At 1 PM CST on Sunday, October 18th, the Methexis Institute Forbidden Books reading group will discuss Walter Burley's 'On the Purity of the Art of Logic' (c. AD 1324). Click to join: meet.google.com/aoo-gpou-juz

This suspicion that Leo Strauss and his followers practice deceptive hermeneutical tricks arises from their conceptually under-determined style of esoteric reading. If "figuring out the hidden meaning" in an esoteric style of reading "makes the whole text cohere" in a way that was not possible with the "preferred majority", then such a coherence that was produced by upholding the minority text as the hermeneutical key to understanding the majority text must be considered more coherent than the majority text, which lacks coherence by comparison. Because 'coherence' (from the Latin word 'cohaerere') means to 'stick together', and is used in logic to describe the combination of non-contradictory judgments, this hermeneutical coherence means a line of interpretation that is free of contradictions. Hence, if the esoteric reading that privileges the minority text is more coherent it must also be less contradictory, while the majority text is, conversely, less coherent but more contradictory. And, because an absurdity cannot be admitted, it is precisely because of these contradictions that the initial reading of the majority text must be rejected. The task of hermeneutics is, for this reason, implicitly dialectical, and only rises to the level of philosophical legitimacy when its dialectic is explicitly recognized. Where, I contend, Strauss and his followers have failed as hermeneuticians and as philosophers is in subtracting the post-Socratic developments of dialectics (even the dialectic of Plato's Sophist and Parmenides) in favor of a skeptical elenchus, in which contradictions are rendered as pragmatic conflicts, and both the selection and the resolution of such conflicts is the product of an insufficiently evidenced and conceptually under-determined sleight of hand.

There is, to the contrary, no real contradiction (or dilemma) in the joint affirmation that (1) esoteric writing is a historical fact and that (2) reading esoterically risks arbitrariness. For it can be true both that scholars have practiced esoteric reading and that this very practice lacks the rigorous conceptual determinacy to be considered non-arbitrary and rationally warranted. Furthermore, this risk of arbitrariness in esoteric reading cannot, as @AlexPriou contends, be simply disregarded by either invoking "the historiographer's responsibility", alluding to critical departures of Strauss by his students, or recommending zetetic re-readings. For if, by 'arbitrary', we mean the willful imposition of certain prejudices of the reader in the act of reading, where such prejudices are not warranted by the letter of the text, then not only is there - as H.G. Gadamer argued - always an inescapable prejudice involved in reading, but the esoteric style of reading is distinguished by its conceited denial of its own prejudices. As a long line of his critics have argued (see the bibliography below), the basic problem with esoteric readings is that they privilege a hidden meaning that is evidenced by a minority portion of a text - even a single paragraph or sentence - as the contradictory opposite that should be upheld to destroy the coherence of the evident and majority text. Because, however, as @AlexPriou has already acknowledged, Leo Strauss did not believe that esoteric readings "could be reduced to a method", both the selection of such minority text, and the contradictory opposition of minority to the majority text, must remain conceptually under-determined. Lacking in both the evidence of the majority of a text and the higher concept of logical warrant, this under-determinacy then allows for the esoteric reader to naively or surreptitiously impose the prejudices that accompany their own historical moment. It is this pivotal conceit that exposes the failure of Strauss's hermeneutical project. For if, in 'Natural Right and History', Strauss's reaction to Heidegger had been to defend an a-historical conception of 'natural right' that could be discovered through an esoteric style of reading classical texts (esp. Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle), yet this under-determinacy of esotericism not only invites but essentially operates with the imposition of historical prejudices, then all such a-historical truths must collapse back into varieties of historicism and relativism. Fortunately, Christian theology provides an answer to skeptical historicism. This answer was inspired by Origen's 'theology of history', systematized in G.W.F. Hegel's Encyclopedia and Philosophy of History, and radicalized by J.A. Möhler, J.H. Newman as the 'Development of Doctrine', and Henri de Lubac's 'Ressourcement' of history as a witness to the chronological unfolding of the divine ideas in successive epochs of the Spirit of reason and freedom. In short, our answer must be to more radically embrace historicism as the eternally reflective story of coming to know the true and mystagogical meaning of classical texts more and more. For more criticisms of Leo Strauss's esoteric style of reading, see • Altman, William H. The Reading Order of Plato's Dialogues. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015. • Burnyeat, M.F. "Sphinx Without a Secret." The New York Review of Books, May 30, 1985. • Burnyeat, M.F. "The Past in the Present: Plato as a Contemporary of Leo Strauss." In Platonism, Ancient and Modern, 253–275. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024. • Drury, Shadia B. "The Esoteric Philosophy of Leo Strauss." Political Theory 13, no. 3 (1985): 315–337. • Pocock, J.G.A. "Prophet and Inquisitor." The New York Review of Books, February 2, 1989. (A central Cambridge School critique reviewing Strauss’s methodology). • Skinner, Quentin. "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas." History and Theory 8, no. 1 (1969): 3–53. (The foundational methodological essay rejecting ahistorical, esoteric textual isolation). • Holmes, Stephen. "Truths for Philosophers Alone?" The Times Literary Supplement, December 1–7, 1989, 1319–1324.

At 1 PM CST on Sunday, October 11th, the Methexis Institute Forbidden Books reading group will discuss Thomas Crean and Alan Fimister's book 'Integralism: A Manual of Political Philosophy' (2020). Click to join: meet.google.com/bkw-ehwp-sgp

At 10:15 am EST on Friday October 9th, @RyanHaecker will host the Jesuit Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (JCCRU) panel of the Patristics, Medieval, Renaissance conference at Villanova University. Join us online: youtube.com/live/aLWDGv_QZQ0