[lbo-talk] Re: Strauss, Bloom, and Rashomon

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Mon Oct 13 11:42:17 PDT 2003


``...what the Straussians think is true and in need of a coverup is that the world is meaningless, God is dead, there are no objective values, everything is permited. But this, they fear, is too strong medicine for the hoi poloi, who must be told that religious faith and objective values are very important, otherwise we will all loot and rob and kill and rape and upset the social order. In this context it is useful to remember that Strauss was a Jewish refugee from the Nazis. One can understand hwo (why) he might have come to think such things...'' jks

But when you compare his reading of say Rousseau and Nietzsche with that of Hannah Arendt and Ernst Cassirer---who give essentially the modernist liberal view, the one I learned---how do you square their views with those of Strauss?

All three had roughly equivalent experiences and backgrounds as German jewish academics, and all left the collapsed Weimar Republic at about the same time. They all landed academic jobs here in the US.

I am still in the process of reading Strauss, so maybe I'll find some overt implication to fabricating separate philosophies, one for the rulers and one for the ruled. So far I haven't. All I've seen so far are what I would call disturbed readings.

``...i guess i've always thought of it less as a repression of the past than an embrace of "history" (that is, the discipline or process) as a kind of myth-making. in the context of rashomon, it's like saying that they've embraced their subject-positions in their understanding of fact/history and then can externalize that as objective reality..'' Jeffrey Fisher

Yes, this is it, or at least part of what I am coming around to. It's this particular subjective process that I am trying to understand. Of course I believe my own version of history, philosophy, and democratic states and am therefore completely closed to Strauss and Bloom's view. On the other hand, their views are such an anathema, that I can't help but be fascinated by their deformities.

It is these deformations in historical and philosophical views that seem to me to relate them to the more concrete and overtly political---the sick and twisted mentality that is ruling the country, and which apparently has broad popular support.

Which brings me to Dwayne Monroe: ``So, the Rashomon phenomena is caused not simply by divergent perspectives, but by the need we have to cling to those elements of the truth that support and reinforce our already formed beliefs...''

Unfortunately, I don't have the friends and family that I once had who were overtly religious and rightwing. I could still manage a tolerable appearance if necessary for the sake of a wedding or a funeral, but that's about it.

What seems to be at the bottom of all these people's soul is fear. So it becomes a kind of game at understanding the nature and configuration of those fears.

Of course my fear is their view of the world and history will become the dominant paradigm not just within the US political arena which it seems to have already accomplished, but also that it will slowly saturate the whole fabric of the US through its re-interpretations of founding ideas and histories. That was their goal, at least I think so.

The ideas, or the intellectual foundations that are part myth and part philosophy for social systems, religions, governments, states, are endlessly modified over time and sometimes disappear. What remains are ritual figures and hollow pronouncements. What strikes me as so crazy about this process is the views that Strauss and Bloom advocate gut the foundations of what they claim to preserve.

Chuck Grimes



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