The conflict between the City and philosophy “consists in a conflict between two incompatible ways of life. The city requires authoritative settlement and closure; philosophy demands openness and questioning. The city necessarily bases itself on custom, the philosopher seeks to base his life on reason—and these two foundations, custom and reason, are fundamentally opposed.”
Melzer next details his four main suppositions for why esoteric writing was practiced. The first was a fear of persecution. Tacitus wrote, “Seldom are men blessed with times in which they may think what they like and say what they think.” Pierre Bayle agreed, “Those who write with a view to publishing their thoughts accommodate themselves to the times and betray on a thousand occasions the judgement they form of things.”
Melzer suggests a second reason for esoteric philosophy was to protect dangerous truths. Melzer states “there are some important truths that are “inconvenient”—dangerous to society or to ordinary life…. All human beings are not equal in their capacity to handle such difficult truths…. It is morally permissible…. to conceal or dilute the truth.” Aquinas writes, “A teacher should measure his words that they help rather than hinder his hearer…. There are matters, however, that would be harmful to those hearing them if they were openly presented…. These matters, therefore, ought to be concealed from those to whom they might do harm.” Jean d’Alembert commenting on The Spirit of the Laws, states “Montesquieu, having to present sometimes important truths whose absolute and direct enunciation might wound without bearing any fruit, has had the prudence to envelope them, and by this innocent artifice, has veiled them from those to whom they would be harmful, without letting them be lost for the wise.”
A third reason to cloak truths in esoteric writing was as a method of teaching. Melzer states, “The purpose of pedagogical esotericism…. more directly concerns philosophy itself: the transmission of philosophical understanding. In this sense, it is esotericism’s purest form…. One must embrace obscurity (of the right kind) as something essential to effective philosophical communication.” Alexander Herzen wrote of obscure teachings, “In allegorical discourse there is perceptible excitement and struggle: this discourse is more impassioned than any straight exposition. The word implied has greater force beneath its veil and is always transparent to those who care to understand. A thought which is checked has greater meaning concentrated in it—it has a sharper edge; to speak in such a way that the thought is plain yet remains to be put into words by the reader himself is the best persuasion.” In the Phaedrus, Plato’s Socrates puts these words into the mouth of the Egyptian god, Thamus, through “[writings] you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction, and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant.” Kierkegaard writes, “One can deceive a person for the truth’s sake, and (to recall old Socrates) one can deceive a person into truth.” Augustine suggests, “Lest the obvious should cause disgust, the hidden truths arouse longing; longing brings on certain renewal; renewal brings sweet inner knowledge…. It is true that any doctrine suggested under allegorical form affects and pleases us more, and is more esteemed, than one set forth explicitly in plain words.” Nietzsche adds, “the good fortune that attends the obscure is that the reader toils at them and ascribes to them the pleasure he has in fact gained from his own zeal.”
Melzer describes his fourth reason for esoteric writing as political, which he states as a uniquely modern form. It is “defined as esotericism in the service of the newly political goal of philosophy: to actualize the potential harmony of reason and social life through the progressive rationalization of the political world.” It is the goal the ancients viewed with skepticism, if not impossibility. Macaulay writes, “Logic admits of no compromise. The essence of politics is compromise…. Every political sect has its esoteric and its exoteric school, its abstract doctrines for the initiated, its visible symbols, its imposing forms, its mythological fables for the vulgar.” In a letter to Voltaire, d’Alembert states, “Time will enable people to distinguish what we have thought from what we have said.”
Melzer continues by explaining the proper way to read esoteric texts. Nietzsche suggests when grappling with his own writings, “A book like this, a problem like this, is in no hurry; we both, I just as much as my book, are friends of lento [slowly]…. I am a philologist still, that is to say, a teacher of slow reading…. For philology is that venerable art which demands of its votaries one thing above all: to go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow…. It teaches to read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers.” Montesquieu argues for giving the author the benefit of the doubt and withholding judgement before taking the work as a whole when deeply reading, “When one reads a book, it is necessary to be in a disposition to believe that the author has seen the contradictions that one imagines, at the first glance, one is meeting. Thus it is necessary to begin by distrusting one’s own prompt judgements, to look again at the passages one claims are contradictory…. When a work is systematic, one must also be sure that one understands the whole system. You see a great machine made in order to produce an effect. You see wheels that turn in opposite directions; you would think, at first glance, that the machine was going to destroy itself, that all the turning was going to arrest itself…. It keeps going: these pieces, which seem at first to destroy one another unite together for the proposed object.”
Melzer concludes with a section on Leo Strauss and the opposition between philosophy and poetry. For Strauss, Socrates is the philosopher par excellence. His greatest opponents were not the sophists, but the poets. Strauss wrote, “The great alternative to classical political philosophy is poetry.” Melzer explains the side of the poets, “For the philosophers are typically detached from and contemptuous of the human things, the merely mortal realm; they are rationalists seeking the universal, the necessary, and the eternal. It follows that true wisdom is the preserve not of the philosophers but of the poets who immerse themselves in human life, who know it from the inside, and who are able to imitate and articulate the unique experience of the human in all its inescapable particularity, contingency, and changeableness.” If Socrates was successful it was in defending “the philosophic life successfully against this double challenge to its legitimacy, the religious and the poetic (or “historicist”).” The beauty of Socrates was his ability to return again and again to the dirtiness of the particular world, despite his flights towards eternal truths. “The famous Socratic turn, that is, his return to the human things. No matter how high philosophy, with divine madness, soars toward the sun, it must always recollect its origin in and continued dependence upon the cave, the world of opinion, the average-everyday, the commonsense surface of things.” Melzer suggests, “esotericism is the literary counterpart of the Socratic method. A properly esoteric text does not allow the philosophic reader to form a dependence on the writer or on foundations laid in the past; rather it artfully compels him to develop and rely on his own inner powers.”
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