4 (pt.1) Objections, Resistance, and Blindness to Esotericism - Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing by Arthur M. Melzer - #dopoil1800 #leparaboledigesù #estrapolazionievangeliche #sensodellatragedia #psicologismovsesoterismo #pragmatismovsesoterismo #elitismoripugnante
4 Objections, Resistance, and Blindness to EsotericismRead more at location 1969
Note: e. nn ci sta simpatico nn vogliamo crederci xchè e ci sfugge xchè la cultura moderna lo nega? nella storia e nello spazio siamo gli unici a rigettare e gesù e le parabole: voleva chiarire o oscurare? l e di g. è incontestato anche se sui motivi c è disaccordo oggi l e di g. è negato con argomenti filologici e di testi adulterati l uomo moderno è impenetrabile alla tragedia Edit
a crucial part of our effort to understand esotericism sympathetically is to understand our long lack of sympathy with it.Read more at location 1976
Leo Strauss and others attempt to revive the understanding of esotericism.Read more at location 1992
these efforts are met with a resistance that seems to go beyond the usual sorts of scholarly disagreement and skepticism. To be fair, there were important exceptions: Alexandre Kojève, Arnaldo Momigliano, Gershom Scholem, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and a few othersRead more at location 1993
Gregory Vlastos sadly laments Strauss’s “delusion that the classics of political philosophy were meant to be read as palimpsests—Read more at location 2000
George Sabine fears that esotericism simply amounts to “an invitation to perverse ingenuity.”Read more at location 2001
Virtually all societies outside the modern West embrace a “high context” communicative style that emphasizes indirection and speaking between the lines.Read more at location 2009
rejection of the reality of esotericism is a thesis unique to late Western modernity.Read more at location 2014
in the two millennia of Western philosophy prior to 1800, not only is the denial of esotericism extremely rare,Read more at location 2016
parables can be used to make things either more clear and concrete or more obscureRead more at location 2032
Jesus sternly declared: “Give not that which is holy to dogs; neither cast ye your pearls before swine” (Matt.Read more at location 2035
Then the disciples came and said to him, “Why do you speak to [the people] in parables?” And he answered them, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.Read more at location 2037
In a similar spirit, Jesus “strictly charged the disciples to tell no one that he was the Christ [i.e., the messiah]” (Matt. 16:20; see Matt.Read more at location 2043
Thomas Aquinas, in an article of the Summa Theologica entitled “Whether Christ Should Have Taught All Things Openly?”Read more at location 2053
Calvin, in his Commentaries, remarks: Christ declares that he intentionally spoke obscurely, in order that his discourse might be a riddle to many, and might only strike their ears with a confused and doubtful sound.Read more at location 2057
Grotius explains: He spoke to the people through the indirectness of parables, that those who heard Him might not understand,Read more at location 2062
Augustine maintains: the Lord’s meaning was therefore purposely clothed in the obscurities of parables,Read more at location 2065
John Locke, emphasizing the political element, argued that Jesus “perplex[ed]” his meaning to avoid being arrested before he could complete his mission:Read more at location 2068
there was some ongoing and lively disagreement about the precise purpose of Jesus’ practice of esotericismRead more at location 2074
Now, for the first time in history, one finds the widespread denial of Jesus’ esotericism—notwithstandingRead more at location 2078
Our experts float one loosely grounded philological speculation after another—primarily conjectures concerning the adulteration of the texts—inRead more at location 2080
For the last century or so there has been something of a consensus among experts that parables of the kind found in the New Testament were always essentially simple, and always had the same kind of point, which would have been instantly taken by all listeners, outsiders included. Appearances to the contrary are explained as consequences of a process of meddling with the originalsRead more at location 2085
When God says he will speak to Moses openly and not in “dark speeches,” the Greek for “dark speeches” means “parables.”Read more at location 2090
with a vast “expense of learning,” modern experts strive to overturn the obvious,Read more at location 2094
THE SOURCES IN MODERN CULTURE OF THE DENIAL OF ESOTERICISMRead more at location 2108
Note: all uomo moderno manca il senso dela tragedia: nn concepisce l opposizione tra conoscenza e vita edipo: una tragedia inconcepibile x l uomo moderno che cura tutto con la verità aristotele: l uomo è un essere razionale... aristotele: l uomo è animale sociale... a.m.: l uomo è animale tragico poichè ragione e socialità nn possono convivere umanesimo e teismo: il posto del disordine le armonie illuministe ultimo sviluppo: la teoria subordinata alla prassi Edit
The most profound (but least obvious) reason concerns, not the visible characteristics or consequences of esotericism, but its source, its essential premise—the antagonistic view of theory and praxis.Read more at location 2110
Consider, for a starting point, the oft-repeated observation that modern man lacks a sense of tragedy.Read more at location 2113
Sophocles’s Oedipus tyrannus, arguably the most powerful and representative of ancient Greek tragedies, was precisely a tragedy of theory and praxis, of the incurable conflict of truth and political life.Read more at location 2115
for us, “Oedipus” names a classic psychological disorder, present at our imperfect beginnings but more or less curable through the science of psychotherapy, through the life-healing power of truth. This reversal of the tragic tale is typically modern: the very idea that life could have an incurable problem at its core—that the two essential elements of our nature, rationality and sociality, could be permanently at war—Read more at location 2119
The source of our resistance to tragedy would thus seem to be something new and more complex: a novel kind of idealism that emerges precisely on the basis of modern realism—secular humanism.Read more at location 2127
triumph, sooner or later, over the grave imperfections of his received condition. It is the faith in progressRead more at location 2129
if the world is originally well ordered, then God is needed to explain that order. And if it is incurably disordered, then God is needed to save us from that disorder. Only if life is originally bad but fixable through human effort is it the case that God is neither a necessary hypothesis nor a fundamental need.Read more at location 2134
In the realm of natural philosophy, for example, when thinkers like Bacon, Hobbes, and Descartes proclaimed their intention to redirect contemplative philosophy to the practical end of the “relief of man’s estate” (Bacon) by making man “the master and owner of nature” (Descartes), they did so long before the progress of science proved that such far-reaching technological mastery was actually possible.Read more at location 2143
the early Enlightenment thinkers eagerly embarked on their unprecedented effort to enlighten and rationalize the political worldRead more at location 2146
as this enlightening effort proceeded, it soon became clear that, notwithstanding its partial successes, it was indeed dangerous in a variety of ways to social health, as the thinkers of the counter-Enlightenment thunderously proclaimed.Read more at location 2149
these latter thinkers, obsessed as they were with the dangers of Enlightenment harmonism, were nevertheless not tempted to return to the conflictual view and to classical esotericism. Still driven by the spirit of humanist harmonism, they chose instead to continue the pursuit of unity—only in the reverse manner by subordinating theory to practice.Read more at location 2150
FURTHER SOURCES OF DENIALRead more at location 2161
Note: la libertà di pensiero rende l e. non più necessario oscurità letteraria: oggi è un male slitismo... è caduto in dispregio prudenza... oggi nn è + una virtù liberarsi dal contesto storico... oggi nn richiede infingimenti Edit
So the second most important source of the forgetting of esotericism, especially in the last two centuries, has been the gradual success of the modern movement, which finally rendered this activist and defensive esotericism unnecessary.Read more at location 2165
to charge philosophers, of all people, with esotericism—with behavior that we find so childish, cowardly, deceitful, elitist, inauthentic, and so forth—strikes us intellectuals as both demeaning and implausible in the extreme.Read more at location 2194
But esotericism will be abused not only by writers, but by readers and interpreters.Read more at location 2202
The whole theory is, to repeat Sabine’s remark, an open invitation to “perverse ingenuity.”Read more at location 2204
exactly what are Strauss and his followers trying to do? Speculation has proliferated, most of it political, some of it rather extravagant and conspiratorial—what Peter Minowitz ventures to call Straussophobia.Read more at location 2216
Note: STRAUSSPHOBIA
