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. Justin
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Justin, I've been waiting for you to put up something. Thanks. Anyway, yes your right, I had completely forgotten the Dionysus v. Apollo trip. How? I haven't read Nietzsche in years. I tried a little a few months ago. The Modern Library selections are sitting right here with Kaufmann's intro along with Heller's The Disinherited Mind.
I think Nietzsche and Strauss shared the ideal that the primordial Greeks had tapped into the core (or discovered for the first time) the philosophical human spirit, which is an ideal that Heidegger shared.
I know we probably disagree about Strauss's so-called esoteric method. I think he was just a lousy philosopher who forced his pre-conceived ideas on his subjects and didn't particularly care whether his analysis was accurate or not. He did the same thing to Cohen in some of his Zionist writings in the 20s. But Guttmann finally took him to task in an essay that I've seen referenced, but not translated.
According to Mari Rethelyi, Strauss's critique of Guttmann's `Philosophies of Judaism', was `Philosophy and Law' (haven't got to it yet). Again according to Rethelyi, Guttmann's response was, `Philososophie der Religion oder Philosophie des Gesetzes', Israel Academy of Science and Humanities, (1974).
See:
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/journals/tr/volume3/rethelyi.html#n1
(This is a neo-con defence of Strauss, but you can sort of tell what Guttmann's criticism was..)
I had a brief moment, while I was fixing wheelchairs this spring to talk to a Rabbi (UK origin) and theological scholar who knew about all this stuff. He had read Cohen, Strauss, Guttmann, Spinoza and more. It was hard to fix his chair. All I wanted to do was talk. I am afraid, I was entirely overbaring. We started with Spinoza, and he said that there was a movement to have Spinoza's excommunication lifted. I thought this was astonishing. After four hundred and fifty years! This is almost as generous as the Vatican who rescinded the proscription on Galileo's works in the 1840s. Ah, what radicals. Unfortunately, I fixed the chair in an unconscious flash and we had to end the conversation.
Long before Strauss wrote about an esoteric tradition he did his PhD thesis on Jacobi. I went through as much as I could stand of Jacobi (who reminded me of Strauss as a matter of fact, picky, circuitous, and exasperating), and realized that Strauss probably did a bad job on Jacobi too. But the thesis is also un-translated, and I only have Michael Zank's (Leo Strauss, Early Writings, 1921-32) not very systematic presentation.
I am going to quote an essay by Strauss `On the Argument with European Science (1924) in Michael Zank, Strauss Earily Writings. His primary target is Cohen, but he takes on Cassirer in passing:
``On a first reading of the most recent works of Ernest Cassirer, one might think of him as the successor of Hermann Cohen. On the basis of materials gathered from the special sciences and of the attendant discussions, Cassirer reaches the conclusion that the peculiar form of mythic thought consists in a concentration of givens around the sychosomatic unity of the human being. Things are classified either in accord with the character assigned to them by the primitive affect or in accord with an analogy to the parts of the human body, and so on. Thus it is true that myth forms the givens, but `it soon recedes again, along with its own product, into the form of the given'. It is true that myth, like all other forms of the mind, creates a realm of `meanings'; in this respect it too idealizes the world of things. But, to myth, `the moments of thing and meaning indiscriminately' flow into one another. Now, to a certain degree, the mythic concept formation is the fundamental layer that certainly does not vanish in the more mature consciousness of humanity, which has overcome it in principle. If one asks, however, what motive brings about the overcoming of myth, or rather its `sublation', Cassirer answers in a typically idealistic manner that the overcoming is brought about by virtue of the fact that the mind reads the world of myth as its own product, that the mind recognizes itself in the world of myth---and thereby this world loses its `compulsory' character for human beings. `The sequence of stages of the intellectual forms of expression''; leads from myth to language to art, in which the mind attains its highest freedom.
Naturally, this theory cannot be applied to the biblical development. To be sure, when the formations of pre-prophetic `religion' are seen as `the work of man,' this also means the negations of their compulsory character. However, the work of man that compels human beings is now replaced not by the autonomous human spirit, but rather by a different, stronger compulsion, the `one and only' compulsion. The products of myth are rejected not because they compel human beings but rather because, in view of their human origin, they cannot compel them. It is characteristic of the difference existing from the beginning between Cohen and the Marburg school that Cohen's polemic against myth---aiming, as it it does, not at its `sublation' but at its elimination---is guided precisely not by idealist motives. Cohen teaches that the ethical motive, that is, the interest in the question `to what end' the mythical motive, that is the interest in the question `whence'? What does this mean? In the concrete context of human existence, the transcendence of the Ought in relation to Being demands by its very nature, as Cohen stated over and over again, the ethics be further developed into religion.'' (114p, Zank)
``Naturally, this theory cannot be applied to the biblical development'' is exactly contrary to the whole thrust of Cassirer's work. Of course religion was a prime example of precisely the sorts of mythic systems he was interested in investigating. Strauss later in the same passage notes,
``It seems to me that it is no accident that Cassirer, in his attempt to sketch the relations between the mythic and the religious formation of concepts, refers to Vedic religion, to Parsiism, to Calvinism, and to Jansenism, but not to Judaism...''
Strauss was right, Cassirer did not mentioned Judaism or Christianity by name, except to refer to them both as Prophetic. On the other hand, there is nothing in Cassirer that implies that Christianity or Judaism were some how immune or exempt because they were not mythological world views.
Although Strauss had no way of knowing at the immediate moment of his essay above, Cassirer devoted a whole section to the idea that religious systems created concepts of time that suited the morphology of their world views. In particular, in the section, Time and Religious Consciousness (vol 2, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms), Cassirer quotes Hermann Cohen on the Prophetic view of time:
``Time becomes future and only future. Past and present are submerged in this time of the future. This return to time is the purest idealization. Before this idea, all existence vanishes. The existence of man is transcended in this future being... What Greek intellectualism could not created, Prophetic monotheism succeeded in creating. History in the Greek consciousness is synonymous with knowledge as such. Hence for the Greeks history is oriented solely toward the past. The Prophet, however, is a seer, not a scholar... The Prophets are the idealists of history. Their seerdom created the concept of history as the being of the future.''
Cassirer then follows,
``The whole present, that of man as well as of things, must be reborn out of this idea of the future. Nature, as it is and endures, can offer no support to the Prophetic consciousness. Just as a new heart it required of man, so there must also be a `new heaven and a new earth'---a natural substratum as it were of the new spirit in which all and change are seen. The theogony and cosmogy of myth and of the mere nature religions are thus surpassed by a spiritual principle of an entirely different form and origin. And the idea of the Creation disappears almost entirely, at least in the pre-exilic Prophets. Their God stands not so much at the beginning of time as at its end; he is not so much the origin of all history as its ethical-religious fulfillment.'' (TPSF, v2, 120-1p)
Go back and read the section from Strauss that notes that the Ought transcends Being. This is a very early example of how Strauss attempts to dismiss the world of material, factual, and concrete existence and its thorough going examination, and instead privileges some idealistic realm, in this case ethics. It is as if, ethical thought possibly the most fungible of all human constructs, was endowed with the timelessness of the Ten Commandments. In other words we are to privilege eternal values over the ever changing and endlessly disputable facts. It doesn't matter that all our belief systems are mythologically constructed, just as long as they embrace our fundamental and timeless values. Nevermind that of all phenomenon we know, the natural world seems the most enduring and stable, while our own world of endless human strife appears to be the most relative and changing of all.
I am not sure Strauss understood just how far Cassirer's relativism had actually progressed at this point. And, I am not even sure how to relate all that back to Strauss, except to note Strauss was an idiot. He had no idea what kind of worlds Cassirer was examining.
CG