Posted on 05/11/2003 6:43:44 AM PDT by A. Pole
Edited on 04/13/2004 2:09:46 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
The late Leo Strauss has emerged as the thinker of the moment in Washington, but his ideas remain mysterious. Was he an ardent opponent of tyranny, or an apologist for the abuse of power?
ODD AS THIS MAY SOUND, we live in a world increasingly shaped by Leo Strauss, a controversial philosopher who died in 1973. Although generally unknown to the wider population, Strauss has been one of the two or three most important intellectual influences on the conservative worldview now ascendant in George W. Bush's Washington. Eager to get the lowdown on White House thinking, editors at the New York Times and Le Monde have had journalists pore over Strauss's work and trace his disciples' affiliations. The New Yorker has even found a contingent of Straussians doing intelligence work for the Pentagon.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
But they are the Amendments. They can be removed without annihilating the Constitution.
I should add that the terminology is not mine. Have you read any Willmoore Kendall?
Here is a great example of Law and Politics (he is also somewhat of a Nietzsche scholar)- kindly note these links:
http://www.utexas.edu/law/faculty/bleiter/
http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/
I've been pondering this article,deciding what to make of it. On the one hand, anyone who describes Brent Staples as "sensible" needs to have their head examined. And on the other hand, there is a great deal of truth that Strauss and his acolytes held dearly to the idea that some sorts of knowledge must be restricted only to initiates, and kept from the lumpensprache. At its worst, it leads to some very silly consequences, and my generally egalitarian nature rebels at the thought regardless - it smacks too much of the sort of vanguardism that the Marxists always seem to produce, and yet claim to despise, whenever they sit down and try to figure out what exactly it is that they want to do.
Many neo-cons were leftists before. I suspect that the forming experience for Strauss was the failure of Weimar Republic. He developed the deep distrust for the self-government and republican/democratic process. He decided that people are not fit to rule themselves and have to be guided/manipulated by the enlightened elite.
Such attitude can be disatrous in the viable strong republic and be appreciated by the leftists.
You don't suppose Strauss should have been singing in a choir and walking his dog? That he should have played baseball with his boy and waxed his car on Saturday?
My answer is to you is to frame the issue with this question: upon reading Strauss, why do some consider that knowledge is restrictive and others that it must be restrictive?
I'm not so sure that this is a proposition about the qualities of knowledge per se. Rather, the question is, what should be done with certain sorts of knowledge by those who hold it? And it seems pretty clear that, for Strauss, some sorts of knowledge should be kept from the masses - for their own good, of course. I'm not entirely sure how you can read it any other way, but I am always open to suggestions...
That certainly is a very appropriate for question Nietzsche.
Strauss himself seemd upset enough about the inattention paid to the distinction between theory and practice. It would be a difficult thing for anyone who has read him to insist that this distinction was for the sake of practice at the expense of theory.
First and foremost, if any doing was sought for, the thing to be done about the knowledge of those who hold it, was criticism. Not in the style of Descartes, but in the form of the ancient zetesis, in the style of Socrates. The best apologist for this was Allan Bloom. Incidentally, Nietzsche abhorred and admired Socrates. It might be of some interest here that Nietzsche too was embraced by low and highbrow dabblers.
But back to the other question. A knowledge that should be kept from the masses requires a standing army. Certainly I am not the first, but I'll happily be the first to say it, there is no secret code. He was not a gnostic. The thought of Strauss is as much available to me as it is to you. It is told that Allan Bloom with delight reminded his friends every day his book stayed on the top ten list. "See, I told you so!" Of course the joke was as you like it: Bloom was a snob. So are all real tennis players. So was Nietzsche. But for Bloom the joke was that they don't get it, not that they musn't.
Perhaps it is more of political concern whether those who don't get it should call the shots. I recall Bloom's single reference to Strauss in The Closing of the American Mind. It was a tip of the hat to the modern political structure inherited from the moderns and Locke: "They built on low but solid ground." Of course, we should probably look again at those passages where they are busy keeping the masses in the dark.
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