I’m just getting around to reminding you about the second part of the symposium in Perspectives on Political Science on Arthur Melzer’s Philosophy Between the Lines. It features five great essays.
Rogers Smith explains why you could love Melzer’s book, know that esotericism is real, and still be a political progressive. He’s right, you really could, as long as you’re a somewhat ironic progressive, as Smith is. Melzer is a bit of an ironic progressive himself, if you read carefully. He even says relativism makes our lives better, to a point.
Peter Thiel, the best educated billionaire in Silicon Valley and quite the libertarian techno-progressive, contributed “Exotericism and the Untroubled Race for the Future.” I’m not going to try to summarize that.
Gabriel Noah Braham, quite the feisty countercultural English professor, explains how the revival of attention to esotericism is “the antidote to the poison of politically correct multiculturalism” and so has much to offer to “classroom instruction in general.”
The distinguished professor of philosophy Maudemarie Clark provides considerable evidence that Melzer’s case for “Aristotle’s alleged esotericism” is weak, and she contrasts “Melzer’s Straussian account with [her] Nietzschean account of what esotericism can contribute to philosophic education.”
And Melzer’s response to the sixteen essays in the two parts of the symposium–”Esoteric Tangles”–includes much not found in his book in defense of “defensive esotericism.”
Here’s one example: A puzzle is that Plato’s/Socrates’ fleshing out of all that is implied in the doctrine “virtue is knowledge” is boldly trumpeted–or seemingly the opposite of esoteric. Yet claiming that “all departures from virtue must be from ignorance” obviously means that “people cannot therefore be justly blamed or punished.” So there’s no “rationale for redistributive punishment,” and our whole legal system is rooted in angrily unjust illusions. It also means that we can’t be justly blamed or punished, I would think, for our angry ignorance.
Melzer suggests that this openness, in its way, is sort of exoteric. It is an exaggerated–become wholesale–denial of the real phenomenon of moral virtue. What’s the point? Socrates and Plato thought that “the main danger to philosophy stems from a populace dominated by angry and retributive passions,” and so “an open critique of retribution would form an essential part of philosophy.” That open or exoteric critique is a form of defensive esotericism. The resulting relativism makes our lives better, to a point.
But what would provoke human anger more than promulgating that anger makes no sense at all? And it really is true, after all, that the line between good and evil, as Solzhenitsyn wrote, goes through every human heart. What do we make, as our pope emeritus recently wrote, of an understanding of science or philosophy that can’t come to terms with personal love and personal evil?
All that and much more can be found in vol. 44, no. 4 (October-December). Let me thank Peter Minowitz once again for his exceedingly meticulous and savvy guest editing.