a note on strauss and esotericism 1

A note on strauss 1

The key Leo Strauss’s scholarly work is based on his recovery of esotericism, which he fully developed in the late 1930s, and which he took to be the key to understanding the ancients as well as understanding how the ancients were misunderstood by the moderns – how in fact modernity defines itself through that misunderstanding. Among the deepest pre-modern writers stretching back to the ancients, all writing had two sides: one is a surface of exoteric writing, in which meaning, theme and style is subordinate to the norms of the masses, while the other, deeper side esoteric, presenting truths in a suitably obscure manner that are not meant for the vulgar. In the golden liberal era of the 19th century (about which Strauss, like Hayek, had the most romantic notions), the urgency of the threat of persecution vanished, and made it harder for researchers to understand this two faced structure in older texts.
Although Straussians like to paint Strauss as an intellectual hero struggling against the positivism and behaviorism of the time, in actuality, esotericism was not so far out of line with many of the intellectual currents of the post war era. In literary criticism, for instance, Northrop Frye was not alone in turning to medieval rhetoric to create an ontology of reading within which there was a hierarchy of levels, from the literal to the anagogic. Psychoanalysis had spread a general cultural feeling for codes in everyday behavior, seeing surface and ostensive behaviors as the results of complicated and unconscious developments, in which, most grandly, thanatos wrestled with eros, and most trivially, Oedipus killed his father and slept with his mother. This kind of psychology was bundled up with the whole set of “strategic” sciences, from game theory to anthropology, which provided the paradigm for defense policy wonks in the fifties.
It was in the early forties that Strauss gave the lecture which became the first chapter of Persecutiona and the Art of Writing. The book begins with a plea for understanding the idea of “writing between the lines.” To make this plausible to a contemporary American audience, he imagines the following scenario:

“We can easily imagine that a historian living in a totalitarian country, a generally respected and unsuspected member of the only party in existence, might be led by his investigations to doubt the soundness of the government-sponsored interpretation of the history of religion. Nobody would prevent him from publishing a passionate attack on what he would call the liberal view. He would of course have to state
the liberal view before attacking it; he would make that statement
in the quiet, unspectacular and somewhat boring manner which would seem to be but natural; he would use many technical terms, give many'quotations and attach undue importance to insignificant details; he would seem to forget the holy war of
mankind in the petty squabbles of pedants. Only when he reached the core of the argument would he write three or four sentences in that terse and lively style which is apt to arrest the attention of young men who love to think. That central passage would state the case of the adversaries more clearly, compellingly and mercilessly than it had ever been stated in the heyday of liberalism, for he would silently drop all the foolish excrescences of the liberal creed which were allowed to grow up during the time when liberalism had succeeded and therefore was approaching dormancy. His reasonable young reader would for the first time catch a glimpse of the forbidden fruit. The attack, the bulk of the work, would consist of virulent expansions of the worst virulent utterances in the holy book or books of the ruling party. The intelligent young man who, being young, had until then been somehow attracted by those• immoderate utterances,
would now be merely disgusted and, after having tasted the forbidden fruit, even bored by them. Reading the book for the second and third time, he would detect in the very arrangement of the quotations from the authoritative books significant additions
to those few terse statements which occur in the center of the rather short first part.”

Although I’d like to separate out and analyze three moments in this scenario, it is necessary to pause for a moment and observe its type. Philosopher’s often pretend that their examples come out of a moment of chair bound thought, but in fact they are not immune to the types and tones current in the world of stories. What is this one, after all, but a sort of thriller in the high, between the war style of the Tory adventurer? The threat to the British empire is, in writers like John Buchan, warded off by intelligent ‘gentlemen’ – the cool type who do not make too much heavy weather out of the evilness of the villains they face, but know it is evil nonetheless, and that everything depends on getting the message through the screens they throw up. Headquarters must know the name of the spy, or they must change the placement of the troops – the show must be saved. It is in moments like these that one hears the dogwhistle of the cultist, where the sense is given that one is not simply decoding a way of writing from the past, but that one is in the center of an imperial thriller. Even sensible students of Strauss are liable to go off the tracks when this theme is near. Stanley Rosen, who seems have his feet on the ground as far as applying Strauss’s hermeneutic principles to philosophical texts, compared Strauss, in one essay, to Churchill. Churchill? He was making a political point that Strauss, like Churchill, was really a defender of “western style liberalism.” Not, mind you, Roosevelt, who was president of the country in which Strauss actually resided in World War II. Rosen even feels entitled to make a jab, here, at Nietzsche, whose image of a hero was more “Attila the Hun.” Of course, this is absurd – Nietzsche admired Napoleon, not Atilla the Hun. Even so, Rosen doesn’t even pause to ponder who ordered the massacre of more lives, and decimated more cities, in the “West”: Attila the Hun or Churchill?

Such, then, is the tone and style of Strauss’s scenario. One notices that it is a scenario about delivering a message. The message is one of the components of the esoteric writing scene. The threat of persecution is the context in which the message is encrypted in a larger, more harmless text. The transmitter, in this case, is a historian, and is more commonly a thinker. And the receiver of the message? Intelligent young men. The intelligent young men, or gentlemen, are the boyscouts of Strauss’s philosophical world. Always male, always from the class of “gentlemen”

Sony vs. North Korea - fun for the whole family!

I’m enjoying the hell out of the dispute between Sony and Kim Il jong.  On the one hand, you have a megalomaniac dictator, on the other, a clueless corporation that got its start distributing propaganda films for the Japanese army in WWII. The movie sounds like a gross out version of  Rambo, with American secret agents hilariously shattering the skull of the evil dictator – cause America can! A great movie to show in the torture season. Throw in Obama’s impassioned plea for freedom of speech (which of course doesn’t include Wikileaks or Edward Snowden, and doesn’t address the fact that we haven’t had a Presidency that so aggressively pursued leakers and journalists since Richard Nixon) and the exposed emails revealing that the head honchos are as stupid as you think they are, and it is a Christmas gift that keeps on giving! It isn’t the best Christmas gift from Hollywood – that’s Kim’s butt – but it will do. 

two forms of evil in the movies

I just watched the beginning of Fargo, the tv series.

The evil character in Fargo, played by Billy Bob Thornton, is signalled as evil not so much by stabbing people or shooting them – no, his evil is established when it seems that the usual matrix of cause and effect fades when he is around. Normally, when a man goes into a basement with no other access than the stairs, that man will have to go out using the stairs. But, in a crucial scene in Fargo, the killer goes into the basement and disappears, reappearing in a getaway car later on.

I think there are roughly two forms of evil in film. The one is cosmological, and the sure sign of it is this fading of cause and effect. When Scorcese redid Cape Fear with Robert DeNiro playing the bad guy, the crucial moments in the film were all the result of this fading. This can, of course, create startling effects: evil is in the room and is about to slice somebody’s throat! The spectator’s visceral reaction is stimulated – hell, it is shot through with a thousand volts.

But the first Cape Fear did evil differently. Robert Mitchum played the evil man in terms of his slouch, his look, his accent – in terms, in other words, of signs. Evil here is semiotic, not cosmic. There’s no fading of cause and effect. When Mitchum lets his sleazy gaze travel over the daughter of the lawyer he has marked out as his enemy (played by Gregory Peck in all his iconic righteousness), that was the evil . If he murdered, raped, or terrorized, it was all on the earthly plane. There was no fading of cause and effect.

My preference is for semiotic evil – cosmic evil leaves me feeling a little ripped off. Of course, sometimes the payload of visceral jolts is nothing to sneeze at. But I am attached, like a peasant, to my cause and effect.

conceptual zippers

Guilty reading

Lets face it: the innocent reader who spots the blue pants on the boy holding the balloon in the picture and associates the “C” with cookie monster was filed away long ago. It exists, thinly, in the brain's filing system, although to dive in an find it is a task that would make Proust blanch. We guilty readers come, now, with a certain hodgepodge sophistication to the fragment or the treatise, or even to the letter “C” – which may remind us more of Wallace Stevens than Sesame Street. We take our theories to our books, and are eager to apply readings, now “political”, now “hermeneutic”, now “neo-darwinian”, and so on.
Myself, I’ve always like the promise of dialectical materialism, although not often its results. The idea of looking at texts not in the idea-system, head talking to head, but in terms of both historical conditions and of the text’s own long interiority – that’s the ticket. Oh that interiority! To be a writer, I think, means that one exists like a bat in a dark cave that is slowly filling up with the echos of the signals one has emitted, revealing surfaces that must eventually and imperfectly be translated into data subserviant to the detailing eye – although the writer, in his heart, always remains a creature of radar, of the sonogram.
What’s dialectical about all of this? What, except the continual stomping back and forth and the interminable difference. One can trick oneself, here, easily, into thinking that the difference can be reduced to two sides, two tracks, like the two tracks of a zipper – and that with a little conceptual zipper and a little force the two tracks will fit tightly together as one. Conceptual zippers are the most tempting things in the world, and the trick with them is not to believe them too much. The dialectical, here, for me, is ideally stripped of the absolute and has learned the humility of stripped things, naked things. The world is not all zippers, or even mostly zippers. The zipper is not all the case is.

More reflections on what Nietzsche was up to

To the second edition of The Gay Science, published in 1887, Nietzsche added a fifth book entitled, with that mock boastfulness to which he was prone (and which has added that bellicose aura to his posthumous reputation – beloved by post-structuralist and white supremicist prison gangs alike!), We fearless ones. The end, sort of, of We fearless ones  comes with a dreamy little number  342, entitled “The great health”. Healthiness as a concept that encompasses every part of the self, instead of describing a state of bodily equilibrium, a healthiness that becomes a means to an end instead of an assumption about the everyday – this is what the perpetually sick author dreams of. His dream, though, is of a  likeminded community – this we is, as all we’s are, political. Here Nietzsche is both a child of the century, which was discovering health not as a sort of balance among animal spirits but as a fragile norm that few were able to achieve – and a sign of the coming century, when health really does get interpreted as an intention, so that our sicknesses are somehow, unconsciously, willed.

The great health, however, while has its roots not in physiology, or at least not in physiology alone, but in experience. This is an immense and interesting shift. To be fearless, in Nietzsche’s terminology, is to be an adventuerer – and the first adventure is through one’s own experience. In that instance, experience is transformed into something adventure-worthy. This connection  leads Nietzsche through one of the dithyrambic, labyrinthine arguments in which he specializes, where association and implication become interjoined, and all the rabbits are pulled from all the magician’s hats. The adventurers - the “we”, here – catch a glimpse, due to our health, of an as yet “unexplored land” which overflows with the “beautiful, the alien, the the questionable, the fearful and the divine”  - a glimpse that creates total existential discontent, since it seems that this is the place we are seeking. This place is also an ideal, but not an ideal of the sacred or the good or the just, but an ideal of play, - and here we go back to the great health, for this health belongs to the naïve and curiously innocent spirit who plays with the values that the people have erected, who enjoys a well-being and well-willing that appears inhuman in contemporary terms. These terms seal what is good, true, and real into a package with what is serious – the serious being defined by being ‘unplayable’. But the spirit that Nietzsche evokes isn’t impressed by this “earth-seriousness”, and unconsciously and involuntarily parodies it. Out of that parody, Nietzsche imagines a new seriousness springing forth, setting up its own question marks. And thus “the hour hand moves” and “the tragedy begins”.

So it would seem that the chords of the fifth book, and the book as a whole, crash to a conclusion. But the little numbers don’t stop - Nietzsche moves on to an epilogue – something that is not exactly part of the book, but is in the no man’s land of prefaces and after words. The epilogue begins like a parody of a Wagner opera – or like an episode in Disney’s Fantasia. Nietzsche takes up the “I” as  the author of the book , and depicts himself, like Poe’s poet in The Raven,  feeling the effect of the dark and dreary task of erecting question marks.

“But when I in conclusion this gloomy question mark slowly, slowly painted,  still wanting to recall into the memory of my readers the virtues of correct reading – o these forgotten and unknown virtues! – it happened, that around me the most evil, spirited, gnome-like laughter broke out: the spirits of my book themselves fell upon me, pulled me by the ear, and called me to order.”

It is passages like this that bother those who want to tell us Nietzsche’s esoteric message, or who feel like, as a proper philosopher, Nietzsche’s texts should be  easily reducible to thesis and antithesis in the good old monographic manner. Hegel’s terminology might be obscure, but the form of his book is very clear; and if we are to take Nietzsche seriously, we have to correct his tendency to mix things up and put them all in their proper place. Otherwise, of course, one would have to multiply question mark by question mark, and finally be reduced to reading Derrida’s note on Nietzsche’s misplaced umbrella – the kind of jape that got Derrida into royal trouble when Oxford was about to grant him, horrors, an honorary degree in philosophy.  Here, at the moment when a Hegelian philosopher would be at the end and have argued to a conclusion – here, suddenly, the spirits of the book treat the author like a erring school child. Who, after all, are pulled by the ear and called to order? As Nietzsche well knew from the time he’d invested in German educational institutions, being pulled by the ear was a not uncommon scene. That allusion to a schoolroom scene comes right after a lament for old fashioned reading – another pedagogical theme. But if this is a schoolroom scene, it is a reversed one – for certainly it is the bad students who make gnome like laughter their sabateur’s weapon of choice.

Viewing Nietzsche as an author, this conclusion is not completely bizarre. In fact, as an author who is a philologist and who has written on Greek tragedy, this scene conforms pretty well to the kind of satyr play that always came after the tragic cycle. In fact, we are never far from the satyr play whenever seriousness becomes an issue in Nietzsche’s texts.  

Of course, all of this, for the decrypter of the esoteric message, is simply denial and disguise. Of course, as soon as Nietzsche has revealed his real intentions – dreaming of an order of masters killing and enslaving the weak – he feels that he has gone too far, and engages in this little diversion.

However, if we engage in reading the text, which is what the text literally suggests we do, we find an artistic structure that does not look like denial or diversion, especially as the spirits of the book itself are called into play. Play, parody, and seriousness are the keywords here. The spirits of the book object, evidently, to the last word being given to tragedy. And they also mock Nietzsche’s future fetishism, the sentimentality he has invested in “solitude”, in being a great thinker alone. The jibes are put in terms of music, and Nietzsche accepts the jibes of his “friends” – the spirits of the book, the “we fearless ones”  – while at the same time accepting that the music of the book and the sense of it might be two different things, of which the first is primary. Instead of tragedy, then, the book ends on dance, and on a peasant’s dance at that. Remember that this is the Nietzsche who had no liking or sentiment for the stinking people, and presumably also their tavern instruments, among which the hurdy gurdy would be preeminent.  

If we follow up the notion that we should be reading, here, and perhaps even reaading Nietzsche’s other texts, than the hint – the non-esoteric hint – comes in the phrase “involuntary” parody, which he has used once before in his polemic against David Strauss, the liberal theologian. It is peculiar to authors that the phrases they have used years before still float about in their memory. It is perhaps their characterizing peculiarity. In the case of the polemic against Strauss – well, I would guess that this part of the Thoughts our of Season is the least read, since who among us, friends and droogs, is interested, even a little bit, in 19^th century liberal theology? Strauss is probably best known, now, for being translated into English by George Eliot (who thus became the target for some of Nietzsche’s most misogynistic taunts – Nietzsche was quite the troll at times). In attacking Strauss, Nietzsche also attacks the positivist Hegel, and a certain form of apologetic for God that wills the unity of the universe, the eventual conjoining of the subjective and the objective in one coherent work. Interestingly, in his attack, Nietzsche seems to mock a certain rhetoric he later plays with in The Gay science. Here’s a long quotation to finish with – it is left as an exercise to the reader to pick up the resonances:

he [Strauss] assumes without question that all events possess the highest intellectual value and are thus absolutely rational and purposwful, and then that they contain a revelation of eternal goodness itself. He is thus in need of a complete cosmodicy and at a disadvantage compared with those who are only concerned with a theodicy, who

conceive the entire existence of man as, for example, a punsihment or a process of purification. At this point and thus embarrased, Strauss goes so far as to venture for once a metaphysical hypothesisn – the driest and most palsied there has ever been and at bottom no more than an unconscious parody of a saying of Lessing’s. “That other saying of Lessing’s, he says on page 219, that, if God held all truth in his right hand and in his left the never sleeping quest for truth with the condition of contiually erring in this quest, and offered him a choice between them, he would humbly fall upon God’s left hand and beg for the contents of it – this saying has always been regarded as among the finest he left to us. There has been found in it an expression of his restless desire for action and investigation. This saying has always made so powerful an impression upon me because behind its subjective significance I have heard resounding an objective one of immense range. For does it not contain the best reply to Schopenhauer’s crude conception of an ill-advised God who knows of nothing better to do than to enter into such a wretched a world as this is? May it not be that the Creator himself shares Lessing’s opinion and prefers continual striving to peacceful possession.” A God, that is to say, who reserves to himself continual error at at the same time a striving for truth, and who perhaps humbly falls upon Strauss’s left hand and says to him: all truth is for you. If ever a God or a man were ill advised it is this Straussian God, with his pariality for error and failure, and the Straussian man, who has to pay for this partiality – here indeed one can ‘hear resounding a significance of immense range’, here there flows Strauss’s universal soothing oil, and here one senses something of the rationality of all evolution and natural law! Does one really? Or would our world not be, rather, as Lichtenberg once called it, the work of a subordinate being who as yet lacked a full understanding of his task, and thus an experiment? A novice’s test-piece which was still being worked on? So that Strauss himself would have to concede that our world is an arena, not of rationality, but of error, and that its laws and purposefulness are no source of consolation, since they proceed from a God who is not merely in error but takes pleasure from being in error. It is a truly delicious spectacle to behold Strauss as a metaphysical architect building up into the clouds. But for whom is this spectacle mounted? Or the noble and contented “we”, so as to preserve their contentment: perhaps they were overcome by fear in the midst of those merciless wheels of the universal machine and tremblingly begged their leader for help.”

The secret messages of authors: Nietzsche again

How does one use the papers of an author?

Some authors, like GS Lichtenberg, are famous mainly for the notebooks that they left to posterity. Others, like Emerson and Nietzsche, are famous firstly for their books – even as those books are trailed by the vast haul of their Nachlass, their jounals, their scratch books. Both Emerson and Nietzsche, as well, worked in an essay form that centered on the phrase, or paragraph – or perhaps it would be better to say, using Nietzsche’s dynamite metaphor, that the essay or the number is a sort of photograph of the ruin caused by the explosion of these phrases, sentences, slogans at the center. The center, supremely, does not hold.

I’m thinking about this while reading and  gritting my teeth through, Geoff Waite’s book on Nietzsche. Waite, who positions himself as a true, Nietzsche-defying leftist (an authorial figuration that takes many turns – sometimes he casts himself as a man  heading Nietzsche off at the pass, as though FN wore a black hat and rustled cattle and GW was Wyatt Earp), still turns to Leo Strauss’ notion of esoteric and exoteric to find Nietzsche’s true message. This message is in the notes.

I must admit that I find a certain amount of humor in this. Nietzsche, as is well known, was a sick man with bad eyes, who for most of his life made little money from his books and had to depend on the pension he’d been granted when he quit the University of Basel. This pension was around 800 thaler. Which, in today’s terms, would be about 23 thousand per year. Waite, however, refers to him as a rentier – which is exactly what he wasn’t – and comments about certain illegible notes in Nietzsche’s papers: “Exactiy here Nietzsche's text stutters, becomes unintelligible.91 Whenever one's handwriting breaks down completely—becomes illegible to others or to oneself— this is not necessarily by chance, nor necessarily unconsciously motivated.” The ‘not necessarilys” here are supposed to look like arguments, and certainly they are indisputable – but they also indisputably get us nowhere. Was Nietzsche such a sneek that he couldn’t even write in his notebooks without looling over his shoulder to make sure that nobody read what he really wrote about Plato? I would say, not necessarily, and not even probably, given what we know about the material conditions of his production. In another place – this struck even sympathetic reviewers – Waite pushes towards an image of Nietzsche dreaming of concentration camps to come, when in a notebook entry from the time of the composition of Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes “Der Entschluss. Unzaehlige Opfer muss es geben.” Waite translates this as "There will have to be countless dead bodies [Opfer: offerings or sacrifices]."57  The parenthetical translation choices are there, apparently, to save his scholarly integrity – for of course “The decision: there must be countless sacrifices” could mean just what it seems to mean – that there will have to be countless sacrifices. Since Nietzsche’s public works often speak of Opfer, with the meaning being a sacrificed living thing, or a sacrificed desire, etc., it would seem more, well, hermeneutically just to compare uses and decide just what is going on here, if anything.

However, if one is armed with an esoteric reading kit, things become a lot clearer, forensically clearer in fact.

If Waite’s style of reading Nietzsche seems to go off the track at times, he still presents us with an interesting question, one that is particularly pertinent to Nietzsche. After all, famously, many of Nietzsche’s jottings were put into a book and the book was attributed to Nietzsche: “The Will to Power.” The history of that book is a sort of philological crime, and like so many crimes, it was committed by a family member of the victim – Nietzsche’s sister made the book, employing Nietzsche’s friend, Peter Gast, to read the notes.

Gast – guest – what a perfect name for the intruder in the notebooks! And yet, we, who read those jottings, soon make ourselves at home. After all, it is from these notebooks that the books were quarried, and so we are tempted to think of them as the raw material, or key to the mysteries.

Waite himself seems to move between thinking that the notebooks are where the exoteric reveals its esoteric content, and thinking that even the notebook jottings conceal some ultimately even more horrible fascoid thought. Myself, I think that the exoteric/esoteric dichotomy is disturbed, and made less ‘forensically’ useful,  by Nietzsche’s perspectivism.

Leftist attacks on Nietzsche, or why I am a pseudo-leftist

Domenico Lusordo’s attack on Nietzsche is one that I am weirdly eager to read, or at least some of it – I don’t think I’m in it for 1300 pages. I haven’t yet read Geoffry Waite’s massive attack on Nietzsche, or, really, Nietzschian leftism – pseudo-leftism, Waite claims. Pseudo-leftism is a pretty good description of my own politics, and the fall of communism is not something I mourn (except when listening to Leonard Cohen’s The Future) so there is that.  Marx and Nietzsche were allied in at least this: they weren’t mourners.

However, from the reviews I have read of the Lusordo, and the bits I have read of Waite, my impression is that they are operating within the Nietzschian dance – a politics of the text, if you will. Interestingly, though, they seem to deny Nietzsche any humor or wit. Rather, his is a corpus to be driven through with a plow. If there is humor or wit, this is mere deception, mere encrypting. What it is not, what it can never be, is enjoyment.  For instance, Waite interprets Nietzsche’s subtitle of Zarathustra (a book for everyone and no one) as dividing neatly into a book for the masses and another for the elite. This division leaps over the fact that it is an odd elite, indeed, that is no one. No one, on the contrary, seems to be where the social breaks down, not where the social is ruled. Now, one could argue that rule is all the more efficient when it is incorporated by every one and enforced by no one – but this argument seems to go against Nietzsche’s own fierce anti-democratic bias, and make Nietzsche more like a liberal nudger, a la Cass Sunstein: we’ll just use clever prospective theory to make the masses make the right choices.

No one seems to me to be more hermeneutically approachable by way of a politics of (psychological) depression – the feeling that one’s loneliness has erased one’s social self entirely.

This isn’t the only interpretation of that Niemand – but it does, at least, treat with the letter of the word. Waite seems to have impatiently decided that the opposite of mass being elite, Nietzsche’s text will just have to be nailed here and we can discard as moping or disingenuousness any question about how we get from no one to elite.

This is what I mean by the bulldozing tendencies of Nietzsche’s new lefty critics. From what I have read in the review of Lusordo’s book, a similar impatience with Nietzsche’s playfulness gives us the truth about his “politics”. Lusordo shows that the rhetoric of anti-semitism – most of all, the notion of the rootless Jew – is heavily borrowed from in The Birth of Tragedy to contextualize Socrates. Voila, the book has a hidden anti-semitic subtext that is its key. Now, this is all very well – Nietzsche was prone to anti-Jewish bigotry (a nineteenth century malady that crops up in the correspondence of Marx and Engels as well), and he was very much in Wagner’s circle at the time he wrote his first book. But we seemed to have skipped over a rather crucial moment in the book – this anti-Jewish rhetoric is used to describe Socrates. Doesn’t this rather collapse, or at least damage, the idea around which the anti-Jewish rhetoric was built in the first place – the division between Christian Europe and the Jew? Doesn’t it even, retrospectively, cast into doubt Schopenhauer’s worship of Kant, who the anti-semitic Schopenhauer compared to… Socrates?

What I like about pseudo-leftism is that it deprograms the old lefty urge to conclude.  I don’t ever conclude … this is a principle in which life intersects with theory, for me.