I am so eager to write about something that I do not understand adequately. When I pause to reflect on it I find myself in the midst of the largest philosophical and psychological problems I am aware of.
The problems concern the relation between hermeneutics, psychology, politics, and metaphysics (or ontology).
Hermeneutics provides the most striking entry point: Leo Strauss (Persecution and the Art of Writing and everything else he ever wrote) and Arthur Melzer (Philosophy Between the Lines) have convincingly demonstrated that our era is unique in that we have lost touch with an ancient and abiding rhetorical practice known as 'esoteric writing'. Esoteric writing concerns the relationship between philosophy and society, and the relationship between truth (or nature) and language.
Pre-modern philosophers were consistently under the threat of persecution and censorship. Consequently, they could not openly discuss their more heterodox ideas, lest they open themselves to threat of death. Philosophers thus developed a rhetorical style in which they could communicate things to careful readers, and hide things from careless readers. Ways of tipping off the right kind of reader include: Purposeful mistakes and misquotations, long digressions, abrupt transitions, oblique prefatory notes, anonymous publishing, and so on. Annabel Patterson, a renowned literary historian, also demonstrates the existence of these rhetorical strategies in her book Censorship and Interpretation.
Esoteric writing is a hermeneutic strategy that above all demonstrates that great writers in all eras possessed a deep awareness of text and sub-text, surface and depth.
The implications of esotericism are vast simply in the world of philology and scholarship. If it is true that authors were forced to write in encoded ways due to the threat of censorship and persecution, and if it is true that we have forgotten how to read this way, than much contemporary scholarship needs to be revised.
But there are also deep implications in the world of psychology, politics, and metaphysics (or ontology)
Psychologically, it puts us face to face with a divide that sits at the center of our souls: we are, as human beings, often divided between, on the one hand, our allegiance to our political communities and the opinions that bring them, and on the other, to the truth or the reality of things regardless of their implications for our political communities. The love of one's own and the love of the good are often at odds.
I often say that I am interested in the psychology of conformity. Because in order to get by in our daily lives, in order to be what we are, we must conform to social roles and standards. But we are more than the roles and the standards. Yet we cannot live in this excess only. We must live as a fusion of role and life; structure and growth. We must, in Collingwood's phrase, be vertebrates.
Esotericism thus describes also the structure of our souls: we are a surface of social form, role, structure; and this surface always obscures, supports, and reveals a depth. The task is to become a surface that is the surface of a depth.
This puts us face to face with the political dimension of esotericism. The implication I would draw from the esoteric tradition is this: Society is inherently violent. It always coerces, it always shapes, it always enforces and forces us into a given shape. Unfortunately we are not able to absent from this violence. This violence is a precondition of our being.
All life and growth is also violent. Growth is the fulfilling of certain possibilities. Violence is the denying of certain possibilities. It is impossible for us to fulfill certain possibilities without denying others. Ergo growth requires violence. But some forms of growth are less violent than others because they fulfill our nature more full or 'fit' us better. Esotericism, in a peculiar sense, is a practice that mitigates the necessary violence of social life; it dampens and enlivens the conformity that, if left unchecked by the life of our lives, would transform us into cogs.
The most peculiar implication of the esoteric tradition relates to all of this, and is the most obscure to me.
I will refer to it as metaphysical esotericism (following Benardete). Metaphysical esotericism refers to the fact that reality itself seems to possess the structure of surface and depth. Phenomenology, in Heidegger's sense, can become ontology because there is a depth in the world that responds to the surface formulations of language. Merleau-Ponty says that 'to be is to be the surface of a depth'. No matter what facet of reality we look at, it always seems as it things appear a way, and are a way. The world unfolds from itself.
There is some sort of developmentalist ontology implied in this, one that I don't want to call historicism.
Our being as political animals, divided psychologically, finding ways of writing that mitigate the violence of society by navigating the relation between surface and depth, wouldn't be possible unless the world also possessed the structure of surface and depth.
The practice of philosophy, which is identical with esotericism, is the practice of learning that the surface depth relation that gives rise to philosophy (the discovery of nature) is identical in structure to reality itself.
I cannot say more. I am baffled by these problems.
But I like this formulation: the task of philosophy is to become the surface of a depth; and esotericism is precisely training in becoming the surface of a depth.
The link between ontology and politics is so real.
Our own waking up into the dilemma of philosophy, the ascent from political opinion to knowledge, becomes a guide to the nature of nature: Ie the movement and permanent relation between surface and depth, being bound to temporality, incompleteness and unfolding... Quid sit deus?
