The Lost Art of Reading

The art of esoteric reading—scrutinizing a text for “hidden meanings”—has been lost.

For more than two thousand years, this art was a widely acknowledged way of reading philosophy. It was an understood that wise men wrote “esoterically,” which is to say carefully, so that an insensitive reader would fail to notice the structures, subtleties, and apparent paradoxes that fully informed the meaning of a work.

This approach could reveal that a text professing to be about the goodness of religion could actually be an argument for atheism, or that a dialogue championing the rule of philosopher kings could actually be intended to show that such a form of rule is impossible.

Today, most scholars reject the idea of esoteric writing, even denying that it ever existed. This blindness has consequences. In Philosophy Between the Lines, Arthur M. Melzer explores the history of esoteric writing and argues that if we refuse to understand it we will inevitably misread and underestimate the greatest books of Western Civilization.

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