-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of Chuck Grimes Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2004 9:17 PM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: RE: [lbo-talk] Gadamer, Truth and Method
> I am having a similar problem with Strauss. I am still brooding on
what he wanted out of Judaism. I suspect he expected to be convinced
of the actuality of revelation. I am almost certain he never had such
an experience and he is extraordinarily blind to the aesthetic
dimensions of life. It's like he has a fundamental block, so he can't
feel anything. Oh, he can get angry and pissy, but he has no lyrical
moments, ever. There is nothing funny about him. He can be sarcastic,
but otherwise he is irony deficient.
** Is there any kind of utopian imaginary animating his thought? It takes a great deal of energy and determination to repress or ignore the aesthetic dimension... perhaps to paraphrase Agnes Heller's critique of Habermas: "Straussian man has no body, no feelings; the 'structure of personality' is identified with cognition, language and interaction..." (Heller, Habermas and Marxism in Habermas: Critical Debates) ?? What about Arendt's comments about Eichmann: he had a fundamental incapacity to see the world from the viewpoint of another person... doggedly attached to cliches, elation... and forgetting, at his execution, that he was about to be killed.
ken
ps. there's a new marketing gimmick: Vitamin Irony. Vitamin Irony is a pill that will aid in the development of an incongruence between the horizon of expectation and the semantics of experience, functioning primarily as a carrier of sarcastic insult between members of the social body but also providing topical relief to aching ontologies and first principles.