Skip to main content

So: What is a Straussian?

The philosopher and blogger Brian Leiter recently wrote summarily, "Straussians are incapable of reading Nietzsche."

For some of us in the peanut gallery, this raises the question: what the heck is a Straussian?

LeoStrauss.jpg

The term arose in political philosophy and was in use back in the early 1970s, around the time Leo Strauss co-edited a textbook on the history of political philosophy with Joseph Cropsey.

The term "Straussian" suggests several things. First, it is an approach to the classic texts of political philosophy that presumes that nearly every important philosopher in the canon was hiding something. Thus, texts must be read for their esoteric meaning.

Second, related to this, the esoteric meaning was often irreligious. Political philosophy is full of thinkers who are in fact atheists but who have to hide the fact.

Third, related to this in turn, Straussians suggest that these thinkers were right to hide the fact. Their own premise is that there is no God, but that the belief that there is a God is a socially useful one, cartilage for the body politic.  They seem to make the presumption that they are members of an elite who don't need to believe in God but that since the masses do need this, the elite have to talk with one another in code so as not to tear up that cartilage.

Further, the history of political philosophy is a long-running macrocosm of precisely that coded discussion.

This is probably why Leiter believes Straussians can't understand Nietzsche. Nietzsche wore his atheism on his sleeve, there is no point to try to decode his language to FIND his atheistic core.  That throws them off their game!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak