Comments on: Straussiana

By: clew

clew — Thu, 23 Oct 2003 21:59:21 +0000

The guardian class was a meritocracy whose members were drawn from all other classes, male and female alike. They were denied material possessions and the ability to have children. This corresponds to fascism how, exactly?

Well, denying people material possessions and offspring sounds fascist enough. It just means that the fascism isn’t located completely in the guardians themselves. The rabble were denied other stuff – e.g., freedom of speech and religion – so there was plenty of suspiciously-fascist-like constraint to go around. This isn’t unusual for working states with a guardian class; for instance the earlier Mamelukes, or the eunuchs of the East(?) Chamber in the earlier Ming(?) dynasty. (I have a really faint memory that at the height of Mameluke rule they didn’t personally own anything, though they were very rich collectively, like some religious orders.) One certainly can’t say that because the members of the ruling class were denied some indulgences that the class as a whole was virtuous.

By: David

David — Wed, 22 Oct 2003 14:04:27 +0000

Strauss was the first to admit that the influence of sitting in Heidegger’s lecture hall was the impetus for getting him to re-think his position on the ancient philosophers. See his talk with Jacob Klein called “A Giving of Accounts” or something like that. He can hardly be said to imitate Heidegger, however, as Heidegger ran roughshod over the surface of Plato to get at the “depths”. Unfortunately for Heidegger, this meant that the depths weren’t really there. His misreading of the “epikeina tes ousias” in the Republic is fascinating and challenging but thoroughly wrong. Heidegger read Plato through the eyes of Aristotle which had the net effect of erasing Plato’s rhetoric in favor of an almost Albinus-like position of the “theses of Plato” or whatnot. One need only read his essay “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” to perceive this. You’ll note that Strauss never wrote an essay entitled “Plato’s Doctrine of…” for Strauss didn’t believe that Plato had doctrines. The difference in these two positions is very important, though I will be the first to admit that Heidegger is the deeper thinker.

By: john c. halasz

john c. halasz — Wed, 22 Oct 2003 06:33:17 +0000

No, rhm, I’m afraid you badly missed the point. Cognitive and moral/ethical judgments are to be reduced to the status of mere aesthetic judgments. This is Nietzsche’s slippery slope. And a solipsistic taking of responsibility without regard to consequences? Yes, this is very Kantian. To me the very identification of freedom with autonomy, a deep legacy of the Western metaphysical tradition, needs to be called into question. Yes, Nietzsche did not reject the Enlightenment out of hand. He bedeviled it. As to those above who wondered what Nietzshe has to do with Plato, Nietzsche was an inverse Platonist, as I think he would admit. Strauss’ “Platonism” is actually an inverted Nietzscheanism. It was not remarked above how much Strauss actually owes to and imitates Heidegger.

By: Chris Jenson

Chris Jenson — Wed, 22 Oct 2003 05:11:38 +0000

Nietzsche, by most scholars’ lights, is not a “proto-fascist.” Frank Wilhoit should at least make an argument to defend that claim.

By: Keith M Ellis

Keith M Ellis — Tue, 21 Oct 2003 22:57:41 +0000

“Keith, let me mostly agree this one time.” Well, that’s a nice change, isn’t it? :) I’m in many respects a Hellenophile. To me, they’re like teenagers drunk on the nectar of the “first love” of reason, earnest but not humorless, intellectual yet passionate. There are a lot of (false, in my opinion) dualisms that are deeply embedded in later western culture that are completely alien to the Greeks. Those are the traits we would do well to emulate. Yes, there are numerous ways in which I would judge them harshly from a contemporary context. But that seems rather pointless to me. I prefer to just let them be what they were, on their own terms. And you’re completely right, as far as I can tell, that the Straussians implicitly (at least) violate this “rule” of requirement for appropriate context by the nature of their argument.

By: Zizka

Zizka — Tue, 21 Oct 2003 22:28:34 +0000

Keith, let me mostly agree this one time. To the extent that the Straussians bring this over into the present, a criticism can be made, though. Wolfowitz was booed at one right-wing conclave because he mentioned that the Palestinians rights and interests have to be taken into consideration too. He’s not a raving nutjob like the Armageddonists and warbloggers. Paul Veyne said of the Romans, but it could be applicable to the Greeks just as well, something like “The difficult thing about understanding the Romans is accepting how incredibly different they are from us”.

By: Keith M Ellis

Keith M Ellis — Tue, 21 Oct 2003 20:50:54 +0000

“…is that for them philosophers and men of excellence are transcendant over their inferiors, who really have no rights that they can assert against their superiors.” Well, that seems like criticizing the soup because it’s not a good book. I mean, using the language of “rights” is completely inappropriate in this context. The soup isn’t a good book. Yeah, well…so? Yes, there are a great number of very important ideas that were central to the Greeks that we’ve inherited. But they were very, very different than us. Because of this legacy it’s easy to overidentify “western values” with “Hellenistic values”. But many of the things that appear to be the same are only superficially identical. I think this is well illustrated, for example, by the contrast between how the Greeks understood mathematics and how we understand mathematics. My point is that were Hellenistic culture as alien to us as, say, Confucian culture (or whatever, maybe that’s a bad example), we’d not be so quick to evaluate it on the basis of things like its failure to recognize the “rights” of the rabble. But because it seems so similar to our culture, and yet has these notable divergences, we are inclined to judge it harshly. I think that’s a big mistake. I’m no professional scholar, and some of these books we’re discussing I’ve only read once and many years in the past. But my education involved a couple of years of homeric and attic greek, translations of portions of texts, reading and discussing a great many of these texts, and, you know, Euclid et al. There are times in Plato’s dialogues where these people seem deeply familiar and immediate. And in many ways they are deeply familiar and immediate because their legacy is ever-present in our culture. But, really, they were very, very different intellectually and culturally than us. It took awhile for this to become apparent to me, but it did. I don’t know enough about the Straussians and their esoterica to judge; but it seems to me that the people that fetishize the canon assume a unity that simply isn’t there. They assume such a unity because doing so suits their ideological purposes. Just so with the canon’s foes. And the Greeks are almost always (mis)used as a crucial piece in this intellectual chess match.

By: Zizka

Zizka — Tue, 21 Oct 2003 18:57:39 +0000

On Plato’s banning of the poets: Homer (and the tragedians to a lesser extent) actually had a formal religious authority for the Greeks, like the Bible or the Koran. The Iliad and the Odyssey were scavenged for precedents the way people scavange the Bible, and Odysseus (in all his deviousness) provided a model for human behavior. So Plato wasn’t really banning a private pleasure; he was proposing that one model of intellectual authority (the epic) be replaced by another (reason, philosophy). Banning may have been extreme, but getting people to a place where a snatch of Homer didn’t count as a killer argument was a goal we can all endorse. (Havelock, Preface to Plato). What I find unappealing in Aristotle and Plato and really the Greeks generally, and I think it extends to Strauss and the Straussians, is that for them philosophers and men of excellence are transcendant over their inferiors, who really have no rights that they can assert against their superiors. The Greek polisses were predatory, and sum sort of zero-sum state of nature seems to be taken as absolute, with the Straussians supporting the excellent vs. the rabble (Palestinians, the third world, the lower orders.)

By: David

David — Tue, 21 Oct 2003 16:15:35 +0000

C.J., Start out with”What is Political Philosophy” by Strauss. It is polemical in many places but it is, by far, the most accessible of his works. The problem with Strauss is that he presupposes a great deal of knowledge so you may need to bone-up on your philosophy if it isn’t what it should be. If you don’t you will miss the obvious short-hand formulations and semi-hidden references. There is also the fact that much of Strauss’s work is on other philosophers so you will need to become familiar with them. Sorry, but there is no way around this. I still find stuff in Strauss which I missed the last time I read him. Good luck and be persistent. Like all things worth doing, it takes a lot of time.

By: john c. halasz

john c. halasz — Tue, 21 Oct 2003 10:49:41 +0000

Aristotle made a basic distinction between the ethico-political domain of practical reason and the metaphysical and scientific domain of theoretical reason, whereas in Plato the consideration of the metaphysical and ethical is undifferentiated and conflated. I think this is the point of the above cited quotation from Aristotle’s “Politics”, stated in the plain speaking manner of Aristotle. In general, I think it is a mistake to de-emphasize the continuities between Aristotle and Plato, for many of Aristotle’s “criticisms” of Plato amount to saying,” This is what Plato says, but I can do it better.” But let me end, if I may, on Diogenes of Sinope, who was not looking for an “honest” man- that is a Victorian bowlderization. Diogenes, who was a well-known public character and on equal terms with everyone, walked through the marketplace in broad daylight with a lighted lantern held high, knowing full well that everyone would ask,” Diogenes, what are you doing?” “Looking for people”, he would reply. This is a satire upon the Platonic doctrine of the divine/natural light of reason and its alleged humanizing effect. But, like all well-crafted satire, it cuts both ways.

By: Keith M Ellis

Keith M Ellis — Tue, 21 Oct 2003 08:04:09 +0000

When I wrote: “I’ve never been persuaded that Republic is in earnest a socio-political blueprint”, I chose my words carefully. I agree that it’s undeniable that Plato took his model city state seriously—its elaboration alone makes that clear. But there’s a gap between that and the view that sees Republic as being primarily a political blueprint and completely disregards the moral philosphy which provides the context. The latter seems to me to be a suspicious elision that indicates a narrow special-interest reading of Republic. The casual and intentionally toxic labeling of Plato as a “proto-fascist”, as Mr. Wilhoit exemplifies, is a rhetorical gambit, not legitimate intellectual discourse. This is also true of Drury, as far as I can tell. Throughout Republic, Socrates warns that this isn’t a practical blueprint for a republic. At the outset of its discussion, he says that since this is intended as a metaphor for the well-ordered soul, then the discussion needn’t be limited by any sort of practical consideration of constructing and organizing a republic. And he repeats this many times, averring that many details are obviously impractical. Even in its details and taken earnestly, its supposed “proto-fascist” nature is unclear to me. The guardian class was a meritocracy whose members were drawn from all other classes, male and female alike. They were denied material possessions and the ability to have children. This corresponds to fascism how, exactly? I agree it’s not democracy, but it doesn’t look like fascism to me, either. (I’m sure that Popper makes a more sophisticated argument. I haven’t read it; I’ll reserve judgment.) I also find it extremely odd that Drury and others are so quick to connect Plato, Strauss, and the Bush neocons given that Plato’s specific criticism of democracy was that it is too easily (or, actually, inevitably) corrupted by power accruing to wealth and becoming a plutocracy. An apt criticism in the contemporary context, isn’t it? And one quite unfriendly to the Bush administration. (Of course, it should be noted that the Bush plutocrats and the neocons are probably distinct and somewhat hostile factions with the Bush administration.) I don’t recall that passage from Politics, but I think it is very amusing. It doesn’t seem to me to be “an elaborately esoteric inside joke” but rather a simple and manifest inside joke. In any event, as I said, I was not arguing that Republic wasn’t at all a political blueprint, but that reading it as that exclusively is simple-minded. C.J. Colucci, a Google search on “Leo Strauss” will result in a lot of material on Strauss, both pro- and con-. You should take much of it with a grain of salt. For example, straussian.net identifies some tutors I knew personally at St. John’s as Straussians, and as far as I can tell, that claim is false. Some may be, of course. But the Straussians and the anti-Straussian camps cast pretty wide nets for convenience’s sake. “Plato’s authoritarianism came from his horror at some of the acts of the Athenian direct democracy, which was really impulsively murderous at times.”—zizka And obviously the chief example of this, for Plato, was the trial and death of Socrates. It seems to me that Plato was a hair’s breadth away from Churchill’s formulation: “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others”. Churchill’s observations is profoundly pragmatic; and when Plato discusses actual forms of government, he is similarly disapointed. Unconstrained by practical considerations, however, he esteems the philosopher king and a similar republic. But he’s clearly quite frustrated with the reality of things. I mean, good lord, Plato was Plato. He’s the western prototypical idealist. It’s a profound misundertanding of Plato to see Republic in primarily practical, rather than idealistic, terms. I don’t think Plato especially cared about the practical reality of organizing a city state. He was primiarly a moral philosopher and an epistemologist. He certainly wasn’t a social engineer. Aristotle was more practical, I admit. But this use of Plato and Aristotle as a template for the practical organization of society (or a critique of such) to my mind has a strong taint of medieval neoplatonism—which was, I think, an alien culture’s deep (and convenient) misreading of them; and I wonder if that’s not what we’re really arguing about here.

By: rmh

rmh — Tue, 21 Oct 2003 07:46:01 +0000

Your point is well taken with regard to Nietzche’s insistance on the importance of aesthetic judgement into ordering ones life and choices. However, aesthetics should be injected to balance w/ rational learning and thought. A fusing of the Appolonian and Dionysian. Music w/ passion, as well as precision. Science pursued w/ joy as well as logic and rigor. The death of God becomes the rejection of the mere acceptance of outside justifications for one’s choices and actions and a call to accept the rewards and consequences of those same. His insights are not a rejection of enlightenment, but rather a rejection of the western conceit of continuous progress. Lessons get lost, then regained, from generation to generation.

By: Zizka

Zizka — Tue, 21 Oct 2003 04:42:44 +0000

Once more I come to the Straussians’ rescue, sort of. Plato’s authoritarianism came from his horror at some of the acts of the Athenian direct democracy, which was really impulsively murderous at times. You don’t have to accept his solution, but “democracy” shouldn’t be used as a slogan to obscure the real criticisms of bloody Athenian practice. Likewise, Strauss thought of Hitler and Stalin, not as aberrations or throwbacks, but as ever-present possibilities of the modern age. His anti-populist authoritarianism was directed against their kind of modernity. When Strauss came to the US he was in a terrible bind. The high German culture he was devoted to, and from which he got his authoritarianism and his belief in heierarchy, was in the process of self-destructing in an extraordinarily spectacular way. He came to the US for shelter—a place for which his sort of German had only the most condescending respect. [Yeah, that’s historicist and relativist. So sue me]. So his doctrine of secrecy had an immediate function, helping him to find a niche for himself in this strange land. His niche was among the elite of anti-communist (anti-populist) afministrative liberals—who later cut deals with free-market ideologues and religious nut cases. His followers, notably Bloom, adapted Strauss’s ideas for U.S. consumption—Bloom accepted the Enlightenment, which Strauss probably didn’t. He sort of had to, because American institutions are almost all Enlightenment-based. The weird thing for me is that Wolfowitz really seems to have developed into an democratic imperialist. The Straussian definition of democracy is anti-populist and procedural, but Wolfowitz seems to believe that we will be able to turn Iraq into one. A highly unconservative belief.

By: Frank Wilhoit

Frank Wilhoit — Tue, 21 Oct 2003 00:29:46 +0000

“…How could an intelligent person of any political persuasion not admire Plato and Nietzsche?…” It’s easy. The one was a proto-Fascist and the other was a lunatic. Plato (foul though his ideas were) should be read, for the insight he gives into his time and place; Nietzsche lacks even that excuse.

By: Chris Jenson

Chris Jenson — Mon, 20 Oct 2003 23:58:34 +0000

It strikes me as very strange to lump Nietzsche and Plato together. Nietzsche disagreed with Plato on almost everything. I would imagine that Plato and Nietzsche came to their political views for very different reasons. I have always found it strange that people are interested in Nietzsche as a political philosopher.