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In another place, Rosen offers a different account of Platonic irony, or at least another perspective on the same explanation. He surprises us by asserting that "Strauss never accuses Plato of duplicity"—a claim that is incredible in the face of the argument of
Persecution and the Art of Writing. Relying on Nietzsche, Rosen now declares that there are two kinds of esotericism, the first a deliberate concealment of one's views "for reasons of prudence, playfulness, or aristocratic pride" and the second a reflection of "the intrinsic deceptiveness of becoming." Both are "the inevitable consequence of our warranted suspicion of nature." This is to say with Nietzsche that being, at root, is a randomly shifting chaos.
Thus, Rosen argues: "Honesty here stands for philosophy as an existential requirement of the higher human type: a frank perception of the fanciful or invented status of natural order is the basis of concealment. To exist is to conceal chaos." The "higher man, who alone is capable of self-knowledge," has a sense of social responsibility to the many who could not bear knowledge of the true facts, so he "conceals this concealment." 127
If we wonder what this Hegelian and Nietzschean reasoning has to do with Plato, Rosen promptly replies by moving to unify the philosophies of Nietzsche and Plato. He appeals to a passage in Nietzsche's Nachlass without quoting it fully. The passage reads as follows: "My philosophy reversed Platonism: the farther from the really being, ever more pure, more beautiful, better it is. Life in appearance as goal." 128 Rosen treats Nietzsche's understanding of his philosophy as "reversed Platonism" as if it meant "Platonism."
It seems to me that one might wish to take Nietzsche at his word, as if he meant "reversed" Platonism, that is, he is conscious of Plato's affirmation of a being that really is being, and that he is also conscious of his own affirmation of a being that is merely a randomly changing chaos as a doctrine directly opposed to Plato's. However, Rosen does not see the matter this way. He proceeds to complete his unification of Nietzsche's and Plato's philosophies by assimilating early Greek poets, musicians, and sophists who are cited in Plato as practitioners of irony to Plato himself. He states, for example, that "Protagoras understands that Being is deceptive. Plato does not contest this." Therefore, the dispute between Protagoras and Socrates is "the quarrel between noble and base sophistry." 129 Plato, it seems, is an esoteric writer not only because he is a "Kantian" but also because he is a "noble sophist." Nonetheless, this term might apply more to Rosen than Plato. 
[Part 10 will appear next week].
NOTES
115. Rosen, Plato's "Symposium," xiv.
116. Ibid., xlii, Ivi; Rosen, The Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry: Studies in Ancient Thought, 11.
117. Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics, 125.
118. Ibid., 16,54,44,65, 71,105,106,59,180,25,96,126,180,18,17. It might be significant that Rosen omits the following comment by Kojève in Introduction to Hegel: "Now, if a being that becomes God in time can be called 'God' only provided that it uses this term as a metaphor (a correct metaphor, by the way), the being that has always been God is God in the proper and strict sense of the word" (120). He adds that to construe oneself as God in the proper and strict sense of the word is "absurd."
119. Quid sit deus? means "What is god?" Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics, 16-17. Strauss himself calls quid sit deus? the "all-important question which is coeval with philosophy" (The City and Man, 241).
120. Strauss, Persecution, 33-34; Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics, 30-31.
121. Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, in NW, 6.1.5.5-9; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, 121; Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics, 108,181. 122. Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics, 33,139,187.
123. Ibid., 133.
124. Ibid., 133.
125. Ibid., 137, 136, 134-37.
126. Rosen, Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry, 12, 26; Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics, 137, 122, 140.
127. Rosen, Metaphysics in Ordinary Language, 62, 2, 3.
128. Rosen quotes the recent paperback edition of the Nietzsche collection that I have been citing: Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 7, p. 199,1870/71, passage 156.
129. Rosen, Metaphysics in Ordinary Language, 13.
