When Charles asked what the relationship was I realized I didn't know. I had forgotten most of what I read of Nietzsche (Birth, Beyond, Genelogy) and I haven't gotten that far along in Strauss.
``If you want provactive, stimulating stuff that will make you think through things in new ways, he's a good philosopher...''
Okay, I agree with this.
I tried to just read Strauss straight up. I could more or less follow it, but many passages ended in completely twisted conclusions. At first I thought it was just me. I wasn't sharp enough to get it. It was sort of like following an algebra word problem I didn't understand. So I decided to read some of works he was using as foils. I had no problem at all. But I also couldn't see how Strauss came up with his interpretations either.
So, then I thought, okay, try reading Strauss's earliest work and see how he developed. Boom. Right away, I had the same problem. His rants on Zionism made no sense either. So, I did night after night web surf reading on the history of Zionism. Okay, so I kind of got a handle on Strauss in his Zionism phase. His basic complaint was, Zionism wasn't Jewish enough! But, what kind of complaint is that? I mean, Zionism was a political movement composed of factions across the left-right spectrum, so what if various religious considerations were dropped? These guys were trying to build a political state, not found a theological seminary. Duh.
Anyway, Strauss dropped his Zionist writings. (Maybe he was booed off stage too often, who knows). But I think he was inspired by his Zionist phase to start studying the idea of the political-theological problem he saw in the early Zionist movements (or thought he saw). His idea was that Zionism had not sufficiently incorporated Judaism into its core political ideals.
In the middle of this phase Strauss started in on Cohen's works on Judaism working his way toward his first book on Spinoza. Again his critique made no sense. His basic compliant with Cohen, was Cohen was too rational and hadn't allowed for enough, I am not sure what, mysticism or faith, raw belief or something like that. Cohen's problem was he was a Neo-Kantian with too much reason! Imagine that.
So, I got stuck again. I read Julius Guttmann's Philosophies of Judaism. No problem. I learned a huge amount. Beautiful book. But once again, when I returned to Strauss his tedious critique of Hermann Cohen made little sense.
The example of Strauss I quoted on Cassirer was relatively easy because I think I know Cassirer pretty well. Strauss gave a crude and brief account of what he had read of Cassirer, then turned right around and said it didn't apply to religion. Go figure. A philosopher of culture whose analysis doesn't apply to religion. Why? Well, because religions are on a higher plane than ordinary cultural constructs. Right. That works.
Anyway, I should get beyond Strauss's Spinoza stuff. But somehow, I keep thinking, if I plug away long enough in this period, I'll figure out Strauss, find his central motivation. And, that collection of insights will help illuminate the rest of his work.
You're right Strauss was an antagonist, agent provocateur. Perhaps that's all he was. Perhaps I am just ignorant of the themes and traditions in German philosophy that Strauss may have tapped.
I'll have to read Isaiah Berlin on the Counter-Enlightenment and see. Thanks for the suggestion.
About Cassirer. I certainly agree he needs to be re-discovered. My first Cultural Anthro prof, Edmund Carpenter, noted him on a suggested reading list and used him in some of his lectures. After the class I went back and bought the first volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, basically hoping to find applications in art history. I was blown away. TPSF made Gombrich and other art historians read like Dick and Jane. Later in another Anthro class, I recognized some of what I was reading in Levi-Strauss and Piaget was from Cassirer, but it wasn't footnoted.
I think Cassirer had a big impacted on Anthro, Sociology, Developmental Psychology, Linguistics and cultural studies, as well as the whole Structuralist movement. The post-structuralist reaction was still under a kind of Cassirerian influence.
(I can't be sure any of these guys actually read Cassirer, or if they just picked up bits and pieces from secondary sources. Piaget I think probably did study him. Besides some of the sections in the 2v of TPSF, Cassirer also published a short essay on group theory and space perception in the Journal de Psychologie in 1938. It outlined in very broad terms an idea that Piaget would later make the center piece of his theory that human mental development recapitulated in some fashion various branches of mathematics. Cassirer later reference this 1938 essay in his last public lecture in 1945, and continued its development in his lecture, on spatial concepts, perception, etc, drawing parallels to Klein's Erlangen Program. The lecture took place several days before he died of a massive heart attack in NYC. A written version of this lecture is in Symbol, Myth and Culture, ed. Verene, Yale.)
None of these `soft' science fields, and few people who I've met who read anything of Cassirer realized that there was another whole branch of Cassirer, as a philosopher of science. In his first math/sci phase he unravelled some of the modern foundational work in mathematics and physics as early as 1910-20s contemporary with their developments. A much better reading of his Substance and Function (1910) than I did, would unearth some really fabulous insights into the epistemological problem of concept formation and its relationship to set theory foundations and the imaginary spaces of physical theories. It was his work on math and physical science that led him to cultural studies, because he saw the whole problem of concept formation is a kind of universal key to various problems in both the hard and soft sciences, the arts, and cultural systems in the broad sense.
Anyway, Cassirer was inspired to start on a philosophy of science because he was born right in the middle, the very hot-bed of modernist controversies over set theory, relativity, and quantum.
I just want to mention one last thing about Strauss and his so-called esoteric method. This was originally going to be addressed to Michael Hoover who did a nice job of positioning Strauss in political science...
Consider the problem of writing about writers who lie. Is that writer, a liar? See, if you start down the path of esoteric interpretation you will fall prey to the liar's paradox, sooner or later.
No. Whether it's accurate or not, you simply can not mount a critique that presupposes your subject is lying. You absolutely have to start on the premise your subject means what he says, and you can then hold him to account for it.
Like my lawyer once told me. You said it. You own it, Chuck. I take that as a commandment from the devil himself. Justin (and Charles) you would have liked this guy. He was hell's own litigator.
CG