Strauss argued that many pre-modern philosophers, living under repressive regimes, hid their their true, potentially subversive, teachings within their texts. The hidden meaning was available only to a few astute readers, while a more conventional message was presented to the public.
Strauss's arguments rest on an underlying tension between the prevailing power structures of society and independent, heterogeneous thought, resulting in persecution by those in power of those promoting subversive ideas. An inherent interest of the prevailing political power is to suppress ideas that conflict with its views, thus maintaining a homogeneous intellectual milieu that favors political stability. The political interest of homogeneous thought is protected from the heterogeneous ideas of ‘independent thinkers’ by politically motivated prosecution that manifests itself as censorship. Censorship may present itself in several forms and act as a source of pressure on individuals wishing to express their independent ideas. As a reaction to political oppression, some authors capable of free thinking develop the ability to ‘write between the lines’, i.e. authors imbue their texts with meaning hidden well enough to pass censorship.
Examples of this technique can be seen in the works of Al-Farabi and Maimonides, where contradictions or subtle linguistic cues guide attentive readers toward the philosopher's true, often heterodox, beliefs, making the text speak to both a wide audience and a select few simultaneously.
According to Stanford.edu, the university that knows a thing or two about Strauss:
In a 1936 essay on the political science of Maimonides and Farabi, Strauss returns to the meaning of prophecy for Maimonides. While most interpreters, including Strauss in Spinoza’s Critique of Religion and in parts but not all of Philosophy and Law, viewed Maimonides’ conception of prophecy in epistemological terms, Strauss argues that Maimonides’ innovation was to think of prophecy in political terms. According to Strauss, “Maimonides neither wished nor was able, nor had any need, to lift the veil which conceals the origins of the Torah, the foundation of the perfect nation” (RPSMF, pp. 15–16). Yet, Strauss maintains, the attentive reader will notice that Maimonides distinguishes between Moses, the lawgiver, and all other prophets. Maimonides stresses Moses’ exalted status, argues Strauss, because for Maimonides Moses is the Platonic philosopher-legislator. The emphasis on the uniqueness of Moses as the ideal prophet and ideal ruler is the core of Maimonides’ political philosophy because “Not the mystery of its [the Torah’s] origin, the search for which leads either to theosophy or ‘Epicureanism,’ but its end, the comprehension of which guarantees obedience to the Torah, is accessible to human reason” (RPSMF, p. 16).
Obedience to the law and the philosophical meaning of the law are two different matters that are reflected in what Strauss argues is Maimonides’ dual conception of law. The exterior, literal meaning of the law serves to sustain the political community in which certain forms of behavior and belief are required, while the ideal meaning of the law is a matter of philosophical speculation only for those who are capable of such speculation. This dual conception of law parallels the dual character of Maimonides’ writing, which offers what Strauss calls a “moderate” reading meant for the masses and what he calls a “radical” reading meant for the philosophical reader. As Strauss would elaborate just two years later in greater detail, this dialectical tension lies at the heart of Maimonides’ style of writing and argumentation.
According to Strauss, Maimonides is able to properly balance the relation between praxis, obedience to the law, and theory, the mystery of the law’s origins, not by conflating them but by keeping them in continual dialectical tension. For Strauss, Maimonides’ refusal to resolve the tension between law and philosophy (between praxis and theory) expresses Maimonides’ moderate claims both for what philosophy can produce on its own (it cannot produce the law) and for what revelation can claim to know absolutely (it cannot provide certain knowledge of the mystery of its origin). Strauss’s attention to esotericism is rooted in a philosophical interest in “a golden mean which is neither a compromise nor a synthesis, which is hence not based on the two opposed positions, but which suppresses them both, uproots them by a prior, more profound question, by raising a fundamental problem, the work of a truly critical philosophy” (RPSMF, p. 4).
For Strauss, the work of a truly critical philosophy is to grasp problems, and not to provide solutions. What is the absolute problem at the heart of esotericism, according to Strauss? The problem concerns the self-sufficiency of reason or, put another way, the inescapable and necessary tension between theory and practice. The theological-political predicament of modernity stems from the modern commitment to the self-sufficiency of reason that, Strauss argues, results in reason’s self-destruction. Esotericism is a means toward preserving the limits of philosophy and revelation (or law) vis-à-vis one another. The law comes up against its own limitations in the quest to articulate the philosophical foundations of the law. But at the same time, philosophy comes up against its own limits in recognizing that the philosopher is always already within society (or the law) and for this reason dependent upon the law. Strauss thus makes the seemingly immoral move of revealing Maimonides’ art of writing for the sake of saving the possibility of both revelation and philosophy.
oUch, that is pretty intellectual stuff, and for those of you who didn't check out, the key here is "esoteric messaging." It is everywhere. In today's terms, no one politicians runs on what they say, they run on what they hide from us, or we wouldn't vote for them. Strauss saw this in his philosophy.
~~ Eso Terry
