``strauss essentially lumped 'liberal relativism' (he didn't use term 'moral relativism'), historicism, and natural science into similar 'bad' category, crisis of political thought required that western political theory - which strauss claimed had been in decline since machiavelli and hobbes - recover truth of classical political philosophy in plato and aristotle...
of course 'eternal truth' that strauss believed in could only be uncovered by likes of strauss which explains all that esoteric reading crap...'' Michael Hoover
----------
This reminds me why I more or less gave up on reading Strauss to understand what on earth possessed him to write what he did.
He had some kind of mental or interpretative deficit or perhaps he was just one of those people who were perverse, in the sense of obtuse and pig headed. He would read a work and then turn it inside out and backwards, and then claim to have given a correct reading. Then he would proceed to argue with his inside out and backward interpretation as if that was what his interlocutor had actually written.
He is so difficult to read that he far surpasses Judith Butler in her heyday of postmodern traceries of Hegel. At least Butler wrote with a relatively accurate reading of Hegel in mind, so that you could go back to Hegel and find what she was interrogating (Psychic Lives of Power, Master-Slave dialectic in FWH's Phenomenology of Mind).
I'll give you an example. In his work on Spinoza, Strauss takes the view point that Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise founded what Strauss called Bible Science. What he means by this is a kind of rational theology. He then proceeds to begin with Epicurus as the origin of a rational critique of religion. (Needless to say, Spinoza had no intention of founding bible science. He used common sense, reason and doubt, following Descartes, specifically in order to destroy religious orthodox by rational ridicule and endless illustrations of orthodoxy's evident absurdity.)
I am sitting here at a complete loss. While Strauss's approach makes a certain kind of twisted sense, it is too far removed from the apparent intentions of either Epicurus or Spinoza to make any sense. I think it is a profound mistake to argue with Strauss directly, because to do so, is to tacitly assume his interpretations are correct and lay out the true universe of discourse. However even a cursory reading of either E or S reveals Strauss has more or less invented his own strawmen and they bare only a passing resemblance to their models.
His delusional idea that he was to the `left' of empirical social science is a case in point, and illustrates his own twisted form of rationalism.
``despite his conservative politics, strauss labelled himself on the 'left' of the profession in his defense of 'ancient' political science against 'modern' political science, his rationale for this was that he - like 'the left' - was issuing a challenge to mainstream 'orthodoxy' in the discipline...'' (MH)
A proper characterization of what Strauss was doing has nothing to do with `left' anything. The issue is that the German brand of historical idealism as practiced by Strauss's professors, was founded on various ideological assumptions in the history of the German philosophy, and using these philosophical approaches, French Positivism and US-UK `empirical' studies in the social sciences can be thoroughly critiqued to reveal their own ideological assumptions, which are for the most part obscured by empty claims of objectivity, illustrated with data. That many of Strauss's contemporaries on the Left made these critiques before Strauss got his twisted version into print, hardly qualifies Strauss to claim he was mounting a left critique of US academic political science.
Now let's try to disentangle the idea that Strauss's embrace of Aristotle is a Left move in relation to the evidently pragmatic and democratic ideal that the modern state should be composed of chorus of different interests and voices---which are to be sorted out through a means based process of debates, votes, separation of powers, and elected representatives. Of course, in the realm of idealism these gritty, contentious, and very sloppy means will result in something less than a perfect representation of their idealq. For one thing, the living process is quite far removed from Aristotle's ideal of the universal good (happiness) since the means are most often nasty, vicious, and miserable to live with. Certainly it is far better to have a comodious elite determine the public good among themselves behind closed doors and then announce their finding to the rest of us. However, I see nothing Left about such a proposition.
I think that Strauss, by his example alone illustrates just about everything that is wrong, anti-progressive, and utterly intolerant about the current political atmosphere of the US---which is heavily ladened with his bastard offspring who were suckled on his ideologically driven babble on antiquity. The core political point is, the belief that an ideological view of the world absolutely triumphs over the concrete facts of life. Ideas trump facts, or more absurd, values trump facts. It therefore doesn't matter that thousands die, that the means are so perverted that they violate every code of justice, because in the great end point or the ideal, the greater `good' will be affirmed.
The deepest practical problem with such idealism is that like religious faith, it is revealed only as a subjective truth to the initiates, and allows no objective measure. Theoretically idealism is subject to reason, and reason is in its most fundamental sense, a public process, a method, something both characteristic of and dependent on public debate. But idealism maintains its stature by denying reason any examination, since a priori, the universal good or the founding principle of idealism, is not a relative truth, one to be argued, modified, perhaps refuted, but an absolute truth---an absolute that is beyond refutation, modification, or god forbit, change.
Since absolute truths are uncontestable and immune to the liberal democratic arena of debate, even in the abstract as rational dialogue, and in principle can not be moderated, mediated, or modified without falling prey to evil relativism, it almost falls like bricks crumbling from the facade of the police state, that the proper political arena for the combat of absolute truths is war. There in the blood and iron machine, power and fortune determine which absolute survives. And thus we are lead, step by step to understand that the most resolutewill to power is the final arbiter of such absolute truths.
Seig Heil.
CG