Heidegger came to represent, in Strauss’s view, the logical end of radical historicism and nihilism, his philosophy of history having "the same structure as Marx’s and Nietzsche’s." Heidegger’s association with the Nazis was by no means an accident on this view (Strauss’s "reductio ad Hitlerum"). The philosophical basis for such an interpretation lies in Strauss’s much maligned distinction between the exoteric (for the people) and esoteric (for the wise) levels of meaning in a philosophical work—which is what is meant by "the hermeneutics of reticence"—and Paraboschi spends the remainder of the section summarizing Strauss’s case for the distinction in Persecution and the Art of Writing.

¶ 2:39 PM