Literacy between the Lines: Toward a Methodology of Esoteric Reading

• In Event: Politics, Science, and the Art of Interpretation

Abstract

The recovery of the idea of esoteric writing constitutes one of the most important historical-philosophical developments of 20th Century scholarship. It helped to revitalize political theory as a discipline, inspiring a great deal of excellent scholarly work. However, as even some of the leading pioneers of this work anticipated, it also posed serious challenges. The problem with “reading between the lines” is that even well-intentioned and thoughtful readers may read what’s not written rather differently. Worse still, shoddy scholarship is much harder to pinpoint and eradicate in the absence of clear general standards for a practice. While figures such as Leo Strauss, Arthur Melzer, and others have made a few very broad points about how one should approach serious esoteric reading, they largely remained on the highest levels of generality, offering few concrete rules for distinguishing good esoteric readings from spurious ones.
In short, esoteric reading lacks a clear methodology. Insofar as political theory aims at the pursuit of truth and the debunking of nonsense, this poses a potentially crippling intrinsic problem. In addition, it has the potential to pose a strategic problem as well for political theory by contributing to the sense among the empirical portion of political science that political theory lacks clear standards for what constitutes good work. As political theory’s place within the larger discipline becomes ever more marginal and precarious, this is a potentially fatal danger.
The fact that esoteric reading is an art—and thus not susceptible to the same level of scientific exactitude characteristic of empirical research—does not make the search for a methodology a futile one. As Aristotle demonstrates in the Rhetoric, arts, too, can be examined with an eye to enumerating the principles of excellence in their practice.
This article does not attempt to offer the final so much as a preliminary word on the methodology of esoteric reading. It begins by synthesizing what has been said so far by leading scholars about methods of esoteric reading. It shows that while these are helpful beginnings, considerably more can and should be said about how to do esoteric reading well, and in some cases, what has been said before requires challenging or revising.
From there, the article lays out a series of proposed principles for esoteric reading. Not all the principles will fit every author or every text. Indeed, the first such principle is the injunction to take seriously what particular authors say about how they themselves ought to be read. The subsequent principles emerge not from any specific author, but rather from the intrinsic logical dynamics of reading philosophic texts. They are less intended to be a list of boxes one can tick to be sure one has the “correct” esoteric reading, than a set of concerns that any good esoteric reading should have to grapple with in order to be convincing. They thus also provide a basis for evaluating the plausibility of esoteric readings.

Author

• Michael C. Hawley, UNC Chapel Hill