[lbo-talk] Re: rm -R Strauss

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Tue Oct 19 21:23:24 PDT 2004


As for the missing chapter, if you've got a print-out, I'd be glad to scan it in for you at work. Michael

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I might take you up on it later. But I am in the middle of other things and have my head somewhere else. Besides it was Karma. The computer knew it was bad stuff. Poor thing was making strange noises. The screen used to flicker and wiggle. Now all is quiet, smooth, even the old cpu fan stopped squawking once Strauss vanished.

I think Leo was bad for my computer, and he was definitely bad for my brain. He was a terrible writer. I really had my doubts about whether I could keep working on him or not. I could barely stand to read him.

I would start one of his essays and then stop and re-trace the works he as trying to analyze, only to find the originals were all much more interesting than what Strauss made them out to be. I would get lost in someone else for days and forget about Strauss.

Two background works in particular were very good. Julius Guttmann's Philosophies of Judaism and George di Giovanni's The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill of F.H.Jacobi. The wonderful confidence and command of material in Guttman or di Giovanni was always an great relief from Strauss's forever tortured and ambiguous development on identical material. Just as it struck me as extraordinary that Strauss could have been a student under Cassirer, it also seemed equally ridiculous that he worked under Guttmann. I couldn't figure it out. Here were two really beautiful writers with extremely sophisticated scholarship, astonishing erudition and absolute command of their material and its history, and then there was Strauss. Always nervous, mostly wrong, confused, circuitous, even stalling around a point he couldn't quite make and completely out of his league. He couldn't have picked better mentors. He then proceeded to spend some of his meager talents trying to critique them!

I learned a tremendous amount about the period, the intellectual history behind it, and gained a great deal of sympathy for Weimar Germany. It's hard to explain why the sympathy. At this point in time, we just assume Germany deserved its fate. It didn't.

I think what was making me sick was to realize somehow Strauss had been infected by `it' what ever the fuck `it' was. Idealism? It was more than that and more than just the propaganda politics of race and hate. What was coming into focus was that `it' was a consequence of pursuing an idealism of a created or re-created or fabricated identity. It was this rather vague construction that pushed Strauss to react against the Enlightenment and turn first toward Nietzsche and Heidegger and then backward to before Spinoza. He was doing in books and libraries what other German academics were doing in the Middle East who were looking for the Aryans in archaeological digs. It was a return to some pre-enlightenment `roots', but some how gone off into the purely imaginary.

It was a delusional nightmare because the efforts escalated in intensity as an ever more comprehensive denial of their own deteriorating concrete conditions and increasingly dower political climate. It was a frenzied race into the unreal.

When I got close to Strauss by reading his early work and tried to reconstruct its motivations for understanding, he made me ill. It's almost impossible to emphasize enough how many intellectual elements of that period have intensely vivid parallels to our own---particularly the Right's insane insistence that they represent `traditional America', and `American values.' The Right is an identity movement married to an ideology and these are both a complete fabrication of their own minds with just barely enough popular history flourish to make believe they represent some traditional America that never existed.

Of course Leo Strauss isn't responsible for the US Right or even the neocons. Most of the Right has never heard of him. The neoconservatives are another matter. But even most of them have never studied Strauss, let alone tried to read his early work within its own historical and intellectual context.

Strauss's importance is as a kind of flawed historical and intellectual example, a sort of dark thematic trajectory of how a cultural-intellectual dialectic of identity and polity can develop into a full blown reactionary ideology. But none of that reactionary ideology is fixed as some historically deterministic trace because the starkly contrasting examples were numerous, and ironically they were all well known to Strauss. For example there were Arendt, Cassirer, and Guttmann, or some of the more distant Frankfurters on the left.

Gregory Geboski posted something yesterday that goes straight to the heart of the matter (The reality-based community):

``...The aide [to Bush] said that guys like me [journalist] were `in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who `believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. `That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. `We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'...''

(from Without a Doubt, Ron Suskind, 10/17/2004)

I think the connection to Strauss here is through a similarity of mind set. Strauss would decide apparently in advance where and how he placed his subjects in some pantheon of his own design. Then Strauss would write over his subject deforming him or it into the corrected position. This was particularly evident in his views of Spinoza and Rousseau. The writings and thoughts of his subjects represented obstacles and so he proceeded to re-construct them accordingly.

CG



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