straussian readings

epistemic status: me trying to understand the concept

When you were reading Plato’s Republic, did it ever feel like Plato isn’t actually sincerely putting forth a blueprint for a society that he believes would be the most just and ideal, but rather that he is undermining his own statements in a subtle way to make a different, opposite point? That he is not actually a proto-totalitarian, but is critisizing any attempt to build such a “perfectly just city” as one that is unattainable and undesirable? That he is hinting at the fact that the values of philosophy are themselves incompatible with the ideal of a just city?

You would not be alone. You would have discovered what Leo Strauss coined an esoteric reading, kind of a hidden message between the lines, most of the time contrary to the point that the exoteric reading, the reading that takes the written things at face value, is making. Leo Strauss wrote about this a lot in his 1941 essay “Persecution and the Art of Writing” and in his subsequent works, to the point where people now reference to such interpretations as “Straussian readings”. He made the case that this happened quite a few times throughout history, with authors hiding their true opinion behind the public facing message, for attentive readers to find.

The reason for hiding a message or true opinion like this would be the author living in a setting where voicing his true opinion would cost him a lot, maybe leading to persecution, exile, execution. Living under a repressive regime, in a society ruled by orthodox religion, or even in a society with a strong public opinion on the matter, where voicing something critical could lead to social ruin. So either you voice your true opinion and die, you voice opinions in line with what the ruling entity wants to hear and pursue truth in all other cases (see Kolmogorov Complicity), or you write on two different layers, with the surface one being unproblematic and only the esoteric reading revealing what you actually wanted to say.

Strauss argues that one can spot these esoteric readings by paying close attention to contradictions, to strange emphases and omissions, weak arguments holding up conventional conclusions, things that get said once and then never again, mismatches between the description of a character and its actual behaviour, the dramatic context of the argument undercutting the argument itself, amongst other things. It is Macchiavelli never saying that God doesn’t exist, but his arguments silently presupposing it to make sense. It is Hobbes bringing forth a rather weak argument for the existence of God, where in other places he is much more rigorous in his reasoning. And it of course is Plato contradicting himself by first saying that poetry has to be banned as it spreads depictions about the gods behaving lying, only to later construct the “noble lie” himself, a falsehood told by the rulers for the benefit of the city.

It is of course in the nature of the concept that the esoteric reading is not clearly visible, maybe only hinted at. That makes it hard to deliver a completely convincing argument, with every data point being plausibly deniable in regards to meaning something hidden. This dynamic also makes it easier to overfit your data when you are looking for a hidden meaning. You might start bullshitting, making up a connection that isn’t there, because you want to see a hidden meaning that might not even exist. Most of the authors you cannot ask if your interpretation is correct, as they are either already dead or would tell you no anyway, because the incentives that made them hide their meaning will also stop them from confirming your reading, if it were true. This leaves you with no tool to get calibrated on uncovering esoteric readings, forever to wander the world of literature without knowing if you found an authors hidden and true meaning or if you are just going crazy and making shit up.

(The best approximation to ground truth we can get here is of course through Bayesian updating: a single data point isn’t worth anything, only by having a lot of data points in a text that all point to the same hidden meaning you are allowed to update to “there might be something here”.)

Now, I would have loved to give you a proof of this idea by putting a ten page analysis and straussian reading of Cixin Liu’s “Three Body Problem” here, but there is not enough space in this margin to write in. It is left as an exercise for the reader.