Hide and Seek

Strauss, Heidegger, and Mysticism

Thrilled to share my latest podcast conversation with Teresa Bejan, public intellectual, Oxford professor, and author of the acclaimed Mere Civility.

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I.

Leo Strauss famously teaches in Persecution and the Art of Writing that great thinkers conceal their true beliefs and arguments, that the best philosophical texts—from Plato to Maimonides to Machiavelli and Spinoza—are coded, ciphers.

Strauss’s hermeneutic view of philosophers parallels the mystical view of God. Reality is not what it seems. Light is sewn for the righteous (Psalm 97:11). This means that light is concealed for the righteous, i.e., that not everyone merits to know the divine secret. Why would God hide the secret teaching? One Midrash answers that God fears its weaponization by evildoers. Thus, light is hidden for the righteous ones, specifically. In Star Wars, which is based in Daoist principles (but ones that mirror mystical traditions across the board), the Force is morally neutral, and can be wielded by both the light side and the dark side. Knowing this, the Straussian-mystical-Midrashic tradition argues the Force, as it were, should be concealed.

II.

Strauss’s argument also parallels a core teaching of Heidegger, namely, that truth is unconcealment, that revelation also always involves hiding. Where the mystical tradition posits the world as the levush (garment of God), Heidegger de-theologizes it and says that everyday life is mask of Being. While mysticism imagines life as a game of hide and seek with God, Heidegger claims it as one with Being (meaningfulness). But the structure is the same.

Strauss worries that the philosopher will be persecuted for saying what is true; Heidegger, by contrast, does not think that Being is at risk of persecution. That would be quite a fanciful personification. And yet, there is something to the idea that we persecute Being whenever we turn away from it in idle chatter or gossip or else whenever we instrumentalize it for self gain, as in Heidegger’s Lorax-like example of the (chopped down) forest, which the lumberer now sees only as raw material to be sold. So Being hides for Heidegger much like God hides for mystics and philosophers hide for Strauss.

III.

What’s shocking—enticing to some and appalling to others—about Heidegger and Strauss is that their arguments offer a kind of defense of mysticism and obscurantism. While the Enlightenment ideal is that knowledge can be found and brought into the open, and disseminated to all, for Heidegger and Strauss, the best things must remain secret, available only to initiates, a vanguard of students, a class unto themselves. These are philosophers who restore a sense that philosophy is closer to religion than science.

IV.

Let’s accept that there really are mysteries and that one can initiate oneself into them through rigorous practice and commitment. Let’s also accept that scientific method is founded on the ability to reproduce results in the open and thus can leaving nothing mysterious. How do we fit the realm of mystery and the realm of science together? Are they mutually exclusive, each vying for the kingdom, or can they tolerate a peace between them, a separation of powers? This is one of the most important and decisive questions—but who has the authority to answer it?

V.

My view is that mystery-appreciators overstep when they claim knowledge, and thus demean their real wisdom in the process. They become envious of science and end up producing pseudo-science (of course, the term “pseudo-science” begs the question).

But science worshippers also overstep when they deny the ineradicable reality of mystery, not just as an experience, but as a source of insight. Science can only know the sensible world, but it can’t know what Kant calls “things in themselves.” “Reason must leave room for faith.” Knowledge must leave room for wisdom. Instrumentality must leave room for mystery. But how much room? This is a question, individually, of temperament and pragmatics. Socially, it is a question of politics.

It comes down to how we weight materialism vs. intangibles. The ancients mostly frowned upon materialism, while moderns, especially utilitarians find spirituality to be a positive only to the extent that it is a happiness-boosting technology.

Most people can’t live as ascetics, content to just philosophize or pray or quest for meaning. But as we read in the papers, “deaths of despair” are growing even as we make tremendous economic and technological gains, suggesting that the answer to our social ills probably isn’t going to come from shaving a few minutes off our grocery delivery times.

VI.

Perhaps light is hidden for the righteous in the same way that we are hidden from ourselves. The great mystery—which connects the mystery of God to the mystery of the self—is who we are. We won’t elucidate this mystery by studying our 23andMe or looking at a brain scan, but we also shouldn’t wait for folksy preachers and new age gurus to give us poorer versions of the same.

Whether Straussian, Heideggerian, Kabbalistic, or something else, esotericism is something that must be believed to be seen.