[HN Gopher] Straussian Reading (2017)
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       Straussian Reading (2017)
        
       Author : gauchojs
       Score  : 16 points
       Date   : 2021-03-26 10:58 UTC (1 days ago)
        
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       | pmdulaney wrote:
       | normal meaning that normal _reading_ would reveal?
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | mycologos wrote:
       | Sounds nice if you can do it, but it also seems to require a deep
       | familiarity with the author that is impossible, short of actually
       | knowing them personally? This is what makes me nervous about
       | anything "Straussian", in most cases it requires a lot of
       | discipline to avoid just filling in gaps with what you yourself
       | wish the author was saying.
        
         | megameter wrote:
         | In the Melzer _Philosophy Between the Lines_ book mentioned in
         | the article, the author does a pretty throrough job of making
         | the case that pre-modern philosophical writing defaulted to
         | esoteric style, while in the modern era we default to exoteric.
         | 
         | He does this by pointing to the allusions and references they
         | use and the clear contradictions within them - often inversions
         | of meaning from the original sources that are alluded to.
         | Socrates makes these errors, as does Machiavelli. If you assume
         | the errors are mistakes, the work's apparent conclusions become
         | more shaky, but if they are intentional puzzles, the work gains
         | additional meaning. We often use puzzles as teaching devices
         | and writing isn't really different in that respect.
         | 
         | It's not really _different_ from reading for literary subtext,
         | it just applies that toolbox more widely. I believe it 's more
         | useful for writing than for reading because esotericism makes
         | it easy to encode something legible only to intended
         | recipients. I would not expect to parse new wisdom from the
         | utterings of a CEO, as in article's example, until I become
         | familiar with corporate culture in general.
        
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       (page generated 2021-03-27 23:01 UTC)