Faustian Man as Explorer: Some random reflections

Some random reflections about nothing in particular...

I recently linked to an essay on Wikipedia (sic) about Plato´s unwritten doctrines. I think it´s pretty obvious what´s going on with the denial of Plato´s esotericism (whatever you take the esotericism to be). The attitude that since esoteric doctrines aren´t *supposed* to exist, they ipso facto *don´t* exist, obviously comes from the Protestant reformation. 

I happen to have a strong sympathy for the "populist" attitude that things indeed shouldn´t be "hidden away", but that´s a very different proposition from claiming that actually there are no such things. Or, to be more precise, there were no such things in the primordial, pure and pristine past the Reformation (any reformation) is supposed to be a "return" to. The reformers claimed that the message of the primitive Church was purely exoteric, and that the Catholic Church had muddled everything at a later point. In the same way, Plato had a pure and pristine exoteric message, later muddled by Plotinus and the Neo-Platonists. 

Of course, this is the usual way in which humans seem to operate: everything radically new, is depicted not as it is, but as a "return" to something old. So here´s a radically new idea I just cracked: what if humans actually do, ahem, new things from time to time? Our modern Western civilization is certainly new in this way (for good or for worse). Indeed, we are presumably unique. Uniquely wrong, perhaps, but still unique. You don´t have to believe in "Whiggish history" or "the myth of Progress" to realize that our civilization really is a new, unique and crazy adventure in time and space. Not a revolution (pun intended) back to some Golden Age, the (Neandertal) inhabitants of which would be horrified by our antics...