Straussiana

Hopefully it was just laziness but you can hardly blame Chris for pointing it out. You can tell what she was driving at the moment you read the sentence but you would think she would be a bit more careful with her language than that.

It’s also not clear that she doesn’t think you can only admire someone who’s views you agree with – which is a bit silly.

The clarifications offered on the Plato/Nietzsche point are well taken, but Chris’s larger point is worth considering: that Drury’s “obsession” with Strauss and the Straussians has clouded her judgment. She has done a great deal over the years to expose the real (and loony) underpinnings of Straussian thought, but her determination to explain virtually the whole of Bush administration policy as a consequence of Straussian influence is lamentable. Too often it takes the form of a dubious syllogism:

Straussians encourage political leaders to lie;
Bushies are Straussians;
Therefore Bushies are liars.

All three clauses are either simplistic or misleading. And Drury’s insistence on making her case airtight leads to other reductive statements. For instance, when she wants to discredit Strauss’s claim that in the Republic Thrasymachus represents Plato’s view, she says, “In Plato’s dialogues, everyone assumes that Socrates is Plato’s mouthpiece” — everyone except Straussians, we are led to infer. But this is simply wrong. Dozens of scholars, most of whom hold no brief for Straussianism, have shown that the straightforward equation of Plato and Socrates is untenable, and often needs to be nuanced.

Again, let me make it clear that I think the Straussian way of reading, with its claims to special illumination, is dangerous and unjustifiable. But Drury shows us how a scholarship driven largely by opposition to someone else’s scholarship, and someone else’s politics, has its own pitfalls.

As a practice in intellectual history, it might be worth not just thinking about “Straussian” as consistently-applied-doctrine, but also about the particular milleus (in Chicago and elsewhere) in which these sorts of ideas predominate(d). I share the suspicion that Straussianism harbors a streak of deep intellectual dishonesty. The important question for me is: what sorts of institutional spaces allow dishonest ideologies (of either the right or left variant) to flourish? And why? Is the toleration of this sort of nonsense an Achilles’ heel of liberal democracy? It’s not the masses we can’t trust, it is the intellectuals.

And put me down as a non-admirer of Nietzsche…

I am always mystified by the lumping of Nietzsche w/ these ideas. Yes, his writings were used by proto-nazis and the nazi party to justify their political points of view, first by his sister and her husband. Most of his writings were directed at personal development … many of his critiques of art, artists, government and religion were directed at how institutions subvert the personal development of the individual. He was most concerned w/ the full development of individual potential, which is a profoundly liberal idea. There are ample reasons to argue w/ his points, but more care should be given to dividing his points of view from the misinterpretations used by others to justify a political agenda.

I’ve never been persuaded that _Republic_ is in earnest a socio-political blueprint. The discussion of a properly ordered republic was engaged as a metaphor for the properly ordered soul. To so literally focus on certain ideas in _Republic_ out of context—for instance, the “noble lie”, the guardian class, etc.—seems to me to be astonishingly simple-minded.

Likewise, many of the vulgar (mis)readings of Nietzsche; and, for that matter, Machiavelli.

True, I’ve encountered a frighteningly large number of people who claim significant familiarity with these writers but who have only read secondary sources.

Anyway, this is of personal interest to me as The “Great Books” connection between Chicago and St. John’s College goes back to its origin as an educational reform of the thirties. And while the overlap between the two schools was/is significant, including Strauss’s connection with both schools[1], it seems to me, as a johnnie, that Strauss’s cryptography polluted the Chicago program. Allan Bloom took a veiled swipe at SJC in “Closing of the American Mind” when he ridiculed schools that present the “great books” without the necessary guidance. Bloom was profoundly Straussian and, I think, the elitist esotericism is telling of an entire worldview implied in Straussianism, including its reactionary conservativism. These things are _not_, however, inherent in University of Chicago in general, St. John’s College, the so-called “canon”, or, even, specifically, Plato and Nietzsche.

And I’m with Chris on this: how can any intelligent and informed person _not_ admire Plato and Nietzsche?

[1] And I mentioned this when it came up here in the past; but Strauss was a close friend with a St. John’s College tutor, Leon Kass. (By the way, Strauss also became a tutor emeritus at the college later in life.) I heard secondhand from a tutor that knew them both that a big difference between Strauss and Kass was that Strauss had and encouraged “disciples”, while Kass discouraged them. To my mind, that exemplifies the difference between Straussianism and the ethos at St. John’s.

Oy vey. One of Strauss’s statements is that philosophy must be careful among the masses because the masses aren’t very thoughtful or intelligent. He also said that this was doubly the case with the partially educated as they were liable to overvalue their incomplete schooling. This blindingly obvious statement has a very long pedigree. Strauss never said that rulers can lie at will. He was thinking about the political use of religion by men such as Romulus and Moses.

“I’ve never been persuaded that Republic is in earnest a socio-political blueprint. The discussion of a properly ordered republic was engaged as a metaphor for the properly ordered soul. To so literally focus on certain ideas in Republic out of context—for instance, the ‘noble lie’, the guardian class, etc.—seems to me to be astonishingly simple-minded.”

For me, the Republic as metaphor for the soul raises the question: what the heck was Aristotle up to in his criticisms of the text?

“Besides, the end he says his city-state should have is impossible, as in fact described…I am talking about the assumption that it is best for a city-state to be as far as possible all one unit: for that is assumption Socrates adopts. And yet it is evident that the more of a unity a city-state becomes, the less of a city-state it will be. For a city-state naturally consists of a certain mulititude; and as it becomes more of a unity, it will turn from a city-state into a household, and from a household into a human being. For we would surely say that a household is more of a unity than a city-state and an individual human being than a household. Hence, even if someone could achieve this, it should not be done, since it will destroy the city-state” (Politics, Book 11).

A vulgar misreading? or perhaps an accurate reading toward a simple-minded end (ie, it really is about the individual soul but it shouldn’t be, because we’re supposed to be talking about the polis here)? or perhaps an elaborately esoteric inside joke?

I assume there’s a name for using “Plato” simultaneously to mean, possibly, the historical person with grudges and virtues and all; or, possibly, the writings of the historical person w.r.t. his times; or, possibly, the writings of the historical person as a system with views about our or all times.

The only term I can come up with is “the Chinese Room”, though. What’s Drury’s view on Searle?

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.

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.

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.

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.

“…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.

“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.

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.

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.