Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Has been published at last . (This link will work for the first fifty readers, I believe.)

"For 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. That is why this specific humanistic posture seems to be the product, not so much of some new discovery about the world, as of a need, a demand, an imperative. The humanistic credo that life has no fundamental problems that we cannot cure has the character less of a calm, settled belief than a mixture of hope and insistence." -- Arthur Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines, p. 103

One figure Melzer cites to show the prevalence of esotericism is Jesus himself. And he quotes some New Testament passages that seem to back him pretty strongly, e.g.: "To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given... That is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand." (Matt. 13:10-12) Or: "To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of god, but for those outside everything is in parables." (Mark 4:11)

“From Burke to Foucault, [the counter-Enlightenment] emphasizes and heightens the conflict between reason and society, although now putting primary blame on the former instead of the latter. It attacks rationalism for such varied social evils as political doctrinairism and utopianism, the uprooting of tradition and inheritance, violent revolution, intolerance, persecution, colonialism, and totalitarianism. But, again, it engages in this political critique of reason, heightening the conflict between rationalism and society that this conflict is somehow an aberration, mistake, another problem to be solved. Harmony is possible.” – Philosophy Between the Lines , pp. 86-87 I cannot pretend to have read every single "counter-Enlightenment" thinker; for instance, I have barely glanced at Foucault. But this does not strike me as a sound critique of the ones with whom I am familiar. It is very contentious to cite these thinkers for "heightening" the conflict between...

Having made it to chapter three of Arthur Melzer's Philosophy Between the Lines , I find that the book has taken a surprising turn for the better. I say surprising, because after the weaker material in chapters one and two I did not expect to like chapter three as much as I do. The problem I see with chapters one and two is that I think Melzer overstates his case. For his main argument, which I feel is found in chapter three, to go through, all that he needed to claim was that there are frequent and important instances of esotericism classical and Medeival thought. And that claim he can back. Instead, he claims that it "was a nearly universal practice among Western philosophers prior to the late modern era" (p. 69), a claim that is well beyond the evidence he presents. And trying to back it leads him to stretch the term "esoteric" beyond its useful limits. And it is particularly unfortunate that Melzer leads with this weaker material, since chapter three...

"We in the West are accustomed to a plain and direct mode of speech, which we think of as normal... But outside the modern West, people incline to a kind of esotericism of everyday life... Whatever the reasons for it... that is the plain, empirical fact." -- Arthur M. Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines , p. 51 This is the sort of equivocation which is all to common in Melzer. "Esoteric," in its common definition, means "intended for or understood by only a chosen few, as an inner group of disciples or initiates" ( here .) It is bizarre to apply the term to a practice of indirect communication shared by an entire culture. What would be much more accurate would be to say that these cultures have an exoteric tradition of indirect communication. It is a "plain, empirical fact" that many cultures employ indirect communication styles: it is a very contentious hypothesis to say that such communication is "esoteric."

At the recommendation of a reader, I am reviewing Arthur M. Melzer's Philosophy between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing (Chicago and London: University Of Chicago Press, 2014). Melzer is a Straussian who has latched onto Strauss's idea that philosophers commonly hid their "true doctrine" (their esoteric teaching) while giving lip service to common pieties. I must say that so far I find Melzer's case quite a stretch, as it seems to me he regularly interprets passages as evidence of esotericism that appear to have far more straight-forward readings. For instance, Melzer quotes Erasmus criticizing Luther: “For seeing that truth of itself has a bitter taste for most people, and that it is of itself a subversive thing to uproot what has long been commonly accepted, it would have been wiser to soften a naturally painful subject by the courtesy of one’s handing than to pile one cause of hatred on another…A prudent steward will husband the trut...