What can /his/ tell me about this man? Was it true that he was a Neocon? I never got the sense that he ever arrived at a solid political, or even philosophical position apart from "esotericism is pretty neat niggas"
>>944391
Your instinct I agree with, having read most of Strauss's published writings, but also the transcripts of his lectures. My suspicion is that he's a Platonic skeptic, i.e., he thinks knowledge of the whole is improbable if not impossible, and that the fundamental questions are more knowable than the solutions and answers. This also means that politics is a bracketed subject, with respect to the question "What should be done?", since all that's maybe evident are the worst abuses and dangers.
Neo-con? No, though a few of his students probably were. The bigger influence on the neo-cons was Albert Wohlstetter, who also worked at Chicago, and while both of these men taught Paul Wolfowitz, it's the latter who really captured his attention and helped mold him.
The "Straussians" don't really agree with each other about how to take Strauss, besides that he's enigmatic, that his emphasis on close reading is important, and that the issues he pointed to (e.g., the Theological-Political Problem) are somehow the most basic issues of philosophy. Beyond that, no one can agree on whether, for example, he wrote esoterically himself or not.
Some entertaining polemics by his students aimed at Shadia Drury and Anne Norton on their books associating Strauss with Neo-Conservatism:
http://www.mmisi.org/pr/23_01/schaefer.pdf
http://www.interpretationjournal.com/IJ32_3CostopoulosNorton.pdf
http://www.interpretationjournal.com/IJ32_3SchaeferNorton.pdf
>fuck the average person
>if a Tyrant would make a better environment for a philosopher, then we need a Tyranny
>>945329
>natural law
>universal
>moral
>political
>counter-enlightenment
>plato
Are Heidegger and Strauss the most beautiful (in a tragic, pitiful sense) instances of cognitive dissonance philosophy, in response to Nietzsche?
>>945499
How do you mean?
So what does he mean when he talks about the 'noble lie'?
>>946757
Well, the Noble Lie is Plato's idea, though the meaning of it would still need to be clarified in noting that. Search for "noble lie" in the following lecture course on the Republic and you'll find some explanations:
https://leostrausscenter.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/Republic1957.pdf
"One of the crucial passages later concerns the noble lie. If lying as such is unjust, then there can be no such thing as a noble lie."
"Later on in the Republic a certain institution called the noble lie will be mentioned. What does this mean? The noble lie is the result of the fact that it is a command of justice, of duty, to say the untruth. As we shall see when we come to that story of the noble lie, it is a fundamental lie or untruth. If you are shocked by the word lie, then you may say untruth. The word is the same in Greek, but we are more delicate and perhaps do not like the word. If it is a duty to say the untruth, then there must be a tension between justice and knowledge."
"Consider Plato’s use of the noble lie. This noble lie is not a peripheral matter but a basic lie, as we shall see later. If that shining temple has as its foundation in a noble deception, is there not some fundamental injustice built in? There may be other things."
>>945647
I suppose in the sense that Nietzsche tried to smash the ideals and Heidegger and Strauss tried to piece them together again. idk lol
>>948050
Hm, Strauss *does* have a reading of Nietzsche that shows that Nietzsche didn't completely rid himself of ideals in some broad sense of the term.
>>949328
So does Heidegger, they are experts in self-justification.
>tfw he called Schmitt a pathetic nice guy, who will amount to true heroism
>>950336
*who will not
Could you give me a quick summation of his work?
>>949473
I'm not sure how'd you get that from either Heidegger or Strauss, since they were both notorious for being enigmatic figures whose positions weren't clear enough to pin down. With Heidegger, the obscurity is obvious, but Strauss's students, much more than Heidegger's followers, barely agree on any point about their teacher besides that he pointed to something important. None of them can agree on basic matters such as whether he was religious or not, and if so what that meant, and his political positions beyond a very broad "democracy is the least worst" stance.
>>950667
Tough to do.
Basic shtick: Write commentaries or essays on old philosophers, with an emphasis on the Greeks (especially Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes, Thucydides, and Aristotle), a few medievals (Maimonides, Al-Farabi), and the most important of the moderns (Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Rousseau, Nietzsche).
He rediscovered while studying both Maimonides and Lessing that philosophers commonly wrote exoterically before the 18th century, and so he focuses on close readings of texts, with an insistence on paying attention both to what is said, and to what is not said in cases where one is justified in expecting the thing that's not said.
Takes it that the reason for philosophers writing that way is both fundamental to philosophy (a difficulty in achieving wisdom), and due to political pressures, especially when confronted by civic piety.
He's real fun to read if you like to see behind-the-scenes stuff, and he's super helpful if you're interested in the philosophers he writes on.
>>945329
He's right
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpZKKmVZ1DY&nohtml5=False
>>953547
>Heidegger or Strauss, since they were both notorious for being enigmatic figures whose positions weren't clear enough to pin down.
Are you serious? Self-justification doesn't require clarity. Which do you think is harder to assail?
>>954623
Okay, I think you're going to have to be a bit clearer about what your essential point is, since I'm responding ultimately to the claims at >>945499 and >>948050. I'm merely saying that especially the claim in the latter post doesn't seem to make any sense of the actual philosophizing of Heidegger and Strauss, if the claim being made is that they're trying to resuscitate ideals--Heidegger might be, and Strauss definitely is, aporetic in philosophic approach, which doesn't strike me as holding onto ideals for the sake of doing so blindly.
My point about their readings of Nietzsche is that Heidegger points out how Nietzsche still hangs on to metaphysics, which is demonstrably there in his own texts, while Strauss points out that Nietzsche, as an exoteric writer, downplays his sympathies with ancient, arguably "idealistic", thinkers.
I'm not sure how "self-justification" comes in at all except as a non-sequitur. It certainly appears as one without any further comment or elaboration.
>>954934
Not him, but Heidegger is clearly trying to resuscitate ontology and metaphysics far more than Nietzsche.
Nietzsche and Heidegger are essentially opposites, since Nietzsche clearly thought Heraclitus was right with his "becoming ontology" whereas Heidegger thought Parmenides was right in his estimation that being is eternal and "becoming" is simply a spook in your head that isn't real, because of the human understanding of Time.
Nietzsche is much more interested in "overcoming" and "becoming" something else than human, because humans are weak and twisted. I think a lot of Nietzsche's philosophy is really psychological projection.
>>954979
>Not him, but Heidegger is clearly trying to resuscitate ontology and metaphysics far more than Nietzsche.
That's not the case, especially by the point when Heidegger is delivering his Nietzsche lectures. Heidegger's interest in metaphysics was an interest only insofar as metaphysics treated of Being, and not necessarily metaphysics and ontology as such. By the mid-30s he's talking more and more about the "end of metaphysics" and "overcoming metaphysics". At a certain point in maybe the early 40s, he stops calling himself a philosopher entirely, because of its relation to metaphysics.
>Nietzsche and Heidegger are essentially opposites, since Nietzsche clearly thought Heraclitus was right with his "becoming ontology" whereas Heidegger thought Parmenides was right in his estimation that being is eternal and "becoming" is simply a spook in your head that isn't real, because of the human understanding of Time.
That's not Heidegger's view of Being, even a little bit. Heidegger's project largely consists in "destrukting" (de-con-structing) ideas such as the traditional interpretations of Heraclitus and Parmenides.
>>955007
But this is an issue of "early" Heidegger versus "late" Heidegger tbqh.
It's pretty clear to me that Dasein, was not meant to be taken as a "becoming" in the Nietzschean sense of the word becoming.
I know that Heidegger was more interested in destruktion later in life, but that's because he thought that Being was an intrinsic part of language itself, and he was trying to find some way to break the hermeneutical circle of Being.
But that doesn't mean he wasn't a philosopher, nor does it mean that he stopped considering Being to be eternal, and "always already" here, and not ever-changing and moving like a river; "becoming".
>>954623
I think he is talking about their political position.
>>944391
Funny how him a pic related had similar views, yet pic related inspired Islamic Jihad group and Al-Qaeda.
>>955092
what is his name please, i'm curious about him.
Benardete is the true genius.
>>955023
Being for Heidegger was never static. It is contingent upon the existence of beings who can render it intelligible from the world which is not inherently so. The meaning of being can change as those beings who are being-there change their orientation in the world.
>>955190
Mr. Strauss understands being in the same way, but emphasizes first that man because he is of a definite kind and nature, is limited in his possible understandings of being. Because man is in possession of a definite nature, following Aristotle, man has certain ends that lead to his fulfilment. For this reason the theoretical domain of philosophy is subordinate to the political needs of life. I understand Strauss to endorse a method of philosophy which employs proof by natural necessity at least in his favored domain of politics and ethics where flourishing of the human animal may be thought to be the supreme test of the quality of any theory.
(He reacts to Heidegger's Nazism.)
>>955143
Sayyed Qutb. You should probably watch The Power of Nightmares by Adam Curtis
>>954979
>I think a lot of Nietzsche's philosophy is really psychological projection.
In the sense that he was a prodigy, one of the greatest thinkers, and fit despite health issues?
>>955023
>But this is an issue of "early" Heidegger versus "late" Heidegger tbqh.
That's simply not true. Heidegger at no point held the view that Being was anything like the eternal Being of Parmenides. The difference I outlined was simply whether Heidegger thought metaphysics would shed light on Being, and "early" Heidegger is sketchy about that while "later" Heidegger thinks it's utterly off track.
>It's pretty clear to me that Dasein, was not meant to be taken as a "becoming" in the Nietzschean sense of the word becoming.
I'm not sure why you're bringing Dasein in? Dasein isn't Being for Heidegger.
>I know that Heidegger was more interested in destruktion later in life
Destruktion was a move he was using in the early 20s, that is, *early* in his career.
>>955092
They didn't hold similar views. That documentary never brings in any of Strauss's writings; their whole presentation is merely lurid and sensationalistic. It's as if they asked Rosen and Mansfield (the latter wasn't a student, btw) to simply share some anecdotes about Strauss, and Rosen shares some he found funny and that were meant to be funny, and autists making the doc decided that was literally the whole story. Look up any of Rosen's articles on Jstor--he's a longtime student who's *critical* of Strauss, and he doesn't bring up te made up ideas associated with him.
>>955149
Yes, this.
>>955281
I suspect he's far more skeptical than that, though he is certainly distinct from other skeptics in his refusal to accept a dogmatic form of historicism.
http://www.mmisi.org/pr/23_01/schaefer.pdf
Wait, this thread lost me.
How did Heraclitus and Parmenides differ on their conception of being?
>>958343
At least traditionally it's been taken that Heraclitus took a view of Being that saw everything as Becoming, i.e., Being as unstable or as fundamentally changeable or impermanent. Parmenides has been taken to view Being as eternal and unchangeable.
Where I'm lost is the strange set of claims made about Heidegger that seemingly have nothing to actually do with Heidegger.
>>959296
Some people see the word "Being" and think "Oh, this guy's an eternalist/essentialist/theist, obviously, since he's bothering to write about this concept," and can't get past that stumbling block in interpreting another thinker.
>>955149
He's literally a relatively obscure philosophical-labourer.
>>960353
Pretty much, but by god is that labor excellent.
>>944391
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfioQi_4nz4
>>955149
One of Benardete's lectures:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rioS0H-EHdw
Best essay coming through
http://www.dhspriory.org/kenny/PhilTexts/Strauss/GermanNihilism.pdf
>>963215
The obsessive hatred, bordering on psychosis, against products — i.e. against man-made objects — seems to be the hallmark of the pseudo-intellectual today. Hatred of consumption, a problem which no sane, healthy person has ever had. As if food and clothes, as if eating or dressing were bad. Such is the pseudo-intellectual's craving to appear to be raging at something, that he will rage at life's basic necessitities if need be.
The "consumer society" should have been called the "slave society", since there's nothing wrong with consuming, it is indeed the basis, the prerequisite, of all growth. Marx was at least healthy in focusing on production; Baudrillard's obsession with consumption is neurotic. Why not reduce it to zero and die of thirst in a few days, you fucking nihilistic little prick? Better yet just stop breathing; oxygen too is something that we consume.
>>963412
You alright there, champ?
Lecture courses:
https://leostrausscenter.uchicago.edu/courses
More occasional lectures:
https://leostrausscenter.uchicago.edu/lectures
>>963883
Ultimately — and pay close attention to this because it's one of the greatest insights I have to give, which is to say one of the greatest insights ever — anger is always a symptom of a lack of power, whether it is my enemies being angry at me, or me being angry at my enemies. My enemies are angry at me because they can feel my overwhelming power just as well as any other living thing, and it is only natural that they would band together and rise against it, since for every action "there must be an equal and opposite reaction", as even Newton back in his day managed to see; whereas I am angry at my enemies because I overestimated them: I genuinely believed they were intelligent enough to understand far more than they were able to finally understand, and this incapacity of mine to perfectly gauge the intelligence of people I hadn't even seen is, of course, due to a lack of power on my part (i.e. to a lack of omniscience and clairvoyance). To be sure, my lack of flair for omniscience and clairvoyance is a far less serious failing than their incapacity to grasp five or six basic facts about the world they are living in, which is why my periodic fits of anger are a nothing compared to their boiling, seething hatred that goes on 24/7, 365 days a year, "we never close because if we did it would slow down the accumulation of force for the opposite camp", which is a physical impossibility while my camp is growing stronger every day, and DEMANDS that an "equal and opposite force" rise up to meet it. So anger exists in both camps, and in both cases it's entirely understandable, but it must be interpreted correctly, as must the "complete absence" of anger of the saint, the Buddhist and the tree.
>>967788
kek
Probably the single best defense and explanation of Strauss RE: the "godfather of neoconservatism" meme. Absolutely tears the shit out of Shadia Drury.
http://en.bookfi.net/book/1123931
Is he another Jew whose legacy was inflated by other Jews and who is passed off as someone everybody should be intimately familiar with, regardless of their interest in the man and his perspective, because educated Jews know who he is?
>>971361
Everyone knows the Jews are the only one's worth listening nowadays.
>>971452
Does everyone know that?
Answer the question
>>971361
What? No, the entire point of interest in him is interest in the philosophers he comments upon, and his treatments of their topics. No one should be familiar with him just to be familiar with him.
>>973227
But what's interesting in his commentary? I haven't gotten much out of this thread. It seems like he just retreads tired territory.
>>975493
Retreading is a way to avoid the implications of epoch philosophers (the most famous names in the tradition), at least personally. Give it a new spin or jargon and you have a new school. This gives a feeling of good conscience and intelligence, remote from that initial spur of dissonance.
>>977975
But what are his significant contributions? I've genuinely never gotten the impression that Strauss contributed anything original to philosophy. Maybe he was a good interpreter but I honestly don't get the big deal.about this guy, hence my original question about whether or not a network of well-educated Jews played a role in his present-day significance on this Laotian claymation forum. I see Strauss discussed here often and I've never seen a conversation that led me to think I'd get anything out of reading him that I wouldn't get out of reading anyone else from his epoch who studied classic works of philosophy and wrote about them.
>>977990
>tl;dr i have nothing to say publicly, so you have to be smart enough to reach my inner secrets :) btw this is ok because all the great thinkers did it, you just gotta look DEEPER
>>978074
So basically projecting intellectual cowardice onto all the great philosophers of the past.
>>978074
Why should anyone care about his inner secrets, though?
>>977990
His significant contributions are the rediscovery of exoteric writing and esoteric positions among the ancient philosophers. If you don't think this is significant, go check out any work on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and see if any of the scholars who've written for it take the philosophers they write about to have written "between the lines". The implication of such a thesis is that the usual takes on pretty much every philosopher you could name up to a point in the 19th century are absolutely wrong, and that the philosophy itself is misunderstood.
Now, that ends up meaning that an extraordinary amount of time is spent carefully reading the old texts in order to see what "real philosophy" actually is and amounts to, since the traditional readings take the texts at face value.
That's his most basic and important contribution, since if the thesis is true, not just our view of philosophy changes, but our understanding of how philosophy has functioned in the history of politics.
(For a compendium of testimony of the exoteric/esoteric character of philosophical thought, see http://press.uchicago.edu/sites/melzer/melzer_appendix.pdf )
>>978584
His further work has been the rehabilitation of a view of "political philosophy" as being more basic and fundamental than what academics now take to be fundamental to philosophy, namely epistemology and ontology/metaphysics.
He offers an understanding of the relationship between reason and revelation, and the fundamental aporias (or at least publicly seeming aporias) that face reason in its confrontation with revelation, and how they both affect politics, and on what grounds and implications.
I mean, he's done a lot of stuff. The guy wrote books and essays on a huge portion of the philosophical tradition, not limiting himself to any one period. The only way to access him is through just reading him, and if he's commenting on a philosopher, to read that philosopher alongside him to see what's up. I recommend reading either On Tyranny, or the central chapter of The City and Man on Plato's Republic.
>>978584
But that doesn't sound like an adequately original or in any way distinctive thesis for a person's claim to fame to be based around it. I'm not denying that he was a gifted commentator, I just feel like you're inflating his contributions to philosophy a bit, even if this is a thread about the man.
>>978584
>His significant contributions are the rediscovery of exoteric writing and esoteric positions among the ancient philosophers. If you don't think this is significant, go check out any work on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and see if any of the scholars who've written for it take the philosophers they write about to have written "between the lines".
So you're saying Strauss is indirectly responsible for those "Plato/Machiavelli/Nietzsche didn't mean that!" shitposts? I thought these ideas predated the 20th century.
>>978863
Exactly, I don't get the big deal. This thread reminds me of people who credit Freud with moving the irrational into the sphere of what constitutes human beings, present this as a move forward from the Enlightenment, and act as if nobody had ever had the idea before. Nothing is genuinely innovative about Freud other than the institutions that emerged from his practical activity.
>>978632
Since when was philosophy or its importance about developing "an adequately original or in any way distinctive thesis for a person's claim to fame to be based around"? What's the "philosophic truth" of such a position? You asked if Strauss was merely because "muh j00z" want him to be well know, and that's simply ridiculous; take it or leave it (and mind, the mere summary of the theses does not actually teach you the theses), but Strauss's influence is only a thing at all because he taught so many of his students how fundamentally wrong their whole view of things was, enacting in his classes the move in Plato's Republic from the cave of political education to an initial sight of the truth of things in at least the more limited Socratic sense of "not supposing one knows the things one doesn't know".
He's a commentator, and so not a "real" philosopher? Fine, neither then were Simplicius, Proclus, Averroes, Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Thomas Aquinas, Ficino, Pappus of Alexandria, Damascius, and plenty of other figures. None of them are philosophers, sure, fine. But only if you accept basically a very modern academic position about philosophy that has no basis in the history of how almost any of the philosophers actually saw themselves or their work. Which, fine, go ahead. If you're not interested in the truth of things as such, but rather the originality of an idea, then no, Strauss is not for you. Move on.
>>979867
I think it's a bit premature to compare your pet political philosopher to Aquinas or Avicenna. Proclus, well, are you rally saying nobody can object to putting him on a list of philosophers?
Nobody said he wasn't a philosopher, you autist, I'm just asking you to make a better case for this guy's legacy being as big as it is than you have been. I honestly don't care about what he enacted in his classes. I'll never take one of them, neither will you, and there's 2500 years of literature on Plato that contains any insights Strauss may have had and more.
What's more you aren't even explaining what his contributions are behind simply teaching old ideas to his contemporaries. I genuinely don't understand why this is a big deal in itself. Hence my asking if the Jews are responsible for his fame, since he obviously doesn't offer much on his own that hasn't been offered before.
>>979910
I understand. You found paradise in America, you had a good trade, you made a good living. The police protected you and there were courts of law. You didn't need a friend like me. But, now you come to me, and you say: "Don Corleone, what was Leo Strauss's big contribution to philosophy." But you don't ask with respect. You don't offer friendship. You don't even think to call me Godfather. Instead, you come into my house on the day my daughter is to be married, and you ask me what Leo Strauss's big contribution to philosophy is.
>>979910
Are you completely retarded? You got your answer, he changed the entire way people read texts. This is the same thing Aquinas and Avicenna did. You seem hell-bent on disregarding him because MAI JEWS.
>and there's 2500 years of literature on Plato that contains any insights Strauss may have had and more.
Did you read these 2,5000 years of literature to see if Straus is copy-paste? or just pull that idea out of your ass? That's why the other annon brought out Aquinas and Avicenna. All Avicenna did was write a commentary on Aristotle and Aquinas wrote commenteries on both of them! If you are going to disregard Straus why not those guys, escpially since his interpretation of Plato is more relevant in contemporary philosophy than the other two guys. As the other annon said if you don't want a commentetor you shouldn't read such people. No one is telling you have to read him, you got a synonopsis, if that interests you read the book, if not disregard him. No one gives a shit about your Hebrew Trigger words.
>>979910
That entire list I put together wrote commentaries on Plato or Aristotle. You know, they were "tired retreads" of what had already been done, by your standard regarding commentators.
>>979910
bereshiyth bara elohiym eth hashamayiym we'eth ha'aretz weha'aretz haytha thohu wevohu wechoshekh alpanei thehowm weruach elohiym alpanei hamayiym
>>979960
>he changed the entire way people read texts
I've called bullshit on this over and over again, he died quite recently, it's far too soon to actually say of this is true in any meaningful way that it isn't also true of other philosophers
You don't seem to understand, I'm not saying he wasn't a philosopher, I'm saying he seems completely average in terms of the scope of his tasks and therefore overblown. I honestly don't think it makes much sense to even say Aquinas changed the way people read this, all of those thinkers did more than comment on Plato and Aristotle, for example they used their ideas in a religious context. I don't understand the context in which Strauss' work is supposed to be great.
>>975493
SEP has a pretty good entry on him
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/strauss-leo/
