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Product Review Summary: Strauss is brilliant and articulate and difficult (as always) Leo Strauss collects essays from a novel perspective in this volume. I bought this to read about his take on Maimonides, and esp. his Guide for the Perplexed. He supplies context and continues his work of explicating the complex thought f Maimonides as only he does.
I like it.
Product Review Summary: Logica equina This book is an introduction to the sociology of knowledge. Or perhaps not. The historians must be aided by the sociologists of knowledge. That is a fact. It is the logic of the Houyhnhnms. The esoteric message of the esoteric philosopher is esoteric itself. Or is it? Perhaps it means nothing. Maybe it means a symbol or parable. But perhaps the symbol or parable is esoteric as well. Such is the logic of the Houyhnhnms. Perhaps Plato's dialogue with Trasymachus means something. But that would be absurd. Or perhaps it means nothing. But that would also be absurd. So perhaps we should simply say that it means nothing? Some people are not ready to hear the truth. This is because a + b = c [a - c = b] a + c = d. Yes, that is the logic of the Houyhnhnms. However, I have spelled out the truth in private to my beloved disciples Alan Bloom and Paul "Yahoo" Wolfowitz. Beware of Lyndon LaRouche, he is one of the historicist Lilliputians! Such is the method of the Kuzari. And the logic of the Houyhnhms, mind you.
Well, does *anyone* understand Leo Strauss? ;-)
Product Review Summary: Strategems which Errors seem... This book is absolutely central within the body of Leo Strauss's work. It stands as the culmination of his earliest work and the beginning of his middle phase of work (which most readers and commentators seem to focus on).
Leo Strauss started his philosophical career directly confronted with what he would come to call the "theological-political problem". As a Jewish intellectual in during the Weimer years, he found himself confronted with the ways that liberal political philosophy had failed the Jewish people. That confrontation led him from an exploration of different forms of Zionism to the roots of the Enlightenment critique of revelation in Spinoza and Hobbes and back to (what Strauss called) the Medieval Enlightenment works of Maimonides, Farabi and Halevi. Particularly in the writing of Maimonides and Farabi (but also in the writings of Lessing), Strauss found the clues that led him to his theory of esoteric and exoteric writing.
When talking about this Straussian way of reading, the first thing to emphasize is that it is not a universal hermeneutic. Strauss is not saying that all philosophy or theological books were written with an esoteric component. He is saying that some were and that there are indications that can be used to detect when a book is so written.
Before we get to that, let's consider THE basic presumption of Strauss's- that there are two types of men, philosophers and non-philosophers. And the two are motivated fundamentally differently and are capable of fundamentally different lives. Furthermore, it is important to realize that what Strauss believes is going on in an esoteric text is that one philosopher is writing in such a way that other philosophers can discern his hidden meaning.
Why would someone do this? This is also key. Strauss feels that since the mid-1800s in most Western cultures that it has not been as necessary to write this way. In fact, as a culture, we have forgotten that this was necessary. The radical Enlightenment determined that all truths must be told to all humanity and we have come to accept that.
But not long ago, that was not the case. Men and women died or were tortured for daring to express the heterodox thought. So the first reason philosophers wrote esoterically is to avoid the fate of Socrates.
The second reason is more Straussian. Philosophers wrote that way for reasons of propriety. They too believed that most men were not capable of living the philosophical life with its calling into question of all opinion (see p.59 of PAW). They furthermore believed that "opinion is the element of society: philosphy or science is therefore the attempt to dissolve the element in which society breathes" (the quote is from the essay On a Forgotten Kind of Writing in the collection What is Political Philosophy).
So the philosophers (the wise men), by disguising their questioning of
the dogmas on which any one society is based, acts responsibly. They do not call into question those dogmas for those for whom it would be hard to live virtuously without them (the vulgar). (Before you go ballistic with the elitism of it all please remember that this is what Strauss is saying that people like Maimonides, Farabi and Plato thought- what he thinks is a lot more elusive. Also keep in mind, that it is easy to find this same attitude in our Founding Fathers. Very very few of them were free of some form of the wise man/ vulgar dichotomy. The whole idea of the Electoral College is based on it.)
The third reason one writes esoterically is to unearth "the young men...[who] might become philosophers: the potential philosphers are to be led step by step from the popular view which are indispensable for all practical and political purposes to the truth which is ...purely theoretical" (p. 36 of PAW) (By far, the most disturbing thing about Strauss is the complete lack of women as any sort of presence in his writings- for someone who was romantically intrigued by Hannah Arendt in their youth (she loathed him) this absence seems almost like a symptom. Of what I have no idea. I'm just saying.)
So we should look for esoteric literature during time of repression. What other clues should we look for? There are four main clues from what I can tell.
The first is in the determination of the literary or rhetorical nature of the work in question. Strauss never fails to point out the Plato's works are dialogues, that you cannot assume that Socrates or the Athenian Stranger is the stand-in for Plato, that what is Platonic has to be ascertained as a result of the all the conversational strands. (See his essay on Plato in the collection The History of Political Philosophy).
The second is that someone who is a careful and precise writer writes something that contradicts something else they wrote. There are a lot or ways to do this. On pp. 70-73, Strauss lists five different ways that Maimonides contradicts himself throughout the Guide for the Perplexed. For example, Strauss notes that it is possible to express a contradiction by contradicting not the original proposition but one of its implications. The casual reader does not notice this but the careful reader does and begins to try to understand why someone like Maimonides or Plato would make such a mistake.
A third clue is a specific instruction from the author on how to read the works of others. Thomas Pangle provides some good examples of this from Locke's First Treatise in p.137 of his The Spirit of Modern Republicanism.
Locke, e.g., wrote that "in a Discourse of this Nature," written by "a Master of Style...obscurity [which includes "silently passing over" matters that could not be avoided were a frank and full exposition provided] cannot be imputed to want of Language." This is Locke's way of telling the reader to look for such passages in his own work and to search out the hidden meaning.
The fourth clue is the use of commentary. In his essay on Farabi's
reading of Plato, Strauss points out passages where Farabi acts ignorant
of aspects of Plato philosophy of which he could not possibly be ignorant.
It is through rhetorical devices like these, that authors both indicate a
hidden meaning and hide that meaning. Obviously, there are as many
strategems as authors.
There are some obvious advantages to Strauss's approach. First, and
foremost, his is a humble approach. He does not approach the thinkers of the past assuming that he knows more than they do or that his place in history gives him a priviledged position as to truth. His approach to the reading of others opens us up to learning from them. It opens us up to the possibility that Farabi or Maimonides may enrich my life and become my teacher. Strauss has really opened up the possibilities with this approach. He is not offering us anything like a universal approach. He is forcing us to sink into the particular of each author. What we do with this approach is up to us.
Suggested readings: The essays by Diskin Clay and Paul A. Cantor in Alan Udoff's collection, Leo Strauss's Thought, are extremely useful. I flat out stole my review title form Cantor's use of a quote from Pope as an epigraph.
Product Review Summary: Mr. Way Too Quickly Mr. Quickly (see review below) is either a prankster or an idiot. He has confused the philosopher, Leo Strauss, with the composer Richard Strauss.
But his review was good for a laugh, at least.
Product Review Summary: Contra the Neo-Cons... Now that certain of his followers have risen to such unpredictably high prominence and stuck around, Leo Strauss is getting more attention. This is good. Strauss is a good reader of good books (esp. Spinoza and Aristophanes), but his legacy is more ambivalent than one might expect. He is more than simply the intellectual architect behind Reaganism. Here are some observations that give an idea of what I mean in Persecution and the Art of Writing:
First, something to like about Strauss: He proceeds from the beginning of this study with the assumption that knowledge has a social basis, that social factors produce "truth." This position actually puts Strauss much closer to Foucault, the Frankfurt School, and the Cultural Studies crowd than to, say, Paul Wolfowitz and others who seek to engineer social circumstances by force if necesary to meet their proclaimed truths; thus, "freedom" must be "spread" to Iraq. Strauss was not stupid, like these saps. (We'll leave non-Senator Alan Keyes out of this.)
In fact, Strauss saw the right-wing shouters and their exercise of free speech at the expense of everyone else's coming: "What is called freedom of thought...for all practical purposes consists of--the ability to choose between two or more different views presented by the small minority of people who are public speakers or writers." (23). Nuance be damned. "We made the right decision on Iraq." "Ignorance is strength..."
Second, a disturbing view. Strauss assumes that the suppression of ideas by those in power and the persecution of dissenters and intellectuals is okay. Why? "Persecution...cannot prevent independent thinking. It cannnot prevent even the expression of independent thought" (23), never mind that this contradicts the statement Strauss makes above that independent thinking doesn't really exist anyway unless you have an AM talk radio show. Strauss's thesis: "Persecution cannot prevent even public expression of the heterodox truth, for a man of independent thought can utter his views in public and remain unharmed, provided he moves with circumspection. He can even utter them in print without incurring any danger, provided he is capable of writing between the lines" (24). What follows from this? Because the savvy socialist can write allegorically, then, it's alright to oppress socialists, or feminists, or any other kind of grownup. One can also argue from Strauss that religious minorities may also be persecuted, since they ought to find a way to "behave" between the lines. This is disgusting, obviously.
History teaches us the danger inherent in this attitude. The case of Walter Benjamin is a good place to start inquiring, if you're interested. I'd rather find a way to do without persecution at all. A more productive vision might be: Free Inquiry and the Art of Listening.
May Allegory Strike Back, and "fit audience find, though few."
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