Kenneth B. MacIntyre launches what can only be called an, er, exoteric assault over at The American Conservative, one which may portend an internecine debate: he blasts Leo Strauss and his followers as ideological “false prophets.” Taking Paul Gottfried’s recent biography of the man as a starting point, he winds up arguing that:
The results of the Straussian method read like they were written by the intellectual offspring of Madame Blavatsky and Edgar Bergen. It may seem difficult to distinguish between the oracular pronouncements and the intellectual ventriloquism, but that’s because there is no real distinction to be made. As Gottfried notes, there is uncanny similarity between the Straussian reading of texts and the postmodern deconstruction of language. The esoteric claims provide cover for Straussian interpretive preferences and shield against criticism from anyone outside the clique. Cleanth Brooks once imagined what postmodern literary critics could have made of “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” and it makes just as much sense to ask what the Straussians could do with the nursery rhyme.
The two primary conclusions associated with Strauss’s esoteric reading of past texts are that all philosophers from the time of Plato onward were atheistic hyper-rationalists and that the United States emerged fully formed from the forehead of John Locke. Both of these conclusions are historically false, but it is inaccurate to call Strauss or his epigones bad historians because they are not historians at all.
To be fair to MacIntyre, the bulk of his criticism is filtered through the book he’s ostensibly reviewing (which, according to other reviewers, seems to be a more balanced survey), and isn’t that direct.
But still. This is a bomb-tossing review by design, which is why it seems to consist largely of dismissals on the grounds of inadequate historical scholarship, of repeated assertions that Strauss and Straussians are simply “not taken seriously” in some places, and of claims that this method of exegesis bears worrying similarities to postmodern deconstruction, with its obsessive parsing.
MacIntyre’s piece demands a longer response from both camps, but whatever one thinks of Strauss (or the subsequent “-ianism”), can this be really called a high-level review? Or, perhaps, is MacIntyre’s polemic necessary to ignite an argument whose time has come? Does the force (if not strength) of this essay indicate that it’s time for the American right to re-examine its discipleship, acknowledged or unacknowledged, to this man?
May 15th, 2012 | 7:49 pm
I’m not the scholar to make a defense of Strauss. I’m not a Straussian; more of a person who is interested in, and somewhat influenced by Straussian scholarship. I will make the following observation (as I made to a friend after sending him a link to this article): In terms of “who” takes Strauss seriously, you have to wonder why so many folks who are movers and shakers in the Nietzschean sense (folks who make a difference) find Strauss interesting enough to be fans.
Peter Thiel comes to mind as a recent example.
May 15th, 2012 | 7:50 pm
The review deserves ridicule. And I’m no Straussian.
May 15th, 2012 | 10:55 pm
Since MacIntyre doesn’t give anything like an reasoned argument, it is hard to see how one could reasonably respond to him except to ask for a reasoned account.
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Like most people who attack Strauss, MacIntyre seems not to have read much of what Strauss wrote
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I must admit that I don’t know why the author of this post thinks that MacIntyre’s admittedly poor argument should cause a reexamination of Strauss simply because his attack is polemical.
May 16th, 2012 | 5:04 am
MacIntyre’s piece will scarcely set off an internecine debate; it is bombastic, tired, and thoughtless. At best, the errors in the piece need to be corrected, but the piece is not seriousness enough to generate a considered discussion.
One example will have to suffice. MacIntyre claims that one of Strauss’s primary conclusions is that all philosophers from the time of Plato onward were atheistic hyper-rationalists. I am not sure what a “hyper-rationalist” is, but this term does not even appear to hold for Strauss’s Plato, since for Strauss Plato is zetetic. Plato’s teaching, according to Strauss, is that reason is weak. Reason cannot arrive at an understanding of the truth, but can only pose the questions and formulate answers which will never be final and will always be incomplete. Despite reason’s limitations, it may be possible to conclude that philosophy is the best way of life, although even this conclusion is subject to searching doubts in Strauss’s writings. Moreover, one cannot say (to pick one of many possible examples) that Strauss’s Rousseau was a “hyper-rationalist.” According to Strauss, for Rousseau, the highest life is not one of rationality, but a life that experiences that sentiment of existence to the fullest possible extent.
May 16th, 2012 | 9:05 am
The review is interesting, but not having read Gottfried’s book, I will limit my commentst some points made in the review.
First, I am not sure one can say that historians and philosophers have dismissed Strauss and his works. To be sure, scholars come in and out of flavour, but no one has, to my knowledge, demonstrated that his scholarship was flawed. I would argue that any serious scholar on Machiavelli, for example, has to consider Strauss and his justly famous (or infamous) Thoughts on Machiavelli.
As to understanding Strauss, anyone approaching this has to disentangle the political and the philosophical teachings. Often political minded students and observers “run with” a statement or conclusion by Strauss. By contrast, the philosophical students or observers, often pronounce a philosophical point, which is, then, in turn translated into a political statment or position, which appears quite, well, extreme.
If we are going to begin to understand Strauss, or make claims to understand him, we need to understand his work in relation and response to Heidegger. I would caution anyone from dismissing a political thinker who has engaged with and encountered Heidegger. Without a doubt, Heidegger shaped and continues to shape much of the discussion concerning post-modernity and those intellectual fads which seems so popular and appear in such stark contrast to those discussed by Strauss. However, to begin to understand Heidegger, one has to understand his relationship with Nietzsche. By this stage, we are already beyond the interest or the attention of most political men or political observers. In the end, to understand Nietzsche, one then has to return to Plato. We now, return full circle (pun intended ;) ), to Strauss and his engagement with Plato. Yet, this only suggests what needs to be considered without disentangling the political or philosophical teachings without making a judgement regarding them.
A further point that needs to be considered in Gottfried’s review is the focus on Strauss as a Jew. I am not sure of the importance given this observation because it fails to refer to Heidegger as a Catholic, given his influence. Moreover, one finds that Strauss had Catholic students and students of Strauss, for example, Jaffa had Catholic students. So we see Catholic students learning from Jewish teachers, who as students in turn learned from Catholic teachers who as students learned from Jewish teachers. Or, is it the other way around?
In the end, it is more likely a tempest in a teacup and a good way to raise public interest (a political statement) in a philosophical issue and also a chance to sell some books. I look forward to reading Gottfried’s book.
May 16th, 2012 | 9:57 am
“First, I am not sure one can say that historians and philosophers have dismissed Strauss and his works.”
At the very least, Strauss’ reading of Arabic philosophy, especially of al-Farabi and Maimonides, has been shown to be pure whimsical fancy by as otherwise different scholars as Dimitri Gutas and Remi Brague. This is no small thing, since his reading of Farabi stands at the center of Persecution and the Art of Writing…
May 16th, 2012 | 10:21 am
@Samn
Although Brague disagrees with Strauss, it is not true that he dismisses his thought as simply fancy – in fact, he takes Strauss seriously and ends up agreeing with him about many things, and most importantly, that the questions raised by Strauss are THE questions.
The problem with most assessments of Strauss is that they are based solely on the book you mention – when one looks at Strauss’s work on classical political thought (the area where Strauss has been most influential) Strauss’s reading is far less esoteric than his essay in Persecution suggests it would be.
Perhaps this is because the essay in Persecution is ironic (or at least calls for a sense of irony to be understood.) The one thing one cannot say about Strauss’s enemies is that they have a sense of irony.
May 16th, 2012 | 11:34 am
PC,
My point was about whether Strauss is taken seriously by historians or philosophers, rather than as a (highly idiosyncratic) political philosopher in his own right. While Brague does approach Strauss as a thinker, he (along with many others) has pointed out that Strauss as a reader of medieval philosophy was a dilettante at best, if not simply a fantasist. That is to say, the question of whether reading Strauss himself is a different question from whether Strauss can be used as a guide for understanding other philosophers.
May 16th, 2012 | 1:16 pm
A lot of nonsense has been written about Strauss’ “esoteric” readings, but the best account of how Strauss actually read books is given in Alan Bloom’s eulogy (available in “Giants and Dwarves,” I believe).
Read that, and then read one of Bloom’s discussions of Shakespeare, or Jaffa’s of the first scene of King Lear (see “Shakespeare’s Politics,” and “Shakespeare on Love and Friendship”), and then tell me that this approach is not head and shoulders above anything else in the Shakespeare lit-crit field. In the “Straussian” studies, one encounters the poet as a giant in terms of his wisdom and humanity, with something to teach the world, instead of as the sum total of various secondary influences.
The problem is that very few readers, scholarly or otherwise, are able to give this level of attention to detail to texts–and so it is predictable the run-of-the-mill scholarly community, most of whom are mediocrities (as Bloom asserts) to be dismissive. At present it is fashionable to be so–but merely fashionable, that is, unenduring.
May 16th, 2012 | 1:40 pm
I couldn’t agree more with ChrisZ that most critics of Strauss and Straussians are academic mediocrities who are resentful of the fact that they are second or third tier intellects in comparison. . . . I’m in those tiers as well, but I recognize it and I do not allow my pride to get in the way of the fact that I can learn from Strauss and many of those who have learned from him.
May 17th, 2012 | 9:55 am
@Lawrence and @Chrisz,
Both your points hit the nail on the head. One cannot understand Strauss without first understanding the historical evolution of his thought via Heidegger and Nietszche. And one of Strauss’s more famous pupils, Alan Bloom, makes this point quite effectively. As a matter of fact, I think Bloom’s interpretation of Plato is just as fascinating as Strauss’s interpretation of Machiavelli. Both took seriously the actual texts of thier subject matter. In short, language does matter. Heidegger believed that Being and language are so tightly intertwined that accurate translation of text from one language to another was almost impossible.
This reminds me of an essay Joseph Pierce once wrote concerning Tolkien. JRR Tolkien came from the West Midlands. In his small village as a boy, a few old timers still spoke a form of dialect that was nearly extinct. The dialect itself, Tolkien later found out, was a Saxon offshoot that survived the arrivals of the Normans. Tolkien learnt the dialect as a small child and continued to use it as an adult, by which time he was the only one in the West Midlands who could understand it. Tolkien once wrote that he preferred this dialect over English for the very fact that it was so interlaced into the history, customs, and religious beliefs of the West Midland commoners who still spoke it. This might sound strange, as the Normans brought to Britain an expanded vocabulary with strong Latin influences. Shakespeare would have not have been Shakespeare without these influences. Yet, Tolkien preferred a language that went back to King Alfred and not Queen Elizabeth. He didn’t say so, but to him the almost extinct dialect of the West Midlands gave Tolkien a much clear path into his own Being than English. Language, to Tolkien was much more than information. It is no suprise that the West Midland villages of his childhood were the inspiration for the Shire – a land virtually cut-off from the “comings and goings” of the world at large. For Tolkien and Heidegger both, language is something that divides us and not necessairly unites us. I’m not sure how Tolkien could resolve this problem with the universalism of Catholicism and its language, Latin. Alan Bloom himself pondered this problem and could offer no resolution other than to remind readers that Heidegger and other thinkers could in fact be wrong.
Strauss himself took language, culture, and philosophy seriously. He believed that the original thinking of Plato was so “corrupted” by the Christian Worldview that it needed to be re-evaluated. Like Aqauinas and Enlightenment Thinkers he returned to the Greeks in the hopes that there was still something they could teach us. Even if one doesn’t subscribe to Strauss’s works, this in itself isn’t such a bad thing.
May 19th, 2012 | 2:47 pm
The blog master got it right. Professor McIntyre was looking to ignite a debate that Straussians have adamantly refused to have. Not only have they pointedly ignored my “more balanced” assessment of their maitre a penser. They also wrote to publishers warning them not to accept my work since it came from an enraged madman (me). For people who go on and on about the lack of intellectual freedom in the academy, the Straussians, with few exceptions, have a glaringly defective record of practicing what they preach. In my seventy years on this Earth, they stand out as the least intellectually tolerant group I’ve encountered.
May 19th, 2012 | 6:49 pm
Strauss would be no more interesting than L. Ron Hubbard were it not for the malign influence of his vacuous followers in American politics (and in various mediocre political science departments in the US).
The more interesting question for First Things readers is why American Catholic intellectuals are so invested in such a mediocrity. Off the top of my head, I can name Elizabeth Anscombe, Alasdair MacIntyre, John Finnis, and Peter Geach (amongst contemporaries) as more accomplished and compelling thinkers than Strauss and as committed orthodox Christians. Why should Strauss be interesting to First Things readers at all?
May 22nd, 2012 | 2:37 pm
I am wondering if the questing vole is here is just posting questions to keep the discussion moving. MacIntyre would not consider Strauss mediocre nor would he have any doubts as to why Catholic intellectuals and theologians need to consider him. One only need to consider how moribund Natural Law scholarship was before Natural Right and History to understand how exciting, challenging, and dynamic it could be as a field. Strauss, literally, transformed that study from one pursued by canonical scholars or jurists to one that was intimately tied to the study of political philosophy.
However, for Catholics the question he raised, quid sit deus presents a fundamental challenge. He was echoing Heidegger, in a sense, who suggested that any real questioning of why there was something rather than nothing could NOT be done by men of faith. We either believe or we question. We cannot do both. Strauss showed that this question question did not stop us thinking and it showed how important natural law, and natural rights, thinking was to the shaping of modernity. By clarifying the terrain, Strauss helped a lot of scholars understand their role and where they stood in relationship to the fundamental questions either as those of faith or those of philosophy. In this, he was extremely radical but at the same time he was able to show that it need not be corrosive of a decent political order nor would it be the end of Catholic thinking.
Then again, I might be wrong and maybe he is just “mediocre.”
May 23rd, 2012 | 3:19 pm
[...] May 23, 2012, 3:19 PM Matthew Cantirino Paul Gottfried writes the magazine in response to last week’s blog post calling attention to the American Conservative article on Leo Strauss and his followers. While the [...]
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