> Justin, I've been waiting for you to put up
> something. Thanks.
Very flattering, Chuck. I should say that I hope you write up your own stuff on thsi sometime. I think your scholarship is extremely impressive and your thinking quite original and illuminating. We don't always agree, but that's the name of the game.
> 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.
Hmmm. I am not sure what this means, but I think Nietzsche thinks that there is no philosophical core to the human spirit, just a struggle among different wills to power rooted in different interests. It is not the case for Nietzsche that Mastery and its morality is more true or something liker that, more authentic in Heidegger's or anyone else's sense, than Slavery and its morality. It's rather Thrasymachian, whoever wins gets to say he's right.
The only reason(s) that N thinks he can lambaste Christianity are (a) that he thinks that Christainity is going down the tubes on its own contradictions anyway, destroyed by the Will to truth it has engendered in science, and (b) anyone gets to propose a perspective and see if it can catch on. N thought his was best for the elite of free creative spirits. (This is an idea Strauss grabs onto, although he has no truck with N's romantic idea of the elite free creative spirit as essentially artistic, an idea that comes through, e.g. in Schillers Aesthetic Education of Man.) But it's not one he'd attrribute to the Greeks.
>
> 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.
Leaving out "lousy," I agree with you, but why is it inconsistent to say that S forced his pre-conceived ideas on a lot of people without much regard for accuracy and that one of his basic pre-conceived ideas was the esoteric/exoteric distinction? As a scholar I think S was often lousy. As an agent provacateur, an exposer of tensions and contradictions, a revealer of subtle and interesting meanings in innocent looking passages, a challenge to the dull and complacent, I think he's often great. He's sort of a Derrida (of the right) who can write. Does that mean he's a bad philosopher?
I guess it depends on what you expent of philosophy.
If you want honest, careful, dull schilarly
interpretation, he's a bad philosopher. If you want
provactive, stimulating stuff that will make you think
through things in new ways, he's a good philosopher.
Even when he's deliberately lying, as in Natural Right
and History, possibibly the most mendacious book in
the history of philosophy.
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.
I thought it wasn't until about 20 years ago.
> 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.
Isaiah Berlin writers about Jacobi, probably carefully and reasonably accurately. I read that stuff once, but that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.
Following, Chuck takes up Strauss' treatment of Cassirer, an important contemporary. Cassiser is someone waiting rediscovery; I think he's actually a pretty important figure.
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