Damon Linker praises Arthur Melzer’s Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing, calling it “the most compelling, surprising, and persuasive defense of [Leo] Strauss’s thought” he’s ever read:
Staying far away from questions of foreign (or any other kind of) policy, Melzer has chosen as his
subject Strauss’ notorious assertion that virtually all philosophers up until the early 19th century wrote their books “esoterically” — that is, using a rhetoric of concealment, with a surface teaching meant for general readers and a hidden teaching for those who were intelligent, clever, and tenacious enough to uncover it. This contention has been dismissed by most non-Straussian scholars, who have tended to suggest that Strauss projected the phenomenon onto most of the canonical authors he discussed in his many learned books and essays.
Melzer supplies a mountain of evidence in support of Strauss’ claims — quotes from just about every major philosopher (and many other writers) from ancient Greece to 19th-century Germany testifying to the reality of esotericism. … It seems that up until roughly two centuries ago, almost every culturally educated person took for granted that books of philosophy (and sometimes also works of scripture and literature) were written in a style of deliberate obscurity.
Why the recovery of this way of writing – and reading – matters:
Toward the end of his book, Melzer urges scholars and other interested readers to undertake esoteric interpretations of the entire Western philosophical tradition, at least up through the end of the 18th century. If he merely meant to encourage careful, creative readings of old texts, the suggestion would be a little banal. But of course that isn’t all that Melzer has in mind. After all, his invitation follows an elaborate (and remarkably persuasive) effort to establish not only that pre-modern writers wrote esoterically but also why they did so — in part to shield society from truths that puncture the ersatz nobility of politics and point beyond it altogether, toward the fully examined life of philosophy.
A world in which readers regularly produced revisionist esoteric interpretations that exposed these truths to the light of day would be one in which our understanding of the Western philosophical tradition was radically transformed. It would, for one thing, look far more deeply skeptical, profoundly anti-utopian, and brutally realistic about the permanent problems of political and moral life than it is usually presumed to be.
The Dish 