Strauss, Montague, Rose and Piper: what a text hides and what it shows

Four philosophers were born on 20 September, in 1899, 1930, 1947 and 1948, and it would be easy to make nothing of the coincidence beyond a paragraph each. But the four of them, Leo Strauss, Richard Montague, Gillian Rose and Adrian Piper, took up positions on a single question so opposed that the date reads like a seminar nobody convened. The question is whether what a text, or a person, means is on the surface for anyone to read, or hidden and available only to those who know how to look.

Strauss built a career on the second answer: the great books were written under persecution and say one thing to the many and another to the few. Montague, who was murdered at forty, gave the first answer in its most uncompromising form, that the meaning of an English sentence can be computed from its parts by rules as explicit as those of arithmetic. Rose spent her short life refusing both consolations, the secret doctrine and the clean formula, in favour of what she called the broken middle. And Piper, a Kantian who is also one of the founders of conceptual art, made the hiddenness of her own body the material of her work, handing strangers a card that read "Dear Friend, I am black."

Annie Besant, who died at Adyar on the date in 1933, supplies the cautionary tale. She organised the hidden into an institution, and the young man she had trained to be its revelation walked out.

Strauss and the art of writing between the lines#

Leo Strauss was born in Kirchhain, a small town in Hesse, on 20 September 1899, to an observant Jewish family. He took his doctorate at Hamburg in 1921 under Ernst Cassirer, heard Husserl at Freiburg the following year, worked on Spinoza in Berlin, and in 1932 published a set of notes on Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political that Schmitt took seriously enough to alter the book's next edition. A Rockefeller fellowship took him out of Germany the same year; he reached the United States in 1937, taught at the New School from 1938, and moved to Chicago in 1949, where the students who would be called Straussians, Allan Bloom among them, sat in his seminars. He died in Annapolis in October 1973.

The thesis for which he is known appeared as an essay in 1941 and as a book, Persecution and the Art of Writing, in 1952. Philosophers from Plato to Maimonides to Spinoza wrote in societies that punished heterodoxy. A careful writer in such a society, Strauss argued, will put the safe doctrine on the surface for the many and the dangerous one between the lines for the few who can read: in a contradiction left standing, in a digression, in a sentence placed at the exact centre of a chapter. The exoteric text is a cover; the esoteric text is the teaching.

Then, in the 1949 Walgreen Lectures at Chicago, published as Natural Right and History in 1953, he told the story that the esoteric reading was meant to serve. Classical political philosophy asked what the best regime is, and grounded the answer in a natural standard of right. Modern political philosophy, beginning with Machiavelli and Hobbes, lowered the standard to what men actually do, and the lowering ran on through historicism to Nietzsche and Heidegger, where it ends in the conclusion that all standards are the products of their time and none can be judged. Strauss thought this was nihilism, and that the way out lay behind us, in the question of the best regime taken seriously again. Alongside it ran a second tension he never resolved and did not want to: between Athens and Jerusalem, reason and revelation, each of which, he thought, had to grant that the other might be right.

The method is the divisive part. To its admirers it is the only way to take a text more seriously than its author's enemies did. To its critics it is unfalsifiable, since any passage that contradicts the hidden teaching can be read as part of the cover. The political afterlife is worse. On 12 May 2003 Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker that the Pentagon office supplying the case for war in Iraq was staffed by admirers of Strauss, and speculated that a taste for Platonic noble lies had gone into the intelligence. The speculation was thin, the reporting was not, and the two have been confused ever since. What Strauss's texts actually say about lying to the public is a matter for the texts, and it would be a poor tribute to a theorist of careful reading to settle it from a magazine piece. His student Bloom was in this series six days ago.

Montague: nothing hidden, everything computable#

Richard Merritt Montague was born in Stockton, California, on 20 September 1930. He studied at Berkeley, taking degrees in philosophy and mathematics before a doctorate in 1957 under Alfred Tarski on the axiomatic foundations of set theory, and it contained the first proof that no finite set of axioms will do for the standard theory. From 1955 he was at UCLA. Until the mid-1960s he was a logician's logician; then he turned to English.

Three papers carry the turn: "English as a Formal Language" (1970), "Universal Grammar" (1970) and "The Proper Treatment of Quantification in Ordinary English" (1973), which linguists call PTQ. Their premise is a sentence that most logicians before him thought false and most linguists thought impertinent: "I reject the contention that an important theoretical difference exists between formal and natural languages." Frege had built the predicate calculus because ordinary language was too loose to reason in; Tarski had said that the semantics of natural languages could not be made precise. Give every rule of syntax a matching rule of semantics, so that the meaning of a phrase is built from the meanings of its parts in the same step that builds the phrase; let the meanings be functions over possible worlds; and quantifiers, tense, belief and the word "the" all come out with truth conditions.

What made the papers a discipline was Barbara Partee, who learned them at UCLA and carried them to linguistics, arguing in 1975 that Montague's semantics and Chomsky's syntax could be married. Formal semantics as it is taught today is the child of that marriage. The founder did not see it. On 7 March 1971 Montague was strangled in his house in Los Angeles by people he had brought home that night; the case was never solved, and the linguist Ivano Caponigro has spent the better part of a decade on a biography that is meant to give the life the same attention as the work. The doctrine survives him as the standing alternative to Strauss, and now to something Strauss never imagined. If a language model learns meaning from patterns in text, then meaning was never a set of explicit rules at all; if Montague was right, the model has learned something else. This site's piece on Chalmers and language models sits on that fault line.

Rose: neither the secret nor the formula#

Gillian Rose was born in London on 20 September 1947, into a family named Stone; she took her stepfather's surname at sixteen. She read PPE at Oxford, studied Adorno in New York and Frankfurt, and taught in the sociology department at Sussex from 1974 to 1989 before Warwick made her professor of social and political thought. Her inaugural lecture there, in February 1993, was called "Athens and Jerusalem: A Tale of Three Cities", and the borrowed title was a challenge to Strauss as much as a nod. Weeks after it she was diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. She died in Coventry on 9 December 1995, at forty-eight, during the closing moments of a conference at Warwick on her own work. She had been received into the Church of England shortly before, saying it deepened rather than replaced her Judaism.

Her best book, by common consent and her own, is Hegel Contra Sociology (1981). Its target is a Hegel domesticated by both sides: the Marxist Hegel who is a method with the metaphysics removed, and the post-structuralist Hegel who is a totalitarian to be escaped. Rose's Hegel insists that the absolute be thought, not because it can be possessed but because refusing to think it leaves social theory pretending its own categories are neutral. The Broken Middle (1992) turns the same refusal on the ethics of the 1980s. Derrida, Levinas and their readers, she argued, had fled the difficult ground where law and love, institution and individual, meet and fail to reconcile, and taken refuge in a purity beyond the law, a "holy middle" where nobody has to risk being wrong. Her alternative was to stay in the broken one, where every action is exposed.

Strauss offered a hidden teaching for the few; Montague a formula for everyone; Rose thought both were ways of not being in the room. Love's Work, published in February 1995, is a memoir of her illness, her lovers and her family, and it carries as its epigraph a sentence from the Orthodox monk Silouan: "Keep your mind in hell, and despair not." Readers who know her only from that book, and since the revival of the early 2020s there are many, tend to miss that it is the same argument in the first person; Jenny Turner's essay in the London Review of Books in 2024 is the best recent account of why the two do not come apart.

Piper: the body as a text people misread#

Adrian Margaret Smith Piper was born in New York on 20 September 1948 and grew up in Harlem. She was raised as a Black American and was light-skinned enough that strangers assumed she was white, and that gap set the terms of everything after. Art came first, and by 1970 she was performing the Catalysis pieces on the streets and in the subways of Manhattan, riding a train in clothes soaked for a week in vinegar, eggs and cod-liver oil, and noting what her fellow passengers did with the sight. Then, from 1973, she walked the city as the Mythic Being, a moustached man in an Afro wig, a third-person self she could observe being feared.

Philosophy came alongside it. She took a BA at City College in 1974, a doctorate at Harvard in 1981 under John Rawls, with a year in Heidelberg studying Kant and Hegel with Dieter Henrich, and taught at Michigan, Georgetown, Wellesley and elsewhere. In 1987 she became the first African-American woman to be given tenure in philosophy in the United States. The Calling Card series began the previous year. The first card, handed to a person who had just made a racist remark in her presence, read: "Dear Friend, I am black. I am sure you did not realize this when you made/laughed at/agreed with that racist remark." It is a Montague sentence in a Strauss situation: an entirely explicit statement, delivered to someone who had been reading her surface and getting it wrong.

Her large philosophical work, Rationality and the Structure of the Self, took her thirty-four years. By her account more than thirty referees declined to read it before Cambridge University Press accepted it; in May 2008 it appeared instead as two free e-books from the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation in Berlin, where she has lived since the early 2000s, and where it can still be downloaded. Volume One dismantles the Humean self that acts on desire and calculates utility. Volume Two builds the alternative on Kant's first Critique rather than the second: a self whose unity is the unity of its rational structure, and which, on that account, can be moved by a principle against its own inclinations, which is what whistleblowers do and what the belief-desire model cannot explain. Wellesley ended her tenured post in 2008 while she was on unpaid leave in Berlin, citing her refusal to return to a country whose transport security agency had put her on a watch list. She took the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2015 for The Probable Trust Registry, and in 2018 the Museum of Modern Art gave her a retrospective that filled its entire sixth floor, the first time it had done so for a living artist. She is seventy-eight today. The question this site asked last week, in a piece on AI and art, of what a maker has to be for the thing made to count as art, has in Piper a working answer: a mind that knows exactly what it is doing, presenting a surface that it knows will be misread.

Besant: the hidden made into an institution#

Annie Besant died at Adyar, outside Madras, on 20 September 1933, at eighty-five. Her first life was English and public: separated from her clergyman husband in 1873, tried with Charles Bradlaugh in 1877 for republishing a pamphlet on birth control, organiser of the matchgirls' strike in 1888. Her second began in 1889 when she reviewed Helena Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine, sought out its author in Paris and was converted. She became president of the Theosophical Society in 1907, moved its business to India, founded the Home Rule League with Tilak in 1916, was interned by the British in the summer of 1917 and, on her release that September, was elected president of the Indian National Congress.

Theosophy is Strauss's esotericism with the philosophy removed and the hierarchy kept: a secret doctrine, a class of initiates, a teaching that the many are not ready for. Besant found the teacher it needed in a Brahmin boy on the beach at Adyar, Jiddu Krishnamurti, adopted him, educated him in England and built an order around him as the coming World Teacher. In August 1929, at Ommen in the Netherlands, in front of her and some three thousand members, he dissolved the order, declaring that truth is a pathless land and that no organisation can lead anyone to it. It is the day's last word on hidden meaning: a doctrine that depends on the few knowing what the many cannot will, sooner or later, be told by one of the few that there was nothing to know.

The previous instalment of this series is here; the season's meetings are in the autumn calendar.