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I can see, my changing the subject title did get a read. Good.
So, stop, James.
Your missing the point to the post. I've tried to analyze Strauss as a scholar and so-called political philosopher. I could not deconstruct most of his essays with any sort of rational understanding at all.
If you want, I can rip his idea of natural right a new asshole. I am pretty sure most of the list would be bored. I can open up his letters to Carl Schmitt to show you he was trying to create a concept a Jewish people as a race----and those sorts of ideas go straight to the extreme rightwing political parties in Israel.
About the only thing I did understand, was his interest in Judaism, and the reasons for it. But not as a rational understanding. I understood that part of Strauss as a man who felt his identity seriously and concretely threaten, was in question or in loss. These are psychological insights, not philosophical insights.
``Chuck has no intention of talking about Strauss either the ideas or the man, but uses him as a cipher for a generalised attack on "white men in middle to lower middle class". It was not me that opened a debate about which race has made the greater contribution to social change, it was Chuck..''
I certainly did start with an interest in the ideas. My problem was that Strauss's analysis and conclusions were exactly opposite mine---and that was only when I could understand him. Most of the time his arguments and so-called `close' readings are nonsense. And furthermore, when I was reading some of the works he was analyzing, I thought I was following more or less the intention, the positive themes in the works. When I read Strauss's analysis, he seemed to be deliberately mis-interpreting the same works in a different direction than its general meaning and intention.
How could this be? I kept asking myself. How could you see that, in this? What's going on with you (Strauss)? My general impression of Strauss was he seemed to be a complete contarian and an engima.
My motivation for studying some of the same philosophers was to learn about how they viewed the world---more or less as a historical and cultural view. I didn't have any axes to grind. I wanted to learn from them. Some I liked, some I didn't. I was always on the look out for a radical idea, meaning progressive, something useful now to help open up society.
Strauss's motivation was to find the roots of modern rational liberalism in the Enlightenment and 19thC in England, France, and Germany that formed the modern state and its democratic forms. He was on the look out for how to tighten it all up, as it were, like the US Republicans have been doing, like all reactionaries.
His axe to grind was, these liberal ideas created the Weimar Republic and the disaster that followed. He concluded that an open and liberal, social democracy was a very bad way to run a state. And he lived his battles. He conspired with Voeglin and others to block the appointment of Karl Popper to the Univ. of Chicago, for example. Isn't that nice? Isn't that collegial? He was prick, James, a real life asshole.
(For people who don't know, Popper wrote The Open Society and Its Enemies. It was a highly influencial work in US academia, It made the case for US style liberalism in contrast to fascism and communism.)
I called a professor in poli sci at UCSF a few years ago that I knew pretty well to talk about Strauss. M. had met Strauss and listened to some of his lectures. I asked, so what do you think? What's going here?
He said, ``Think short and fat. He's the enemy, Chuck.'' He meant enemy as in total enemy. I asked, what did he talk about?
``Aristotle.'' That's when it hit me. Heirarchy.
This project wasn't going to be about a liberal or collegial understanding by traciing rational arguments and following themes of ideas.
I decided this intellectual project was going to be ad hominem in a much more sophisticated way than is usually understood. Here's the sense of ad hominem I mean. Understand the man, then you will understand his ideas. It is the mirror to attack the man, instead of attacking his ideas. So I think understand the human condition of Leo Strauss is a rational and concrete or material way to understand his ideas.
``I just mean that you can make as good, if not better, a case that white people have been the radicals in history,,''
I certainly followed my reading in philosophy to find better and better ways to think about reforming the the state and society. That was exactly my goal.
In other words, me and Strauss were intellectual enemies all the way down. No quarter given.
His work is more or less devoted to how to keep a very conservative clique in power. Plato's Republic, more or less. You know rich guys on top, laying around in the middle of the day, sipping wine, talking big ideas, while us slaves are up on hill building the Partheon or the nicely finished streets. Well pretty much like the neocons today. They are in their fancy think tank offices, getting paid a fortune to write crap about how I belong down in the shops cleaning shit off broken wheelchair. Screw you guys.
My goal was how to get them out of power, and spread the fun of running things around a lot more.
``As Diogenes said, a man called me a dog, why should he be surprised if I piss on him?''
If that was intended for me, I am not surprised at all. In fact, I was hoping for it.
Most white guys in the US don't like to be talked about as white, homophobic, racist, fear ridden little chickenshits, hidding in their SUVs with the windows rolled up----especially stalled in traffic in a bad neighborhood. It is a constant theme in US movies, and I certainly saw it everyday I was doing deliveries.
You get a real insight into this white male privilage business by reading Allen Bloom's Closing of the American Mind. When I first started on this study, I read Bloom. I recognized that asshole, almost from my own real life as a student. No wonder those kind of hidebound, ideological, reactionary, bastards kept giving me bad grades in English. (Yes, I do have some axes to grind.) My English skills were just fine, thank you. (Well minus the spelling.) You just didn't like what I was saying, that's all.
Any way, the real point to the post was, I blew months and months trying to understand Strauss's writing and his views in the history of ideas, and was at a complete loss. I had gone through more or less the same path as he had and found great ideas on how to make things better, and especially found a sort of intellectual beauty, like Kant or Cassirer for example.
Strauss studied under Cassirer. He wrote his thesis on Jacobi (Jacobi was against Kant) under Cassirer. What the fuck was with this nasty little asshole? I kept asking myself that over and over. Cassirer was elegant, beautiful, and graceous to read. And the best part of all, Cassirer was extremely radical. Following his ideas you end out on the far, far edge of your concepts of language. culture and society. Another example in constrast to Strauss was another hero of mine, Hannah Arendt. Of course Arendt was Strauss's life long enemy. Her writing is clear, articulate, and has great insights on just about every page. There's a lot I don't agree with, especially The Origins of Totalitarianism. But her writing and her ability to develop ideas is very good. In fact she teaches the reader how to do that sort of thing.
Anything by Strauss is always the exact opposite. It's impossibly anal. It is picky to an absurdity. Very often the ending of a paragraph contradicts what you expect as the conclusion. And the result is that you can not understand his point. Strauss prided himself with this kind of opaque and bad writing, by pretending it was esotic. Bullshit. It was bad writing pure and simple. He wasn't sly. His interpretations were wrong most of the time.
So, I got fed up trying to figure out Strauss. When `snag' blew up the other day and said in effect why waste your time on Strauss, when you could be learning something worthwhile about American history, African American culture and society, and women and their struggles, I did a little of that.
And that's when it hit me, as I explained in the post. Stop trying to find some intellectual points in Strauss. Just look at the guy himself. There's the motivation, there's the man. He is a clinical model of what's wrong with white male middle class America, and why they keep voting for assholes like Bush.
I am going to this, then stop.
``... your basic argument is white people have a chip on their shoulders? Now where have I heard that before?''
No. There is a pretty specifically characterized group (white male, middle class) that have views of our society that lead them to a consistant pattern of voting for Republican reactionaries. I am a member of that same group. I have never really been able to understand my fellow white male middle class cohorts and why they as a group went in one direction, while I went in another.
The only thing that separates us are our experiences in life. My life paths have led me to live in some of the most integrated and politically contentious urban areas in the US, where there is a constant reminder of race, class, gender that has to be psychologically negociated almost hourly.
Very early on, I had to confront and get through my own fears and assumptions about all the different kinds of people I was surrounded by, almost none of whom were like me.
So basically, the conclusion I came to was, many of my white male middle class cohorts vote their fears into office. And those fears all intersection in race, class, and gender, more or less along the lines that I tried to profile in Strauss.
CG
I can't let go.
``..you would have to admit that white assimilated Jews have made a greater contribution to social liberation than most. Marx, Trotsky, Luxemburg, for starters... let's face it, a substantial proportion of the leadership of the early socialist and communist movement were assimilated Jews...''
Yes, exactly. Don't you? Strauss's generation were almost all on the Left. How in hell did he end up on the Right? Here's my explanation. Most of his Left cohorts somehow confronted the threats, oppressions, personal fears, anxieties, and overcame them with a sort of intellectual and determined courage. You can use Hannah Arendt as an example.
Strauss on the other hand, went with his fears, and fell into the master-slave dialectic and stayed there.