Welcome back to the new Thinkery. I'm David Barr and with me as always is my good friend, Greg McBrayer. How are you Greg? Doing well David.
Good to hear you. Good to see you. Yeah, likewise. How are the holidays?
The holidays are lovely. I've been doing a little bit of traveling to visit friends and family and down right now in Georgia actually visiting mom and dad. Excellent. And you're hard at work on your translation of Zenfons, Hellenica, I trust.
It's the plans to start that in January. Yes. I've got book one. Thank you, David.
Keep on. So you heard of here folks Greg is officially engaged in this. Yeah. Yeah.
I don't know what's going on. Great. Now I've got competitors. Good job David.
How are the holidays? Doing well. Very nice. Have very in-laws over.
You know, eat some pork. That's about it. How much to say. When does school start again?
Mid-January. Okay. See still some time. Are we releasing this right after New Year's?
We should talk to you. Happy New Year. Happy 2020 was a doozy. I'm so glad it's over.
Well 2020 was the answer room for what comes next. I think. So Alex, I'm super excited. I'm thrilled.
And our Twitter fan. Our Twitter reaction. They're thrilled too. Because who our guest is on today's episode where we will be discussing Heidegger.
And Leo Strauss. But in particular, the argument that natural right in history, Strauss's great book is a veiled response to Heidegger, both critical and appreciative. So Alex, who's our guest introduce your old teacher? Yes, I'm very excited.
Our guest today is Richard Vellkely. He's Celia Scott, weather head professor of philosophy at Tulane University. He has a BA from Cornell, PhD from Pennsylvania State University. At which institutions he studied with two of his most well regarded students, Alan Bloom and Richard Kennington.
Since then, he's gone on to have a career, a remarkable academic career of his own. While also serving as associate editor of the review of metaphysics from 1997 to 2006 and president of the metaphysical society of America from 2017 to 18. Say nothing of his many fellowships and invite lectures both in the United States and abroad. He's an author of a number of articles and chapters and he's edited or co edited five books.
But he's also the author of three monographs, all of them still available from the University of Chicago Press. The first freedom and the end of reason first published in 1989 is on the decisive influence of Rousseau on cons thinking among other things. The second from 2002 has the wonderful title being after Rousseau and traces Rousseau's influence through modernity beyond cons all the way up to Heidegger. And the third monograph from 2011 is Heidegger Strauss and the premises of philosophy.
So what we're going to be discussing today and details the often quiet, even silent engagement of Leo Strauss with Martin Heidegger. I listed these to be works in the subjects just so that I can display the extent to which Professor Vellkely's work reflects his deep reconsideration of the scholarship on the greatest of late modern figures and more fundamentally of the premises of modernity up to the present age. As such, I think his works are indispensable for anybody who is serious about coming to know himself as a creature of late modernity. And we are all such creatures.
This quest for self knowledge reflects the Socratic nature of Oakley's writings feature no less true of his teaching, which I was fortunate enough to enjoy first hand as a graduate student in his classes at Tulane. In courses on Rousseau, Kant, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Heidegger again, Nietzsche again, and Strauss, Vellkely displayed an impressive agility in switching quickly from one thinker's framework to the next, bringing them into dialogue with one another. So I'm very pleased to have him here so everybody can get a taste of what it's like to learn from Professor Vellkely. Richard, welcome to the New Thinkery.
It's wonderful to have you here. Well, thank you very much, Scholey. It's a great pleasure to be here. That was a very kind introduction.
Those delighted and a little bit wary of discussing this topic of Heidegger and Strauss. I have found in the past that it's a bit difficult to discuss this topic with many audiences. It's because the followers of Heidegger in general don't show very much interest in work and the students and scholars influence my Strauss. I would say on the whole they show more interest in Heidegger than Heidegger and Strauss, there is a kind of resistance or kind of nervousness, very widespread, I've found, Strauss and scholars.
And I believe there are important misunderstandings of these thinkers that are occurring on both sides. And perhaps the things I say will help to correct some misunderstandings. Now I began reading Heidegger and Strauss actually quite early. I happened to come upon some of their books when I was a senior in high school.
But right away I saw that both were very important figures. Of course I didn't yet understand what they're important. I just had a sense of the depth of questioning and the vast range of learning that each thinker brought to that questioning. I'll briefly say things about what I did in my youth as a college student.
Just for the sake of clarification, just to point out to our audience, Martin Heidegger and Leo Strauss, both German thinkers of the early 20th to mid to late 20th century up until the 70s, right? And what's really at stake in their, maybe just a quick statement on what's really at stake in their disagreement before getting into the background. Oh sure. Well, as you say, they are as you were contemporaries in Germany, early 20th century.
They had a certain amount of contact but not a great deal. And Heidegger came on the scene as a leading example of a philosophic approach called nominology, which sought to simplify a lot. It's not to question the primacy of the concepts and methods of modern natural science and the understanding, especially the understanding of human beings. And the stress to kind of pose examination of phenomena of human life and human experience with his few assumptions and prejudices from inherited from modern thought.
And Strauss was significantly influenced by this movement. There was a brief coincidence of his studies with Heidegger at the University of Freiburg and he also had encountered with the teaching of Edmond Güsterl, who was the real founder of this. And the Strauss had many friends and acquaintances who were also studying with Heidegger. A number of these people he retained contact for his life and corresponded with him.
These include such noteworthy figures as Hans Gueher-Gaudemer, right? And Jacob Klein. Exactly. And Jacob Klein.
Gaudemer Hans Gueher-Gaudemer Karl Lühve, Gerhard Krüger, Hans Jonas. These are particularly prominent among his correspondence friends. And they were all deeply affected by Heidegger's teaching. You want me to go on and say how?
Yeah, let's see how and then we'll go move on to how you were, how you got specifically interested in this. Oh, all right. Yeah. In the early 1920s, Heidegger Strauss, lecturing on the beginning of Aristotle's metaphysics.
He said about this that he had never heard or seen such a thing. It's a thorough and intense interpretation of the philosophic text. And he thought that in fact Heidegger's investigation of philosophic questions in the end surpassed that of the sort of set it up. In the end Heidegger went out to over go through a sort of radicalized, sort of way of questioning.
I won't try to go into the end with that means technically. And hearing Heidegger, Strauss, as of this, nothing affected us as profoundly in those years in which our thought took their lasting directions as not as much as anything else as the thought of Heidegger. I'm sorry, Mr. Heidegger.
That's quite a revealing statement because Heidegger is saying, well, he doesn't press this down and we never forgot it. But giving a lasting direction there thinking. I don't think that's often acknowledged by the students either of Klein or of Sir Alice. Yeah, I was particularly struck when reading.
So just for listeners were discussing chapter from your book on Heidegger and Strasmer. You get some of this background, right? Especially from the natural right in history. But your account of what it means to expose the roots so that they can be seen I think is and how that creates a great affinity.
But also there's disagreement about what's going on with these roots. I think that's a really profound statement about what Heidegger accomplished for them. Exactly. Well, that's actually, that's the main issue here.
I hope we can get some light on it. Yes, along the lines of what he said, Strauss says that his friend Klein was actually the first to understand possibility which Heidegger had opened up. Even though Heidegger had not really intended this. It is the possibility of a genuine return to classical philosophy.
That is the philosophy of Plato or his Donald D. No, so as Strauss acknowledges that Heidegger is a philosopher. He uses this expression number of times, even a great philosopher. But he also acknowledges he could not stomach his moral teaching.
And he objected to Heidegger's emphasis on what Heidegger called resoluteness in his teaching in the 1920s, which pointed toward the kind of political extremism. Although it was actually rather indefinite. What sort of it? What?
What? It went short. Professor, I have a question on that. This is always something I puzzled about.
I understand plainly why Strauss, a German Jew would have utter disdain for Heidegger. But did Strauss use that same other philosophers in the Pantheon? He just simply engaged a kind of in the background with because he found them distasteful, let's say. In the personal lives.
I'm sorry, are you asking if there's a parallel case to Heidegger? Yeah, yeah, that's Strauss. Is there a parallel case where Strauss treated somebody else in the same manner for similar reasons? I can't think of someone who's being treated by him in the same manner for, I mean, this is a special case for as a philosopher Heidegger's very important to him, extremely important.
And at the same time, of course, he had the strong objection to Heidegger's moral and political outlook. And I can't think of another situation that's actually parallel. I'm glad you've asked that. That's all right, I think of one.
But I think I'll be able to come up with one. Sorry, so I don't want to keep you healthy, but maybe we can go into a little bit how you got interested in the subject matter because I think you're touching on something now that I think it's quite big. I mean, we can get to a little bit later, which is the fact that I think Strauss's disagreement with Heidegger is not simply more political, right? It also has a philosophic basis that all this talk of resoluteness and other categories in Heidegger's thought reflect a failure to engage with some of the premises of modernity and with some of the fundamental problems.
Yes. Specifically reason of revelation, I think, as you point out is lurking in the background here. Yes. So maybe we can get into why you got interested in the subject and maybe late modernity generally.
Well, I could say that I as an undergraduate studying political philosophy with a few professors. I was also studying history, languages, literature. I was preoccupied with certain questions about the modernity actually, about its origins, about its origins of its politics, of its science, of its philosophy. And I began to have an interest in this issue of the break with ancient philosophy, ancient ambideval and what that meant.
As you mentioned, I took some courses from Alan Bloom, also from Richard Hennigton, who was a visiting professor at the Cornell and taught a remarkable course on Descartes, which greatly influenced me for the future. And I continued my studies in Germany and at Penn State. I, while in Germany, read a great deal of German philosophy and conversations with Hans-Garradamir and Dieter Henry and was moving towards some sort of public and German philosophy for a dissertation, but that became, I formulated that finally, during my Penn State years. And I was studying there with Richard Hennigton, and Emily Rosen, Thomas Zabong, who was a very excellent scholar in Kantian phenomenology.
And, well, I gravitated toward thinking about Kant because I saw that he in some ways summed up early modern philosophy and then was so very crucial for the development of later modern philosophy, not by understanding what motivated him and what he was most fondly attempting. And I think it's a great deal about modern philosophy as a whole. I mean, at least I think it helped me out and said that it did help me in that regard. And I became aware of Rousseau's great importance at a critical phase of Kantian.
And I reflected on this and conceived of it as part of the larger theme of what I called Kantianity of Reason, where there's only a cause-conf to question the modern enlightenment and the role of the reason within it. And Rousseau's questioning, in fact, had made him wonder deeply about the goodness of Reason itself for giving life. And I saw that Kantianity was to provide an answer to that question and to restore consciousness in a changed or reformed version of enlightenment thinking. Sorry.
To take one step back, right? So in early modernity, right, there's a concern with developing the sciences, right? And this sort of basic faith in Reason and figures like Rousseau especially came to question the influence of the arts and sciences on civic culture. And this is in a way, I think, an issue that still sticks with us today, probably even worse with contemporary technology.
But in a way, Rousseau and Kant are trying to situate the arts and sciences in a more robust moral framework or political framework. Is that maybe a kind of layman's way of putting it? Right, right, right. Yes, yes, too.
That does enlighten me, can be morally and politically sound, beneficial, not destructive of human moral sense, and foundations of political life. And of course, they approach their responsibilities, probably, in very different ways, ways that have some very important relation. So I wanted to think further about how this modern project of the relief of the United States through science, through the dissemination of knowledge that we call enlightenment, was a challenge that we thought and continued to be a controversial matter in later modern thought, right through the 19th century, and it remains a major issue in different ways for both high-degree and Strauss. Oh, very quickly, I just indicated why we're not right, second and third book.
Yeah, so let's get to the real subject matter, high-degree and Strauss. Let's get back to that. Correct. So I think you've discussed a little bit the problem of discussing high-degree and Strauss, the reception among students of each, and then also I think a little bit why Heidegger was important to Strauss and his contemporaries.
Maybe you can go into a few details about why Heidegger was so important for Strauss, some of the features. Yes. Now, I would focus on three primary reasons. And this is a reason for Heidegger's exertion of a considerable pull on not only Strauss, but others just like the figures that we have mentioned.
Now, there is, first of all, the powerful mode of questioning in phenomenology, but in Heidegger's phenomenology in particular, which, as I mentioned, called to question the parent-digmatic status of the concepts of the natural scientific, which do understanding human life. And so, in terms of the way questioning related to that, also this is very prominent in Heidegger, the idea of the autonomous human self, the understanding in modern philosophy, you can say very, very prominently in Kant. Of a human being as a self-diverning independent fundamentally oriented by his or her own reason, and attaining considerable freedom from tradition or from, or reason, I mean from religion. Heidegger's questioning of that issue also is very fundamental.
And in taking up this questioning of modern concepts, he was really departing very strikingly from the academic philosophy of the time, which was mostly Germany, reflecting the influence of Kant, the neo-Kantian tools, and in Strauss' means of how he studied with major neo-Kantian philosophers and scholars, and they were important in his education, such as Paramount Cohen and other figures. And Strauss also acknowledged Heidegger's challenge to this tradition was very powerful, and that was brief for the other figures. Also Heidegger, I'll go to a second point, put forward an understanding of the modern period as a deepening loss of the awareness of the most fundamental question, you might call it a kind of bargaining, I do the soul, that he emphasized. Of course, the audience was receptive to this because of their experiences of the First World War.
There were the pessimistic analyses, edition of the West, such as by Oswald Schwangler, and there was the very important growing influence of Nietzsche's thought and Nietzsche's diagnosis of European nihilism, after the death of God. And so Heidegger was providing a penetrating philosophical, I'd say, analysis and underpinning for thinking about this condition of growing decline and darkness. And thirdly, through his careful analyses of philosophic texts, he showed that fundamental questions, and he crucially focused upon one which he called the question, what is being. We're recently more genuine way in Greek antiquity than in modern thought, and he was having some understanding of how we can move forward with a better understanding of these questions by investigating the ancient texts.
At the same time, this is pointing towards the topic we have to take up the differences. Heidegger was arguing that both ancient and modern philosophy had failed adequately to grasp the most fundamental issues, and not adequately grasped even in antiquity the real bearing of the question of being. That's very not easy to sum up what Heidegger means by the question of being. I would try to put it in a kind of preliminary and simple way.
Heidegger is investigating what it is, how it is possible for humans to be open to the world, or open to being as a whole. He has the distinguishing feature of the human. And more or less centrally, Heidegger is thinking in terms of the human possibility of questioning, of raising the question about being as, or of our place in being. In this view, the tradition is not adequately understood how it is possible to raise this question.
Heidegger's view is that the impriminate first principles of philosophy such as the ideas or substance or causes are answered to what is possible. But somehow not explaining the questioning itself as this remarkable openness of humans. Just to emphasize that point a little bit, I think that this is something that is really remarkable in what Strauss does, which is to understand that these solutions that you see in the history of philosophy, which drive Heidegger's historic system is understanding that all thinking is somehow historically conditioned or conditioned on the particular. Strauss suggests, and I think what he noticed is that Heidegger observes that all solutions are impossible without a prior questioning.
kind of openness and that awareness, I think, and quickly from longer, that awareness is necessarily of a higher order than the theorizing or the system building or the proposal of solutions or doctrines that comes in its place. That's very well said. So Strauss's focus upon what he calls the fundamental problems is a kind of parallel focus, who I think is renewing of the question of being, that renewing. And although Heidegger does give a great emphasis on history as the unfolding of a series of metaphysical answers, which increasingly forget the question itself, it is true that Heidegger does in his way bring out that there is an underlying question for the whole the entire tradition.
And even something that in a way precedes the tradition, although his reflection on that is quite elusive, but he has a thinking about the original opening and how that original opening may have some in-ship with the thinking of the eastern world, and how there's a possibility of a return to beginnings that would provide a kind of global possibility. Why, however, does Heidegger, well, let me put it this way, why does Strauss make the accusation that Heidegger thought is an inadequate addressing these fundamental questions? And let me say that sometimes we present Heidegger thought actually partly under the influence of Strauss, in a way that obscures how fundamental his thinking is. And so far, there is a tendency to focus upon Heidegger's work in the 1920s and just focus upon the theme of resoluteness and in being in time, Heidegger has a certain connection of human project, a self-projection, and Strauss focuses upon a very well-known essay called Introduction to Existentalism.
He talks about being in time, and it's a bit misleading about the character Heidegger thought. Or in that summary, Strauss is making Heidegger sound rather like a somewhat popular version of existentialism. I think he's laying a familiar basis, who might say a accessible basis, talking about Heidegger, which he wants to deepen. And then he goes further into the elaboration of Heidegger thought of Heidegger, which, as he mentions, is more genuinely in base with the Greeks and with the question of being.
And I think people often don't read onto the end of that essay or don't take seriously enough to need to read some of this later writings of Heidegger, who say that Heidegger is not just the resolute willful existentialist with relativistic nihilistic implications. And when Strauss himself was engaging with, I know in the courses on Zarathustra, he was reading some of the later work that Nietzsche did on, or sorry, that Heidegger did on Nietzsche, who's Nietzsche's Zarathustra, which was recently published at the time of the course, which is, I think, the 60s, right? Or the 50s. Is it early 60s?
Quite. Yeah. Yes. Well, you gather from his letters that he was reading just about everything that Heidegger published after the Second World War with great interest and remarks to at least one correspondence that He thinks Heidegger's about has become much deeper and making it, you know, and then away a second, major impact upon him in his life.
And he is writing natural writing history just around the time is reading of important works coming from Heidegger. You have to world war in the late 40s and the early 50s. So what I can say about that connection is, you know, the later Heidegger picks up certain themes that are rather resonant with Strauss, and then we can again try to focus upon the important differences. But, you know, the Heidegger of being a time is resolutely atheistic, I might say.
And the later Heidegger quite differently makes the case that the human awareness of the world with being inevitably brings forward the thought of infinity. And Heidegger means this without claiming any particular, you know, doctrinally allegiance. It's not a specifically Christian playing or any other particular, I mean, yet Heidegger thinks that there is some understanding of this point in pre-Socratic philosophy and in the ancient poets, and in modernity in certain writers, but with hell to lend hand in each of them. So, and that issue of, well, the intrinsic connection between human openness to the world and question of divinity is related in Heidegger's discussions to the topic of technology, modern nihilism, and what he calls the flight of the gods.
Now Strauss is certainly very interested in the history of Heidegger. He doesn't even know he doesn't be in board stuff. He thinks that there is something in a way defective in this reflection. But, when can he say this?
Heidegger was developing his points in traditional ways of thinking about metaphysical principles, thinking about, say, being the divine and God. We're not chinnable. And that does not lead us properly in Heidegger's view to endorse aerialism or positivism or a kind of existentialist, willful obstruction of meaning. It should lead us, he thinks, to a new way of thinking about the cosmos or the whole that embraces human.
Now, isn't there something in a way parallel in Strauss, even if there aren't very great differences? It is. Strauss describes Socrates signifies the space of Socrates' turn to the study of the human soul as providing a key to the understanding of the whole. And he's based of the human as the only part of the whole that is open to the whole.
I mean, these actually sound very much like formulations of Heidegger. And at the same time, he wants to take or investigate this a chronic approach without the assumption that there are traditional metaphysical answers or metaphysical ideas endorsed by us. In the next, he says expressly, that this is just a point that Socrates is open to the cosmological question without importing it. Yeah, if I can talk about that one second.
I really find it such an interesting angle into Strauss' relationship to Heidegger and also Nietzsche, which is the question of Socrates, right? Yes. Nietzsche, Nietzsche, Strauss is less critical of Nietzsche, right? At the end of that first chapter in natural writing history, he's far more willing to have a decisive statement on Heidegger than he is about Nietzsche.
He waffles on whether his critique of the stories of applies to Nietzsche. And one of the features really comments in Nietzsche and Strauss is their interest in Socrates. I mean, they both have writings to the problem of Socrates, obviously. Strauss taking that name from Nietzsche, whereas for Heidegger, he kind of just gives a, has a doctrinaire approach to Plato, where he lies Plato and Platonism on a certain level in a way that Nietzsche and Strauss never would.
And it's also as though the power of the example of Socrates is what allows Strauss to have this critique of Heidegger as maybe overreaching. He's able to thereby see the Socrates of uncertain ancient and medieval thinkers that would otherwise maybe be a bit too opaque or were too opaque for Heidegger at least. Yes. Yes.
In Richard, sorry, as you're answering that question, if you could also note for our listeners, the differences in manner of presentation between both of these men, I don't know if it's fair to say there's a radical difference, but Strauss has an almost common sense manner of presenting extremely deep ideas. In fact, it's not like Xenophon writing, because he writes a kind of like a higher level, but he still presents it in a way that at first glance, you might think, oh, yeah, I know exactly what Strauss is getting at, even though he's getting something deeper versus Heidegger's just seemingly impossible prose, at least for an American, I don't know if the Germans had taken it up here. Yes. Yes.
But Alex's question is more interesting. I just wanted to ask that as a piggyback. Yes. I mean, there are some common features as teachers and writers.
They both focus a great deal upon the commentary on philosophers in the past. And Heidegger's readings are, if you enter into them, really quite illuminating. And as a reader of other texts, he's often loosing, at least, might say compared to some of these independent investigations of a particular idea. And that lucidity came across to get students.
They had a sense he was really opening up things about Aristotle and other philosophers. So this gets to a really major point that we've been sort of waiting in the wings for a long time. It's that Strauss has turned its octetes, of course, giving central importance to the relationship of the philosophical life, and thus do the close examination of things, who, you know, political matters, questions of rights and justice and law, and virtues, and the role of Heide and the rest. And, of course, provides a very accessible story.
But I think it's actually connected to Heidegger's central question in Ross' mind in that if the question Heidegger opens up, is how is human questioning itself possible? I think Strauss' view is that it's possible because human is a kind of dual being, that this is both as immersed in the realm of the political, the things that make demands upon us, as citizens, as family members, as human beings in social life. And on the other hand, there is an openness to a whole that transcends all this, to still reflect it even in a non-philosophic life, and many human concerns. The duality of our existence, I believe, is what Heidegger, I mean, Strauss investigates as the addition for being open to the world.
So, and that's really elusive and complicated matter, but I believe that's an art of thing. And he thought Heidegger had not seen that sucratic, the relevance of that sucratic emphasis, that's a poetic approach. And his own question. I mean, it's actually kind of striking when you put it like that, I had not thought of this before, but the very title of the work, Natural Write in History, sounds like a sucratic version of peeing in time, right?
Right? It's a kind of revision of it, and it's saying, you know, you haven't paid enough attention to the moral political realm from which you come. And it's a sort of, and I think you put this in your chapter, right? It's redoing Heidegger's destruction or deconstruction of the tradition trying to get at the roots, but in a way that's more attentive to the moral political in the style of Socrates.
Precisely, right. Yeah. I think that's very well put. There is that echo of the title in his dual title.
And well, maybe we should say a bit more about that book. Yeah, I think it was a term to it. Yeah. So what is his critique of Heidegger and Natural Write in History?
Right. Yes. Now, this is the best known confrontation of Strauss with Heidegger's thought, and especially at the evidence in the first chapter, all of the book is a whole, is such a confrontation. Because Strauss does not mention Heidegger by name, but it is clear that he is the reference when Heidegger describes what I mean, Strauss describes what he calls radical distortions.
And why didn't he mention him by name? I think it's partly because Heidegger was almost completely unknown in the English-speaking world at the time, and perhaps also because Heidegger did have a bad reputation. Maybe he also didn't want to convey the sense that this was an adequate discussion. I'd say, well, this is Heidegger's thought.
Because in fact, it doesn't really intend to be an adequate treatment. I mean, I'll mention a couple of ways in which it's notably not adequate. For example, he says that the historicist approach that he is describing is the idea of philosophy as the attempt to grasp the eternal. Now, in point of fact, Strauss says that historicist philosophy, as he calls it, is rejecting the idea of the journal.
So there's even a kind of contextual tension here since he's characterizing this whole topic. But you could get away from the reading if you don't look at it carefully at thinking that Heideggerian thought, or if you had given it that name, is anti-filasm. And another point is that Strauss makes central with the claim that for a radical historicism to be in the highest sense and not mean to be always. Now, it's interesting that in the course of the book, Strauss himself defines the theme of philosophy as the fundamental principles that are govivial with human thought.
It doesn't claim very eternal. He always claims that they are perennial and enduring as a human life. As opposed to eternal, right? It's not outside of time or beyond time, but coeval with so long as human beings are, these problems necessarily exist with them.
But should there be no human beings, this might altogether disappear. We only know that they're perennial. We can't make larger claims. Right.
So at least the impression that medical historicism is going to stray because it doesn't confirm the eternal is an impression that you have to correct and of that an effectiveness in itself is not an objection to it. Now, another way in which that discussion is a bit misleading is that Strauss claims in that first chapter that the modern historical consciousness seems to be identifying if this right of the story is a very primitive nature is a higher dignity than any works of man. Now, that's how to say that. That would also pertain to Heidegger's thought, but it's actually just not.
And Strauss actually knew well that Strauss's own thought does not intend to give a supreme place to the works of man instead of sees the need to understand the human in the light of what Heidegger called being, which is his reinterpretation of the notion of fusus and Greek philosophy. And there's something that is a power higher than human. This is just because now all of our listeners are well-educated in Greek, our famous translating co-hosts right here, fusus being nature, right? Nature is as the thing that grows or something like that.
Exactly. Yes. I do. I do.
You know, raspous is a very important notion in the beginning of philosophy and brings his own understanding of it forward. But it's not the case that he simply after glorifies it. So, yes, nature refuses to human action or control. In fact, he's arguing strictly against that.
So, it's really clear that Heidegger is introducing radical extorts. Strauss is not attempting to engage all the subtlety. He's really focusing more in his discussion on the prevalent historicism of academia and modern academic thought or it's more immediate intellectual sources. But I think what he wants to indicate is that there is this deeper investigation that has a certain source as character, which in fact has to be investigated if one really fully and seriously wants to consider the problem.
This superficial form of man has to be passed at some point in this fact is the attentive reader that one must turn to another source, the deepest investigation. Now, that doesn't mean though that he isn't presenting reflections and thoughts that are in assembly, Heidegger and critical of him. Now, the first chapter though does also contain a statement, which is indicative of Strauss's very high regard for Heidegger. He says that radical extortism tells us to realize the need for unbiased reconsideration of the most elementary premises of philosophy.
That's right. In fact, the title of the book. Yeah, and that's what it means to expose the roots really. Heidegger might not, he might be critical of Heidegger, but at its basis, he's done something utterly monumental or really quite necessary for anybody who's going to start questioning the tradition.
Yes, I mean, if this were simply an erroneous form of thought, I'll be at the same time, very influential. It wouldn't require you to investigate the most fundamental premises of philosophy. I mean, he doesn't claim that historicist methodology required you to consider the most fundamental premises throughout this implied prey, clearly. Should we now move on to the question?
I don't know if you're more about to say on natural in history, but should we now move on to the question of what Strauss's challenge to Heidegger is? I mean, I think you've shown really quite well how he's open to what Heidegger is questioning, but he does, I mean, decisively and ultimately move beyond him in some level. Right? Or what exactly is the challenge that he levels to well, I'm going to stay with natural writing history and frame it in terms of what you can draw from and I mean, the book provides a certain historical account of thinking about natural writing.
He's clearly concerned with the great importance that history is acquired in modern philosophy and especially in the German philosophy, in German philosophy after Rousseau. Strauss's claim is that it's turned into history in modern philosophy is due to a politicization of philosophy that really, philosophy is forth in the 17th century in the natural writing history, the emphasis of the law. Other week, it's a brief version of Machiavelli as a kind of predecessor and indicates how Hausen's life is already pointing toward a kind of racism. In so far, as the philosophy is taken as a kind of tool, it's a kind of means or the relief of the human estate or for the overcoming of the hostility of nature and and politicizing a philosophy that thereby detracts from its contemplative character and perhaps out of over space as a deliberate strategy, the banishing of the contemplative element of modern philosophers.
But nevertheless, he wants to claim that a politicizing, a widespread politicizing curse and it's as much to do with the emphasis on history unseen thought in historical terms. And now the, in these weeks, these are a particular important point, which is when modern thinkers begin to question the universalism, modern conception of natural writing, this universalistic approach toward it's practical, business practical, and they begin to favor the local and the particular. And he stresses in especially Burke and the historical school of jurisprudence. Now, that's mentioned in today, the kind of great history and the more radical historicism that emerges with and each and how you hear who are more briefly mentioned in the book.
In other words, what is increasingly lost in the course of modern thought for Haidagar of a poet's browse is an awareness of the aspect of philosophy that necessarily transcends of media practical application of ideas for an anti-practical sense in a universal or generally available sense. And what he wants to suggest is that radical historicism is also in this tradition, even if it doesn't fully acknowledge it or even if it isn't aware of it, that it's due to a politicizing current in modern philosophy. So the course of his argument is in its way a kind of parallel to Haidagarian deconstruction in so far as Strauss wants to argue that modern tradition deconstructs itself, mantles itself, and replaces nature with history. And thus in imitation, you might say of Haidagarian deconstruction, there is kind of imitation in which the critical examination of the tradition leads to this disclosure of a self-destructing aspect.
Now, Strauss is showing that he clearly wants to take things further in that he wants to provide a kind of dismantling of Haidagar's unbridical sources and to show us the need to consider a lost dimension of socratic question. In other words, to indicate a different kind of forgetting than the forgetting of being imitized by Haidag. If I could just jump in here, I think this is easy, this is a very detailed analysis. I think it's easy to lose sight of what exactly is happening.
You have a statement in your chapter where you say he's giving a historical critique of historicism. Ironically, showing that historicists like Haidagar, who focus so much on the historical conditions where they thought, haven't done enough historical work, right? They haven't looked into it. And I just to impress us a bit more, I mean, when we think of Leo Strauss as a thinker, progressive Haidagar, we may think of certain distinctions like ancient versus moderns, reasons versus revelation, poetry versus philosophy.
But I think one of the things I find so compelling about your work on this, and so illuminating is that all of these distinctions are in a way fundamental to his critique of Haidagar, right? His failure to distinguish ancient philosophy from modern philosophy is his failure to distinguish socratic rationalism, as opposed to a kind of revelatory disclosure of being right, and also just a different relationship to poetry, right? All of these features, I think, are these distinctions are fundamental distress, but it really helps him to see beyond the horizon that Haidagar has exposed, but not really moved beyond, right? Yeah, so like very much the way you put that, I mean, he's bringing forth a kind of differentiation of the human that Haidagar hasn't adequately examined anyway.
I mean, a differentiation that reveals a fundamental tensions with the human, and to say that this tension with the human is more the key to how it's possible to question than Haidagar's, you know, how to dislocate your opinion. And so, practically, yes, so the complexity and differentiation of the human, which is related to the theme in Haidagar's, you know, reading of the Socrates of No Way, a Hundred Renanti, you know, the importance of this, investigation in Platonic and other ancient texts, you're going to have to explain that term, Professor Bell, you're going to have to explain that term to folks in No Way, a heterogeneity to folks. I'm just about to, I think I really don't know if I really explain it, I'm just about to answer. Fair enough.
Good. Terrifying. That's helpful. This is the, you know, a characteristic theme in Platonic writing that in place of an account of the world and of human things, well, in terms of one primary cause or material cause, or cause any cause in nature, it is inadequately investigating or clarifying human, in the sense, one has to turn to the evident, complexity and variety of human themes, human problems in human concerns, and know their heterogeneity, and that's connected with the term No Way, because it's relating to the Greek word, nudes or intellectual or knowing, or the word for knowing, one of the words for knowing, and knowing, so that we have to see that there is a kind of intelligible articulation, or a too much diversity of human problems, which is a key to an understanding the world as a whole, in this case, we have to start from other words from this, well, rather a basic, rather ordinary standpoint of moral and political and other human passions and concerns, and investigate the depth of morality, and what it exposes about the soul, and about how it is possible for our soul to be investigated.
We'll just ask fundamental questions about things that investigate ultimately the whole of things, and the whole itself, how to guess those ourselves as remains mysterious, but we can have some profound understanding or deeper understanding, the help of these democratic writers of our starting points. So I don't want to cut you off, or maybe if you want to just put a bow on that, and we can go to some listener questions. Oh yes, well, I would just say, yeah, I'm just waiting to sound that up by saying that, since you're talking about the entire tradition of philosophy, antiquity to the presence, which is in the process of a continuous, fine, and movement toward destruction, it was specifically the modern tradition, you, yeah, under went across as self, so, so, I'm just, and so that of course isn't in contrast to hydrogen's view of not the whole tradition. I'll just add, he thought that hydrogen crucially started questioning, that had to be seriously engaged, and he was bringing some investigations of its own to help with that evaluation.
I don't believe he thought he brought it to an end, I mean, even in terms of an adequate response to hydrogen, but that he went, it's not necessary to raise this challenge. Now this by no means, I just lack blessings, no means implies that Strauss has thought it's now derived from idea. And I know my book has been criticized for suggesting that, but very, very wrongly, that isn't at all, I understand, but that his, his, Strauss's questioning is engaged with in a very significant way with Reopening the question, is undeniable. I'll have to stop there, so that I can face a question.
Well, I think these questions might actually help to spell it out a bit because some really good stuff here. So, Board and Flanagan, who you probably know, yes, right? He wants to know what you think of, he says, is there, is there, is there, Merrick to Pippen's charge, not Scotty, but Robert Pippen? Is there a merit to his charge that, well, maybe Scotty Pippen has the same question, is there a merit to the charge that Strauss's response to high to, high to go fundamental problems depends on granting a privileged status to the life world of the ancient polis as pre philosophic experience?
You know, well, the, I don't think Strauss is in any way claiming that we have to answer solely into the investigation of the pre-scientific world of antiquity in order to understand major questions, but this is a major access or an especially helpful access to them, right? I know they say historicizing, which is claiming that the questions can be, you know, revoked or, or, uh, grasped only by translating myself into, uh, the century Athens. So, I think that criticism is rather overstated. Um, I mean, whether Strauss perhaps at times draws an extreme contrast between ancient and modern, which is untenable, is, I think, quite possible, but, and it could be that he is knowing that for a tort, there is a certain tension in one plane he makes, because a radical break, um, so that modern philosophy is even forgetting, you know, the basic questions, and then the definition of philosophy is the permanent investigation of problems.
So, uh, that means, I think, to a certain tension between, um, two positions in his writing. It might understand why aspect of it is being, uh, foregrounded and recordable relation. All right, we have another question that's very helpful. Another question from, uh, Nick Almer, would you?
Yes, sure. Yeah. Uh, graduate student Tulane, uh, you know, I asked him, why can't he just email you? He's got to take up time on our show, but you know, it's fine.
Nick is a friend of the show, so let him ask his questions. He says that on page 128, you state the remaining teleological element in Strauss's understanding of man, that of an orientation toward knowledge of the whole or toward the question of the ground of the whole is the use of knowledge with the whole and question with ground salient. So again, knowledge of the whole and question of the ground of the whole. And, and now we state his final question.
What is he's asking whether using knowledge with the whole knowledge of the whole question with ground sailing. So at the he's saying, you have knowledge of the whole, but then you question the ground of the whole. Is that a salient distinction in your mind? Let me look at my statement right here.
Let me run that quickly. Maybe the meantime, uh, I see this page. Yes. No.
Okay. Um, so on teleology, yeah, I can comment that human must be understood teleological insofar as oriented oriented toward knowledge to go. Now, that's an orientation orientation toward knowledge is not blaming that knowledge is accessible available. It's an orientation toward knowledge orientation toward hiring knowledge or and then what I treat as equivalent or the question of the ground of the whole.
So we're, we're, is he seeing a something perplexed there or beauty? I think he's wanting to spell out that distinction a bit the object of the whole versus questioning the ground. Yes. Well, you could say that what you're oriented toward when you're seeking knowledge of things would be of all the fundamental ground of things, the mental basis of the whole thing.
So although I agree, those two phrases are not identical meaning. Okay. So I think the second one, one just to put a certain emphasis on a special importance that can be given to the question of the ground of the whole. Does that make sense?
Yeah. I think that helps clarify a bit here. I'll see what I'll see what done is my, we can also, you can flunk them Richard. That's the other, uh, I know, if I know me, it's fine.
I know. One question I had is these are natural and histories based on the Charles Walgreen Foundation lectures, right? Yes. That's only why can't we buy natural and right in history in every Walgreens and it seems like that should have been part of the deal, right?
If they're going to have a name on the book. That's a good joke. I mean, I think that it's a joke. It is a joke, of course.
I mean, it would be nice. Maybe CVS can get ahead of it. But we have a lot of questions, but I think we should, we should move on because we're a little over time. Greg, do you want to ask some of your lightning ground questions?
I know you don't like my lightning ground questions. I would like to ask our distinguished guest, Professor Buckley some lightning ground questions. So Mr Professor Buckley, these questions are just meant to be a little silly, help listeners get to know you a little better. Don't feel obliged to answer any of them, but I have to get a quick answer because it's all right.
Exactly. You've got to get some of our guests don't get that. They get very long winded responses. They think it's the sort of brooding storm round and it's not.
It's the lightning round. I'm glad that this is a kind of concept. It is a concept. Yes.
I have confidence that you'll be bubbardly. Okay. First question. Who's your favorite philosopher?
I don't have one. All right. That's lightning. Yeah.
Okay. I have another question for you. What is your case? I wanted to hear why just for this one.
Just allow me. Okay. All right. I mean, I suppose I would list philosophers and I find most rewarding to study or repeatedly study, but I don't quite see the point of having a single favorite.
And I reject the premise of the question. That's a pretty good lightning right answer. I would say. Oh, yes.
Yes. Unless I were to say, well, I'm just a follower of someone. So then I'm following this philosophy and I don't take that stance. Okay.
Very good. What is your cat's name? Listeners want to know. I have to let's hear.
Okay. They are. They're both female. And why are they named Abby and Cleo?
Oh, do I really have to go into that? It's a few you could pass. But the listeners demand to know. Well, there was a very well reason in Abby's case.
This was the name a little cat already and she seemed to be happy with it. So I kept it and I thought it was nice enough. When I acquired Cleo from the animal shelter, the name she had been given was Bambi, which I did not like. I thought it was too cute.
So I chose a name from the Greek Muses. Cleo. I like sound to it. Yeah.
Sounds very nice. And the connotations of it. Very good. Next question.
Have you read any nicknames? Nicknames? Well, I mean, I often was called by my family and a lot of others I was often called Rick, which is not really too much of a nickname. It's just sort of a Richard.
But I prefer to go by Richard. I think it's a little more euphonious. Okay. Another question then.
If you had not become a professor, what career path would you have chosen? Well, so comfortable with the easy life of academia that I don't even think about. That's right. Amen.
Okay. Very good. Maybe one or two more. What was your first car?
First car was a VW B-4 from the 1970s. That's great. That's great. That's great.
I had to learn to drive it. Yeah. I think I'm a manual transmission. All this had manual specs.
That was it. The manual transmission was a challenge. The three on the floor. Do you remember?
Who was on the floor? Who was on the floor? Yeah. One last question.
Do you have a favorite song or musician? Favorite song or musician? Answer carefully, Richard. Your cousin might be upset.
Well, I mean, I would probably take an aria from a Bumstar to opera or from a Bach bass. Very nice. That sounds like a great answer to me. I just want to say I hope the listeners enjoyed this.
I've just sat here sort of admiring and listening to what the master had to say. I mean, I learned a lot about Strauss and Heidegger. I also learned a lot reading and reading the chapter of the preparation for the show. I would encourage listeners to go buy the book to get the book from library if you're short on cash and a student.
Professor Buckley, it's been a pleasure and I appreciate you taking the time to talk with us. I'm sure Alex would like to say a few words before we cut this thing. Richard, can you give us the title? I know the title.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I guess the University of Chicago press. Oh, I guess we didn't read the title, did we?
Oh, we got to plug the book. The title and the subject. Yeah. I did Aaron Strauss and the premises of philosophy with a subtitle on original forgetting.
It's a University of Chicago press and there are translations into Chinese and French. Holy cow. If one of those languages, Alex, your book ever been written, giving away all of our state secrets away. My Chinese translated into German.
That's where it needs to be read, right? Yeah, that's true. I'll be reading English very well. That's true.
Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Richard. This was Echo Great Center. This was really eye-opening.
It's always a pleasure to talk to you and especially about these subjects. Oh, that's very kind. It's certainly very indo-able for me. I appreciate the invitation.
I also wish I was you. Absolutely. You may have exaggerated that. I don't know.
All right. Thank you to our listeners as well for listening to us.