Projection: Good, Bad, or Just Inevitable?

Yesterday, a friend said to me, “To Straussians, everyone is a Straussian.” Which reminded of Xenophanes’ dictum, “If humans were horses, the gods would have hooves.” It’s hard not to read other thinkers and texts in our own image, projecting ourselves and our methods onto them, but is it impossible? A certain class of academics in the 19th century Germ…