Quick Take: Look for Esoteric Writing

Why continental philosophers tend to write so badly & why you should still make the effort to read them

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Some time ago, I found myself trying to explain to

Bentham's Bulldog

why Descartes sucked at writing (almost certainly, purposefully). It’s because Descartes often was esoteric:

To clarify my point, I have to explain first that most people have been using the word “esoteric” wrong your entire life (also the word “bigot.”) This is the Cambridge English dictionary explaining what esoteric actually means, and it has nothing to do with witches or secret rituals:

Last year, I published a comparative history of ancient Chinese and Western philosophy that I would not recommend you buy unless you really like hard-cover books (it’s very expensive at almost $100). If you want to read it you should subscribe to my Substack, since all paid subscribers receive a free (electronic) copy.

Anyway, early in my book I rely heavily on Arthur Melzer's excellent “Philosophy Between the Lines,” a 2014 work exploring the history of esoteric, or hidden, transmission of concepts in the history of philosophy. Melzer blames misguided efforts by the Enlightenment thinkers of the 18th century for the simplification of historical tradition: when we once had competing schools offering various viewpoints on important concepts including social arrangements and religion, the Enlightened effort to order Western thinking under the twin categories of “progress” and “reaction” created what we might call a “Whig” concept of philosophy, under which philosophers add bricks to the great cathedral of human comprehension, while enemies of thought and all that is good in the world are trying to tear that same cathedral down.

This idea of “Whig” refers, of course, to the British concept of “Whig history,” or history arranged to show the unstoppable progress of mankind towards material development and the liberal system of government. This is hardwired to such an extent among Westerners of the 21th century that I’m pretty sure a lot of the people reading these words are now shaking their heads and saying to themselves: “Whig history? That’s just history!”

Such embrace of a typically Hegelian historical guiding principle — the basis of Karl Marx’s thought as he explained in his dissertation of 1841 — leads to the common arrangement of thinkers in philosophy courses: Thales has some insights, on which the Pythagorean add some more, on which the sophists put their own contribution, all of which are built upon by the greats like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle and so on, until Kant takes over the whole edifice and creates a great wall of ethics on which Hegel incorporates dialectics, and on to the great triumph of rational thinking in the 20th century.

This orderly presentation would be terribly endangered by a deep discussion of the countercurrents in Classical thinking and of the fact that most classical philosophers were strongly opposed to political liberalism/democracy and the best were rabidly, murderously anti-democratic. So the cracks are papered over by making a lot of fuss about their worthy theories about physics and their path-breaking approach to mathematics. Melzer blasts the whole artificial construct thus:

“In its commitment to being practical and politically effective – and in its resulting need to overcome skepticism and arrive at settled, certain answers – modern rationalism embraces a kind of hyper-foundationalism: it hopes once and for all to lay down solid, even indubitable, foundations and on this basis to build up a great and ever-increasing edifice of reliable knowledge. In a word, it seeks to make philosophy progressive, like the technical arts. This idea [of progress] implies that the most elementary questions can be settled once and for all so that future generations can dispense with their further discussion, but can erect on the foundations once laid an ever-growing structure. In this way, the foundations are covered up.”

The great irony in this Whig view of philosophy, Melzer adds, “is that the belief in progress necessarily creates a new, more inescapable kind of tradition. Under the sway of this idea, not just religion or custom, but philosophy itself prompts one to accept the teachings of the past without serious examination and move on. All modern thinkers stand on the shoulders of giants – that is why their thought is so ungrounded. In sum, the growth in modern times of historicism – meaning now the development, not of the will to such a view, but of the inner sense of its plausibility – is largely due to the rise of the idea of progress. For this latter idea is what caused modern philosophy to be so dependent on its own history and traditions, trapped in a cave beneath the cave. And eventually the modern mind, judging of things from its own inner experience, came to its unique 'insight,' which all earlier ages had found implausible: the historical imprisonment of all human thought.”

In his book and an online appendix, Melzer frequently cites ancient writers who commented on the esoteric intent of all Classic philosophers, and their efforts to hide some of their teachings so that only the initiated, and certainly not censors or dangerous politicians, would be able to understand them. For example, in a dialogue written by Plato¹, he has Socrates discuss Protagoras, wondering whether he was “a very ingenious person who threw out this dark saying for the benefit of the common herd like ourselves, and reserved the truth as a secret doctrine to be revealed to his disciples.”

In the same dialogue, Plato suggests that Homer, Hesiod and some other early poets were covertly presenting Heracleitean ideas about nature when they gave their genealogies of the gods and other mythical accounts².

Augustine of Hippo also made comments in that vein about his Classic predecessors³ (“For, as Plato liked and constantly affected the well-known method of his master Socrates, namely, that of dissimulating his knowledge or his opinions, it is not easy to discover clearly what he himself thought on various matters, any more than it is to discover what were the real opinions of Socrates”) while many others had similar things to say about pretty much every philosopher that will be discussed in this book.

The Muslim world has, of course, its own esoteric tradition: in the 10th century, propagandists working for the Andalusian Umayyads accused the Tunisian Fatimids of falsely interpreting the Quran thanks to their habit of allegorizing the literal meaning (zahir) so as to bring out its inner and occult sense (batin). Jewish esotericism has its own thing going too.

In modern times, that tradition is not visible to Melzer only, of course. In his “Short History of Chinese Philosophy,” (1948), Fung Yu-lan makes it clear that the esoteric tradition is also extremely strong in China:

Suggestiveness, not articulateness, is the ideal of all Chinese art, whether it be poetry, painting, or anything else. In poetry, what the poet intends to communicate is often not what is directly said in the poetry, but what is not said in it. According to Chinese literary tradition, in good poetry “the number of words is limited, but the ideas it suggests are limitless.” So an intelligent reader of poetry reads what is outside the poem; and a good reader of books reads “what is between the lines.” Such is the ideal of Chinese art, and this ideal is reflected in the way in which Chinese philosophers have expressed themselves.

Martin Heidegger, attacked after World War II because of his Nazi involvement, went as far as using esotericism as a defense: as he later claimed, when he held his seminar on logos in Heraclitus in the mid-1930s, it was clear to everyone ‘with ears to hear’ that he was dealing a devastating blow to Nazi ideology⁴.

Leo Strauss is just the most famous among the 20th century esoteric thinkers, but pretty much every academic in Communist China could be added to the list, except for a handful of stubborn, committed Maoists. Even as dedicated a progressive like Slovenia's Slavoj Žižek had this to write in the London Review of Books, of all places, citing Strauss:

”Questioning the gods and the ethos of the city undermines the citizens’ loyalty, and thus the basis of normal social life. Yet philosophy is also the highest, the worthiest, of human endeavors. The solution proposed was that philosophers keep their teachings secret, as in fact they did, passing them on by writing ‘between the lines’. The true, hidden message contained in the ‘great tradition’ of philosophy from Plato to Hobbes and Locke is that there are no gods, that morality is merely prejudice, and that society is not grounded in nature.”

Žižek, of course, is often pretty esoteric himself, which probably explains why he may be the most controversial thinker alive: on the right, he’s commonly derided as a buffoonish Communist, one described by the popular conservative writer Theodore Dalrymple as an “Ideal Fraud” who hopes for the resurrection of Stalin and ample gulags in which to intern and torture his abundant number of enemies; on the left, he’s amassed many, if not most of those enemies despite his frequent protestations of leftism and his oft-repeated love for Lenin.

Take Adam Kirsch: in a 2008 article in The New Republic, headlined “The Deadly Jester,” he called Žižek “the most despicable philosopher in the West.” Not harsh enough? In 2012, Noam Chomsky accused him of “posturing,” the worst possible crime for a philosopher, which the well-respected linguist and political commentator described as “using fancy terms like polysyllables and pretending you have a theory when you have no theory whatsoever.” For good measure, Chomsky also said that Žižek’s so-called theories never go “beyond the level of something you can explain in five minutes to a twelve-year-old.” 

To some extent, both Kirsch and Chomsky are following up in a long tradition of mistrust between philosophers on both sides of the English Channel. For centuries, there’s been a deep divide, between English-speaking thinkers fond of calling it as they saw it and obscure continental thinkers who frequently preferred to twist words and phrases beyond rational comprehension, often because of esoteric traditions little known outside of their own nations.

English philosophers such as Locke have pitted themselves against Frenchmen like Descartes, later Germans like Heidegger and, in the period following World War II, a new French-led attack of the existentialists and the post-moderns. Jacques Lacan, the late philosopher and psychoanalyst whom Žižek identifies as his master, was one of those, and Chomsky is old enough to have met him. His verdict:

“I kind of liked him. We had meetings every once in awhile. But quite frankly I thought he was a total charlatan. He was just posturing for the television cameras in the way many Paris intellectuals do. Why this is influential, I haven’t the slightest idea. I don’t see anything there that should be influential.”

Chomsky was a smart, often brilliant, person. This is not to say he was an idiot.

This is to say that I think it’s time for us to accept that divide between the people who think they can write freely and they people who think they can’t, and to understand why it exists. And, perhaps, to assume that it will always be necessary so that thought can actually move forward while thinkers avoid being cancelled, fired or shot.

1. Plato, Theaetetus, 152c, 155e

2. Plato, Theaetetus 180c-d

3. Augustine, City of God, 248

4. See Slavoj Žižek’s “Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?: Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion” (Verso Books, 2001).