--- Chuck Grimes <cgrimes at rawbw.com> wrote:
> CB: What's Strauss' relation to Nietzsche ?
>
> -------
Here is a post I wrote for another list that (out of context) that partly addresses Charles' question, though in a superficial way.
Nietzsche was by training a classical philologist, a student of the origin, meaning, and history of words as used in classical texts. He was only very briefly a
professor; he hated the academy (see "We Scholars" in Beyond Good and Evil). Being a professor made no serious mark on him; his major work as a professor, The Birth of Tragedy, was so strange, from an academic point of view, that he was regarded by the profession as Someone Too Wacko To Be Taken Seriously.
Chuck is right that the Greeks were very important for both Strauss and Nietzsche, but I think in very different ways. Strauss wrote about classical philosophy, but the key to his interest in classical philosophy, I believe, is Plato's idea of the Noble Lie, from the Republic, as explained below; it is the source of his doctrine that the great thinkers have an exoteric and an esoteric doctrine, the former for public consumption and the latter for the cognesienti who have mastered Straussian reading.
Strauss may have indulged in the usual German Romantic fantasy about pre-Socratic Greek culture asa realm of wholeness, happy hierachrchy, and unquestioned obedience to the masters -- one gets some of this in Hegel's doctrine of Sittlichkeit or Ethical Life in the Phenomenology of Spirit.
And Nietzsche was no friend of Socrates either, but not because he thought Socrates busted up a happy wholeness in hierarchy -- the whole point of The Birth of Tragedy is that preSocratic Greece was a witches' brew of Dionysian conflict that gets covered up[ by an Apollonian mask of calmness and reason.
He returns to the idea that ancient (preSocratic) Greece was a world of confict in the Geneaology, with his class struggle account of the origin of morality. Nietzsche was deliberately attempting to dynamite the image of Greeks that had been made sacred in German (and other continental, as well as, but N did not knwo this, English) education.
However Chuck is right that Nietzsche's Greeks have something to do with Strauss's Greeks and with Strauss' appropriation of Nietzsche; this requires more examination.
jks
* **
Strauss is an evil scumbag, the worst kind of abuser of Nietzsche, the eminance grise of American neoconservatism. Every word he wrote was a lie -- and this was his theory. he was inspired by Plato's idea of The Noble Lie in The Republic -- the story that hierarchy of philosopher-kings, guardians, and worker bees is justified by the "fact" that the first are made of gold, the second of silver, and the third of lead -- Plato in fact believed that abilities of different sorts are randomly distributed, but that hierarchy is socially necessary, and some sort lie like that is necessary to get people (including the philosopher kings) to accept it.
Now Strauss thought that the world is divided into the tiny handful of people in the Program in Social Thought at the University of Chicago who can handle the Nietzschean truth (as he understood it to be) that God is dead and life is meaningless, and the mass of boneheads who have to believe in the lie that there are absolute values built into the structure of the universe, without which belief society would collapse.
Not only did Strauss write books like Natural Right and History in which he deliberately lied about the existence of such absolutely truths in which he most emphatically did not believe, but he thought that many of the important thinker sin Western thought had the same idea -- Thucydides, Plato, Maimonides, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Hobbes, and of course Nietzsche -- all people he wrote about. (Some of these people arguably did believe something sort of like this.) He "taught" (this is the way Straussians talk) that there us an exoteric meaning in the great writers for the hoi poloi and esoteric ones for initiates of the Program In Social Thought.
Straussian method is actually similar to what was later come to be rediscovered by the French as deconstruction -- careful reading, focusing on contradictions and inconsistencies that "show" that what they apparently said is not what they meant, and what they really meant is what Strauss thought. As someone who has been on the receiving end of several Straussian teachers (not at U of C), I can testify that it is actually a pretty bracing and exciting experience, which is probably part of why it is so seductive to many who become acolytes -- that being being told that you are part of a special elite.
In addition, though tendentious in the main, Strauss's books, or some of them, are pretty interesting, at least the interpretive ones -- not the silly lies he wrote about absolute value. As are some book by his disciples, including Allan Bloom, btw, many of whom are very smart.
Strauss' influence in American public life has been baneful. A Canadian writer named Shadia Drury, author of Leo Strauss and the American Right, as well as some other books, has explained Strauss' ideas (with careful references) and traced his influence -- and this was before his followers in the Bush administration elevated his ideas into an imperial policy. Because while Strauss of course hated Communism and Fascism (he probably would not have hated fascism if he had not been Jewish), he despised democracy -- while lying to say that he believed in it passionately. What he really believed in, politically, is rule by philosopher kings in the name of democracy.
Anyway, that's a short intro. Read Drury for more details.
--- Chuck Grimes <cgrimes at rawbw.com> wrote:
> CB: What's Strauss' relation to Nietzsche ?
>
> -------
>
>
> This is something that I haven't managed to
> untangle, but I know from
> gossip and Strauss's own notes, that he spent a
> great deal of time
> reading Nietzsche in the 20s when he was in his
> twenties. (Below is
> all speculation, so it could be way off...)
>
> Naturally I spent a good deal of time reading
> Nietzsche in my 20s. But
> honestly, while I enjoyed the great rage against the
> machine of
> modernity, I didn't have much sympathy with N. I
> didn't like his rants
> on the herd---common people. I had already made up
> my own mind about
> God and morality, and I was not enthalled with him.
> In fact, he made
> me sick (existentially nauseated) in a strange
> intellectual way. I
> thought what a fabulous mind, somehow poisioned by
> its own
> erudition. There is something sad about Nietzsche. I
> came to think of
> Nietzsche as a kind of warning. Beware.
>
> Later, after reading Thomas Mann, Malraux, and
> others, I came to see
> that Nietzsche's most important contribution was to
> the literature of
> the age that followed his.
>
> What was Strauss looking for in Nietzsche? We forget
> that Nietzsche
> was essentially what we would call a classics
> professor. He taught
> Greek literature and philosophy, so it is possible
> that theme was what
> Strauss sought. On the other hand, the classics were
> part of the core
> German education system, and it was an area that was
> forbidden to
> Jewish professors who tended to be concentrated as
> unpaid dozents in
> mathematics, physics, and some of the newer
> sciences---departments
> that were just beginning to become `important.'
>
> The other theme involved here is the flow of 19thC
> history where the
> dialogue over modernity was conducted through the
> arts as a battle
> between the painters of romanticism,
> realism, and later impressionism---over and against
> the classical
> inspired artist like David and Ingre---which was
> turned into academic
> painting---those endless historical portraits and
> scenes of national
> heros like Napoleon or Bismark or Wilhelm or
> whoever.
>
> I had to read a book for my German lit class that I
> still have, Eric
> Heller, The Disinherited Mind, essays on Goethe,
> Burckhardt,
> Nietzsche, Rilke, Spengler, Kafka, Krauss. (I have
> yet to re-read
> it...) For at least the first five, you can see a
> common thread. These
> were all writers intensely engaged with the problem
> of resolving Greek
> antiquity with their own idea of modernity. The
> great promise of the
> liberated, rational, and secular human spirit was
> seen as the
> consumate achievement of antiquity. Such a pinacle
> was lost during the
> dark ages and only resurfaced in the Renaissance and
> Enlightenment. The revival of classicism became part
> of the great
> promise of modernity and a return to ancient roots,
> and the true
> center of the human spirit (add Gobineau for the
> dark side). This
> formed a core belief system in all of the above
> along with Kant,
> Hegel, and most of the 19thC luminaries (even Marx
> to a limited
> extent).
>
> Nietzsche saw Christianity as a kind of perversion
> of antiquity, which
> of course it was. I suspect it was some where within
> this tightly
> bound historical moment that most of Strauss's world
> view was
> formed. In his early work, I think he was looking to
> find some way to
> resusciate Judaism's ancient Hellanistic roots in
> neo-platonism. I
> suspect Strauss saw Judaism aligned with classicism,
> through his
> imaginary ideal as a balance between the rationalism
> of antiquity and
> a modern scepticism (in his Zionist writings
> anyway).
>
> I will probably get an enormous amount of shit for
> saying this, but I
> suspect that Judaism was almost a dead religion by
> the late 19thC and
> that it was literally brought back from historical
> oblivion. I think
> Judaism was rescued most especially by German
> Zionism. Whether the
> orthodox agreed or not, (and they mostly disagreed),
> Zionism put
> Judaism back into history. As I went through
> Guttmann's Philosophies
> of Judaism, I was struck by the undertone of urgency
> in Rosenzweig,
> Cohen and of course Guttmann himself.
>
> But I am mentioning this impression only to give
> Strauss some benefit
> of the doubt. He must have felt a similar
> threat---the doors could
> close on an entire world. It was possible, given the
> sweeping changes
> that were gathering on the horizon of modernity,
> that one day here
> would be no living memory of what it had meant to be
> Jewish and live
> in a traditional community. (I am thinking of the
> late 19thC to say
> late 20s before the Third Reich)
>
> So, if you are following this, then that was
> Strauss's attraction to
> Nietzsche, who was kind of a grand rhetorician of
> lost worlds. The
> pronouncement that God was dead, was in effect a
> statement that the
> soul of Christianity was dead. But of course also an
> affirmation, we
> are free to re-invent the world.
>
> Well, first time as tragedy, second round as farce.
> I think (but have
> no way of actually knowing) that the Islamic world
> has been undergoing
> a deeply related transformation. Of course the
> Christians and Jews are
> engaged in some nth round of similar rivivals.
>
> I don't know Charles. I think all these people are
> out of their
> fucking minds. I obviously don't believe any of this
> bullshit. On the
> other hand, it is nice to live a city where I pass
> by old Churchs, an
> old Synagogue done in the Bzyantine style, or a
> Mosque with its dome
> in gold. It makes me feel like I live in a civilized
> world. I don't
> begruge any of that. I just don't what to hear their
> crap on the news.
>
> Speaking of which, it sounds like Ratzinger is a
> neo-con.
>
> CG
>
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