On Reading
Isn’t the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon great? I've noticed the phrase "Straussian reading" twice recently; it popped up somewhere on Twitter, and then I saw it in Matt Levine's Money Stuff, which I really enjoy.
McEnery advances a Straussian reading of the tweet, arguing — I swear — that Cohen might have meant to reference the “South Park” catchphrase “Oh my God, they killed Kenny,” because Reddit meme-stock investors “have made Citadel founder Ken Griffin into their prime enemy, re-christening him as ‘Kenny G’ or simply ‘Kenny.'"
Now, I haven't read much Leo Strauss, but the following quote, which I got from this blogpost, seems to be a decent summary of the concept.
Imagine you have received a letter in the mail from your beloved, from whom you have been separated for many long months. (An old-fashioned tale, where there are still beloveds—and letters.) You fear that her feelings toward you may have suffered some alteration. As you hold her letter in your unsteady hands, you are instantly in the place that makes one a good reader. You are responsive to her every word. You are exquisitely alive to every shade and nuance of what she has said—and not said.
“Dearest John.” You know that she always uses “dearest” in letters to you, so the word here means nothing in particular; but her “with love” ending is the weakest of the three variations that she typically uses. The letter is quite cheerful, describing in detail all the things she has been doing. One of them reminds her of something the two of you once did together. “That was a lot of fun,” she exclaims. “Fun”—a resolutely friendly word, not a romantic one. You find yourself weighing every word in a relative scale: it represents not only itself but the negation of every other word that might have been used in its place. Somewhere buried in the middle of the letter, thrown in with an offhandedness that seems too studied, she briefly answers the question you asked her: yes, as it turns out, she has run into Bill Smith—your main rival for her affection. Then it’s back to chatty and cheerful descriptions until the end.
It is clear to you what the letter means. She is letting you down easy, preparing an eventual break. The message is partly in what she has said—the Bill Smith remark, and that lukewarm ending—but primarily in what she has not said. The letter is full of her activities, but not a word of her feelings. There is no moment of intimacy. It is engaging and cheerful but cold. And her cheerfulness is the coldest thing: how could she be so happy if she were missing you? Which points to the most crucial fact: she has said not one word about missing you. That silence fairly screams in your ear.
If you follow the link above, you'll find that all this was inspired by a disquisition about why the Jedi are actually evil. Somehow we've managed to get from Tyler Cowen's thoughts on the Star Wars prequels to analysing love letters - and now I'm going to talk about Anselm, Pseudo-Dionysius and Machiavelli. Ah well.
Straussian reading, thus defined, is an example of a hermeneutic - a way of extracting some meaning from a text. The first thing to note is that there can be more than one hermeneutic, because any given text can have more than one meaning. That's not necessarily an obvious point; some texts are constructed to have really only one possible meaning: contracts, laws, computer programs, but also perhaps autobiographies or love letters. Quite often the author of these texts strives to write such that when a reader - and perhaps a particular reader - comes to the text, the reader takes a particular meaning from it. The author is, of course, not always successful in this.
Mostly, however, texts can have more than one meaning. Different readers will take different things from them. One could crudely but not without some justice say that a huge chunk of French linguistics and philosophy, including the work of people like Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes, riffs off this theme - the idea that texts mean different things to different people. It's a really attractive, and quite iconoclastic idea.
However, I reckon Michael Bentley had it right when he made the point in this absolutely fantastic podcast episode that while a text, or a group of texts like an archive, might have one meaning, or two, or even ten meanings, it can't possibly have infinitely many; at some point, changes in emphasis just don't matter that much. Bentley sees the need for a line, but its position is necessarily arbitrary; if you have a heap of sand, and remove a grain at a time, when does it stop being a heap? It's a common-sense argument from an experienced scholar refusing to get carried away by theory.
I think Bentley's argument implies that hermeneutics are necessarily inexact - because he wants us to draw a line somewhere between one and infinitely many possible readings, that line is going to be contentious and arbitrary. The second important point to make is that these meanings have to be mutually inconsistent. This "Straussian reading" won't really get us closer to the "true" meaning of a text, only lead to a more sophisticated understanding of one of them. Other hermeneutics will produce different results.
In the rest of this essay, I want to talk about two alternative ideas about reading texts. I'm not sure either quite counts as a 'hermeneutic', on the grounds that the first is too simple to be a hermeneutic, and the second is about three hermeneutics wearing a trench coat. I still think they're quite cool.
Apophatic Reading
The first is something of a pet theory of mine. The Neo-Platonists, and especially Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (proud owner of one of the best names in all of history), helped define an apophatic approach to theology; the goal of understanding God through negation, by saying what He is not. It's complementary to cataphatic theology; one can say either that God does not hate, or that God is perfect love. These, then, are spiritual hermeneutics - unfortunately, however, they don't have anything to do with apophantic statements (part of Aristotelian logic) nor with cataphracts (Byzantine heavy cavalry)!
For instance, Anselm's (relatively) famous ontological argument makes a positive case, and so is part of cataphatic theology. If we define God as being "that than which nothing better can be conceived", then we can assign him all sorts of positive traits - he's as loving as one could possibly conceive, for instance. Anselm then goes on to argue that since God would be better if he did exist than if he didn't, and that God is as good as he can possibly be, he must exist.
Bringing all this into the present, a recruiter might describe a company as 'mission-driven' and looking for 'rockstars'; but while one could seek to understand what those terms mean per se, an apophatic reading would try to get past those positive descriptions and understand what the company is not: to see that this is a company which puts profits before ethics, or expects overtime from poorly-trained workers. The goal is to get at what the text omits and negates. In particular, what normally-good adjectives don't apply? Is it necessary to be on time, or to have exceptional attention to detail? Who needs strong written English or statistical literacy? If the unsaid and the denied can be made explicit, then you get a valuable alternative perspective.
Contextual Reading
The Straussian reading of the love-letter described above can be defined as esoteric (i.e. not-obvious) as opposed to exoteric (obvious); but for me that misses a more important point. That sort of reading gets at truth by better understanding the inner world of the writer; meaning is what she meant by what she wrote, what she chose not to say. The hermeneutic is deeply personal and psychological. The goal is to understand the thought-world of an individual.
In contrast, historians these days tend to attempt to understand the world in which the author lived; not least because, since these are historians doing history, the texts being studied are being studied for the light they shed on the world which created them, not the other way around. This external/internal debate has raged for generations. Recently, the study of the history of political thought has been dominated by the ideas of Quentin Skinner, who famously argued in a series of influential pieces that texts need to be placed in contexts; that the key question is what the historian was up to in the world, the way their writing interacted with what Wittgenstein called the 'language-games' of contemporary discourse. The purpose of a close reading is not necessarily to understand exactly what a writer meant, if such a thing exists, but to situate the writing as part of a bigger historical story. That makes Skinner's method radically different from the Straussian reading described above.
In his book Machiavelli and Empire, Mikael Hörnqvist agreed that contexts are important, but disagreed with Skinner on his interpretation of Machiavelli's purpose. He argued Skinner was really interested "in how [a text] interacts with, manipulates, and reshapes the ideological and linguistic conventions conditioning an action, and not in how it seeks to influence contemporary political action itself." Skinner was interested in concepts not too dissimilar to the modern Overton Window, in the "available ideological codes and linguistic conventions of the day". In contrast, Hörnqvist argued that a writer like Machiavelli can work at three levels:
Philosophy - general rules, statements and axioms, such as Machiavelli's 'realist' theory of political science.
Ideology - engagement with the main themes of classical and Renaissance political thought.
Rhetoric - addressing the political here and now, giving practical advice.
Whereas Skinner focused on ideology, Hörnqvist stressed more prosaically the rhetorical intentions of Machiavelli, and the desire he expressed in both the Prince and the Art of War to change public policy - most famously in Chapter 24 of the Prince, the Exhortation to free Italy from foreign control. That means that while Machiavelli certainly has a lot to say to the traditions of Western thought and the authors of his own day, he's simultaneously closely concerned with practical expediency: part of what makes his work better than that of his contemporaries is that it is "at one and the same time less confined to its local and contemporary context, and more directly aimed at the here and now of Florentine politics."
Given that Machiavelli managed to do a lot of both ideology and rhetoric at once, it shouldn't be surprising that Skinner also muddied the waters himself. For instance, in Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas, his great 1969 essay, Skinner had it that any text "is inescapably the embodiment of a particular intention, on a particular occasion, addressed to the solution of a particular problem, and thus specific to its situation in a way that it can only be naive to try to transcend." In that passage, Skinner sounds more interested in rhetoric than ideology.
So Skinner's ideas lead us to a rough and practical hermeneutic, one that focuses on contextual understanding of either practical problems, ideological constraints, or both at the same time. But that's really different to the Straussian focus on the internal world of the author, and so we get quite a different understanding of a text from it.
Conclusion
I've outlined two alternatives to Straussian reading; an apophatic focus on negation, where meaning is found in absence and opposites; and a contextualist desire to understand both the rules of the language games that writers play and the goals they have in playing them. Having these alternatives doesn't just add tools to the toolbox - it makes clear the limitations of the ones you already have. The proverb goes that 'if all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail'; but perhaps the point is also that you'll want to bash everything if you've only ever thought about using a hammer. In the original Money Stuff quote, Straussian reading is seen as a Pareto improvement, a superior technique for extracting meaning and understanding, just like the switch from System 1 to System 2 in Thinking Fast and Slow. The idea is that doing reading like this makes you better at it. But perhaps by drawing attention to the existence of alternative hermeneutics, we can better understand - apophatically! - what's useful about the Straussian approach.