Essential Leo Strauss?

Thanks. I'm by no means a neocon but I've found myself growing a bit more hawkish over time.

Lol it looks like utter trash.

Oh boy here we go again

It is. Dumbest version of the "Strauss made the neocons" conspiracy.

So just gonna ignore all them refutations above are ya.

I'm guessing the "le neocon boogeyman" guy posts on these types of threads often?
So can you actually get me up to speed on Strauss?

bump

>I'm guessing the "le neocon boogeyman" guy posts on these types of threads often?
Not really, but every once in a while, since that's largely how Strauss is known to most people at this point.

>So can you actually get me up to speed on Strauss?
Well, biggest thing about Strauss is that he pays very careful attention to how the great philosophers wrote, and this is where the whole "exoteric/esoteric" thing comes in. Authors at different times wrote with greater or lesser degrees of frankness, either in order to protect themselves from the fate of Socrates, to protect their political communities from corruption, or in order to test potential philosophers by making them work out a difficult and abstruse text.

So in short, the history of philosophy ends up really being the history of political philosophy, since even metaphysical and physical subjects can only be spoken about if the local community is sufficiently open to those subjects and doesn't find them blasphemous. So the ancient philosophers often look very different for Strauss, with *maybe* the exception of Aristotle.

Then we have the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns, starting with Machiavelli, and the attempt to restrain the place of religion in politics by aiming at the self-interest of many people as the basic standard for politics (as opposed to ancient cultivation of virtue). This thread as been pulled through to today, culminating in certain ways in Nietzsche and Heidegger on the one hand, and positivism on the other. The big interest to Strauss here is that the roots of modern liberalism also seem to contain their own protest, which is what makes liberal democracy seem precarious and weak.

The big issue in the background of all of this for Strauss is the "theological-political problem", which seems to be not just the issue of religion in society, but also of the account of origins and order on the part of philosophy (the attempt to offer a cosmology, if you will). The metaphysical principles of philosophy seem to sometimes be surrogate gods to replace the civic ones. His thought is very difficult on this subject.

But otherwise, his thing is trying to reach a place of understanding that doesn't just accept blindly our own modern and inherited prejudices, and so he spends a lot of time reading the ancients in particular.

I don't think any of that sounds super eye-opening unless you get really into his commentaries and start noticing what might be his own opinions very moderately placed here and there. It also doesn't sound all that sexy; he definitely doesn't accept the modern idea that philosophy needs to either be doing something always new, or constantly progressing like the sciences. But that's pretty much what's up with him, at a very simple level.

Seems fairly interesting. So what got you interested in Strauss?

Wow! Paul Gottfried posts on Veeky Forums!

>I never understood why Popper's interpretation of Plato took off
>"Open Society and its Enemies"
>Open Society

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