Heidegger, Schmitt, Strauss: The Hidden Monologue, or, Conserving Esotericism to Justify the High Hand of Violence

For Karl Dahlquist and Rick Joines

Law {Nομος}, lord of all things, mortals and immortals, holds everything with high hand, justifying the extreme of violence [αγει δικαιων το βιαιοτατον υπεϱτατα χειϱι].

—Pindar, Fragments (Boeckh/Donaldson 169[151])

War [Πολεμος] is the father of all things, the king of all, for some he has made gods, others men; some he has made slaves, others freemen.

—Heraclitus, Fragments (Diels/Kranz 22B53)

There is no way to learn the soul and thought and judgment of a man until he has been seen in the practice of power and law [αϱχαις τε και νομοισιν].

— Sophocles, Antigone (ll.175–77)

The same goes for Heidegger: . . . It is necessary to know how to listen to the silences of philosophers. These are always eloquent.

—Althusser, “Du côté de la philosophie”

It must be stressed that it is precisely the first elements, the most elementary things, that are the first to be forgotten. . . . In the development of leaders, one premise is fundamental: is it the intention that there always be rulers and ruled, or is the objective to create the conditions in which the necessity of the existence of this division disappears?

—Gramsci, Quaderni del cacere (15[4])

Introduction to Eloquent Silence

A dual premise. First, it is primarily in the sphere of military history that “1945” demarcates a radical break between whatever preceded and followed it, by far the most salutary consequence being the termination of the shoah, holocaust, or “final solution.” In the capitalist economy and its superstructural effects (which did not produce necessarily but maximally accelerated the shoah), the termination of this one manifestation of “the father of all things” necessitated nothing less or more than retuning the global distribution of capitalist power, which ever renders some “slaves, others freemen.”

Second, but concomitantly, from the point of view that I—with much help from Leo Strauss albeit to radically opposed ends¹—identify as the transhistorical conservation of esotericism (the almost unbroken philosophical and political tradition dating from archaic and ancient Greece),² 1945 could effect nothing less or more than the always already anticipated necessity to retune the exoteric ‘form’ of expression of an esoteric ‘substance’ that forever remains the same. This ‘substance’ (or Wesen) is indeed “the intention that there always be rulers and ruled,” hereby conserving the version of natural law or right called “order of rank” (Rangordnung in Nietzschean and Nazi German, gerachia in Fascist Italian, and with a precise equivalent in Imperial Japanese) by means of the perpetual retuning necessitated by tactical and strategic considerations exclusively. Yet, as Spinoza justly saw in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670): “The application of the word ‘law’ to things of nature is merely figurative, and the ordinary signification of law is simply a human command that men can either obey or disobey” (Spinoza opera, 3: 38; TPT P4). In the Hobbesian variant reaffirmed by Carl Schmitt, “Autoritas, non veritas facit legem” (Schmitt, Begriff des Politischen, 122). It is to prevent some people from disobeying this command and law, understood to be “the truth about all crucial things,” which has been the transhistorical (never a-historical) mission of the conservers of esotericism, who have every right to feel persecuted by us always rambunctious, potentially really disobedient men and women.

Persecution, then, gives rise to a peculiar technique of writing, and therewith to a peculiar type of literature, in which the truth about all crucial things is presented exclusively between the lines. That literature is addressed, not to all readers, but to trustworthy and intelligent readers only. It has all the advantages of private communication without having its greatest disadvantage—that it reaches only the writer’s acquaintances. It has all the advantages of pubic communication without having its greatest disadvantage—capital punishment for the author.

(Strauss, Persecution, 25)

Accordingly, Martin Heidegger remarks in 1951, “Only once or twice in my thirty to thirty-five years of teaching have I ever spoken what really matters to me [meine Sache]” (Gesamtausgabe, 15: 426), without saying whether this was one of those only two occasions. As Bœthius wrote in prison just before...