Episode 135 ... Leo Strauss - Ancients vs. Moderns
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 8 ต.ค. 2019
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I love this podcast. Just discovered it. Listening to the early eps over an over again at the moment. Get more from each ep every time I hear one. Thanks Mr West
This episode is a gem ! You article Strauss idea so masterfully which admits just how well you have comprehended this view.
I would say this is one of my favorite episodes but I like so many of them. The real vs ideal is super intriguing though and I'd love to hear more episodes on that. I've listened to this one many times already.
Yay! So glad to hear a new episode. I have recently grown very interested in philosophy and find myself shut out of most groups bc I am a newby and don't quite understand the vernacular yet. I am homebound bc of Leukemia treatments, but your podcast has given me a new interest to cultivate. Thank you!
I hope you never stop putting out episodes.
So nice to see you back! I’d been wondering about your podcast for the past week or two.
I have no words other than admiration by the work Stephen does to make philosophy accesible with quality by any one who might interest!
I really wanted to ask for episodes about John Mill and Etienne de la Boetie, if I may.
It looks like Joe "A buddy of mine" Rogan wants you on his podcast...I hope I see you on there!
Fascinating. Leo Strauss is great, also I love that you have Isaiah Berlin episodes- his introduction to Joseph De Maistre’s “Considerations on France” is one of my favorite philosophical essays (on a Philosophical essay lol).
Bro you do an amazing job every time I listen to these. I’ve been reading books written by the people you have narrated. Makes me think and helps my convictions.
Well presented. Machiavelli initiated the break with the tradition by openly and publically rejecting the ontological priority of ends in nature. This he did long before the mathematicizing of nature and it's concomitant metaphysical neutrality which followed in the 17th century.
Also Machiavelli launched not just a revolution in philosophy but a blasphemous assault upon Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. Modern philosophy would be further aided albeit unawares by Luther.
Great stuff. For the Everyman like myself
Just so good. Thank you so much! Philosophy is absolutely a way of life.
finally you're back into my life!
This piece was great. thanks
Patreon is cool, dude.
I just listened to his latest podcast about Hannah Arendt, not yet available on youtube.
The ending is powerful.
A veiled or not-so-veiled call to action.
Damn this got me thinking
How do you decide when rational analysis is appropriate and when it is not? Like Hegel said, to know a limit as a limit is to be beyond it. Reason is broader than enlightenment rationality
We need Values, we need Guidance, we need Morality. Why does Leo Strauss resembles my town preacher so much? hahaha my god, i feel i went back five centuries with this podcast.
This is great it really helps with understanding what's going on today.
16:20 what modernity, post-enlightenment, eventually leads to:
Relativism
Historicism
Scientism
Economism
Or Nihilism.
Without a strict value system we might derive meaning from these schools of thought.
Strauss was mid-20th Century, not early. He died, at 74, in 1973, and started publishing in the 1930s.
Eff to the yee-yeah ! !
Translation :
Awesome ! ! More "Philosophize This !" !
Suppose one's implementing certain ways to put together the 'real' world, that nonetheless includes a prior world as a scenario up for implementation, which is a continuity of the 'ideal' one. How can that be included addressed in the discussion? Doesn't that in a way imply the prior world's shortcomings?
Anyways, I'm new here, and having a great time enjoying the podcasts!
are there transcripts available?
Yes, if you go to philosophizethis . org and click on the episode you are interested in, you will find a link to the transcript under the audio player.
If you like this episode on Leo Strauss, you would probably find it helpful applied much more specifically to contemporary American life, particularly universities, by Strauss' student Allan Bloom, in the 80's bestseller "Closing of the American Mind," explained by Bradford Harris. Here's the link: th-cam.com/video/j3OIyCs_In4/w-d-xo.html
Bloom's book owes much to Strauss' account, but much more particular, and concerned of our interest.
Leo Strauss is the most interesting Conservative I've ever heard of before.
Based strauss.
9:00
Question: is incest wrong?
Science: nope
Plato: ohhh man I told you guys that this would rob human being of their identity and values
I listened to both this & Hannah Arendt's episodes, and a question repeatedly came up. Now, I know these are summaries and my ignorance of these authors may get in the way.
But, who are these "people" the authors refer to? In this one we're introduced to the idea that for all the good the Enlightenment/Modernity gave us, it also produced a crisis of values or of identity, which is juxtaposed with earlier historic periods and societies which build their projects upon certain values.
In Arendt's episode, likewise, the Enlightenment merely reinforced the practical idea that the essence of a person is the economic pursuit they're dedicated to.
In both cases I'm left wondering who are these collectives of people that both authors conjured up to justify these argument? Simply put, when has ever not the - for lack of a better term - average joe concern himself with setting food on the table? How can these authors, and Strauss mostly, assert that a farmer or potter in Ancient Greece had the availability to dedicate himself to such existential matters? Or when were such people actively welcome and participating in a society's political life?
It may be my ignorance, but it seems there's an underlying notion of privilege to such analysis, or perhaps self-delusion.
The farmer in ancient greece did not have the availability to dedicate himself to "existencial matters", as you put it. But according to Strauss he did live in a society whose goal was the moral improvement of its members, as opposed to current liberal societies which have as goals the protection of freedom and rights.
This moral improvement was achieved (or at least tried to, of course no society is perfect) by coercion, both from the rulers of the city and other members. Being involved in political life is then this way of exerting yourself on others with the goal of general moral improvement, it is not just being a politician or a member of an assembly as it is commonly understood today.
You speak of privilege and in a way you are right. For the ancients as well as for Strauss, men are not equal in virtue, and those who are better should lead others, again with the goal of moral improvement. It is a good thing that those who are too poor or vulgar are ruled by those who are more virtuous, even if their poverty and vulgarity is not their fault.
I found this very unsatisfying. Who said "reason necessarily gives certainty" about the world"? What did they mean by "reason" and "certainty"? What did Strauss mean by these? The danger of presuming a common understanding of terms is why philosophers normally have to define them.
Strauss' conclusion about the "25:19 " quote yet as long as there is no wisdom but only a quest for wisdom the evidence of all solutions is necessarily smaller than the evidence of the problems." Strauss sounds like an ancient Greek sceptic and his "evidence of the problems" reminds me of the following story about Pyrrho:
"... In his youth, when he was taking his constitutional one afternoon, Pyrrho saw his teacher in philosophy (from whom he had imbibed his principles) with his head stuck in a ditch, unable to get out. After contemplating him for some time, he walked on, maintaining that there was no sufficient ground for thinking he would do any good by pulling the man out. Others, less skeptical, effected a rescue, and blamed Pyrrho for his heartlessness. But his teacher, true to his principles, praised him for his consistency."
What would Strauss do in Pyrrho's situation? Would he be paralyzed from taking action by the "evidence of the problems"?
---
Religious claims to give absolute knowledge through divine inspiration or the authority were exposed not only by the skepticism of the Enlightenment but also by the scientific revolution which demonstrated that it was possible to obtain knowledge about the world but, more fundamentally, defined what we mean by knowledge of the world and also the boundary between our knowledge of it and our ignorance. Ask any scientist repeatedly "Why?" and they will eventually reach a point where they say "we don't know".
Objective knowledge, in contrast to absolute knowledge, can be wrong. If the essence were the same as the appearance, there would be no need for science. (Kant said the thing-in-itself is unknowable. Doesn't this concede there can be no certainty?)
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THE MARXIST ANSWER:
"... From the standpoint of modern materialism i.e., Marxism, the limits of approximation of our knowledge to objective, absolute truth are historically conditional, but the existence of such truth is unconditional, and the fact that we are approaching nearer to it is also unconditional. The contours of the picture are historically conditional, but the fact that this picture depicts an objectively existing model is unconditional. When and under what circumstances we reached, in our knowledge of the essential nature of things, the discovery of alizarin in coal tar or the discovery of electrons in the atom is historically conditional; but that every such discovery is an advance of “absolutely objective knowledge” is unconditional. In a word, every ideology is historically conditional, but it is unconditionally true that to every scientific ideology (as distinct, for instance, from religious ideology), there corresponds an objective truth, absolute nature. You will say that this distinction between relative and absolute truth is indefinite. And I shall reply: yes, it is sufficiently “indefinite” to prevent science from becoming a dogma in the bad sense of the term, from becoming something dead, frozen, ossified; but it is at the same time sufficiently “definite” to enable us to dissociate ourselves in the most emphatic and irrevocable manner from fideism and agnosticism, from philosophical idealism and the sophistry of the followers of Hume and Kant. Here is a boundary which you have not noticed, and not having noticed it, you have fallen into the swamp of reactionary philosophy. It is the boundary between dialectical materialism and relativism."
MATERIALISM and EMPIRIO-CRITICISM Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy (Chapter Two: The Theory of Knowledge of Empirio-Criticism and of Dialectical Materialism. II )
5. Absolute and Relative Truth, or the Eclecticism of Engels as Discovered by A. Bogdanov (V. I. Lenin, 1908)
i.e. There is no certainty. But there are closer and closer approximations to the truth over time and based on passed achievements. Would Strauss agree with this?
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THE THIRD REICH AS THE "ULTIMATE EXPRESSION" OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT? REALLY?
at 18:42 "He [Strauss] makes a case that the agenda of the Third Reich and Nazi Germany is in many ways the ultimate expression of the thought of the Enlightenment because similar to the Enlightenment their chief aim was to do away with the existing traditions and values and replace them instead with a power structure under which the universe could be controlled or at least seemed controlled".
Was it just the Third Reich's "agenda" or their actions as well? Aside from that, what "agenda"? The murder of European Jewry? The destruction of the Soviet Union? The destruction of independent organisations of the German working class? The resumption of German war aims from WWI? All of these? Some of these? It should be noted that the Third Reich not only had to use force and terror to suppress the conservative, liberal, social-democratic, communist, and anarchists who opposed it but also the "internal" threat from the SA. In the 1934 Night of the Long Knives they executed the leadership of the SA and broke up that organisation.
I would ask,
- did Strauss think the Nazis were following the Enlightenment when they called quantum mechanics "Jewish science"?
- did Strauss think Heidegger was the ultimate Enlightenment philosopher since he, in his own way, joined the Nazi "revolution" for a while? In his 1966 Der Spiegel interview Heidegger says the Nazis "were actually moving in the right direction but they were too limited in their purview to really bring it off."
"ultimate expression of the thought of the Enlightenment" sounds like good hyperbolic distortion and exaggeration for ideological propaganda. From the video, Strauss has concluded the Enlightenment project is over but to kill it his project is served by claiming the Enlightenment's logical conclusion was and remains heinous and unacceptable. If it didn't, the danger is we might not discard it. (Strauss wasn't unique in such conclusions: Horkheimer and Adorno^ said “Enlightenment is totalitarian” and "The Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant." For that matter did Strauss only implicate the Enlightenment in the Nazi regime? Many others have claimed that "reason" led to Marx which inevitably led to Stalinism, the gulags and the Great Terror 1936-1939 etc.)
If the Enlightenment was not about "Sapere Aude" ("Dare to know") but really about "a power structure under which the universe could be controlled or at least seemed controlled" then why isn't everything about "power", including Strauss? What was Strauss' answer to Nietzsche?
^ Adorno refused to address, let alone condemn the Moscow Trials even though he and other leading members of the Frankfurt School were quite aware of what was taking place.
YOU WERE GONE TOO LONG AGAIN.
So in other words be a philosopher as needed?
no, be a philosopher from necessity
I know that this has nothing to do with the topic, as a matter of fact I am not very interested in philosophy, simply I listen only for improve my listening, but what an impressive body has my pretty sister in law
Lots of neat oversimplifications here. We don't know what the ancient thought, only a fraction of what they wrote remained and how the average man was affected by then isn't clear. You saying the Greeks thought x is a fantasy. Who were there Greeks in this sentence, do you have any evidence about what the common Man thought of philosophy? All appearances indicate that they didn't think about it at all and it didn't effect their life in any meaningful way. Philosophy is an occupation for the elite who have their slaves reap and sow as the ancient Greek play jokes. The rhetoric used in this podcast is similar to the altright in its fantastic over generalisations.
This is a very bad take. Try harder next time.