folks before we get started in today's episode, we just wanted to take a moment and mention that a friend of the show, Ian Lindquist, has passed away at a very young age. Yeah, Ian, who, you know, I mean, he's a young man, 36 years old, 35, 36 years old. And he has seven children, young children. In fact, he passed away from leukemia, and his wife was pregnant with their seventh when the news came in.
And he fought for, what was it, a year or two years, David? Yeah. And just passed away on May 5th. And, you know, he leaves his wife behind and seven young children.
So one of the things we want to do is direct you all to the GoFundMe to raise money for his family. If you go to our Twitter, twitter.com slash the new Thincory, you'll see at the very top a pain tweet with a link to his GoFundMe. We ask that you guys, whatever you can get, any small amounts, you know, that's a meal that helps out his family goes a long way. So we ask that you give you the best, right?
Yeah. So, so Ian was a graduate of St. John's College where the two of us graduated. I didn't meet him.
He attended as an undergrad. And just as he was the same age, just as he was graduating, the two of us Alex were entering St. John's. So in 0607, I would meet him later on as a her talk fellow, where we were taking these weekend courses on political statesman.
And it's rare. And I think the Germans, I have heard this, are even holding impossible to develop friendships later on in life. Usually you need to time tested events that you can really only approximate during childhood and early adulthood to cement to friendship. But when I met Ian at her talk, we immediately fell in with one another over a shared love of great books and personality.
Now, his mind goes in in the gutter like mine is, but he smiled and laughed at my jokes. And I really enjoyed that. And I think the thing I'd like to say about him is that he was the serious person. To me, that's the, I think that one of the finest compliments I can pay a human being.
This is not to say that he was serious in a gruff way or didn't smile, but he took ideas seriously. So when he could be joking with us at one moment in the second, and you're like this to Alex, we start talking about Aristotle in the good life, things like this. He takes a real interest and he gives you your full attention. And you marry that with just his kindness and diffusive nature with strangers, guys, a stranger, and in a willingness to talk and share.
And you really have a great human being. And I had had personal problems during that period. And we would talk on the phone and I didn't know him that well. He never judged me.
And so I'm upset about it as are a lot of people. But if you can do something just like Alex noted, please do contribute. Yeah, let me add here that he was after graduation, he did a lot of work in education, right? He taught at Great Arts Academy, which is a great book, sort of 10 of great books, schools.
And this eventually led to him working for AI in education policy. And finally, that was via the Public Interest Fellowship. And then he ended up being a senior advisor there, and while also serving as the executive director, which is also when I got to know him a little bit more, when I was having a tough time on the academic job market, he was helping me try to find some sort of work in DC, my current job then came through and things worked out for me. But he was very kind and generous man with his time and his connections when he had no need to.
That's great. I had some really moving words there. I hope folks will go to visit us on Twitter and see that pinned tweet that has got to be paid. Thanks for that, David.
Now let's let's go back to the show. Welcome back to this episode of The New Thinkery. I'm here as always with my good friend Alex for you. That's super good to see you, Alex.
But it is a little bit heavy already. I say that David was unable to do us. He's not with us. No, he's not with us.
Yeah, and he's doing that. Come on, right? Yeah, that's what I heard. You told me he's going to come in the hospital.
Food company. Yeah. He's just eight. He's the first literal food company.
Oh, my God. Yeah. Yeah. Let's do it.
Maybe our listening great. We should try it. We should. We have our esteemed guest.
We're Paul the dude. Paul the dude. Who is my interim director at the University of New York. He's your boss.
Yeah, he demands my interim respect. Okay. And also there's one of your students. Yeah.
We're at the ECTC conference, the Association for Cortex and Chorus. Great conference. They sponsored a panel. We did last year.
Yeah, absolutely. Greg has begun bringing his students to conferences. That's right. Yeah.
As a since of his wife, I don't know what's going on. He's brought to get in here. And this is not the first time Paul and I have been to an ACTC conference. First, I alluded to the time that Paul and I went swimming in the Pacific Ocean.
That's right. One of the ACTC conferences. Maybe not. No, no, it's not student.
It's who knows. We're all students and actually all nice that all they are doing about Plato. We've dragged this on so long because I guess today's Joshua parents that he has a zero truck for Tom Fuhrick. So we're getting all out of the way.
No more. I like seeing him square him out of the quarter of my eye. So we're going to talk today about the O'Strouse on natural law, which is I mean, it's a very interesting topic. Josh, one of the points that you make is pretty a sort of a kind of hermeneutical puzzle is that Strouse comments on natural law toward the end of chapter four of natural history, connection with Thomas.
And there he makes a reference in that discussion to the central of the three sort of three commentary chapters in persecution of the art of rank on Du Jaleid is the Qizari. Right. So this is a strange, and you make this point that he sort of split his discussion of natural law. And in fact, put the most is his harshest criticism, so it's more spiny critiques in the Qizari chapter of persecution of the art of right.
So we have this hermeneutical puzzle, as well as this sort of philosophical question of the status of natural law. So maybe Josh, we can begin by defining what natural law is, why this is of interest, and why it was stressed out to maybe natural rights history as regards. Natural law. Right.
So Strouse, of course, in natural right, history is focusing on natural light. It's developing over the course of Western thought. And one of the points that he's making over those first couple of chapters, culminating in so there's one on the origin of the idea of natural right, followed by classic natural right. And that chapter in classic natural right culminates in a discussion of Thomas, but also a pivot to Machiavelli.
And the rhetoric of that chapter is in effect that Machiavelli's response to natural law has a great deal to do with the founding of eternity. So natural law from Strauss's point of view plays a really central role. And Strauss is treating natural law as a development of natural light away from the more flexible teaching played on the Aristotle. And it's a kind of step by step process in which Aristotle is just a little bit less flexible than played out, but still extremely flexible.
If I were to try to encapsulate Aristotle's natural right, it's captured in the idea that the best regime is the same everywhere. But Aristotle emphasizes in the Nicomachean Ethics that what is right naturally speaking is changeable. So he really emphasizes that very heavily. The way I like to put it is that Aristotle is really emphasizing what Strauss will refer to as the ceiling.
So the best regime, which is he emphasizes the importance of Socrates and that's played up as well. So Aristotle is emphasizing the best regime. As we turn to Thomas, he not only pivots to an emphasis not only on the ceiling, but also on the flooring. And he's probably most famous for claiming that we possess innate principles of practical reason, which human beings can't access through reason.
They're not immediately obvious, and yet they are said to be innate. We don't really find a couple of argument in Plato or Aristotle. So in addition to adding kind of the flooring, probably the most important thing that Thomas adds is the insinuation that there are some exceptionless laws. And the most obvious exceptionless laws would be, for example, the second table of the backlog.
So long as one knows what qualifies as murder, there really are no exceptions to the law that one should not commit murder. Thomas makes this especially clear by giving the only examples he could give of exceptions and they're of God. That God commands in certain books of the Bible or in a sense to be killed. And God can do that right because all human beings are in infinite debt to him.
So in a way, so to speak, they're debt already in life. So that really emphasizes how exceptionless it is. What we're going to see when we turn eventually to the tradition that grew out of Aristotle, for example, my monies, he won't characterize the second table of the deck of luck as generally accepted opinions. Now, if they're according to the philosophers, he says they're generally accepted opinions, which means apparently they're exceptions.
So this is a very significant disagreement. Now, one thing you pointed out in one of your just to clarify the risk of teaching the imposition, there is this interesting passage in the ethics where he says there's no need of adulterate, right? With the murder and theft. No, I know a great search for an exception to this.
But you can't find so. And I know he discusses this passage in persecution, but maybe you could say something a little bit about that because I think we get the sense that virtue or what's right is contextually based on individual circumstances. Right. That passage is, of course, the one of the passages that advocates of actual law point to as an indicator that here's clearly already has a conception of something in the actual law.
However, if you look at the passage, I think what's clear is that what's being argued is there is no way of doing this virtuously. That is to say, there's no way in which one could say that this is an act that he performed for its own sake because it's good. On the contrary, what this is a point that I think Strauss makes pretty clear in what his political philosophy, when he comments on Machiavelli, that the novelty of Machiavelli's teaching has supposed to do with the fact that he makes the exception, the evil exception, into something like the principle of his teaching. But the engines were perfectly well aware that there are these exceptions.
The novelty of Machiavelli only appears in his great novelty, mostly because he's taken out the exception and treated it as a ground. But the engines were perfectly well aware that there are these exceptions. And so I think it's important to emphasize that though you might have to do something vicious on occasion, it may be required, it may be necessary for political life. So in addition to it, maybe not be virtuous, but vicious, I always that passage on those three actions that don't admit of a mean or effect of the culture.
I also thought what's interesting, and that passage is there, so I was a border battle really because the main bound up within the spat. So that's not the neutral category of killing. Murder is a bad feeling. So you've already, so the action could be good about killing, but murder itself, you've already taken the word that it's bad.
But this vicious part, I think, is more interesting than that. But maybe sometimes vicious act is necessary. Yeah, really? Yeah, I mean, that's in the five chapter 11 of the politics on tyranny does give some Machiavelli advice that certainly makes you think you might occasionally condone crimes.
In one of the talks that you gave, whatever it's like, down a case of a round show. But one of the things you talked about is since you already brought up the engines, there's this natural thing that there are rules that are always in place in their no exceptions. Pumps, Machiavelli, it takes the exceptions and explodes into sort of that's not the general rule, and that's what the fine small takes. But what I hadn't seen clear until I read your lecture was that the engines seem to agree with the matters that there are exceptions, but there's sort of a middle ground between a finest and Machiavelli as far as they recognize their exceptions, so it's not the ground of politics, or it's not what we take on bearing by what one takes one's bearing by politics.
So the Machialli takes a bearing from the exception from the extremes. And the the engines are from being all energy, they knew that these engines are necessary, but that's we're going to sort of mute that, we're not going to highlight that, we're going to recognize their fact assumptions. Do you think that Machiavelli's willing is to treat the exceptional case as a ground is related to its neglected, what you call the ceiling, or we might call it the ceiling an aerosol, or what you otherwise call the natural hierarchy of ends? Yes.
Okay. Yes. And I want to anticipate so it's sort of pretty roughly and brutally at this there's this keyword that shows up in that chapter, natural, written history, classical natural life at the end, that the extreme situation is the term that Strauss uses for the exception. This term, this becomes the key term for Carl Schmitt and his teacher, which is itself treated as if it were a replacement for liberalism, but the irony of this all is that liberalism was founded on black one, a state of nature teaching, which in effect treats the extreme situation as parabic mac, and it's just been just a small bit of a vote on Prussian.
It was a 20th century legal jurist who became sort of an apologize to the Nazi regime, sort of emphasized the character of the journey that sort of fails to recognize this truth about politics that's ultimately about these exceptions and the distinction side of this. But you also make these pods as you've drawn, so again, so far the difficulties that state of nature teaching of course developed so in so many very different ways, but at least if you start with palms, you can see the sort of the underlying principle that Machiavelli grabbed, and note by the way that Strauss emphasizes that Machiavelli does not have a natural right teaching. So he grounds the extreme situation, he uses that in effect as the principle of his politics, and then Hobbes takes the extreme situation and he renames it in this positive way as the state of nature, which makes us think of things like eating, and those other things, Hobbes's teaching obviously has nothing to do with that, but then Locke in a certain way he takes over that sort of rhetoric, that positive rhetoric, and in effect what ended up happening is we kind of forgot that this underlying negativity, and then it reappears a shit sort of erosiously. Yeah, there's this sense in Hobbes right that you're leaving the state of nature to attain a sort of greater security, and while there is no greatest good, you're expected to pursue something of another beyond escaping or dealing with extreme situation, but there's every danger that if you deny there's a greatest good that all you be doing is dealing with extreme situation, that'll be your whole orientation.
Or if you like to stop, I mean above the level, if you support the regime, you will be back facing that is the foundation of natural, of the natural order of things that is violent. Do you think it's possible for thinkers to use the extreme situation to different effect? I mean, when Hobbes takes it over from Machiavelli, do you think he's working consistently within the Machiavellian vision, or do you think there's a difference in terms of the effect that he puts the extreme situation to? I think he's repurposing, but he is in some way softening, Machiavelli's teaching, and Locke then internals softening, Hobbes' teaching, because it also is not sufficiently gentle to be widely accepted as our guide.
So natural, the state of nature itself was a kind of rhetorical representation, but you didn't, you know, way what Locke had to do was to doctor it up with a bit of more of a revealed sort of veil so that it had a little bit more of that feel of evil. It looked a little bit more biblical. So we can, let's try to bring this back a little bit to Aristotle and naturalize where the points you made, we were talking before, is that stress really rushes past Aristotle to Thomas, and this is a kind of curious feature. And you wanted, I think you want to say that this has something to do with the specific tasks of natural right in history, right, as laid out in the introduction where he also references, right, the eotons, right?
So maybe you can talk a little bit about that, right, moving on to the Thomas and then also what he's up to, generally natural right in history, that might explain this move. Right. So the frame in natural right in history is something like developing a united front of those who want to appeal to nature as a standard against history. And Strauss, as he looked around himself in his times, saw that in the modern world, almost the only defenders left of nature as a standard for the Thomas.
So even work in which the great rhetorical task is establishing nature as a standard against history as the alternative. He, I think, was turning to the otonism and the Thomas as in effect is only strong alloys. And he alludes to this in the introduction. So in natural right in history, then, we shouldn't be terribly surprised that though he references natural law, and though he gives a kind of hint that there are problems with it, that natural law may have contributed to the rise of Machiavellian that turned to modern actually, right?
He's actually pretty quiet about it. And as you mentioned before, he actually footnotes persecution in the art of writing in natural right in history. Actually, he's on page it's 32. I mean, he references specifically how they as a whole thing, right?
But that's all that he refers to. But it's a 25 year that we've got 32. Right. And that footnote comes at the end of a really long paragraph about natural law.
That's the first step in the critique of Thomas, which is followed one very long paragraph on Aristotle. That's the only explicit treatment of Aristotle in this entire chapter, just one paragraph. It's almost as if what he's trying to do is perhaps to assimilate Aristotle to Thomas just enough so that people kind of ignore the differences. And so the only illusion that it gives, so that he starts by saying, there are two assertions that are key to natural right in Aristotle.
The first assertion appears on 156. According to Aristotle, there is no fundamental disproportionate between natural right and the requirements of political society, or there's no central need for the delusion of natural right. That's somewhat distinctive as an account of Aristotle in comparison with Plato. Plato's presentation on natural right is something like pointing to Socrates.
He's the guy who is the emblem of natural right. Now, the second key principle of natural right appears on 157 in that first paragraph as it turns out about Thomas. The second assertion regarding natural right, which Aristotle makes, and the assertion much more surprising than the first, is that all natural right is changeable. And that almost immediately Thomas takes issue, but and Strauss does very, very briefly underlines the error axioms from which the more specific rules of natural right of drive that are universal valid and immutable.
There he's sort of working between Aristotle and Thomas. So it's only really Thomas who insists that they are such that are immutable. Having just previously said all natural right that's Aristotle's position. Thomas is there certain immutable principles.
But it's only on the very next page, he turns to the avarochistic tradition. So he only barely mentions the difference between Aristotle and Thomas. Aristotle emphasizes the changeability, Thomas emphasizes his immutability, and then he turns to this confusing passive discussion of the philosophy of this is something that he develops in persecution in your writing. Bear with me on 158.
There exists an alternative medieval interpretation of Aristotle's doctrine, namely the avarochistic view, or mathematically stated the view characteristic of the philosophy that is of the Islamic Aristotelians as well as of the Jewish Aristotelians. This view was set forth within the Christian world by Mr. Sipadua, and presumably by other Christian or Latin avarochists, according to what he's Aristotle understands by natural right legal natural right. Or as Marcellius puts it, natural right is only quasi-natural.
So that's the main point that you're given to persecution in the art of writing. And what one doesn't really expect is that in this other work, you're actually going to get a lot more than you got before in the account of Plato, and the Aristotle and the classical natural right in general about how that classic natural right is going to differ from Thomas' teaching. Yeah, so I mean, one of the issues that he's concerned with here, right, the natural right guessers a whole, is the problem of nihilism creeping into the United States, right, whether we adhere to our sort of natural principles in the US, and that kind of creates the need for a united front, just sort of summarizing, creates the need for a united front that comes with a philosophical cause, right, which is specifically not being able to get this question. And he does get into it a little bit right, and what you've talked about that on page 159, but he sort of leaves it as a series of questions and thoughts that doesn't really reveal the extent to which he has decided the issue, I think, a bit more.
And yet you have these references to the Averus, and you have this footnote to the Helene essay. So maybe we should do this, of course, as long as we jump to it. I have a question. So I'm impressed, I mentioned an notion that Strauss is rhetorically presenting it as though he and the Thomas are on a similar page, but that paper is over a really big disagreement.
And I guess what I mentioned in knowing is what philosophically is at stake in this dispute between natural law and natural right. Is it, I mean, yeah, so I think that what we're going to end up seeing is this distinction between treating, say, the second table with ecological, extremely accepted opinion. But this ends up being explained by a thinker like Maimonides as an indication that human affairs are not rational in the strict sense of the work. That's a fundamental disagreement between Maimonides and Thomas, when once you fully naturalize principles of practical reason.
This is not to say that Maimonides is suggesting that human affairs have no role for reason by any stretch of the imagination. However, he, Maimonides wants to insist that the only thing that would be strictly rational would be things that are necessary universal. And the problem here is when it comes to human life and human affairs, we don't rise to that standard. So there's the intellectual state that has a misunderstanding.
Natural law, since the world in weight is at odds with the way reality is. Yes. Okay. That's an interesting point of the gap, because I was expecting to say something like, it's just based on the early remarks that there's a confusion coming, let's say, reason in revelation, you know, seems to give more to this extension of natural right to natural law.
So it's interesting to hear you say that the real problem is over naturalization. Well, this raises many, many questions and problems that perform most of which is a really big debate today among comists. Whether Thomas's teaching about natural law is purely rational. James Kerry has an excellent book called Natural Reason and Natural Law, in which he makes the very strongest case you could possibly make for the suggestion that the natural law teaching is purely rational.
However, there are many comists who think Thomas's teaching doesn't really have the line between the natural and the supernatural, has quite clearly and bright a bit as clear and bright a line as Kerry I think is insisting. This is a very big, complicated debate. I'm going to let my desk. So I mean, so one of the point is, so you have the exceptional case and then you have the sort of rule, right?
And, you know, right, so the Thomas are just going with the rule and saying that's natural. And the moderns like Machiavellia are saying, no, the exceptional case, that's the principle, right? So that's natural. And it seems like this is an immediate way to understand the over naturalization.
The ancient say, no, there's the rule and there's the exception. And then you're left with a kind of puzzle, right? Because on the one hand, it seems like you have pretty good guidance. But then there are these exceptional cases.
And the only way to make a principle out of the exceptional case, like I said, on ancient understanding is to go into something like Socrates. It's like, well, that's the guy who knows how to live. And so it looks like what you get out of that is is your somewhat denaturalizing the domestic position, because your maintain that ultimately, there's a principle between the rules of practical reason or the rules of morality, what you're doing. And the philosophic way of life, right?
And so then you get this sort of disjunct that. So in a way, the moderns and the Thomas are both guilty of a statement. This is a typical critique of the monotony, but they already passed the law to be the sort of continued, but there isn't the start around the canary, so all of prudence versus theoretical reason. But in a way, they're both trying to bridge that that got between theory and practice in a way that the ages just were, and the Jewish and the exotic.
Right. And so by the way, one side, another way of thinking about it, and that is very helpful, is here's what I was teaching about, what is necessary and versatile, applies clearly in his account only to, as my monotony would put it, things about the spherical move, that is to say, in the terrestrial realm, the realm of our experience, what is natural, is what is for the most part. So the standard that he then has in mind is this, well, there is this realm in which things are necessary and universal, that in a certain sense is the exception. And our experience is actually, if things being for the most part, then there are accidents.
This is where Solomon's talking about preservation in a place of elite central world in his account of a natural world. So there's actually a strange way in which there's a kind of parallelism between what he says about our earthly life or natural, earthly life and human affairs. But knows so in a way, what has happened with Thomism is they've taken him down at his university, it's necessary and universal standard, and argued as if it were present here, it's quite a strange thing. It sounds like astrology.
What you said, it's true of natural times, and this is this is this is aerosols. It's just it's true to the most part. Yes, sorry, that gets an earlier drink right around here. Let's just want to go back to Grace's question briefly.
The way you use my margins to characterize what's at stake in this difference between right and wrong, do you think that that's the right formulation for understanding how Strauss would see the stakes of this difference? Yes, the main reason I think that's true is because of the way in which the critique that is leveled against Thomism is presented really only in this oddly Jewish quote. So this is one of the main reasons we're having persecution. Sorry, you know, he's visual persecution in the art of writing.
So really the main point that I'm trying to make about natural writing, the history and persecution in the art of writing is, even so far as there's a critique of natural law and natural writing history, it's very very subtle. He effectively is trying to hide it. If you really want to get to actual critique of natural law, the fully fleshed out one, you're going to have to turn to persecution in the art of writing. And for anyone who knows anything about Strauss, this is really a bit of a body.
Please think about it. Strauss is most famous for his teaching on esotericism. Where did he present that? This strange book with three essays on Jewish thinkers.
This is the book that most Straussians are not going to get to. If they get to anything, they're going to get to natural writing history or at least the public. They're only going to get to natural writing history. They think once they've read that, they've got all of Strauss down.
So in a way, what Strauss did was to put this very important critique given away in the most confusing of the three essays. So the three essays in persecution in the art of writing and the side, believing aside the title of the same persecution in the art of writing are literary characters of the guides with a perplexed, the law of reason in the cruzari, and how to begin, no, sorry, how to study Spinoza's theological political treatments. So all these three essays by far, the most confusing. I think that this is the most confusing thing Strauss has ever wrote.
Really intentional, I let it, the whole lady piece is just by far the most confusing. It's also for the general public, you might pick up this book, It's the most obscure. Right. And there's also this strange thing.
I'm just relating my own experience when I read this as an undergraduate, the first time read along or persecution. And then you open up the maimonides chapter and immediately you're confronted with Greek and Arabic and Hebrew in this chapter almost immediately. So if he just makes it so off-putting and forbidding, just as you're reading about to anybody who's like a casual reader. So it's a really awesome, you're mentioning these books and elements, they each Strauss pointing back to himself and sort of doing something here and pointing to another work where he's saying, so first he comes first, he writes this, then he writes natural writing at the same time, he knows that publication is natural writing history, so he's pointing back to this at work.
It's just fascinating to think about somebody. Blending those things. Yeah, it's very interesting. They just have different purposes.
So we're implying therefore, is that in persecution, it was specific. In a way, the obvious persecution of error writing is not just a care work. But in a way, he's saying it's not, I mean, it's just your authors and such. So if you think the critique of natural laws is down here, it's kind of a label.
And by the way, yes, that's the serious critique is in the whole lady piece. And a lady for folks home was about a century before maimonides, the more famous who lived from 1134 to 12, 12, 6, right? So roughly a century before, but not on the side of philosophers. Correct.
So that's at least my reason. There are there are Strauss into actually think he's also a crypto philosopher. But but anyway, so what I find really striking is this is actually the basis for many. People weren't really very familiar with Strauss thinking, oh, yeah, this has a terrace and stuff.
It's really it's just about these Jewish weird Jewish and Arabic authors Plato's safe. I even know very serious Plato's knowledge, who also know quite a bit of Strauss, who actually I think use this. No, no, no, as an excuse to say, oh, you know, please don't know, he's not really a esoteric. Yeah.
Well, the world thinks about it. No, I mean, I don't think that the surface is art. So it's all right there. So one of the things you so he's writing is actually, I think subtle, and it's I think there's a whole a lot to be said about the reason he's writing these particular books.
Obviously, persecution is coming out of his Jewish studies, he was trying to make the more general case and about about as a terraceism and he had been writing right on zenophon. There's that true case on the taste of zenophon. That's much of his. Yeah, much earlier, he's part of this, oh, yeah.
He's part of the Greek and I'm even an octurian at the Jewish service and the teaching of moderation and that the concern with nihilism, obviously, and what he's talking about the exceptional case, he I think has in mind, obviously, you were talking about this with Schmanz, but he also names Euler and Heiger in this connection of people who took the critique from Adernity too far right, and didn't understand his alternative and turning to nature. And that explains, so an after I had history, he's trying to make a case against this tendency, which could devolve it to a sort of nihilistic alliance of history, he's trying to show that nature is still more viable standard, right, so there's that tactic. But here, yeah, so you have this more Jewish work and he's buried this criticism of natural law within it. Now, you can make this mark, I think, is really helpful, which he makes in other places as well, Strauss makes this point.
He says, Strauss is less interested in criticizing scholasticism in this introduction to persecution than he is increasing scholars who approach Islamic Jewish people philosophy in the same manner as they approach Christian scholasticism. So it's almost like the whole work is devoted to separating the toe-ness from people who study this work. And it's almost like from the very beginning, he has in mind the specific goal that he only gets around to, I guess, toward the end of the ladies. So maybe can you talk a little bit about the introduction of persecution and then how that pans out into this chapter?
Sure. So probably the last century and a half of scholarship on Jewish and Islamic philosophy was very deeply influenced by all of the much more extensive scholarship on scholasticism. Now, scholasticism presupposes a kind of harmony of the moral and the intellectual, moral virtue with intellectual virtue. When Strauss suggests, we will not understand the evil Jewish and Islamic political philosophy if we look at it through the lens of Christian scholasticism above all, what he's resisting is the idea that there's something you could call Jewish philosophy, as for example, Jew's song would refer to Christian philosophy.
Now, there even make and separate scholars of scholasticism don't really like that phrase, Christian philosophy, especially students who know something about Strauss, because they think there's a real difference between the philosophical life and that of Christian. However, the view of a Christian is whatever knowledge we might have of highest theoretical matters, or as Thomas would put it, to be achieved in the afterlife, what Thomas actually develops is that we're in fact even given an additional faculty that enables us to reason about things that weren't capable of reasoning about on earth. But so in a way, what Thomas did was to displace the fulfillment of the theoretical in the other life, which then only intensified the importance of morality in this world, but it also established a claim of harmonization of them. We do not find that harmonization in my monadies for Hulphurambi.
My monadies guided the quest almost at the beginning, in part of month chapter two, my monadies opens with this roaring effective attack on morality as a distraction for a man from the fulfillment or from his proper fulfillment. He in effect makes the argument, Adam before eight of the fruits, he was intellectually perfect. Once he ate of the fruit, what happened? He became distracted by all sorts of moral concerns.
My monadies was engaged in this ferocious critique of his own tradition for its obsession with the radical law. It's a very, very different world here with my monadies, that's where H-actors really goes a long way from my monadies trying to combat this, which is what you said. This over-empsiston moral rigidity and trying to sort of infuse and more or stay in the section, more over-cheons than Jewish thinking. Yes, that's true.
So eight chapters is his introduction to the portion of the commentary on the Mishnah that is called the chapters of the fathers. It's a very, very small part of the vast ocean that is the Talmud, sometimes called the ethics of the fathers, sometimes called the chapters of the fathers, but sometimes called the ethics, because that's where in this vast sea of legal reasoning that you get the ethical teaching of the rebels, my monadies added this introduction called the chapters in which he injects a whole lot of Aristotle into the Jewish understanding of ethics. Okay, so that's, we have a sense that Jewish philosophy is a kind of contradiction in terms, and you have one interesting formulation there, where the law, something about the law being grounded in, I guess one way to put it, you're not searching for a sort of natural basis for the law, but the law is going to be given to you by revelation, right? So what I was just saying about the porosity of my monadies is critique of the importance of morality is intended to a very great extent to suggest to the inquiring Jew that the law's focus on action needs to be tempered, and the higher end of theoretical profession needs to be raised up.
So he engages in what, from our point of view, and I have to say this, studying this often with Christian students, I think they're a bit shocked at the way in which he's denigrating morality, but in a certain way you can get away with it. This, by the way, there's a kind of interesting kind of inverse relation in the case of the natural law. In a way, what's going on with natural law is moving from a New Testament that has so heavily emphasized councils of perfection, that political life in a certain way is a little bit of an afterthought, and part of the point of the natural law teaching is to get Christians more focused on, say, things like the second table of the Decalogue, being much more down to earth and practical. So you get this strange kind of opposite relationship to ethics and theory.
In effect, Thomas is elevating the legal. Maimonides is denigrating the moral, and it has everything to do with their different situations. Now, this whole picture of things is complicated. There are straws, complicates, this picture of things at the beginning of his chapter.
He mentioned by my mind, that my mind did not choose to employ in his discussion of this fundamental question, the term natural law. Whatever may have been his reason, he preferred to discuss the question in this form, are there rational laws in contradiction to reveal the laws? And he comes to the conclusion, ultimately, that these laws are generally accepted, or the Greek isn't Doxel, like those commonly held views. And then he goes on to say in the last paragraph of the opening section of the Cusaria say, the impression that the philosophers rejected the view that there are rational laws distinguished from the positive laws, and in particular, the reveal laws, whether they denied the rational character of the natural law is apparently contradicted by Yohuda Helevi's discussion of this question.
So it seems like now he's entertaining the possibility that no, you can give a Christian, almost Christian scholastic approach to medieval Jewish philosophy, at least when it comes to this text. But it seems like what he's trying to do is distinguish that on the app. So what I just did in contrasting Maimonides and Thomas, is it oversimplification that in some ways is inspired by the infaduct of persecution and the art of writing? Because the way in which he starts is by emphasizing that just the characters' scholasticism, that it harmonizes the theoretical and the practical, that due to its harmonization of the theoretical and the practical, and because Christianity's emphasis on faith involves an emphasis on opinions about the whole, there's a certain way in which in Christianity there's a tendency to subordinate philosophy to faith.
That dynamic doesn't exist in Judaism precisely because Judaism and Islam are teachings of law. Their emphasis is upon action, it's not to say they don't deal with opinion, but the emphasis is on action. And for that reason, the way Strauss puts it in the introduction is philosophy has greater freedom to think. Now that makes it more precarious.
So in effect, what he describes about Scholasticism in general is theory had more intense oversight from the church in the Christian realm than it did in the Jewish and Islamic. So you get any introduction to this kind of radical, there's Christianity in one hand, Judaism in Islam, but when we get to the Halibian chapter, what's really very starting is the way in which he revises that teaching. Now I have to take one tea step back to the introduction. While he's setting up this kind of opposition between Christian and one hand and Judaism in Islam and the other, he talks about, he mentions, Jews of the competence of Maimonides and Halibis thought that it was impossible to be both a Jew and a philosopher.
Like there he's emphasized it. This thing that Christian's scholastics in a way they try to blend these things. This is not considered possible in this among these things. And when he makes that argument, he's getting you to think, okay, so Maimonides, I mean Maimonides, there's no greater Jewish authority than Maimonides in the medieval tradition.
He's a Jew, of course, he can't be a philosopher. So then he starts to develop this kind of tension between the philosophy of Arabic, but especially Muslim philosophers against the Jews. So he establishes a little riff in the introduction, but by the time you get to the law, he's in the first couple of pages, and then pulls out these two different groups in which it turns out there's a Jew, a Christian, and a Muslim in each case. So he starts, interestingly, he starts with quasi-natural light of Marcilius.
So it turns out he puts to a Christian first as the example or a black of the natural light teaching of Aristotle. And then he talks about another era of stodialing, Thomas. Well, it turns out that Thomas is advocating this opposing view. And then the next paragraph, so these are the paragraphs with the super long footnotes.
By the way, this is a little curiosity about this chapter. I know of no chapter in Strauss that has such long forbidding footnotes. Get away, just filled with Latin Hebrew, not just Hebrew, but Judeo-Arabic. That is to say Arabic and Hebrew characters, if the Latin, those didn't scare you enough.
So he uses these footnotes, he really buries in the footnotes, this contrast. But so it's Marcilius, then it's Thomas. And in the very next paragraph, however merely alluding to the difference between Marcilius and Thomas, he turns and says to return to the Jewish heres-totelians, where he's just said that Thomas was a Christian heres-totelian. By now you have no idea what it means to be an heres-totelian.
And then you totally lost Schoetelius, that's one kind of heres-totelian. There's Thomas, there's another kind. Here, so my monothesus here goes as a Jewish heres-totelian. And then Strauss goes on, so you get Marcilius.
So for those representing natural right, you get Marcilius, maimonides, and avarities, where the avaristic tradition, and they are using the avaristic tradition very loosely to cover Al-Tarabi, etc. And then on the other side of the ledger, you have Thomas, Saadia Gahon, and the Muat-tazilai-Khalam, right? Is he adding yet? Muatazilai-Khalam, what is that?
So the Muatazilai-Khalam, so there are historically two main schools of Islamic theology. The most ancient one is often referred to as a rationalist school of theology. Why is it called rations? Because they claim there are such things as rational laws.
What did they mean by that? An eight principles of practical reason. The Muat-tazilai-Khalam is the Islamic equivalent to natural law. To not, you know, natural.
Yeah, that's really interesting. This could be, too big of a cat-worm. So should we say something about what the Kuzari is this word? Because I think the literature of the literary can judge as a dialogue.
I think it's quite important because a lot of his arguments, he's trying to separate the two again after the CPD collapsing. A lot of his argument has to do with this scholar figure in the text and what he's arguing into, who he's arguing into, and then what seems to be the intonation of this scholar's truth. So just a rough sketch. So this work, the Kuzari, this is actually the actual title of the work is the defense of the despised faith.
Come to be called the Kuzari or kuzari, right? If you depending on your Ashkenazi or Sephardic pronunciation of the name. But of course, this was yet another work written by Jew in Arabic using Hebrew characters. The rough frame of this dialogue is that Helavi is describing a king who it's been discovered historically apparently may have been caught between Muslims on one side and Christians on the other.
It is known that there was a king of the Khazars who actually converted his people to Judaism. The suspicion is that he may have done it in emergency objects but anyway. With that sort of vague historical information in the background, what Helavi does is he makes the Khazar king a person with whom one can have a conversation. What he does is to start with a philosopher and then, sorry, I may actually get the word wrong here, forgive me if I'm too.
It may be the Christian next and then the Muslim scholar, but he ends with the Jewish scholar as he goes through these different characters. What we see in the case of the account of the philosopher is a very brief thumbnail sketch of the philosophical view of things. It's one of the most shocking of accounts of philosophy ever given in the medieval tradition and it's given by whom by by I think in the end a critic of philosophy. He presents the philosopher as having a very less a fair attitude toward religion.
The philosopher suggests, well, there are all sorts of different kinds of religions here as a philosopher can adopt. You can adopt the religion of St. Plato's laws or you can just adopt the religion of your particular community. You're a philosopher.
You don't really care. So it's really in your face. You will not find any of the defenders of philosophy presenting philosophy in that guy. He's one of the main reasons.
I think he can't be a philosopher. That is a lady. But it does display a very, that's his well-attuned account of what the philosophers are up to, which is impressive that a non-philosopher could for sure see the section. For sure and Strauss emphasizes that we imagine a lady having studied philosophy and had and at least for a moment having taken it deeply seriously and having had a spiritual crisis after which he returned.
So this is that along with the comment, by the way, the comment would appear that those scholars would appear at the beginning of the work. He's present in the background throughout the work. Now, there are different ways you can interpret that. I'm determined that to suggest that a lady really understands the claims of philosophy and he rejects them with open eyes.
Now, one of the strangest features of the rational law or natural law or the way that Strauss puts it, catagorn comparisons that a lady seems to advocate, is that he develops a novel riff on the move that says like that. And what's most surprising about it is that it doesn't depend on rational principles in a separate stonpe. Simple faith is the basis of catagorn comparisons. That's a really, I think, in effect what Strauss is suggesting is this may be something like what underlies Thomas's teaching despite all the claims of the rationality of an actual law.
That a lady may have actually seen further what's required for claiming there can be catagorn comparisons. The only thing that ultimately undergirds them has to be faith. By the way, let me just add one small thing. Giutto, a lady was far less famous for this work than for the fact that he was the greatest medieval Jewish poet.
And what was his poetry about two things, love poetry and devotional poetry about God. And even his love poetry reaches its peak in love poetry about God. Makes sense. Could it be that a lady, we see something like the dispute between philosophy and poetry, I think, in the opposition between a lady and my monadies.
And I think that anyway, that's part of what Strauss has suggested. So in this comparison between a lady and Thomas, it seems you're suggesting that a lady was clear to himself about what catagorn comparison would require as a condition. That is to say something like faith, they're going to be a relation to the non-able body. So if it's true that Thomas did go this far, then what we were saying earlier, that over-naturalization would rest on a kind of confusion.
Yes, I was not in my head. Sorry. There's only for those in this room. But by the way, to confirm this, there's this really surprising claim at the end of the Guzzari, which as anyone who goes Strauss knows, it's surprising to ever find shocking claims, surprising claims, at the beginning or the end of a Straussian work.
But it comes very close to saying, I think, very surprising things. On page 140, of persecution and the art of writing, he says, for if the philosophers are right in their appraisal of natural morality, of morality not based on divine revelation, natural morality is strictly speaking, no morality at all. It is hardly distinguishable from the morality essential to the preservation of a gang of robbers. Natural morality being what it is.
Only a law revealed by the omnivitant and omniscient God and sentient by the omniscient and omnipotent God, rare repetition of the case of Strauss, can make possible genuine morality, category, and paradox. Only revelation can transform natural man into the guardian of his city, or to use the language of the Bible, the guardian of his brother. By the way, that note, note 142, that's a reference to a lady, but anyone who knows Plato's laws knows that there is this really striking parallel between a lady's work and Plato's laws. And that is this elevation or celebration of the guardian of the city.
It's actually in the laws of the guardian of the laws, but it is in essence the same thing. You stopped right short of one of the best lines here. Please go ahead. One has not to be naturally pious.
He has merely to have a passionate interest in genuine morality in order to long with all his heart, revelation, or only as such is the potential. So now we're all through even a gang of robbers, I suppose. So one of the reasons I hesitate on that is because this happens to be a passage that James Kerry picks out at the end of that really important book on natural law. And he holds it up as one of the only things that Straussians throw at natural law that he sees as one of the serious objections, but he very quickly dismisses it.
I'm sorry that I can't fully recreate everything that York is about at the moment, which is a little bit too tired, but to make a long story short, I do think, James Kerry may misinterpreted this passage. I don't think that it means I'll put it this way. As I understand it, what he was suggesting is in order to be receptive to revelation, one has to have a natural disposition to word it. He interprets that to mean that all human beings are naturally disposed to receive revelation.
But in fact, as I understand it, what a lady is, what Strauss is suggesting is that one has to be a moral man to be receptive to revelation. And what Kerry doesn't really attend to is this is the radical opposition between the philosopher and the moral man. This brings us back to something more toward the middle of the law of reason. One of the most surprising things Strauss never argues, but one of the most illuminating 114 that wouldn't be up.
Greg is a stress. And this is one of the pastors that was openly taught. The philosopher denies the relevance, not only of ceremonial actions, but of all actions. More precisely, he asserts the superiority of contemplation as such to action as such.
From the philosopher's point of view, goodness of character and goodness of action is essential, not more than it means toward or byproduct of the life of contemplation. One of the most when it could take chilling things that's been stated openly about morality, by the way, one of the main reasons that Nathan Parkof says about this book. The one on a lady represents Strauss's only consideration about author and presents what are probably his most radical statements on the relations between philosophy, religion, and morality. It is really shocking.
Let's flesh it out. Think about it. You can think about it in terms of the Republic. In the Republic, we get in books two through four, the accounts of demonic virtue or political virtue.
As the way that Strauss puts it is one way of thinking about Aristotle's account of virtue. Remember, this is what Strauss has in the back of his mind when makes this claim. According to Aristotle, what is required for an action to be truly virtuous and for a human being to be truly virtuous among the most important of the criteria would be that one should do the action for its own sake. And it's going to be an end.
That'd be an end. And what you're saying is that the philosophy, though he performs more actions, he's not doing that to their own sake. This is really very clearly exactly why he's in republic, sorry, the Republic, the Aristotle back to the Republic. But in the Republic, whereas Strauss puts it, you get something like an account of the political view of morality, which is lower than Aristotle's, but the account.
An Aristotle's account of ethical virtue is lower than Socrates's account of the philosophical topic of virtue that he gives in the opening of book six. If you look at the account of state moderation in book six of the Republic, what you see is why is the philosophy of modern? Because he doesn't care about the things that everybody else cares about. He's smart because he's the amount of actually he loves wisdom so much that he doesn't waste his time off to drink.
So it's like a sort of thought, sort of, it's an after it's an after it's an applied product in other words. He echoes that point. He's in the giving accounts with J. Oh, you always thought it was small.
Yeah, he says the sponsor, of course, doesn't indulge in drink because then you can effect, right? So they're it's completely secondary. It's not a sort of stuff for strength. It's just as a matter of a direct quote from part three chapter eight of my modulus is guide.
This isn't need to talk about the gymnast or the athletes who are French and the things. Well, quickly, draw another reference that's not related. That is what this is. The funny version of this version of this that folks home might do somewhat later with actually their professional athletes who seem to be more because they take such care of themselves and don't violate the rules and sort of eat healthy.
But then as soon as the career is already, you know, sort of, you know, all sorts of laws, the reason for which they're behaving more is going to be a silly term example, but it's a similar thing as far as they're more but not in the way that the more the virtue is more than not doing for its own sake. So the philosophers like the athletes, perhaps you can't philosophize in general or I am black to our hair, for example. And so that's the reason that the philosophy is. And by the way, I'd like to, this is a little bit strange, but appealing back to what I said about the suggestion that Socrates is really the standard, much as the best regime is the standard and their style is that things from politics.
Well, it seems to me that actually the argument of ancient philosophers as well as these medieval Jews and Muslims is that it's the experience of public life that we think the most important human beings are the ones who appear to sacrifice themselves for the city the most, right, the great generals, the great leaders of nations, the Churchals of the world. But it seems to me the argument of the philosophers is that in fact, the philosopher is the true standard against which morality should be properly measured. The way that I think Socrates makes this argument in the platonic dialogues is to insinuate that all of those different dialogues devoted to one or another virtue give you common traditional definitions of the virtues. And all of them come up short when measured against Socrates.
And it's not my chance that Socrates, I think is that the famous so-called real about virtue being knowledge, that's really only true in the case of Socrates. That is, it's only Islam in which that shocking plane that so troubles people that virtue is knowledge, which of course, Aristotle's ethics looks like a really serious critique of because he self-rains out ethical virtue from intellectual virtue. The Socrates kind of ranting it down your throat. Virtue is knowledge.
We know plenty of people who know what they should do, but they don't do it. They don't do it. Well, Socrates is the guy who always did what he knew and knew what he did. Sorry, are you saying then that for Plato in this case, the moral life is pointing to Socrates?
That's correct. Okay, but sort of ironically of terminating in a way of life that itself couldn't tolerate. That's the whole dynamic of the ethics. The whole dynamic of the ethics is look at these various moral virtues.
If you press them, you scratch them, you see that there are problems, there are always problems, inconsistencies. Where the inconsistencies go away in this higher way of life. There's one thing I'm going to twist a little bit on though is there's one way in which Socrates seems to be, and this is something I still puzzle with myself, I'm on word of everything. But one of the reasons it's actually so widely admired ultimately is the supposed sacrifice that he makes again is like, which looks like a very traditional, morally good thing to do to lay down his life for one's friends.
It doesn't quite fit easily. I've never really been short-lived. But it's not that hard. But let's go to the test.
He calculates that it would be a wonderful thing for a sprain to go out looking like a like he's sacrificing himself. That's what he's at the end. He presumably has gotten some hint that maybe all of his faculties are perhaps not quite so fully there. So he decides that when he's taken trial, he's going to argue in such a way that he gets himself put to death because I think we all know that in the apology that's what he's doing.
He's like, I was in the record Josh. One interesting, I don't know, people try Socrates. He seems capable in a theatre, right? Like he's not losing his back.
I do think there's an interesting point to me that well, death is bad. So maybe in the best case, you can have a little bit of death. So that would be one I think possible. I think he couldn't, he didn't decide on the moment.
Like when the city was going to a huge city. I want to circle back to it. I want to circle back to it. I want to read it.
It's just a foot note 141 and it's too his statement that the scholar character in the Guzari tacitly asserts that the natural law is not obligatory. And at the end, he says the philosophers would deny of this movement. The philosophers would deny the rules which are called obligatory by the society or in fact the obligatory strictly speaking. Society has to present to its members certain rules as obligatory in order to supply these rules with that degree of dignity and sanctity which will induce the members of the society to obey them as much as possible.
And he brings up then on page 141 as he's wrapping it up. He says, Haleini has spoken on this subject with a remarkable restraint, not being a fanatic. This is right before the chapter of the show. So much I said, that's right.
Not being a fanatic. He did not wish to supply unscrupulous and the fanatic with weapons which they certainly wouldn't misuse. But this restraint cannot deceive the reader of the singleness of his primary and ultimate purpose. Then it just adds right here.
Sort of left wondering. But one of the things I got of this that was really instructive or interesting was that it seems like Strauss, as he's interpreting the text in folks who are in natural law, he's also offering a sort of psychology of Halefi as author. He drifts away towards philosophy, he comes back and he seems to be one in the direction of revelation by his moral seriousness or his passionate interest in morality. He puts it, but he never allows himself, he never wants to submit his reader to the same experience or corruption that he went through.
That he has a kind of restraint that speaks to the degree that one might endorse the natural law, superficially as Halebi appears to be as a way of winning people back to it. But he's somehow aware, I think of the deeper, I'm not afraid of this well, but I appreciate this part of it. It's really interesting. So I think mainly what he's alluding to is the not very great challenge that Halebi has set up by having a conversation between a man who is in fact a guardian of the city with a Jewish scholar.
That is to say, it's not really very difficult to defend being moral if you're a defender of a law and you want the authority of law to be upheld. It would have been much more convincing to have a conversation between the philosopher and that man and have a philosopher beat him down. But obviously he was not going to go out with it differently. Perhaps there should have been a dispute between someone who really brought out as explicitly as Strauss though, that it's really only faith that affirms the truth of morality against philosophy.
Strauss has pieced that together with us, if it works, it's not overwhelming the obvious from the casualties of the Quizani. It's very interesting. I think it's a good pick to stop. I mean, this was really Iowa.
Yeah, fantastic. Fantastic. Fantastic. That was a fantastic episode.
Thank you Paul. Thank you guys. This was a real pleasure. And thank you, John.
Thank you, and thank you, and thank you for joining us as well, Greg's student, he's struggling with. And then thank you, Bob Ol' Josh for this illuminating conversation. And thank you all for joining us on the Youth Think Great, rest in peace, David Barr.