Leo Strauss

[Anonymous No.22116357]

Where do I start with him? Where do I end?

[Anonymous No.22116742]

>>22116357
Just read Arendt instead.

[Anonymous No.22116840]

>>22116742
Why?

[Anonymous No.22116901]

>>22116840
They're both civic republicans who love ancient times, Strauss is more Platonist, Arendt is more Aristotelian. I just find that Straussians tend to be really annoying people for whatever reason which reflects negatively on Strauss. People who read Arendt aren't similarly annoying, and I've read some of her work and it's fine. If I read Strauss and change my mind I'll tell you.

[Anonymous No.22116924]

Read Gottfried's book on the Straussians before you read anything else, and judge for yourself.

https://carnegieendowment.org/2006/02/06/i-am-not-straussian-at-least-i-don-t-think-i-am-pub-17984
>But that's not the reason I never became a Straussian. It was because my father explained to me, as well as to Bloom, of course, that Bloom did not understand Plato. This may seem a bit outrageous to many people today, given Bloom's reputation. But I still think my father was right, and at the time I had no doubt that he was right. My father was and is a great arguer, and as a boy I was inclined to believe that he was right about practically everything. So to me, the Kagan-Bloom debates always looked like a complete wipe-out.

>As best I can recall, their biggest point of contention was whether Plato was just kidding in The Republic. Bloom said he was just kidding. I later learned that this idea--that the greatest thinkers in history never mean what they say and are always kidding--is a core principle of Straussianism. My friend, the late Al Bernstein, also taught history at Cornell. He used to tell the story about how one day some students of his, coming directly from one of Bloom's classes, reported that Bloom insisted Plato did not mean what he said in The Republic. To which Bernstein replied: "Ah, Professor Bloom wants you to think that's what he believes. What he really believes is that Plato did mean what he said."

[Anonymous No.22116966]

>>22116924
>As best I can recall, their biggest point of contention was whether Plato was just kidding in The Republic. Bloom said he was just kidding. I later learned that this idea--that the greatest thinkers in history never mean what they say and are always kidding--is a core principle of Straussianism. My friend, the late Al Bernstein, also taught history at Cornell. He used to tell the story about how one day some students of his, coming directly from one of Bloom's classes, reported that Bloom insisted Plato did not mean what he said in The Republic. To which Bernstein replied: "Ah, Professor Bloom wants you to think that's what he believes. What he really believes is that Plato did mean what he said."

sounds about right.

[Anonymous No.22117028]

>>22116357
it's fucking illegible, i read his thoughts on machiavelli right after the prince and discourses and decided that strauss might have insights but you'd have to spend years untangling what he's actually saying so it's almost certainly not worth your time. also modern straussians are utterly unimpressive.

[Anonymous No.22117135]

>>22116924
>>22116966
seems just like a idiotic gotcha. it is also not loyal to what the esoteric reading implies, that it does not imply that the author did not mean to say what he said, but that he said things with an openness.

[Anonymous No.22117906]

>>22116357
Persecution and the Art of Writing
But all this cryptic bullshit is tiring.

[Anonymous No.22118056]

>>22116357
start and end right here

[Anonymous No.22118084]

>>22118056
Holy fuck you faggots are annoying. If you think reading someone else's thoughts will preclude you from thinking for yourself, maybe you should go back to pol and keep watching the 30 second webms purposefully made to get incels like you foaming at the mouth instead of bothering with books

[Anonymous No.22118146]

https://leostrausscenter.uchicago.edu/audio-transcripts/courses-audio-transcripts/
>listen to his voice
>conclusion is left as exercise for the listener

[Anonymous No.22118193]

>>22116357
Start with his students, and his teachers, his critics and then Strauss.

Ironically they are much easier to understand than this German midget.

[Anonymous No.22118535]

>>22118193
>German
i refer you to >>22118056
>>22118084
sir using slurs like f*ggot is not very nice, i may be a nazi but at least im not rude

[Anonymous No.22118609]

>>22118535
German Jew, or Jerman.

[Anonymous No.22118754]

>>22118609
> German jew
sorry fren i dont really think theres any such thing. there are only jews that live in Germany, No German jews.

[Anonymous No.22118759]

>>22116357
It depends on what you want out of him. If you're primarily interested in politics and concrete political solutions, he'll be of very little help; mostly just reminders of why value-neutral social science is unhelpful for understanding things, and some rhetorically fine enough arguments on behalf of natural right, but his interest in politics is different from Gottfield's mentioned above. If you're interested primarily in philosophy, you'll eventually get much more out of him, and there are several ways to get into him for that.

If you're interested in the thought of particular philosophers, look up whatever essays and books he's written on that figure, or look up the transcriptions of his lecture courses online. If you're interested in the whole exotericism/esotericism thing, look up the essays "On a Forgotten Kind of Writing", "Exotericism", and the book "Persecution and the Art of Writing", and check out Arthur Melzer's "Philosophy Between the Lines" and the online appendix to it containing a not even exhaustive number of passages ancient and modern discussing it (https://press.uchicago.edu/sites/melzer/index.html).). If you're interested primarily in *his* thought, start with the essay collections "What Is Political Philosophy?" and "Liberalism, Ancient and Modern", followed by "Natural Right and History"; treat all of his 60s and 70s non-essay books ("The City and Man", "Socrates and Aristophanes", the two Xenophon books and the book on Plato's Laws) as endgame pieces.

[Anonymous No.22118761]

>>22118084
oh btw because of your little comment i decided that i was going to name the jews even harder

[Anonymous No.22118790]

>>22116357
His method is groundbreaking, even life-changing. He has a lot of valuable insights, and he inspired a few (emphasis on few) acolytes to do interesting philology. But he’s not as deep as he think he is, he and his clique rarely engages with Western esotericism as a whole (post-antiquity especially), and he does have a weird undercurrent of secular neocon politics in his life. He’s not an endgame philosopher but perhaps the end of the beginning. Pair Strauss with Heidegger—they both have a similar hermeneutic bent with a fascinating and well-merited preference for the ancients.

[Anonymous No.22118796]

>>22118790
(((strauss' students)))

[Anonymous No.22118799]

>>22118796
ah its actually not that many, nvm

[Anonymous No.22118804]

>>22118754
What about Ivanka Trump?

[Anonymous No.22118819]

>>22118799
your detector is weak desu

[Anonymous No.22118875]

>>22118819
oh huh. yeah ill email the team for the coincidence detector. nice catch fren.

[Anonymous No.22118893]

>>22118796
I’m talking about Benardete, Berns, and Rosen for the most part. Yeah they’re Jews, but for the most part autistic Jews who work in philology are harmless.

[Anonymous No.22118897]

>>22118819
ok i emailed them

[Anonymous No.22118907]

>>22118804
i guess she isnt really ethnically jewish

[Anonymous No.22118966]

>>22118893
i dont necessarily agree, take chomsky with Universal Grammar. His theory of Universal Grammar is predicated on a theory of universal human neurobiology and through his espousal of UG he reinforces the notion of unviersal neurobiology. You can see how this human universalism undermines race consciousness and by extension Nationalism. So while linguistics may not be as immediately obvious as a field of subversion as say media, It can still be wielded subversively.
im not an expert on philology or chomsky's theories so correct me if im wrong

[Anonymous No.22118977]

>>22118966
>>22118893
also Everett absolutely BTFO'd chomsky with the Pirahã

[Anonymous No.22119038]

>>22118966
Nta, but qualified "yes." But you could 1) point to modern examples of contorted philology (like the libshit classics sites Pharos and Eidolon), and 2) judge whether, say, Benardete is one of those distorting philologists by judging who/what he studied (took classes with Benedict Einarson, studied the works of Jacob Wackernagel and Georgio Pasquale).

[Anonymous No.22119081]

>>22118759
NTA but what should I do if I want to become more familiar with Strauss but german is my mother tongue? If memory serves he initially wrote in German and it surely doesn't make sense to read translations when I can read the original.

[Anonymous No.22119113]

>>22119081
You can definitely and safely start with the German composed books, and I think for the rest of his works, Heinrich Meier apparently has edited a decent German Gesamtausgabe, but for the English composed works, I would consider reading them in English, since he's likely thought somewhat carefully how he wants to get something across to English readers. Thankfully, his English works use a pretty straightforward and non-technical English.

[Anonymous No.22119148]

>>22116357
Start with Persecution and the Art of Writing. Then read his City and Man, the commentary on the Republic. End with his studies on Xenophon. Then read Christopher Bruell, who's smarter; his On the Socratic Education is excellent, as is Aristotle as Teacher.

For 'proof' that the ancients didn't write openly, read the Phaedo, examine the four arguments for the immortality of the soul closely, and see whether they all succumb to basic logical fallacies. If they do, presuming Plato was a competent logician, it would make sense to assume he wasn't convinced by those arguments, and that the reader shouldn't be either. For an explicit confirmation of this, read Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed.

[Anonymous No.22119486]

>>22118796
based alerter

[Anonymous No.22119865]

>>22118056
funny how it took a kabbalist jew to save a proper interpretation of Plato against *nglos after the allegorical reading started do be out of favor

[Anonymous No.22119880]

>>22119148
If the arguments in the Phaedo are intended to be unconvincing (I certainly found them weak), why is Socrates depicted as going to his death calmly? Is there some deeper level to the arguments that I'm missing?

[Anonymous No.22119893]

>>22119865
Scholem was the Kabbalist, Strauss was the kind of Talmudist who'd roll his eyes at kosher laws and eat pork

[Anonymous No.22119900]

>>22119880
Strauss never formally wrote on Phaedo, but in an excerpt from a letter in the 30s to his friend Jacob Klein, he adduces by the fact that Socrates twice covers his face with his sheet before dying that he wasn't immune to fear of death

[Anonymous No.22119909]

>>22119900
Hmmm, I'll need to reread Phaedo sometime. Still, he seemed calm enough about dying even if he didn't totally escape fear.

[Anonymous No.22119915]

>>22119880
>Is there some deeper level to the arguments that I'm missing?
Not really. I doubt Socrates or Plato or Aristotle really believed in the sort of personal immortality that Christians believe in. In Socrates' case, he spent decades in conversation and discipline to help himself accept death calmly. It's hard to overstate the human longing for immortality and the fear of death, and accepting mortality (in the sense of not interiorly resisting it) would be like abandoning your first love, in a lot of ways. But that's exactly the drama depicted in the Phaedo, what with the sacrificial imagery (the Minotaur, etc) and Socrates choosing to die the way he did, to show his followers that the examined life is the best life, even though it ends and that's the end.

[Anonymous No.22119951]

>>22119909
I'm not the Bruell anon at >>22119148, so I'm not sure what they have in mind, but maybe one way to think of it is that calmness doesn't necessarily preclude a lack of fear, and that one can see something like this behind Socrates' whole pursuit of questioning opinions to discover whether he can know anything else besides his own ignorance. Perhaps another way is by putting the Phaedo together with the Apology, where Socrates claims that he doesn't know whether death is a good or bad thing for him, and that he doesn't know if what follows is an afterlife or dreamless sleep. If those uncertainties are more than rhetorical, that might be enough for him to keep steady throughout the Phaedo. But you do have these other little passages in the Phaedo of unsteadiness, such as when a guard comes in to explain how the poison works and tells Socrates not to have to excited a conversation since it slows the poison and they might need to make more draughts of it (Socrates immediately kicks in a more vigorous conversation), and the passage right before he takes the poison, where he asks if he can offer a libation of the poison to the gods, i.e., both an impious request and a request to lessen the amount of poison he has to drink. Early in the dialogue, Phaedo notes that he thought Plato was absent due to illness; if Plato was taking care of his body, an act that sits in opposition to Socrates' overt claims about caring more for the soul, one might infer that this is a suggestion to care more for living than death.

[Anonymous No.22119981]

>>22119951
I'm the Bruellfag, and I thought your points were excellent. I hadn't picked up on those subtle clues linked to an apprehension of death before, thanks for that.

[Anonymous No.22120031]

>>22119981
Cheers Bruellanon. By the by, I've noticed a bit more lately how Bruell and Bolotin seem to differ from Benardete and his students, but I haven't really been able to make heads or tails of those differences. Since we're already taking Strauss, would you happen to have any thoughts on that?

[Anonymous No.22120189]

>>22119915
>>22119951
Thanks, these are really interesting responses.
>Early in the dialogue, Phaedo notes that he thought Plato was absent due to illness; if Plato was taking care of his body, an act that sits in opposition to Socrates' overt claims about caring more for the soul, one might infer that this is a suggestion to care more for living than death.
I thought that was a way for Plato to distance himself from Socrates' historical death. By contrast, he's explicitly mentioned as present in the Apology.

[Anonymous No.22120206]

>>22120189
It could be that, but the fact that it's specified as illness in a dialogue on the body, the soul, pleasure, and pain, suggests some significance there, and it's hard to ignore the implication with Socrates talking about how the philosopher doesn't attend to anything having to do with the body.

[Anonymous No.22120235]

>>22119113
Thanks brother

[Anonymous No.22120844]

>>22120235
Cheers anon

[Anonymous No.22120985]

>>22116357
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg9cz_9RAzg

[Anonymous No.22121781]

>>22118966
schizo retard, stop making the case for white genocide for our enemies

[Anonymous No.22121837]

>>22121781
tell me exactly which point here you disagree with or if ive made any errors in deductive reasoning
- jews are highly in group preferential
- jews do not thrive in otherwise ethnically homogenous nations
- jews want to import non Whites into White nations as a means of benefiting jewish interests
- noam chomsky is a jew
- noam chomsky wants to import non Whites into White nations
- noam chomsky needs to convince Whites to allow non Whites into their countries
- the biggest reason Whites wouldn't want non Whites in their countries is because of the perceived difference between Whites and non Whites
- chomsky attempts to convince Whites that there are no innate differences between races
- part of attempt to 'prove' this is a theory of innate universal grammar

do you disagree with the premise that jews have a high in group preference? or is there an issue with the deductive reasoning?

[Anonymous No.22121845]

>>22121837
What the living FUCK did Chomsky have to do with my post about Strauss and his students? Can you stop schizoing out for ONE second, holy shit.

[Anonymous No.22121851]

>>22121837
Also, universal grammar has nothing to do with racial differences. Those ideas can coexist together. You’re acting just as fucking retarded as progressive activists when they try to decolonize math, and if I ever saw you trying to stifle knowledge like this, I’d throw you into a woodchipper without hesitation. Fuck out of here with this bullshit.

[Anonymous No.22121874]

>>22118056

you got em

[Anonymous No.22121930]

>>22120031
A few. Basically the difference between philologists and political theorists. Bolotin was one of my examiners for my senior thesis (I shat several bricks when I saw his name, never been more terrified, he's a 5'4" tiny dude with a quiet voice, gentle nature, and mind of a merciless steel trap), and I've been reading Bruell lately, and they're very much interested in asking questions about happiness, regimes, the basis of philosophizing, refuting divine revelation, etc. Benardete on the other hand seems happy as a clam to immerse himself in Greek and puzzle about connections between Greek words.

I don't know how accurate that is, but I do know that Benardete's commentary on the Philebus -ostensibly a dialogue about the relationship between pleasure and the good, a hugely important question - didn't help at all in puzzling it out. Philebus is still a black box to me, fuck Plato for writing that shit.

[Anonymous No.22121994]

>>22121930
That is very helpful, thanks anon. You wouldn't happen to be the anon who I discussed the Bruell-Pangle drama with some time back, would you?

I still haven't touched Benardete's Philebus or Laws books, but I get the impression that his readings are motivated by noticing little things like the two different characterizations of logographic necessity in Phaedrus (is it like an animal with parts, as initially described, or is it successive and temporally ordered as compared against the poem about the maiden?), or things like how the tyrant in bks 8 & 9 of the Republic is the Oedipus of the poets, or how Thrasymachus is less like the appetitive part of soul as we expect (if Cephalus = calculation, and Polemarchus = spiritedness), but rather spiritedess more than any other speaker in the dialogue; in that way, I think the characterization of him as leaning hard into philology is very fair. Bruell and Bolotin are so quiet about things, it can be hard to see where they stand w/r/t other Straussians (most I've seen is Bolotin criticize Burger's Phaedo book in his lecture on the Phaedo). The impression I get is that they and Benardete agree on a lot, but that Bruell and Bolotin come at it from asking what science is.

[Anonymous No.22122029]

>>22121994
>You wouldn't happen to be the anon who I discussed the Bruell-Pangle drama with some time back, would you?
That was me, ordered Bolotin's translations immediately. Really thankful for your heads up. That whole drama was the funniest thing I'd seen in awhile, scholars are so hilariously thin-skinned.

>Bruell and Bolotin are so quiet
That they are. Bruell's Metaphysics book is massively complicated. I'm not really sure why, unless it's to force the student to think brutally hard about things. It's not like anyone is going to persecute you for saying there is no God and that pleasure is the good in America of currentyear.

[Anonymous No.22122181]

>>22122029
Cheers dude, nice to catch ya in a thread again.

>That they are. Bruell's Metaphysics book is massively complicated. I'm not really sure why, unless it's to force the student to think brutally hard about things. It's not like anyone is going to persecute you for saying there is no God and that pleasure is the good in America of currentyear.
I guess I'd wonder if it's less a concern over persecution than a concern not to encourage people to speak aloud about things that endanger political life. They're both certainly more moderate and reserved in how they live their lives than, say, Bloom, and more prudent than Rosen who seems to take pride in saying precisely what he thinks. Maybe they and Benardete are two sides of a coin; getting invested in Benardete means going crazy with these harmless puzzles, while Bruell and Bolotin show, maybe like Xenophon, that there's something legitimate to living moderately and quietly.

[Anonymous No.22122203]

>>22118796
The chudfumes radiating from this post. Imagine actually having a plugin that names da jooz. Go back to rotting in your cesspit, /pol/vermin

[Anonymous No.22122215]

>>22118966
I can't wait for the civil war. You and your ilk will perish so easily.

[Anonymous No.22122228]

>>22118966
Has Chomsky ever tackled the issue that blacks seem to have a different sense of grammar than white people?

[Anonymous No.22122258]

>>22122228
>different ... than
You have black DNA.

>>22122203
>>22122215
>The Jew is immunized against all dangers: one may call him a scoundrel, parasite,swindler, profiteer, it all runs off him like water off a raincoat. But call him a Jew and you will be astonished at how he recoils, how injured he is, how he suddenly shrinks back:"I've been found out."

[Anonymous No.22122263]

>>22122181
>a concern not to encourage people to speak aloud about things that endanger political life.
That certainly makes more sense to me, actually. I still think it's mostly misguided, unless they think they'll accidentally produce a tyrant with their teaching. On the other hand, that's precisely the legacy of Marx, Rousseau, and maybe Nietzsche, whereas I can't think of anything more paralyzing to tyranny than being a genuine disciple to Plato. I'll have to think about that some more, thanks.

>Rosen who takes pride in saying exactly what he thinks
Examples? That'd be funny to me, an outspoken Straussian. Has he said anything outrageous?

[Anonymous No.22122304]

>>22122263
>That certainly makes more sense to me, actually. I still think it's mostly misguided, unless they think they'll accidentally produce a tyrant with their teaching. On the other hand, that's precisely the legacy of Marx, Rousseau, and maybe Nietzsche, whereas I can't think of anything more paralyzing to tyranny than being a genuine disciple to Plato. I'll have to think about that some more, thanks.
Both a good question and observation. Maybe their concern is not to produce overly zealous disciples like Jaffa has, or, perhaps, more caution not to get caught up trying and failing to turn potential Alcibiadeses.

>Examples? That'd be funny to me, an outspoken Straussian. Has he said anything outrageous?
Not anything that would shock liberals or progressivists (which is not to imply he's aligned with either at all), but that might be the issue: he suspects there is wisdom to be had (hence his big fascination with Hegel, even though he faults Aristotle for just that), and he's confident enough to teach and write about it as though the problems and questions aren't as hard as some of his gellow Straussians think. As an aside, there was a conference both Rosen and Bruell attended in the 80s, I think, and Bruell, in his subdued and polite way, responded to Rosen by pointing out he's a historicist. I think you can find a transcipt of Bruell's short response on Scribd somewhere.

[Anonymous No.22122490]

>>22122203
you'll be inhaling more potent chudfumes soon enough

[Anonymous No.22123854]

>>22122304
I really like that way of thinking. Prior to today, honestly, I thought the modern Straussian esoteric writing was some kind of pride or similarly foolish imitation of ancient writers who would face persecution if they wrote openly, like Plato, Aristotle, Maimonides, etc. Even a writer as late as Descartes pretended to be a Christian. Spinoza was fairly circumspect but he was excommunicated and exiled. But since those conditions don't really exist in the West right now (the culmination of a difficult book is that there is no God, morality is a fiction, and the good is pleasure, etc), so the most you'd get is boredom and apathy, rather than hatred. The rich will be too busy chasing war profiteering, and the sheeple too busy with their AI girls to give philosophers much mind, especially since Nietzsche said most of all that openly over a hundred years ago.

But you bringing up Alcibiades after mentioning the effect teachers can have is a fun thing to think about, and it's an effect I'm certain the smart scholars have thought about intensely. Rousseau was so powerful a teacher that two hundred years after his death, he inspired a Cambodian to return his country to the state of nature leading to the slaughter of almost half Cambodia's population.

Those sorts of people - tyrants - are often very intelligent, but devoted most of all to action, not contemplation, so they're much more likely to regard 'excessive' philosophizing a waste of time. I was thinking this afternoon about how a smart tyrant today, becoming enamored of the Straussian school, might act, and now a reticence in speaking openly makes a lot of sense.

As an aside, what have you been reading lately, anon? Anything fun you'd recommend?

[Anonymous No.22123949]

>>22123854
That's something I've struggled with too, and I suspect that has to at least be the case for Bruell, who's even more reticent than Bolotin (the book on Aristotle's Physics is pretty bold in the sense of bringing up things maybe not great to bring up for political life, I think, certainly bolder than Bruell's two books), but I think it has to be the case with those two. Bruell's Plato book brings up quite a bit how important it is for a teacher to recognize how central justice is for a student starting on the way, and it's very easy and likely for things to go awry from there. A comparison of the effects that Strauss' students had on their own students seems to bear this concern out, even if the numbers aren't much: Jaffa had Michael Anton, Bloom had Wolfowitz and Fukuyama, Mansfield had Kristol, etc., and of course one can ask about the kind of combative character of the students of Pangle or Rosen. Benardete has harmless book nerds, and the only standout of either Bruell or Bolotin is Robert Bartlett, I think, who pretty much keeps to his work and doesn't get into culture warring or politics or anything. I do like all of those teachers above, but there's definitely something important to be learned by example of Bruell and Bolotin, I suspect.

As for my current reading, lol, it's Strauss's fucking Euthyphro Notebooks that just got published. I've been geeking out over it since I got ahold of it a few weeks ago, everything I could've hoped for. Besides that, J.A. Baker's The Peregrine, which is some of the most gorgeous prose of the past century. How about yourself, anon?

[Anonymous No.22124317]

>>22121845
>Jews who work in philology are harmless.
chomsky is a jew who has done work in philology. i proved how his work in philology is not harmless.
>>22121851
>universal grammar has nothing to do with racial differences
it does, if you have the belief that culture (and by extension language) is downstream of biology (a standard belief for nationalists) then you will believe that language is an extension of race.
all believers in UG are believers in monogenism, all believers in polygenism are not believers in UG
> I’d throw you into a woodchipper without hesitation
post physique
t. 6'3 slightly overweight, used to lift weights

[Anonymous No.22124327]

>>22122203
>>22122215
>You and your ilk will perish so easily.
doubt it

[Anonymous No.22124333]

Thank you to those who gave me decent recommendations. I recommend that you poltards hang yourselves.

[Anonymous No.22124353]

>>22124333
you first troon

[Anonymous No.22124923]

>>22124317
>chomsky is a jew who has done work in philology. i proved how his work in philology is not harmless.
Chomsky isn't a philologist; philology is a study of ancient texts and languages. Chomsky's just some dipshit linguist.

[Anonymous No.22125578]

>>22123949
>Bruell's Plato book brings up quite a bit how important it is for a teacher to recognize how central justice is for a student starting on the way
It really does, and it's always been striking to me how and why he structures his book the way he does - by placing the student of philosophy definitively outside considerations of justice (Hipparchus - limitless lover of gain, Minos - outside the rule of law). Bruell might be right that a) pleasure is the good, and b) Plato and Aristotle thought this as well, but it's pleasure in its highest conception, which would be philosophizing or music or something like that. A sign of that would be that assuming b), Plato enjoyed wealth, fitness, beauty, aristocratic privilege, staggering intellectual genius, and chose philosophizing as the highest pleasure despite being conversant in them all.

I need to go and reread the central part of Bruell's Socrates book, in addition to the Nicomachean Ethics to be sure of this, though.

>Strauss's fucking Euthyphro Notebooks
Nice, going to buy that. How is it? Does his anti-religion side come out at all? I'd love to read that just for kicks, the Straussian hateboner for divine revelation has always amused me (Bloom's various mentions of medieval scholasticism have to be one of the funniest things ever).

For me, it's the Iliad again, just started Book I (wish I'd caught the annual /lit/ Homer party, maybe next year), and then Nicomachean Ethics. I'm going to write a kind of commentary/rephrasing of the book to reflect what I think its deepest message is, but because I'm an anonymous nobody and not a famous neocon-associated professor, I will state it openly with no esoteric bullshit. I probably won't finish that until Christmas, but we'll see if I can eat this whale.

[Anonymous No.22125606]

>>22123949
>Euthyphro Notebooks
$75.00 + tax
I hate everything

[Anonymous No.22125648]

>>22125578
On a lark, I just looked to see what might constitute the center of Bruell's book; even number of chapter plus an introduction. If the intro is taken as a proper section, we end up with 17 sections, the center of which is the chapter on Theages. Now, without looking further, that could be a suggestive choice, since the dialogue, ostensibly showing Socrates turn a young man away from the desire for tyranny, followed by the greatest reticence to take him as a student, also seems to bring the daimonion and Socrates' expertise of erotics into relation, and Theages' claim that all men would desire to be as much like a god, a claim Socrates doesn't deny. That claim is itself related to the desire for wisdom, which comes up in indirect ways in Symposium 204a and Phaedrus 278c-d (i.e., it's said that to be a god = to have wisdom; the issue is whether man can become like a god through attainment of wisdom, or must settle for philosophy, merely desiring it and subjectively progressing with full attainment).

Looking at Bruell's chapter on Theages, it's split into 13 paragraphs, number 7 being the center, which discusses the desire to be a tyrant and the desire to be a god. In the Euthydemus chapter, he starts by discussing how it'd be appropriate to move from Laches to Theages, but has to explain why he holds off on the latter for later, so that seems to be some good evidence for wanting to place Theages somewhere intentional.

The Euthyphro book is incredible. It contains his notebook on Euthyphro and Crito, several sets of notes including for an earlier version of his lecture, and an interlinear translation of the dialogue that Benardete abandoned publishing. Strauss's notes start from the view that Euthyphro is an idiot, and by the end, he ends up being substantially more sympathetic. There are some interesting arguments he develops from the dialogue developing philosophic atheism.

Re: the Iliad, nice, I've been trying to finish personal commentaries on the Theages and Clouds, and then plan to revist the Iliad myself. Missed /lit/'s read through as well, but ho hum. Hopefully you get to share some insights on future Homer threads.

[Anonymous No.22125652]

>>22125606
Kek yeah, I've had to save a bit to get ahold of the damn thing

[Anonymous No.22125657]

>>22125648
>and subjectively progressing with full attainment
*without

[Anonymous No.22125899]

>>22124317
>chomsky is a jew who has done work in philology. i proved how his work in philology is not harmless.
He has? Name ONE of his works in philology. Do you even know what philology is?
>it does, if you have the belief that culture (and by extension language) is downstream of biology (a standard belief for nationalists) then you will believe that language is an extension of race.
And what if I don't have that belief? By the way, you can read "universal grammar" as a form of Platonism. And guess what Plato advocated for as the "ideal" state in The Republic?

Cultural relativist "third positionists" make me sick, because they advocate for "anything goes, might makes right" at a time when their collective power is a nadir. It's such a fucking retarded gambit to try to outdo your competition in postmodernism when they hold all the cards and you hold nothing.

[Anonymous No.22126037]

>>22125899
This poster is a good example of a Straussian, for better and worse. If anyone's wondering what the anatomy is:

>Cultural relativist "third positionists" make me sick,
This is from Strauss' critique of historicism and relativism, which he says all modern ideologies including right-wing nationalist ideologies participate in, because they don't base themselves on claims to privileged access to objective truth but on a radical pluralism and relativism of interests, "true" in the sense of "scientific" and "objetive," that is "value-neutral." One of Strauss' central points, which his followers generally think is his checkmate of all historicist, relativist, and thus nationalist etc. epistemologies and ideologies is that value-neutrality is impossible and that philosophy is inherently premised on value-centric, i.e., moral questions, that the very "move" from doxa (opinion) to concern for truth and objectivity, the move that constitutes philosophy and that was taken by the ancients and epitomized by Socrates and Plato, was a moral move, it had moral content.

Strauss sees it as a very fateful, early modern conception that one can be "scientifically" correct in the sense of value-neutral objectivity, i.e., that one can philosophize without taking moral stands. Modern "nihilism," the professed non-commitment to any moral values, is the result of this unmoored and deficient form of scientificity, which culminates in the German historicism (which itself culminates in Heidegger) and with Nazi amoralism and scientifically, technologically enhanced Robesperrian totalitarianism (which excludes a priori all possibility of being humbled by "the wise," i.e., philosophers like Socrates remonstrating). Nazism thus completes the modern teleology and recapitulates the dynamic of Athens killing Socrates.

Three figures very important for understanding Strauss are Nietzsche, Weber, and Heidegger. Strauss was part of the generation that read Nietzsche in their youth and took him as a sign in the sky, a point of no return for all belief systems premised on any form of revelation, dogma, sentiment, arguments from utility, etc. Basically Nietzsche's philosophy is a call for radical authenticity, and then a terrifying vertigo when one realizes that none of the prevailing or historically significant answers actually meet this call. He is a high point in the teleological development of historicism and nihilism. Viewpoints are indifferently deconstructed, as merely particular concrescences of the interests and commitments of the plurality of historical groups and individuals.

[Anonymous No.22126041]

>>22126037
Weber is a post-Nietzschean "social scientist" who takes this same deconstructive approach and applies it to the sociology of human thought. His attempts to champion value-neutral historical social science are part of the same teleology, raising the same deconstructive and nihilistic method used by Nietzsche to a presupposition: objectivity means no moral commitments; the "scientific" study of human thought and action consists in knowing the factual constituents of belief systems, without any presupposition of which are correct or which have more value than others.

Heidegger completes this teleology or represents its completion by raising the historicistic deconstruction of all human thoughts to mere concrescences of historicity, and by actively embracing this and saying that the most one can do as a philosopher is to identify with the historical concrescence of which one is a member, one's nation or group. Rather than transcending the local doxa, like Socrates, who was killed by Athens, one affirms the local doxa, like Heidegger, who aided the Nazi regime in articulating and systematizing its irrationality.

Straussians use this plausible (but unoriginal) teleology, and all these associations, to graft themselves onto existing critiques of "mere historicity," onto existing fears about relativism and nihilism, etc., and to present themselves as providing the one answer nobody else has seen, not even the mighty Heidegger: that philosophy is never national, philosophy is always post-doxic, and that the philosopher can only ever be a citizen of the ideal republic of truth, never a citizen of a particular republic (which after all is just a space of doxa). To do philosophy is to be Socrates, not Heidegger; and there are clearly risks associated with this, as their respective fates show.

Most Straussians are not subtle enough to bring out all dimensions of this narrative so they will resort to certain easier to memorize talking points like nihilism, historicism, and the association of epistemic pluralism or relativism with nationalism and sub-philosophical irrationality. Astute readers will already detect in this narrative a tacit justification of cosmopolitanism and internationalism.

[Anonymous No.22126047]

>>22126041
(3/4)
Hence this line:
>they advocate for "anything goes, might makes right"
The implication is that nationalism is ONLY EVER a nihilistic, nakedly Machiavellian (another important figure for Strauss along with Hobbes but I'm glossing over this for brevity's sake) power play, like in the Melian dialogue. This is a very common Straussian move. The easiest way to counter it is simply to insist that, for a nationalist, nationalism need not be THE truth, i.e. not the highest truth nor the only truth. He can additionally point out that Strauss made a massive exception to his dislike of "closed" (doxic, nationalist) societies when it came to, you guessed it, Israel. Except he didn't want to live in Israel, like Scholem (a consistent nationalist) did. He wanted to live in "cosmopolitan, philosophical" societies in Europe and America, while VISITING Israel occasionally to look approvingly on the Jewish people finally establishing and fortifying itself on some terra firma, with its own state. He also openly said that it was unwise for the Jewish state to limit itself to doing this, to put all its eggs in one basket as it were. Instead the Jewish people should, as he did, maintain its exceptional diaspora way of life in European countries, in addition to possessing Israel. But I digress.

>It's such a fucking retarded gambit to try to outdo your competition in postmodernism when they hold all the cards and you hold nothing.
Again, associating nationalism with nihilism, relativism, pluralism, historicism, etc. ("postmodernism") but as a defective and blinkered form of it, part of the teleology of nihilism just described. Thus there are no valid forms of nationalism, there is no valid closed society (with one permitted exception Israel), because it's the whole nihilistic teleology that's bankrupt, and nationalism is just a part of it, and a part that has already been tried and led to all sorts of horrors etc. Isn't it time we listen to Strauss and be wise "Platonists" now? -- by which Strauss and his followers mean atheists; Plato was only using all that metaphysical idealism stuff as a metaphor for his basically atheistic social philosophy.

Again this is easily sidestepped by simply denying the teleology, or by agreeing that mindless relativist nationalists are stupid, but there's no reason to be such a nationalist. It's also easily sidestepped by simply rejecting the bizarre Straussian reading of Plato, which no Platonist nor scholar of Platonism in the entirety of human history has ever accepted.

[Anonymous No.22126048]

>>22126047
(4/4)
>By the way, you can read "universal grammar" as a form of Platonism.
By this he doesn't mean anything remotely metaphysically idealist or Platonic in the usual sense. He means Straussian rationalism, i.e., the idea that human reason is universal and non-particular (non-doxic), and to reason at all, that is to do philosophy, just is to transcend doxa. And, per Strauss, any reasoning mind will arrive at the same conclusions that all philosophers (according to Strauss) have ever reached, from Plato to Maimonides and Spinoza to Strauss. Note the subtle suggestion that Jews have properly inherited the wise, elitist "classical" conception to philosophy, and only gentiles have furthered the nihilistic teleology of scientism and historicism (Machiavelli, Hobbes, Nietzsche, Weber, Heidegger).

Anyway, the conclusions at which any reasoning mind, any philosopher, will reach are the familiar ones: Atheism and profound distrust for all religion and nationalism, cosmopolitanism (travelling from city to city spreading wisdom and staying with other wise men), world-weary disdain for the doxic plebs, and above all, recognition of the necessity for a tiny minority of elite knowers to transcend doxa, gather together in small circles and cabals, and make sure the plebs don't ever get too hopped up on religion or nationalism to start killing "philosophers."

Reread the last paragraph if you didn't get the subtext of Straussianism. One doesn't exactly have to be a Straussian esoteric close reader and numerologist to figure it out. If you still don't get it, go back to the paragraph about the special exception he makes for Israel.

[Anonymous No.22126055]

>>22126037
>This poster is a good example of a Straussian, for better and worse
I'm not a Straussian though. A Straussian gives up because they've set their perspective so low that they cannot see far off into the horizon. And this type of anti-Straussian response exaggerates how wedded Heidegger was to Nazi ideology (hardly at all, even if he was excited about a potential for a new beginning) while underplaying how arbitrary modern nationalism is (not to be confused with ethnicity nor the possibility of nationhood).

[Anonymous No.22126065]

>>22126048
>By this he doesn't mean anything remotely metaphysically idealist or Platonic in the usual sense. He means Straussian rationalism, i.e., the idea that human reason is universal and non-particular (non-doxic), and to reason at all, that is to do philosophy, just is to transcend doxa.
You just love to hear yourself talk, don't you Schmitt-anon? I didn't mean anything like "Straussian rationalism", which I do not accept whatsoever. Great exposition of Strauss's shtick, at the cost of understanding Platonic philosophy (and I don't mean Strauss's Platonism).

[Anonymous No.22126079]

>>22126048
I thought I'd place additional stress on my Straussian reading of Straussianism here:
>Note the subtle suggestion that Jews have properly inherited the wise, elitist "classical" conception to philosophy, and only gentiles have furthered the nihilistic teleology of scientism and historicism (Machiavelli, Hobbes, Nietzsche, Weber, Heidegger).
The whole thing is an implicit critique of goyish barbarism. Think about it. In the ancient world, the plebs killed Socrates for plebbish reasons; mired in doxa, they couldn't see how much of a sin against philosophy and reason it was to kill Socrates for a minor slight against doxa (supposedly disrespecting the gods and misleading the youth -- by leading them to philosophy).

That's in the ancient world. The ancient world was inherited by the Christian world, which has a new doxa, revelation. The Jews also have revelation, but it is pivotal to Strauss' worldview that Jews are not REALLY religious, at least not the smart ones. All the smart Jews like Maimonides and Spinoza, just from reading the Torah closely, instantly realized how dumb revelation is, and came to the universal "Platonist" (Straussian rationalist) viewpoint that philosophy can never treat with revelation, nor with mysticism nor metaphysical insight, because philosophy must be rationalistically universal, and none of these things can be universal (another point that is easily disproved and shows Strauss simply throwing out 98% of historical philosophy because he thinks it's self-evidently stupid to any reasonable person -- something also done by his "co-religionist" (co-atheist) Marx).

Even within Judaism, you have pleb Jews like the ones who persecute Spinoza and who would have persecuted Maimonides and ibn Ezra for realizing the Bible is dumb and Moses couldn't have written it etc. So imagine how much stupider the goys are, with their goyish vulgarized Judaism (Christianity)!

This is the implicit narrative of Straussianism. To be a philosopher, a "Platonist," is to be irreligious and to think most people are worthless cattle who need to be "managed" by a cosmopolitan itinerant elite. Again, draw the conclusions for yourself.

>>22126065
If I misfired then I apologize.

>>22126055
Heidegger wasn't a biological racist but otherwise he was a volkisch philosopher. But like I said, that doesn't preclude him from being anything else. Did Herder have any less interest in metaphysics when he said that every people has its own language and thus its own approach to the divine? Strauss would say yes, because he would say Herder "babelized" reason. That's because Strauss like Weber had no "ear for religion," i.e. for metaphysics, for real truth and not just rationalistic cynical truth. It's ironic that Herder wrote Gott: einige Gespräche and saw Spinoza as the "God-intoxicated man" and Strauss saw him as a cynical, bitter atheist and social engineer.

[Anonymous No.22126208]

>>22126048
>the idea that human reason is universal and non-particular (non-doxic), and to reason at all, that is to do philosophy, just is to transcend doxa.
>Anyway, the conclusions at which any reasoning mind, any philosopher, will reach are the familiar ones: Atheism and profound distrust for all religion and nationalism, cosmopolitanism (travelling from city to city spreading wisdom and staying with other wise men), world-weary disdain for the doxic plebs, and above all, recognition of the necessity for a tiny minority of elite knowers to transcend doxa,
This sounds like a philosopher as Strauss and his followers would conceive it would harbor dislike for their native city, or at least distrust, and work to weaken its strength. Maybe that's true (though Socrates fought in the Peloponnesian War with distinction), and if it's true, then those philosophers ought to be persecuted. It's practically beyond dispute at this point that such a "doxic" society, mono-ethnic, homogenous, with a common religion and moral sense, is far more peaceful and stable than the cosmopolitan mess the West is in right now.

[Anonymous No.22126227]

This thread and this author are boring as fuck

I'm surprised that a board of people who don't read actually take interest in this midget

[Anonymous No.22126484]

so strauss' esotericism is that he's really speaking only to jews?

[Anonymous No.22126642]

>>22126048
>human reason is universal and non-particular (non-doxic), and to reason at all, that is to do philosophy, just is to transcend doxa.
But isn't this true? There are opinions about things, and then there's the truth, and the truth as such isn't going to change.
>Anyway, the conclusions at which any reasoning mind, any philosopher, will reach are the familiar ones: Atheism and profound distrust for all religion and nationalism, cosmopolitanism (travelling from city to city spreading wisdom and staying with other wise men), world-weary disdain for the doxic plebs, and above all, recognition of the necessity for a tiny minority of elite knowers to transcend doxa, gather together in small circles and cabals, and make sure the plebs don't ever get too hopped up on religion or nationalism to start killing "philosophers."
I'm torn here. To philosophize in the Socratic sense means pursuing it as a way of life, and implicitly that would mean discounting the possibility of divine revelation, if you can't prove it's false (which no Straussian has done. Strauss tried and didn't do any better than Spinoza, I think it's in his book Athens and Jerusalem or something like that). Christianity (which Straussians hate with a passion) doesn't provide nearly the same affront to reason as ancient Greek religion did, so if you can't prove the moral law is irrational, prove the human soul is mortal, or prove that humans are radically and completely unfree, you're out of luck, and must believe revelation doesn't hold the truth without proving it, which is a big problem.

The problem I have with your argument is this: is it really the case that the philosopher (I'm using philosopher and Straussian synonymously here btw, even though I don't think that's necessarily true) would really hate his native city that much? Socrates clearly fucking loved Athens so much he preferred to die to an unjust law, and fought with honor in the war against Sparta. Why would the philosopher undermine his own city? For my part, I'm an American, and I really admire the system of government Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton, etc. put together. I think it's the greatest defense against tyranny ever created, provided you have those "nationalistic" caveats of common religous practice, morals, cultural homogeneity, etc. Thoughts?

>exception for Israel
Can you point me to where he makes remarks like this? Because holy fucking shit that's infuriating, if true Strauss is a major fucking hypocrite, and I'd see red whenever I hear his name again.

I'm having the time of my life in this thread, anons, thanks everyone. I have a handful of friends I can talk philosophy with, but they all live very far away, and this board for all its foibles has real discussion sometimes, delightfully unfiltered.

[Anonymous No.22126662]

>>22126037
>the very "move" from doxa (opinion) to concern for truth and objectivity, the move that constitutes philosophy and that was taken by the ancients and epitomized by Socrates and Plato, was a moral move, it had moral content.
I don't understand this at all. What morals does the philosopher (as Strauss conceives him) really embody? Temperance and love of the truth? Bruell, whom I'm a big fan of, seems to indicate in his book on Socrates that the philosopher is profoundly unconcerned with ordinary morality because he knows the highest pleasure (and pleasure is the good) closely linked to philosophizing. But that's radically disconnected with civic duty, civic virtue, etc. I don't see the philosopher (again as Strauss/his followers seem to conceive of him) as being particularly just or virtuous, just prudent in what they publicly say, moderate in their appetites except that for wisdom, and private, keeping to themselves. I don't see how that "checkmates" say, devotion to a particular regime at all.

[Anonymous No.22126692]

>>22125648
That sounds awesome, anon. I might save and pick that up if my piracy attempts fail. $75 for a book? Helen of Troy. Sounds worth it though.

>There are some interesting arguments he develops from the dialogue developing philosophic atheism.

I've always found it very curious that Strauss and his followers dismiss divine revelation out court, but have never really tried to engage with the most reasonable and intelligent proponents of it, being the High Middle Ages thinkers of Anselm, Aquinas, and Duns Scotus. They seem to prefer to operate by ridicule and sneering instead, which is really weird. If it's really so easy to show the superiority of the philosophic life (as Socrates envisioned it, but Socrates never encountered a thoughtful Christian, for example), why not show the articles of faith are contradictory or that Christians' presuppositions (immortality of the soul, moral freedom, the natural law) are false/similarly contradictory? Unlike the other Straussian tenets (no morality, no God, pleasure is the good), these things don't exactly benefit the would be tyrant, nor would they mean the philosopher would face public pushback, given the popular view of Christianity in the west today.

[Anonymous No.22126800]

>>22126692
>I've always found it very curious that...
I think Strauss earns his position legitimately, but it's absolutely true that a number of his students don't, with Jaffa and especially Ernest Fortin being notable exceptions (dl any Fortin books you can find on libgen, they're a wonderful corrective to the Bloom/Mansfield/Pangle set). Strauss's case is interesting, because he rediscovers exotericism through Maimonides, and his letters to Klein over his discoveries show him take for granted the superiority of philosophy over revelation (see the first chapter of Lampert's The Enduring Importance of Leo Strauss, which has a number of excerpts from those letters). At some point in the early-mid 40s, however, he writes privately that reading Kierkegaard (and I think he was reading Pascal too at the time) "shipwrecked" him, and he felt he had to really put philosophy in question in a more legitimate way to see how it fares against revelation (the tangible result of this was a lecture in the late 40s, Reason and Revelation, which you can find in Meier's Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem). At some point after, I guess as he was gearing up for Chicago, he wrote a few versions of the Jerusalem and Athens lectures, and at some point in the 60s almost published a small collection of essays on the subject, which would've contained Jerusalem and Athens, On the Interpretation of Genesis, and On Plato's Euthyphron (look up Hannes Kerber's academia.edu page, or his twitter; he's got quite a bit on this). Apparently, just a few months before he died, he wrote to Benardete that he desired to go back over the Euthyphro on account of realizing that he made an error in not seeing what distinguishes the pious from the holy (I...don't know what that is. Yet!). This whole journey in thinking certainly contrast with some students, who it strikes me, weren't strong believers in the first place, and so were readier to accept any insinuation of atheism in Strauss. I think his own wavering on it was to prevent students from just imbibing a conclusion without working it out, but, oops, students tend to really do their own thing whether the teacher thinks it better or not.

[Anonymous No.22126849]

>>22126800
>Apparently, just a few months before he died, he wrote to Benardete that he desired to go back over the Euthyphro on account of realizing that he made an error in not seeing what distinguishes the pious from the holy (I...don't know what that is. Yet!).
I'd love to see more about this.

[Anonymous No.22126885]

>>22126662
I would add to your post an example of slight Platonic evidence that fits well with this.

Consider the Gorgias. Everyone who's read it at least remembers that Socrates argues to Gorgias' student Polus that it is better to suffer injustice than to do injustice. By implication, do what's just must be better than doing what's unjust; but what's justice, according to the Gorgias? Firstly, we recall that the dialogue opens with Socrates asking Gorgias what his art (namely, rhetoric) is, and Polus jumps in to claim Gorgias' art is the best and the most capable of securing a man's freedom, etc. Socrates criticizes this as praising or blaming a thing before being clear *what* the thing is. So looking back at the Gorgias, we secondly recall that Socrates seems to defend and praise justice a great deal without saying what it is; this is itself a demonstration of the strengths and weaknesses of Gorgias' rhetoric, a manipulation of speech that doesn't quite get at persuasion (according to both Polus and Callicles). BUT, we come to the third matter: Socrates *does* define justice indirectly at the end of the dialogue, at 521d-522c, where he defines "acting justly" as "*making others perplexed*" (and see an early indirect foreshadowing by noting what he calls "the greatest evils" at 458a-b).

This is to show that that something like "the philosopher's justice" has a peculiarly unmoral (not to say immoral) tone and color to it. This sort of thing happens in other dialogues too, like Laches, Charmides, Meno, etc.

[Anonymous No.22126898]

>>22126849
Here's the excerpt (footnote 19 from the intro of the Euthyphro book):

>If I should succeed in completing my essay on the Laws, I would like to re-study the Euthyphro (I have not been attentive to the difference between hosiotes [holiness] and eusebeia [piety]).

[Anonymous No.22126943]

>>22126800
That really makes me respect Strauss, any man admitting he could be shipwrecked by Kierkegaard and Pascal really isn't bullshitting. I take back what I said about him glossing over revelation without considering it.

>the difference between the pious and the holy
I think I understand this. Piety is performing religious ritual: offering the sacrifices to gray-eyed Athene, whether or not you believe she actually exists/is paying attention. Those considerations don't really matter. She's the guardian of your village, so you perform your civic piety. Holiness is something quite different, holiness would be a direct personal experience of God or the gods, the divine, what have you, and it's chiefly marked by a personal transformation by what you experienced. Paul on the road to Damascus, Augustine in the garden, Joan of Arc, etc. Pseudo-Dionysius and John of the Cross are huge on this, but for a pretty interesting reflection on this idea, check out Rudolf Otto's Idea of the Holy. It's short, easy to read, and the first half, where he lays things out, is a real page-turner.

I'm not exactly sure my account of the holy would correspond to what Strauss would have understood by the term, but I'm pretty sure my understanding of piety would be. Might be a good starting point, at least.

[Anonymous No.22127022]

>>22126943
>I think I understand this. Piety is performing religious ritual...
I'd thought this too, and maybe he does have this in mind, but the Euthyphro notebooks has him emphasizing the first definition, piety = (implicitly to Euthyphro) imitating the gods, and not necessarily doing what they tell us to do. The way he works this out and finds Socrates to be close to it (the tl;dr is that the philosopher tries to be like a god in trying to be wise; it's very convincing as he lays it out) seems obliterate this distinction, so that the Euthyphro, apparently, presents piety as becoming holy. But knowing that that's how Strauss saw it in the 40s, and that he began to change his mind in the 70s, makes it a bit thornier to follow. I'll have to knock my head around on the Benardete translation and see if hus discovery ends up just being a realization that he assimilated them too much to each other, which would, I suppose, require working out all over again the first definition. (He was asked by Cropsey if he wanted to publish his unpublished at the time lecture on Euthyphro for Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, and he declined on account of needing to do a new interpretation, alluding to his comment to Benardete).

[Anonymous No.22127226]

>>22126943
Why are you working with the English words piety, holiness, etc., and not the Ancient Greek words? They have their own etymologies and connotations that are separate from their equivalents in English.

[Anonymous No.22127284]

>>22127226
Fair enough. I'll grab my Liddell & Scott and see if that clarifies things, will post any updates.

[Anonymous No.22127309]

Hosiotes comes from the adjective hosios, holy or sacred to the gods vs. what is dikaios, just or sanctioned by human law: https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=o%28%2Fsios&la=greek&can=o%28%2Fsios0&prior=o(sio/ths#lexicon

Eusebeia seems to mostly mean reverencing the gods, doing them honor, etc: https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=e%29usebeia&la=greek#Perseus:text:1999.04.0057:entry=eu)se/beia-contents

[Anonymous No.22127736]

>>22127309
How about Wiktionary, with the PIE roots?

[Anonymous No.22127788]

>>22127736
Your turn, anon

[Anonymous No.22127928]

>>22127788
no I'm too lazy I want you guys to do the thinking for me

[Anonymous No.22128087]

>>22127226
This is pedantry for pedantry's sake. The range of meanings between hosiotes and holiness, and eusebeia and piety, are similar enough to be just fine. But what's more, why would looking up a lexicon or word etymology help answer a question in a Platonic dialogue? The ordinary meaning is often intentionally the intended meaning of a word in its first appearance, and thereafter it's treated like variable to be solved, and no longer answered by appeal to dictionaries.

[Anonymous No.22128112]

>>22128087
>This is pedantry for pedantry's sake.
No, it's really not, especially when we're talking about subtleties in philosophy.
>But what's more, why would looking up a lexicon or word etymology help answer a question in a Platonic dialogue?
Because if you're not reading Plato as a literary stylist then you're not fully engaging with him as a thinker.

[Anonymous No.22128140]

>>22128112
>No, it's really not, especially when we're talking about subtleties in philosophy.
You pointed to no subtly, just said "words in other languages are different", and took it for granted that piety and eusebeia didn't both point to behaviors like prayer, worship, rutual sacrifice, because etymology apparently trumps use.

>Because if you're not reading Plato as a literary stylist then you're not fully engaging with him as a thinker.
Go ahead and point out the relevance here for eusebeia and hosiotes.

To be abundantly clear, I'm not saying etymologie aren't helpful in Plato, but lazily resorting to them you don't want to engage in discussion using English equivalents for Greek terms that are being treated as variables in a dialogue anyway is disruptive and not as clever an engagement as it imagines.

[Anonymous No.22128164]

>>22128140
>You pointed to no subtly, just said "words in other languages are different"
Because they are. Do you think "virtue", "the good", etc., and all of the Judeo-Christian presuppositions we associate with virtue today, sufficiently captures what the Greeks meant by "arete", "kalon", etc.? What about the Machiavellian conception of virtu? It's all the same, no? Obviously not.
>Go ahead and point out the relevance here for eusebeia and hosiotes.
I don't know if there is one yet. It was a suggestion. However, I know from experience know careful readings of Plato begin with sticking closely to the text and interrogating Plato in the context of his time. Provisionally, the original vocabulary could generate an insightful reading of Euthyphro, especially if we compare the other contexts in which those words are used. Euthyphro has already proven to be one of those dialogues that requires a careful reading, considering that most people skim over details such as the change in verb tenses (carrying vs. being carried) as part of the philosophical argument being made. Why does that happen? Because the grammatical features present in Ancient Greek don't translate well into English and thus don't hit upon the same "constellation of meaning." If I haven't driven this point home enough, then I don't know if I ever could.
>To be abundantly clear, I'm not saying etymologie aren't helpful in Plato, but lazily resorting to them you don't want to engage in discussion using English equivalents for Greek terms that are being treated as variables in a dialogue anyway is disruptive and not as clever an engagement as it imagines.
It was a suggestion for the sake of understanding what Plato meant. And even if I was merely suggesting low-hanging fruit, it's almost always better to use the original words when you're involved in a technical discussion for the sake of semantic bookkeeping. There's a reason why it's low-hanging fruit, and yet the fruit is still worth the picking. There's nothing wrong with using piety and holiness for the sake of discussing concepts, but I fear that we might be playing shell games with words that mean all kinds of things now and would have had a more concrete usage in Ancient Greece. The key philosophical elements relevant to Euthyphro would be more clear in the language and times that the author used them in, which could then provide us with insights for understanding our own times. Your bristling feedback is unnecessary and counterproductive.

[Anonymous No.22128173]

>>22128087
some more examples of words that are poorly translated into English (either in their own right, in ways that make them easily misunderstood because of our own preconceptions, or in the ways that Greek philosophers would not have thought of them)
>logos
>aitia
>sophrosyne
>episteme
>dialectic
>nous
>techne
>thumos
>eidos
>agape/eros/philia/etc.
>psyche
And many of these words changed in connotation over the course of antiquity too, so it's pretty much a never-ending game of capturing the correct semantic moment in history.

[Anonymous No.22128193]

For Paul to rename his brand was truly genius. Straussites memetically reproduce their ancestor.

[Anonymous No.22128214]

>>22116357
for me? Levi's start and end with the 501™ Original Fit

[Anonymous No.22128217]

>>22128193
That is to say, my noetic scanner is telling me he is the case of priests installing themselves between the Real and the flocks. I haven't read him obviously.

[Anonymous No.22128222]

>>22128217
redpill me on the Pauline priesthood conspiracy

[Anonymous No.22128233]

>>22128222
>Christ was the original memer
>prehistoric jannies were like 'oh shi'
>posting is far too powerful
>'we need to subvert and replace him with Christ 2.0'
>enter Paul (formerly Saul)
>Christ's message gets spammed away with conterfeit boomer meme reposts

[Anonymous No.22128241]

>>22128233
what's wrong with Paul? the Corinthian letters are comfy

[Anonymous No.22128256]

>>22128241
They move the message from the singular – towards the flock: from Christ to Christians.

[Anonymous No.22128279]

>>22128164
>Because they are. Do you think "virtue", "the good", etc., and all of the Judeo-Christian presuppositions we associate with virtue today, sufficiently captures what the Greeks meant by "arete", "kalon", etc.?
Not to be cheeky, but more or less, sure they do? Does virtue not share the sense of "distinguishing excellence" as arete? The cardinal virtues when enumerated might appear different, the Greeks don't really talk about charity as a virtue, but: the word virtue derived from Latin, which we ought to expect to be related more closely to something like andreia, is used by the Romans and Christians to translate arete, *and then, crucially, its range is intentionally shaped by the words it translates*, since anyone using a Latin translation of Plato or Aristotle is going to now have a whole set of texts saying "virtue is x, y, z", and the original "manliness" of virtue gets softened or abandoned. In point of fact, while I'd readily acknowledge differences in such things as the later conflation of thumos and pneuma, the ranges of arete, kalon, agathon, don't differ so much, because the Christians understood those terms in light of the older writers through translation. (I'd also point out that a few centuries after Plato, kalon suddenly meant "good" *in Greek*; the Septuagint uses kalon instead of the expected agathon for the "god saw that it was good" passages of Genesis 1.)

As for Machiavelli, his use of virtu depends entirely on his being able to trick people concerning what he's getting at by expecting that they'll take it by its ordinary meaning at the period of his writing.

>I don't know if there is one yet...
I'm primarily addressing dropping in like >>22127226 did with no further suggestion. I don't disagree with much of what you point out, but one significant risk is to posit such a strong separation between Greek and English, that Plato is no longer visibly relevant except as a philological curiosity; questions about justice, virtue, beauty, are no longer relevant for us, because Plato's talking about these other words. That's surely the implication, right?

(Cont.)

[Anonymous No.22128289]

>>22128279
>I'm primarily addressing dropping in like >>22127226 (You) did with no further suggestion.
I'm the same person. And idk, it was just a suggestion.
>that Plato is no longer visibly relevant except as a philological curiosity; questions about justice, virtue, beauty, are no longer relevant for us, because Plato's talking about these other words. That's surely the implication, right?
No, because the ideas remain the same, even if the semantic universe is structured differently. I imagine that the path to gnosis is cleaner and faster in the original text than it would be after 2500 years of playing telephone, with less room for meandering into one pitfall or the other.

[Anonymous No.22128315]

>>22128233
please explain how Christ's message (what is it, even?) is betrayed by the Pauline letters.

[Anonymous No.22128321]

>>22128315
Christ's message is the BWO of the Tibetan magi. Pauline letters are Lacanian schemata.

[Anonymous No.22128323]

>>22128164
>>22128279
>There's nothing wrong with using piety and holiness for the sake of discussing concepts, but I fear that we might be playing shell games with words that mean all kinds of things now and would have had a more concrete usage in Ancient Greece.
Why would you imagine the words might be concrete enough to solve the problem? Look at the Euthyphro: Socrates is charged with asebeia / not believing or worshipping (nomizein) the gods of the city. The question is raised: what is eusebeia? Euthyphro already distinguishes himself from what the many believe eusebeia is, so the subsequent conversation *is already a departure*, up until the end when Socrates says "oh, it must be commerce between mn and gods, you know, prayers and sacrifices, that sorta thing". The only way you'd know that this lines up with the popular view of eusebeia is by reading other authors like Herodotus or Thucydides or Xenophon. Looking towards the roots *might sometimes* help (consider the opening of the Apology, where Socrates plays off of "forget myself" [from lanthano] with "but I'll tell the truth" [aletheia, the privative of lanthano], where the root relation must be in mind for Plato to pun off of them), but why should it help in all cases? If arete is in fact related to Ares, as some philologists claim, does it really help to have that in mind every time arete is brought up, when you're reading dialogues that aren't Cratylus?

>>22128173
A suggestive list, but if I'm seeing sophrosune or episteme or aitia on such a list, I'd have to hear something about why "moderation / temperance", "knowledge / science", and "cause" are bad or severely limited translations. Is it because rootwise sophrosune is literally "soundmindedness", or because sometimes aitia means "guilty"? It'd be much more helpful with explanation, otherwise why should I not take it as I do the jewpost trolling above?

[Anonymous No.22128362]

>>22128323
I don't have time to give this a full treatment, so I'll focus one on word.
>aitia
It's not just "guilt" but also "debt" and if you trust Heidegger, it's a "bringing forth":
https://www.english.hawaii.edu/criticalink/heidegger/guide3.html
At the very least, when we think of "cause" today, we think almost exclusively in terms of efficient causes to the detriment of the three other causes outlined by Aristotle. And when debts, duties, etc., are brought up, we immediately see connections to Socrates's account in Crito on why he chooses his fate (Athens birthed and raised him, he feels obligated to obey even if the decision is unjust), on what we could infer from Cephalus's definition of justice in The Republic (which is also at least obliquely connected to Socrates's decision to drink hemlock when we expand our notion of cause), etc. You can say there's a certain violence to this kind of reading, but if these terms had a widespread connotation, and if the ideas themselves can be separated from the text, then we have a much richer understanding of the philosophical cosmos of Ancient Greece that could even help us regain a sense of greater meaning, or at least connectedness, in our own world.

[Anonymous No.22128376]

>>22128362
>if you trust Heidegger
abandon all hope, ye who enter here.......

[Anonymous No.22128465]

>>22128362
Re: aitia, it's oldest uses are "guilt"; Heidegger's gloss, if anything, appears more dependent on how it appears in Plato and especially Aristotle. I'm not sure what passages you have in mind where it means "debt"; at least the Republic conversation with Cephalus uses the verb apodidomi, "to return what's owed, i.e. pay a debt", unless you have another passage in mind. I would point out that Plato probably has in mind the use of "guilty" when, in his first speech in the Meno, Socrates calls Gorgias an aitia of Meno and the Thessalians being able to answer questions fearlessly; in context, Meno hears aitia as "that which is responsible for" his answering fearlessly, and if we remember the dialogue Gorgias, we can infer that Socrates is actually blaming him for this.

To speak more to the issue, I do agree that cause tends to be understood primarily as "efficient cause", but what of it? If you're reading Aristotle, and he outlines these four things called causes, one of which lines up somewhat with efficient cause, is there really a confusion in translating aitia as cause? Yes, someone not interested in Aristotle will probably insist, without looking, that Aristotle is wrong, and cause is only of such and such a sort, but would Plato or Aristotle waste their time teaching someone who just wants to fight in speeches?

Part of my qualified resistance to looking too emphatically to etymology is that, at least with Plato, it will fail to the extent that the dialogues always move from common and popular presuppositions about a word to some drastically different meaning. Take Eros in the Symposium as an example. We start with Eros as love of about five kinds from other speakers, and then Socrates says he was taught Eros is philosophy, the desiring of wisdom that one recognizes one doesn't have. Does etymology help here? What about in any given interlocutor's speech? Aren't they *supposed* to be using a word in its everyday use, compared to Socrates, such that taking an interlocutor's use of aitia as Heidegger's "making present what wasn't there in time and space" would be a distortion?

[Anonymous No.22128480]

>>22128465
What do you have to lose by sticking to the original vocabulary?

[Anonymous No.22128537]

>>22128480
More difficulty having casual conversation with someone about Plato and Strauss? More accessibility of a limited sort in taking with non-Greek readers? Greater bearing on issues for English speakers, like how to live moderately and justly, instead of sophrosunos and dikaios? I bring up the Greek, but I try to limit it to when someone's getting stuck on a translation, or lacking the Greek enough to catch distinctions, such as when Jowett translates Socrates in the Apology as saying "I'll speak truly" when the Greek is "I'll speak justly" as though they were the same. I like gatekeeping, but speaking only with the Greek terms out of principle seems arbitrary.

[Anonymous No.22128654]

excellent thread, thank you sincerely effortposters

[Anonymous No.22129736]

>>22128537
I kind of agree, going full autist on greek words is a bit silly. Provided the translator is consistent about important words (every time you see justice it should be rendering dikaios, don't know what Jowett was thinking), even a greekless reader can become an expert in Platonic or Aristotelian philosophy.

[Anonymous No.22129851]

>>22129736
Absolutely, best correctives for touchy spots are footnotes or endnotes. Take two examples that can be settled by a note:

Atechnos, depending on where the accent is, can unambiguously mean either "artlessly" (literally a-technos), or the idiomatic "simply"; in Cleitophon, a dialogue where a young man criticizes Socrates for not teaching him the art of justice, Cleitophon uses atechnos in one speech to mean "simply," but a reader who's noticed all the references to art can look back at the passage and see if the meaning changes if "simply" is replaced by "artlessly," and work out whether Plato has put a criticism of Cleitophon into his own speech. A note clears up both meanings and lets a reader make heads or tails of it. Similarly, at one point in Aristophanes' speech in the Symposium, he uses the phrase "kata noun," which literally means "according to mind," but which in context means "as you like it," with the literal meaning being perhaps another plausible example of a Platonic criticism in someone's mouth. Notes sort that shit right up. A shame that more translators give them short shrift though.

[Anonymous No.22130393]

>>22116901
Be smart and read neither instead. Both are just copying the gentile ancients.

[Anonymous No.22130401]

>>22116357
Any modern author who admittedly does not mean what they write on the page is a pseud and a fraud! I feel the same way about the tricky French "philosophers" who intentionally play word games to confuse the reader. Its ridiculous! I'm not interpreting an allegorical text with hidden meanings written by some random jew.

[Anonymous No.22130477]

>>22130401
you haven't read the thread, sad :(

[Anonymous No.22131456]

>>22129851
Those sorts of notes are a godsend when reading. Plato in particular is always doing puns, word plays, and changing the meaning of important words in the dialogue to illustrate some point, and careless translation ruins it. Autistically wooden literal translations are also misleading, so notes strike the perfect balance. I am a big fan of the translator footnote.

[Anonymous No.22131695]

leo strauss? nah, more like draco agamben.

[Anonymous No.22132209]

>>22117028
>modern straussians are utterly unimpressive
They successfully neutralised Saddam's Iraq, de minimis. I'd say that's pretty impressive

[Anonymous No.22132219]

>>22118796
>plugin missed Shulsky from the OSP
KEK

They also didn't mention Michael Ledeen, check this out:
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0699/machiavelli1.asp

>Verification not required

[Anonymous No.22132241]

>>22132209
But they couldn't set up a stable regime, which is a massive failing.

I'd point out how puzzling the neocons are from Strauss's perspective, since people like Wolfowitz, Kristol, and Shulsky are much less skeptical than Strauss was about world policing -- to that end, they're more like Strauss's friend and philosophical opponent Alexandre Kojeve, from whom Fukuyama gets the End of History thesis, which Strauss abhorred as leading to the death of philosophy.

[Anonymous No.22132262]

>>22132241
>But they couldn't set up a stable regime, which is a massive failing.
https://youtu.be/qEsPqJOKmiQ?t=14

https://d31kydh6n6r5j5.cloudfront.net/uploads/sites/227/2019/11/Ch._7_Jewish_Philosophy022.pdf

[Anonymous No.22133015]

>>22132262
holy shit
>the Jew's enemy is the world
>assimilation is impossible
>so instead you infiltrate and subvert to negate the threat to the Jews
holy fuck, Is Strauss trying to 1488 people? What the fuck?

[Anonymous No.22134118]

>>22132241
>End of History thesis, which Strauss abhorred as leading to the death of philosophy.
Say more about this, anon? First time hearing this

[Anonymous No.22134156]

ITT: DA JOOOOOOOOS

[Anonymous No.22134212]

>>22134118
Tl;dr is that Kojeve, by means of an interpretation of Hegel mixed with Marxist economics and Heidegerrian anthropology, saw wisdom to be completable, and in fact complete with Hegel: this is to say that all that's left for men is to catch up to Hegelian wisdom, and for man to bring about the Universal Homogeneous State. Kojeve brings this to bear in a review of Strauss's On Tyranny (an interpretation of Xenophon's dialogue on tyranny, the Hiero), which Strauss responded to with an essay outlining his disagreements. They also had a long correspondence bickering (in an admittedly amicble way) over it. All of this is collected in current editions of On Tyranny. Strauss leaned towards philosophy as being a fundamentally investigative and skeptical activity, while Kojeve leaned towards it being dogmatic and certain. The UHS is, for Strauss, both undesirable for political stability, unlikely to actually accomplish its aims, and dangerous for philosophy as he understands it.

[Anonymous No.22134218]

>>22134118
Libgen Mark Lilla's Reckless Mind and read the chapter on Kojeve, it's short and gives you the overall picture.

Tldr, he may be one of the most evil men who ever lived.

[Anonymous No.22134239]

>>22134212
Fascinating. Buying Strauss' On Tyranny immediately. I also happen to be reading Kojeve's introduction to Hegel, because I heard it was the most competent, and because I really want to understand Hegel (chiefly because of his influence on current affairs via Marx, but Marx is an idiot and Hegel seems like he's not).

[Anonymous No.22134243]

>>22134212
Where does Fukuyama fit in? Disciple of Kojeve?

[Anonymous No.22134252]

>>22134239
Kojeve's reading of Hegel is very idiosyncratic, you're better off reading Beiser's Hegel and Taylor's Hegel, anything by Inwood, H.S. Harris.

[Anonymous No.22134396]

>>22134218
Just read it, thanks for the recommendation. Kojeve is definitely a piece of work. I've started his introduction to Hegel, and he's monstrously intelligent. I'm becoming entranced.

[Anonymous No.22134397]

>>22134239
As with what >>22134252 says, it's a peculiar, but very rich and interesting interpretation of Hegel, though as Strauss and Kojeve's student Stanley Rosen has said, not very "philologically accurate." For understanding Hegel, Harris, Rosen, Taylor, Pippin, even with their differences between each other, will take you further.

>>22134243
Fukuyama was a student of Allan Bloom, who was himself a student of both Strauss and Kojeve (at least two other Straussians I'm aware of who studied under Kojeve were the above mentioned Stanley Rosen, who Kojeve preferred to Bloom, and Hilail Gildin. There might be others, but I don't recall who.). Bloom translated selections from Kojeve's Hegel lectures, and Fukuyama seems to have partly used it to defend liberal democracy, while lightly and quietly criticizing the latter through Strauss's own overt criticism of the UHS via Nietzsche. He gets shorter shrift than I think he deserves over misunderstanding the thesis of his book and overlooking his qualifications up and down, but I do think he misunderstands both Strauss and Kojeve.

[Anonymous No.22134572]

>>22134397
Fukuyama.....does not seem all that smart. I'll probably read End of History, but I'm skimming his Liberalism and its Discontents and holy shit what mediocre mind so far. It's like he was reading off a script produced by the Atlantic magazine. Decidedly unimpressed so far.

[Anonymous No.22135411]

>>22134572
>Fukuyama.....does not seem all that smart
Oh, I'm not saying he is, he's 100% midwit, just that most refutations of the End of History book tend to be beside the point. Shockingly, he's gotten dumber over the years.

[Anonymous No.22136419]

>>22135411
I believe that. His Liberalism book was beyond stupid, how is anyone smart supposed to take the assertion that there is no hint of totalitarian leanings in the American left? and that all threats to American democracy are because of Fat Orange Man? And that our government is not corrupt? He's a 70 year old boomer and it fucking shows.

[Anonymous No.22137349]

bump

[Anonymous No.22138651]

bump

[Anonymous No.22138695]

>>22135411
That's not entirely unexpected. The only two reasons any liberal is a liberal nowadays is because they are either its beneficiaries, or because they never really thought that deeply about politics to begin with beyond the ideology they were fed in school and by popular media.

[Anonymous No.22139096]

>>22138695
>because they are either its beneficiaries
He's been connected to the government for decades, so I'd suppose it's the former option here. He's a perfect government shill:
>January 6 was the worst thing ever, an American storming of the Bastille
>social distancing, masks, and lockdown work, they are safe and effective
>scepticism of the 2020 elections is anti-democratic
He couldn't be more of an NPC

[Anonymous No.22139132]

>>22136419
>>22138695
>>22139096
See picrel for where this dope's intellect is at now, Bloom would be embarrassed

[Anonymous No.22139284]

>>22139132
Fuck me that's embarrassing. Do Straussians get progressively dumber the further downstream they get? Bloom's overly dramatic, but not bad, Bolotin and Bruell are brilliant, Strauss himself is fairly compelling (albeit a lot of his work is dated now that exoteric writing is so firmly established), but it feels like lots of them either larp as neocons for funding (e.g. Pangle) or embrace retardation for the same reason (Fukuyama).

[Anonymous No.22139325]

>>22139284
They probably get dumber the closer they are to substantial political life, like Michael Anton melting down on some men's fashion forum because some people don't follow arbitrary style rules from the 50s-70s, or Shulsky superfluously citing Strauss on esotericism for some dumb intelligence proposal.

[Anonymous No.22140069]

>>22139325
>like Michael Anton melting down on some men's fashion forum because some people don't follow arbitrary style rules from the 50s-70s
did this actually happen? my goodness

[Anonymous No.22140138]

>>22139132
do these niggers even read? I'm willing to argue that Kant's deontology is undermined by the metaphysics of transcendental idealism but it's absolutely tied to Kant's philosophical system as a whole

[Anonymous No.22140165]

>>22140138
I'm not exactly a Kantfag but saying he didn't have a substantive theory of the ends people pursue is the dumbest thing I've heard in months.

[Anonymous No.22140284]

>>22140069
Lol yes

https://www.askandyaboutclothes.com/threads/why-do-a-3-button-roll-to-2-as-opposed-to-doing-a-2-button-suit.88581/page-3#post-849404

He's "manton" on there, and this kinda dumb pedantry goes on for pages and pages.

[Anonymous No.22140452]

>>22140138
The simpler ad dumber thing is that he's taking "deontology" as "de-ontology", except it's derived from the Greek "deon," "to be necessary."

[Anonymous No.22140575]

>>22140452
yeah I know. you'd think a guy educated at Harvard would have tried to take the obvious route though.

[Anonymous No.22141640]

>>22140575
That which is necessary.

[Anonymous No.22142466]

>>22141640
is never necessary for reputation, unfortunately

[Anonymous No.22142563]

From what I know of Strauss and the little I've cared to read (he's way down the list yet, but I assume I'll reach him at some point in ten years), he and his group of equally unknown students seem to be some close minded "intellectuals" of the type of spending-my-life in a library deciphering non-existent secret mysterious code message in random ancient thinkers. There are a couple of those. They remind me of religious exegetes that do the same but with another purpose in mind and a different goal for understanding. Straussians seem to also be fundamentally biased towards their own rationalist universal positions, which is why when someone of the calibre of Plato bluntly disagrees with their assumptions they go on to "esoterically" "analyze" his works and pull out of their asses some puzzling incomprehensible theory after taking random descriptions and minute blurry details out of context and putting them into their own framework. Plato, for his own sake, most likely wasn't a master of literary allusions and metaphors, nor did he intend to be, and I find the "problem" of the existence of probably esoteric works of his to be irrelevant. I happen to be a radical cultural relativist and an even more radical historicist, so the Straussian emphasis on natural right and some vaguely mystical enlightened liberalism is a priori funny to me. I'll admit my ignorance to comment further, but I'm initially sceptical towards any such methodologies and positions (they're also, not new by any case, esoteric readings and secret scriptures are as old as writing, but that also makes them next to useless to discuss, since their point is to be unreliable to non-acolytes. possible exception to this are alchemy manuals.)

[Anonymous No.22142579]

>>22142563
it also doesn't help that I've already read two or three "exegetical" works on Plato that try to clear up the seemingly hidden nature of his "true" and "actual" intentions, and they all disagree or contradict each other.

[Anonymous No.22142877]

>>22142563
>Plato, for his own sake, most likely wasn't a master of literary allusions and metaphors, nor did he intend to be,
Oh, I guess he must have accidentally wrote dialogues that are layered in artistic flair which magically match up with the force of his thought. You can criticize Straussians for often searching for things that aren't there that align with their own prejudices, but their method is a perfectly valid and often enriching way of reading philosophers when performed without dogmatism.

[Anonymous No.22142925]

>>22134156
Wow, very convincing, I'm going to change my ways

[Anonymous No.22143233]

>>22142563
It would take quite a bit to address this with the precision that would be convincing, especially if Strauss is low priority for you, since what would clear up misunderstandings of him would be the reading of him (and, as with, say, Heidegger, there's a lot to read). So let me start with three points.

>I happen to be a radical cultural relativist and an even more radical historicist, so the Straussian emphasis on natural right and some vaguely mystical enlightened liberalism is a priori funny to me
Presumably, you take it that Strauss has a dogmatic position on natural right?

Here's Strauss on his book, Natural Right and History, in a letter to Helmut Kuhn:
>I myself regard the book as a preparation to an adequate philosophic discussion rather than as a treatise settling the question (cf. the end of the Introduction and of Chapter 1). Such a preparation is necessary because the very notion of natural right has become completely obscured in the course of the last century.
Hence, if one reads the book, while can come away a view towards the problematic differences between modern and ancient natural right, Strauss is also not trying to solve the problems, but raise them anew in the spirit of a free and open inquiry, making certain features apparent in order to set readers on the way to re-opening an investigation into what natural right is, whether it's true or real, etc.

>I'll admit my ignorance to comment further, but I'm initially sceptical towards any such methodologies and positions (they're also, not new by any case, esoteric readings and secret scriptures are as old as writing, but that also makes them next to useless to discuss, since their point is to be unreliable to non-acolytes. possible exception to this are alchemy manuals.)
It's fine to be skeptical (and in fact, I originally read Strauss with the aim to refute him for myself, since, coming originally from Wittgenstein and Heidegger, I thought the esotericist thing was loosey goosey bullshit, and I was at the time persuaded that he and all of his students were the neocons that drove us into Iraq that liberal critics in the early 2000s claimed). Having read him, and been persuaded by him, I can the following about "method": There is no single method, but rather, Strauss starts, whether explicitly in his published works, or implicitly according to private writings and correspondence, by looking to how a particular author suggests they should be read, or by how they claim to read others. Hence, he approaches Spinoza differently from Plato, Rousseau differently from Nietzsche, Xenophon differently from Maimonides, depending on what the authors themselves supply.

(Cont.)

[Anonymous No.22143331]

>>22142563
>>22143233
To use a concrete example: just about everyone who reads the Republic thinks Socrates more or less completely refutes Cephalus, Polemarchus, and Thrasymachus in bk. 1, while Strauss and his students seem to suggest the three are relevant elsewhere in the Republic. So let's say you agree with the former; we point out that Cephalus' concern with what the gods expect of us comes back in as the censored poetry of bks. 2-3, and his concern of the afterlife comes back in through the myth of Er; Polemarchus' view that justice is benefiting friends and harming enemies is refuted *as* justice itself, but comes back in as the standard the guardians/auxiliaries are to live up to (compared to dogs who can distinguish friend and enemy); Thrasymachus' feigned indignation comes back as the spirited, honor- and victory-loving part of the soul that drives a lot of the dialogue, and his demand that Socrates speak precisely about things comes back as the principle of "one man, one art", comes back as the mathematical education of the philosopher kings, and even comes back as the Republic's own peculiar sign of how to determine whether there's a form of something (grounded in speech). So, if you take it, against Strauss, that bk. merely knocks down opinions about justice, what would you do with the interlocutors' notions coming back in?

Admittedly, Strauss and his students differ with each other over details, or one commentary will emphasize these passages over those as sme ther commentary will. But I would think, both, that it's good that the commentaries differ so that they're not wholly dogmatic repititions, and, that it's some evidence that they don't just subject texts to an ossified "one size fits all" approach.

Final point:
>...which is why when someone of the calibre of Plato bluntly disagrees with their assumptions they go on to "esoterically" "analyze" his works and pull out of their asses some puzzling incomprehensible theory after taking random descriptions and minute blurry details out of context and putting them into their own framework. Plato, for his own sake, most likely wasn't a master of literary allusions and metaphors, nor did he intend to be...
I would ask how you can be sure of this. I think what I wrote above applies well enough to the first part here, but a text like the Phaedrus more or less tells you the ideal case of writing at 263e-264e, when Socrates speaks of the logographic necessity of speeches. Would you contend that it's not going to be more revealing of Plato to, as Strauss does, read the dialogues in light of an arrangement that Socrates suggests is the best way to put speeches together? And would not the existence of such a passage (and similar or related appear in Symposium and Sophist) suggest that Plato did think deeply about the arrangements, word choices, and orders he decided upon?

[Anonymous No.22143429]

By the by, the videos for the conference on Strauss's Euthyphro notebook just went up.

https://leostraussfoundation.org/news

[Anonymous No.22143484]

>>22143331
>Socrates more or less completely refutes Thrasymachus in Book 1
About that, anon. If memory serves, doesn't Thrasymachus fall into a self-contradiction only because he asserts that the tyrant always knows his own good when he chooses something (a bafflingly silly claim)? If he'd only said the tyrant acts for his apparent good, he would have escaped Socrates' refutation. So the whole "justice is the advantage of the stronger" argument doesn't really get properly shut down, it seems to me (probably why Glaucon and Adeimantus remain unpersuaded).

[Anonymous No.22144989]

>>22143429
nice, I'll have to check that out

[Anonymous No.22145513]

>>22143484
I agree, rather was just characterizing how most non-Straussians read it.

[Anonymous No.22147089]

>>22142925
I love these threads

[Anonymous No.22147748]

>>22118761
inceldom is a mental illness
the cure is trannification

[Anonymous No.22147838]

>>22143429
>>22144989
Audio is frustratingly quiet throughout, with the exceptions of the presentations of Hannes Kerber (furst video) and Robert Bartlett (second video). Those two presentations, and Ronna Burger's (third video) are very good, full of great insights and questions. But too damn quiet.

[Anonymous No.22149235]

>>22147838
even with it turned all the way up I can't hear it. Exceptionally frustrating, Bartlett is pretty smart.