Leo Strauss' Natural Right and History, Chapter 1

Welcome back to the new Thinkery. My name is David Barr with me as always my good friend Alex, pretty O'Harey Alex. You're on fire feeling well, how are you doing? I'm doing well, I'm doing well.

And how are you Greg? I'm Spry as a young man. That's excellent. Also live it.

Hey baby, I'm here. You guys right? What's wrong? You guys in the elements?

Stole, man. I'm old and tired. Yeah. Actually, I had a pretty good day at Jim's Marintai guys about it later.

It's good. Good day. Good day. Good day, sir.

Tell us about it now. Fickin' you. I don't even want to tell him. His code is the Jim really the barn.

And it's a workout really. Yes. Go on the plank. It's whatever.

It's what he means. No, no, no. It's hard work getting those pigs to do what you wanted to do. Tell us you, Swinehart.

Swinehart. There's some words that we just don't use enough. Book Monder. That's a good word.

You know, what ever since Amazon's taken it over. It's also like a British isn't like Fishmonger. Whatever. What does it mean?

I see someone's about to talk. What's that analogy of Marintai? Oh, man. What a great start.

Tell us the workout, Greg. Oh, no. It's just a look at that. I got some of my buddies who've been doing the Grease the Groove.

Yeah. And so the guys I work out with, we've been greasing the groove every morning for a month. Wow. Do you grease your own groove or do you grease each other's roots?

I don't understand. Well, you kind of help each other out. Yeah. So, do we have to be greasing the groove of one other man?

Well, we get two benches going at the same time. So, we've got some of the guys racing at once. So, everybody's down on the bench. So, everybody greases to completion by the end of the workout at least once, right?

Well, I mean, you're never going to max. It's just, you know, it's whatever you can handle three times. Oh, you're holding the grease three times. That's right.

I feel like you're not talking about one. You're on the bench and three guys grease your groove. Something like that. But I agree to the groove.

This is how I hit my personal best on deadlift. I grease the groove, which is you do the same lift every day, lower weights, right? Like like, like blown out and you need to rest them also group. And then eventually, it like it gets your, what is it like your, your sort of neurofires.

Yeah, everything used to the movement, the fear, unnecessary fear, some signs, and you just lift a whole ton more. I did this and then I started just like going for my personal best after like a couple months or whatever. Yeah. And I was just shocked.

My, I think my deadlift went up like 50, 60 pounds. So, I got this. Where the guys I live with their, their benches went up. Like four guys at PR today.

Nice. What are their best? One guy who was in his 50s, 255. Another hit like 260.

Okay, 295. So, yeah. I did not do the PR today. I did not do the PR today.

What is your PR for batch? Probably 165. You know, my, my, my, you know, 300. So, what's yours there, Alex?

My personal best ever is 355. That's insane. That's insane. That's some kilograms too.

So, that's really insane. He's European, but great. You was over 300. I mean, it's, he's like a year ago, won't be talking to you.

It was like two years ago. Yeah. That's very impressive. So, I was running a parade.

I was on the surgery in 2014 after that. I think I've hit three. That's great. That's great.

But we're not here to talk about Max. No, no. Well, yes. Today, we're here to talk about big and natural right in history.

You know, when this, this book is so, for me, I just call it natural right in the thing that's not yet to be invented that's how old I am. Right. Right. You know, college is just called natural right.

It's just a natural right. Greg, Greg so old, he used to read a book called Weltering Waste. And that's, that's all that exists. That's right.

Yeah. We were away down the light. We're just after the beginning. That's right.

So, this book by Strauss, we've, we've devoted an episode to it before. And I think on the horizon, Greg, who did you speak with email with just the other day? Yeah, we're going to do an episode in a couple of months with Harvey Mansfield on the Burke part of natural right in history. And I think Alex also wind up another guest.

We have Stauffer lined up for Hobbes. And I've got a couple other people we want to ask. We don't want to announce them before we ask. Because they haven't committed yet.

They haven't committed yet. They don't even know them. Martha. Martha.

What? What are we saying? Okay, okay, guys, come on. Stamp it down.

I'm just saying, you know, this is great. Actually, we, this is a tough book, at least for me. And we have this all star cast that's going to help us. I think by the end, you should be able to mix these, sorry, match these link these episodes up together.

And it'll be a tutorial for you to work through natural rank history, which normally is tough going especially with the footnotes. So I'm going to put these like in the books are extremely hard to find. Oh, okay. So we're, you know, sometimes it seems intentionally so.

One thing I'll say is this is a good opportunity. Now I'm going to be putting together probably starting next week, actually, because I've gotten a couple things off my plate, putting together all our episodes in historical order, right? We're going to have a kind of syllabus because one of the problems is this happens sometimes over to me, I guess, we're like, let's do this. We're like, we did that the two years ago, but we did it.

And so I'm going to put all of them together in historical order and also guess, like, organize my guests so that people can can sort of just pick up an episode here or there, if it suited them. Because I think sometimes we have an episode that does really well. And then like six months later, you know, another episode does really well. And realize, oh, well, all of our episodes are doing better than that original episode.

People just need to hear like there's a new audience to hear. So I'm going to circulate an email at some point and post it on Twitter and maybe I'll announce it on the podcast, but give your eyes, feel to our Twitter website. Only we already had a list of all the episodes somewhere that can make it easy for you to draw from that we created long ago, but that only one of us ever pays attention to. I pay attention to the problem is, is we need links to the actual show.

Right. Right. That's true. Yeah.

Well, once we have a horizon, we have a great. Yeah, once we have that, Alex, we need to throw a party at your employee of a Bercocki party in in the retirement. So that we use my episode. No, no, he's doing the Bercocki.

Yeah, episode. I can't wait. All right, boys, let's launch in. What's the what part of the natural right?

Who's really reading? Chapter one, natural right in the historical approach. Well, kick me in the goddamn gym. Yeah, Alex, set it off.

Are you going to set it off with the the frontispiece or so there are different additions. We had an interesting mark about the covers, but we'll save that for the end of the show. We're chatting about that. One thing I'll say, as I was trying to outline this, is it's very difficult to outline.

Did we do the introduction? Yeah, we did the introduction. Okay. All right.

We'll be all the front material as well. Got it. One thing I'll say is, as a general outline, it starts with in the first paragraph, a sort of presentation and then rebuttal to most vulgar historicist argument. Namely, don't you see that just as varies from time to time and place to place.

That means it's just historically variable. Therefore, there is no such thing as natural. Any point out pretty clearly like, look, to ascertain natural right, you need to develop reason. Right.

This isn't really right. Just because there's disagreement, doesn't mean that there is no such thing as natural. In fact, disagreement is the impetus for seeking out something like natural. You notice the variation from place to place in time, therefore you seek it out.

Anyways, he goes from there into a distinction between ancient conventionalism and we'll talk about what that is and the sort of historicism that's more contemporary. And then from there, he goes into the development of historicism. So there's 34 paragraphs. The conventionalism stuff is really paragraphs two through four.

The development of historicism, as I trace it goes from paragraph five on page 12 to about, I'd say, sorry, where is this? Let's say paragraph 16, or sorry, page 16 into paragraph 10, he says, in the moment these assumptions were abandoned, the infancy of historicism came to an end. There's then a further distinction between historicism and positivism. We can talk about all these distinctions.

And then really, the majority of the chapter, I would say is outlining historicism in a kind of dialectic between Strauss and the historicists, pushing it eventually to something like radical historicism, which seems like it's the most extreme position. And that really starts to come up. I want to say in paragraph, it's really the end of when 21, 22, but really it takes off in 23. And then finally pulling up and trying to understand what we mean by the experience of history, but a kind of development of the Socratic position in a conversation against the radical historicist, which many people have noted and we should just say this seems to be a stand in for Heidegger, the Heideggerian position.

We can talk a little bit about that. But one thing I'll just say is I think part of the reason it's difficult to outline this chapter is because it's exceedingly dialectical and conversational character, right? He has the historicist changes position as he counters it and he gives us the Strauss who's really trying to give this position the greatest benefit of the doubt. And he pushes the argument really for every time he's taken the historicist positions, the utmost limit, he pushes it a little further.

And I think he lets it kind of reach its peak on its own and then critiques it on those terms. It's a very, I think, rhetorically and philosophically powerful chapter. That was a good overview. Thanks, Alex.

One thing for our listeners, especially mine all that stuff. Yeah, that's what I was going to ask. So let me ask you in this way, just broadly, you kind of defined what historicism is, are the different types of historicist interpretations. But also, can you explain, you don't even need to put it into a context, but why was historicism such a boogie man for somebody like Strauss?

I've discussed this book with other grad students years ago, some of whom just didn't see the fear or really the point of combating it so vehemently. And so, they wondered why Strauss spent all this time trying to push back against something that was so obviously deficient. Does that make sense? I'll let Alex, you want to implement it.

I'll say that, I mean, based on this dialect, we're torvall thing that Strauss is doing in the chapter that I think Alex rightfully picks up on. I think he can dispose of historicism fairly well and fairly quickly. I mean, he says, see if I can find this quickly. So on page 25, this is paragraph 21 towards the end.

Historicism thrives on the fact that it inconsistently exempts itself from its own verdict about all human thought. The historicist thesis, his self-contradictory are absurd. He says above later, you know, they could, we can easily be dispensed with. And I think that there's something, I mean, he moves to that point.

And so I think that readers can probably see that, yeah, okay, so historicism, which we'll maybe should define it, but therefore, of course, is sort of easy to tackle and we don't see the serious philosophical issue. But as Alex pointed out, as he's moving dialectically, he moves to radical historicism, which I think cannot be dispensed with as he easily. And I suspect, in the answer to your question, David, the real answer is, Heidegger represents the most serious challenge of the possibility of philosophy in his time. That's, I think, what's going on.

And so then we'd have to distinguish normal historicism from his radical historicism. Is that Alex? Right. To pick up on that, because that's exactly along the lines, in paragraph five on page 12, he makes clear that historicism, the contemporary rejection of natural in the name of history, is based not on historical evidence, right?

So it's not this vulgar historicism that just says, oh, look, people believe different things at different times. So like, there is no truth, right? It's not that. It's actually a philosophic critique.

It's not merely an induction from historical evidence, which is not going to work. And stress revisits this argument a few times. And he has the radical historicist push beyond his vulgar premise as far as he can. But he says, we know it now that the philosophic critique in question is not particularly a critique of natural right or more principles in general.

So it turns out that natural right is somewhat beside the point, because he says, it is a critique of human thought as such, right? So the thesis is that you cannot think your way out of history, right? You cannot think your way out of fate or historical dispensation. What do you believe?

What do you think this is the historicist thesis is fundamentally determined by an act beyond your control, right? All you can choose, and this is later on, but all you can choose is how to react, whether you English in your lack of control, or you lose yourself in historical moment. Either way, it's not up to you. Now, he then says, nevertheless, the critique of natural right played an important role in the formation of the historicism.

So there's two questions going on here, right, which is one, is philosophy possible. And that premise is absolutely necessary. Stress is clear about this. You need to show the philosophy is possible if you want to show that natural right is possible.

Why? You need to show there's a concept of nature, right? You need to have the world something be intelligible in a trans-historical way, right? In a way that's true for all times, in all places.

But we have to be clear, there are two arguments in a way or two positions being arbitrated against the historicist position. One is philosophy is possible, and the second, relying on the first is natural right is possible. So there's a kind of more urgency and also philosophic urgency. One of the puzzles of the chapter, and he mixes these two together, it's very difficult to untangle them.

One of the puzzles is, okay, which does he succeed in establishing? Either like does he get the philosophy of the ground? He has to get that together. Does he also get natural right off the ground or do both fail, right?

These are all struggling against this position. He doesn't do it here. I mean, he's not successful here in grounding it, right? He cuts a shimper one.

He says, look, we can't treat all these theses, but he seems to be clear that he's shown the possibility, right? And insofar as the story says, and rests on the dogmatic assertion, you cannot, right? I think he has shown a weakness in that story. Well, we're few today.

But I think, okay, sure. But we saw that we still haven't defined it. Just really, just in the broadest way, what is historicism and then what's radical historicism? Sure.

Here's my, and you guys should feel free to push me correctly, but I do want to come back to Alex's question. Historicism, I think simply, and therefore perhaps unfairly, simply is that the notion that all human thought is determined by its particular historical circumstance, that there are factors and Alex used the word fate, which is a word that Strauss repeats in this chapter basically something controls the human mind and that the human mind cannot escape its particular historical situation. So all knowledge is historically contingent. Therefore, there's no outside sort of position from which to judge.

So in particular, this emerges out of the sense that all conceptions of justice are natural right are historically determined. So if you were an American, so you believe what Americans believe, you're British, you believe what British believe, you know, your sources wouldn't understand Aristotle's ethics per se, just any of these categories of the good. They would say this doesn't speak. I think we'd say that Aristotle doesn't understand himself either, that Aristotle is the product of, you know, fifth century Greek, you know, whatever's happened.

Now, radical historicism, I think. So the problem historicism gets into is this, and this quote that I read is that it wants to exempt itself and say, well, actually, but we figure something out actually, and what we figured out is that all historical thought is historical. Well, if all thoughts are historical, that would include historicism, which means historicism could itself be wrong. So I think what Heidegger does is Heidegger comes along and says there's this unique moment.

So it's not at all. So in other words, he intentionally exempts his historical discovery from historicism, from the historical argument, right? He's like, actually, there what just happens to have been this historical moment that opened up and revealed itself the truth of history to me. Lucky Heidegger.

Yeah. Lucky Heidegger is also that was your book. He shows and grads wasn't it for the lucky Heidegger? Yeah, it was.

It was. Thank you. It is very clear. Okay, good.

I hope so. I had a response with Als was saying before, but well, go ahead, Als. We had one more point. So the story is this whole thing.

I think the most extreme version, I think Greg is right about that version. I think the most extreme version version version, extreme version, that was David's name in high school. Comes up on 31, page 31 at the end of the page 31. He says, what is called?

This is, all right. So the meaning of that discovery, the historicity of human life that everything is historically determined. The meaning of that discovery can be expressed in feces like these. What is called the whole is actually always incomplete and therefore not truly a whole.

Right. This is the crucial promise. The whole is essentially changing in such a manner that its future cannot be predicted. So I think what makes this historicism radical in the sense that it goes to the root is it says, oh, it's not just that our understanding is radically historical.

It's that the whole itself of all things is radical. And you can get, I mean, this reminds me that straight out of Heidegger, straight out of Heidegger, you get this account in his Nietzsche lectures. I only cite that because that's the place where I'm familiar from. I'm sure he says it elsewhere.

I'm not, you know, well, verse in Heidegger, but he says there he proposes something called the bees in a bottle, which is that the essences. These things are transformed. So it makes clear that, okay, we're all human beings, questionably, but yeah, we're all human beings. And we all relate to this thing called human being.

There's a one over many relationship universal over particular. He then argues that situation can maintain, but it can still change. Right. We tend to think of the fact that, well, if human beings are going to change, this essence needs to come out of being in a new one, it needs to come to be.

He says, no, it could be just that the essence itself changes, right? Now, this is very high for himself. But just the idea is you can think of almost evolutionary, but that the whole is essentially changing in its essence, right? In such a manner that its future cannot be predicted.

The whole as it is in itself can never be grass or it is not intelligible. Human thought essentially depends on something that cannot be anticipated, right? So if things are constant, you go and start going. Yeah, so yeah, or that can never be an object, right, an object for understanding, sort of means, or that can never be mastered by this under to be in the highest that cannot mean or any way it does not necessarily mean to be always, right?

So there is that's the hammer dropping right there, right? Yeah, so there might be a high degree, I think even something and this, I think was published, no, this was published before natural right history is Nietzsche lectures, I think, from the 30s or 40s. But this idea that you can, you can have a kind of one over many relationship and yet it's still subject to change. This is a fundamentally radical position because it no longer says I am not absurd.

It is the universe is reality, it's just makes this pointable point is reality itself that is absurd, right? There is this problem in the historic thesis is just a problem of human thought in relation to reality as such. It's a shockingly like anti-philos have a claim, right? Why?

Well, you can't it's not intelligible. Another way to put this and maybe this is something we should just say the word revelation comes out from the first time this right in relation to history, right? So if the whole is subject to change, despite any permanence, that's something like the possibility of miracles, right? Now it's faithful and it doesn't seem to be intentional.

So it's a very kind of perverted form, but it seems like there's a kind of commonality there, right? No. I don't know how far we should press this right now, maybe we can talk after we're done recording, but you know, I think I've been talking to you a lot about some of the work I've been doing on some of Aristotle's scientific writings. And it seems like the beings themselves are not permanent for Aristotle.

So dogness, cat, dog cat, pangaroo, pig, those species are temporary. And so you do get to some, I mean, maybe we should try to distinguish that what Heidi was saying from what I think Aristotle's saying in that regard that so it doesn't be a certain stability to some of the beings over time, but none of them is permanent. None of them is always, right? All things that come to being, you know, the composite beings will come to being a pass away or something like this.

That takes too far field for now. No, no, maybe one way to refine that point. I think that's to bring the difference between historicism and conventionalism, right? And this is, I think, where Strauss is in a way, he's grateful to live in his time, right?

He actually says I'm grateful for the sources at this time. The conventional is challenged to philosophy. Well, conventionalism rests on the same premise on philosophy. There is nature and then there's conventionalism.

You want to get to the natural best. Conventionalism denies that there is anything like natural right? Justice. And so in a way, it seems like a powerful challenge to philosophy.

I think Strauss wants to say that historicism is an even more powerful challenge. It's not just challenging political philosophy, the possibility of arriving at the best political philosophy. It's challenging philosophy as such. And Strauss is very clear that the premises that ground philosophy are necessary to but not sufficient to ground something like that to write that there is something there is by nature, something right and wrong.

And that would mean, right, that you could, the historicist thesis, brings out a more fundamental problem with question. And so again, at one point, he says, is that the great thing about historicism, it helps you fight all dogmatists, every single form of dogmatism, which would, and this is to get back to your point, include all the kind of metaphysical or philosophical dogmatism, like medieval Platonism or Aristotelianism. I was thinking, yeah. But wouldn't necessarily get to the heart of aerosol and or Plato?

Historicism. Insofar as it's taking its setting its sights at Platonism and Aristotelianism, it might leave these things open. Yeah, I think, yeah, I think it, and for that reason, I think it exposes the viability of Socratesism, does that make sense? Right?

The sort of open questioning or philosophic questioning or openness to the philosophic problems, I think, escapes historicism. Though a lot of the dogmatism surrounding it, Platonism or Stitelianism, scholasticism, all of that has to melt away. And Heidegger, and this is, I think when Strauss has that comment to Klein, where he says that Heidegger exposed the roots for all to see, I think he might need something like this. It becomes untenable to think of Aristotelian terminology in its most dogmatic form.

There are substances and there are accidents and all that sort of stuff. No, you realize there's something deeper going on, because Heidegger is eroding all that sort of dogmatism. Does he get the harder things? That's another question that I think Strauss is not convinced.

Can I mention, you mentioned sorry David is trying to go ahead, dude? No, no, I, you go ahead. We keep talking about Heidegger, and with good reason. On one hand, on the other hand, his name doesn't occur.

Furthermore, outside of the footnotes, no historicist is named. Is that right? He mentions Kant and Hume, but they're not historicists. He says they're more like skeptics.

By the way, just on a sidebar there. So we have a stoicism. I tried to track all the isms. Historicism, what we talked about, lengthy talks about conventionalism, which you mentioned.

I talked about positivism, which you mentioned, and also skepticism. So it's a curious manner of writing and it's a curious chat. I can understand perhaps why he wouldn't name names with respect to Heidegger for his politically radioactive. But he speaks about the historicist school and historicism.

And we don't get any names. Am I wrong? No, I think you're right. It's very strange.

And then when you compare it to chapter two, which is on basically Weber, there's only 10 footnotes in here and very few of them are to anything close to historical school authors. And we have lectures and notes that show that he was obviously extremely well. And you can tell from the arguments. So it's very abstract.

And I believe in the original Walgreen lectures, this was not part of it. He just started from positivism, or the second chapter, which we'll get to in our next episode in the series. But with Weber, you can tell he's really done his work. I mean, one account I've heard that Heinrich Meyer has proposed is, well, you have to keep in mind that this was published in 1953.

Heidegger, after the whole Nazi debacle, didn't publish anything. And one possible explanation is, you stress doesn't know where Heidegger's thought is. Secondarily, Heidegger's third rail, but he's kind of unknown in the US. So I mean, I think at the time, I mean, we're now we think of it.

We're like, yeah, Heidegger has this massive effect. I think it took another decade or so when he published, I think was it pathmarks? Was this first book after all this? But in any case, Strauss, anyone wants this in that essay, the Living Issues of German Post-war philosophy says, look, I'm just building this off of conversations and lectures.

I heard he's been out of Germany for what you're to leave in the 30s sometime, right? Germany, maybe 15, 20 years. I don't remember the exact days. I think about 15 years.

He doesn't know what the state of the conversation is. So he's kind of, I think giving a summary. Also, I think this is my suspicion. He pushes the argument further than Heidegger had yet pushed it.

And that would be another reason not to attribute it to. I don't know. These are just different possible. Why not name the names of the people who founded it?

I mean, who's he talking about? I mean, who's he talking about? Mars? Is he talking about we know we talked about?

That's the point of the brain. Yeah, and this is actually related to the question I was going to ask why he sends that he's pulling punches? I mean, so Alex, you as a spelunking quite a bit to put this chapter back together again, right? And both you and Greg have described it as dialectical in presentation.

So why the need is it just that the subject matter is too difficult to tackle head on? Like you just can't look at the sun directly? Or what's he up to? Why not write in a more straightforward manner?

Let me amplify that. This is not a very accessible chapter. Not that the others are particularly accessible. Yeah, it's meant for such a pressing trial.

It needs to be put to bed for the fate of Western civilization. Paul Athena falls apart. Go, Alex, adventure, else. Yeah, yeah.

Well, I mean, you know, he could go through the whole historical school and there's a ton of thinkers. One good, you know, I think there's a Hegel, hard to obviously Hegel comes up explicitly at one point, but it seems like maybe one way to put this is it seems like here more than anywhere else, he is really just attacking an argument, right? He's trying to put it in the best. One way to put this is, you know, sometimes in Plato, Socrates will say, what if where to say to us or the feet is a good example, what if photographers were to pop his head out of the graph and say the following, right?

But that is there. And so Socrates is sort of a task with presenting the position as best he can. And you know, we know that the protagonist and the protagonist was not willing to go all the way. So in a way, you have to do that.

Perhaps Strauss is just trying to defend the historicist position as best he can and he's reviving on his own terms and maybe he's reluctant to attribute it to it is strangely abstract and divorced from, I mean, I think one of the ironies of the chapter is that and this is maybe, you know, more insulting implication, you know, he has a citation. The first citation is to the meanos, right? Yeah. To the most vulgar kind of relativism slash, you know, sorry, no, it's not to the meanos, but this is on the fourth citation, this is on page 12.

Yeah, the fourth one is the meanos. Yeah, yeah, and there, you know, he's saying he's suggesting that this kind of vulgar position is at bottom. It comes back again and again, right? And it does seem like he wants to say that historicist is also ultimately has its root in a kind of conventionalism.

Yeah, a conventionalist is at least the vulgar sort is not even at the creatious level, right? You know, it's a nice bad level, but it's more radical than conventionalism, but also in a way very powerful. You know, I've already defined historicist, but I could just read what Strauss says historicism is. Maybe that'd be a little better.

This is right after reference to the meanos. This is on page 12 paragraph four. According to them, the historicist all human thought is historical and hence unable ever to grasp anything eternal. Whereas according to the ancients, philosophizing means to leave the cave according to our contemporaries, all philosophizing essentially belongs to a quote, historical world, quote culture, quote, civilization, quote, Veltan showing that is to what Plato had called the cave.

We shall call this historicism, in quotes. I don't know what that adds, but it's perhaps more elegant than what I said. I do like how in that passage, he goes from public dogma or built on show. He goes from Greek to German.

Yeah, he's kind of outlining right there, like the history of the thought. Yeah, and dogma is I believe, correct me from wrong, great, but he is the word using that meanos passage, I don't have any idea. I think it's an indiaptial. Like political dogma.

I remember the Yeah, yeah, no, it's not doxide. He's dogma. Like I think it's real. Yeah, doxide has a more active sense than dogma, right?

So like, doxide is opinioning so far as you're trying to understand your experience, dogma is something more received, right? That's something worse than passed down. Right. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know.

I won't argue this is kind of beside the point, but should we talk about how the role the French Revolution played? Yeah, that was curious. Fascinating that the French Revolution scared conservatives at the time. This is a nice little lesson because scared conservatives into saying, oh, we need to rely on tradition and need them skeptical of all absolute standards, right?

Because as Charles articulates this on in paragraph nine on page 15, absolute standards are in a way very destructive. They are absolutely. Yeah. We see this in our own country where like all men are created equal, egalitarianism becomes an incredibly corrosive principle.

So why do you think he chooses the French Revolution versus I think it's a fact of the matter? But I think the point he brings out is really good, which is that if you if you get put off my radical, innovative principles and ideas into rejecting all of that, you actually invite a kind of anti philosophical sentiment, right? And I think one of the counterintuitive results of this sort of conservatism, I'm trying to preserve the wisdom of the tradition and the order of the tradition as he puts it, it becomes historical. It becomes a story since it becomes therefore, and then it turns out if you're a story says, it's actually an open question whether or not what tradition gives you as good or bad, right?

You want to base stuff on tradition. And then the question becomes a question of a kind of radical nationalism. There's a weird tradition for traditions. Yeah.

So there's a weird aspect of Heidegger's software. It's on the one hand, very German. On the other hand, it's like very Greek. So the one hand he's going back behind his Germanic roots and sort of appealing to this sort of grand historical moment in the Greek side.

On the other hand, he's like very rooted in the Germanic qualities. There's a kind of ambivalence between radicalism and conservatism. That's really unpredictable if you take this reactionary position. I think he's saying what you really need to do is he's go back to the inches and sort of reassess their position and take it seriously.

Otherwise, you cultivate sentiments you might not like in the long run. Right. Hey, I love that. Where do you want to go from here?

There's a few things we could layer the French point. We could do stuff down on that. I guess only sort of for the audience at home. Would this be sort of our contemporary paleo conservatives?

Is that kind of what we have in mind? Is that in the center in the realm of this like kind of a store, kind of a store system conservatism? Yeah, I mean, that's ours. Yeah.

Yeah. This is the preview of Burke, Burkeian conservatism, for example, we see later in the book. Good point. Nice.

I mean, there are remarks in the Burke chapter that make you think he has, same in mind as one right sorts of conservatives that he sort of encouraged this, you know, he's a standard for conservatives of his day. Yeah, that has that as echoes. I think the point he makes ultimately is that if you do this move, this reactionary move, you see nature and he says nature becomes something like the individual right like the individual people that your natural type. Now, it turns out that doesn't work out.

So that nature is just completely thrown out. And so both left and right effectively both conservatives and revolutionaries end up rejecting nature, right, or principles of philosophy. And this is a really dangerous situation. And it's really, I'll just say, it's for all you want to say about like people like Gazelle or something like that, who just hate on philosophers, at least he's aware of like the formidable opponent.

Here you just see unwittingly, in like enlightened Europe, just rejecting all of this stuff. It's pretty remarkable. Do you guys have an assessment of how well the Strauss vanquish this dragon? Or is it still, or is this a historicism kind of brineal problem that recurs throughout the modern times?

I don't think it's as clear as say, Heidegger, but I think something like his door says, I'm still fairly prevalent. I mean, like, you often hear, you know, this is our lived experience, right? I mean, this is a kind of shadow of this, right? You can't, there's therefore there's no rational discourse possible with, because knowledge is sort of peculiar to the subject or something like this, which is quite a source of somebody that's kind of similar.

So is that an indictment on the success of Strauss's project or? Because it seems like he's trying to lay out, so he's trying to make his opponent to present the toughest argument that his opponent could level and reject it and show you how he rejects it, albeit in a somewhat opaque way. But then he doesn't seem to succeed like the historical record doesn't play out demonstrating his success, or really successful with his students. Or am I just thinking about this in a wrong way?

No, I think that's a very good question to ask. So what is the project? Is the project to vanquish a store system? Or is it to show to some people that it's incoherent and that we're, it ultimately sounds satisfactory in some way or that what's needed is some return to Socratic rationalism.

I mean, clearly he succeeded with some of us. Given that he was a sort of, no, Socratic, how realistic did he think anything grander was, so wise, right? So that's an open question to me. It seems like it seems to me that he had a number of purposes and that one was simply rehabilitating a more what's every day notion that there's right and wrong, a non-philosophic return to natural right.

And that seems to have had some success, I think, as well. So just sort of the old fashioned, the book, at least several editions have a declaration of dependence on the front. So it returns to a kind of assertion of natural right, or at least a quasi-philosophic sentiment that there is natural right. That's part of the project.

But I think the deeper project is trying to open up the possibility of philosophy for people and show that that's there. And that's been, as far as an academic goes, I mean, good Lord, that's extraordinary success for an academic. But yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it reminds you of these, kind of various authors who who succeed both in a sort of philosophically and morally edifying. Right. Yeah. That's a massive word.

I think he does succeed in doing that. You can see that by the varied reception of the spoken, right? You get the attack in the first two chapters, and then the second two chapters, you get the revived version of Socrates. And then in the final two chapters, the long chapters, each with two parts, you get the history from Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Burke, that sort of explains to you how you got where you were.

So one thing I'll say is that I think an important point to emphasize about his critique is that, and this is to David's point, is that he talks a lot about the experience of history, and whether it's a correct interpretation of what's being experienced, right? So to say I'm ex-abbing the experience of history is already an interpretation. What do you actually experience when you say, Oh, everything's historically determined? And it might be that convention is a better word, right?

And he goes so far to say that this was not a discovery. It seems actually to be an invention, at least that's the position he proposes, right? This was not a discovery of a dimension of reality that escaped classical thought, rather an invention and arbitrary interpretation of phenomena, which are always bit known, which have been interpreted much more adequately prior, right? So he's saying that this, you know, they're getting at something real, but they've actually not gone far enough.

That's one point. Another point, I mean, maybe this is a good place to turn, is this sort of possibility of philosophy and Socrates, or the Socratic rationalism that emerges here. One of the things he's able to rescue from the historicist thesis to say, well, all you've shown is that these solutions to the fundamental questions are not actually adequate, right? You have to assert that the fundamental riddles have not been solved.

But if you assert that the fundamental riddles have not been solved, you have to presuppress about some access to the fundamental riddles, or fundamental riddles, which is persistent over time. Yeah, yeah. And that could be, and he makes clear, this is where the chapter is kind of a elaborate, but he makes clear that that that view is actually coeval with Socrates. He says, this is on page 32 of every 31 towards the end, he says, he says, the experience of history, which he puts in scare quotes does not make doubtful the view that the fundamental problems, such as the problem of justice, persist or retain their identity in all historical change, rather than grasping these problems as problems, the human mind liberates itself from this historical limitation.

So the historic thesis says, well, these are all just various solutions to some fundamental real simple, you have to grasp the problem before you propose a solution. And it might be that every philosopher, a philosopher understands these problems. This is a very difficult question, I think it takes more to parse out than this, just gives you here, any makes clear that look, I'm just going to drop it at this point. But I do think you have to, at this point, sense that there is a, there is, as he puts it, no more is needed to legitimize philosophy and strategic research, for the knowledge that one does not know.

Now here's the real problem. And this is kind of my, my more, like further thesis here is that Strauss in rescuing the possibility of loss and Socrates has to assert fundamental problems, such as the problem of justice. But if the problem of justice is fundamental, and it is, as he says, coeval with human thought, I don't think he admits of a solution. And so it might, and this is my, my more like, you know, I can't prove this, but it might be, I think what stresses up to this, historicism is the bookie man, yeah, of natural right, but it saves you from the deep earth, bookie man of natural right, which is Socrates, and which is that, you know, he's going to refute your understanding of justice, make you confused, and that's going to be a problem, or anything like a clear assertion of natural right.

And that's where I think the real, I think that the deeper threat of this really starts to come out. Right. But do you touch on a word there that in what you read, and I'll pick up the homepage 23 paragraph 19, the human element here. So he says, far from legitimizing the historicist inference history seems rather to prove that all human thought, and certainly all philosophic thought is concerned with the same fundamental themes or the same fundamental problems.

And therefore, that there exists an unchanging framework which resists and all changes of human knowledge of both facts and principles. So this is going back to that, the height of your quote, that for something to be is to be always, here is the fundamental problems are fundamental problems for human beings. And so they're not eternal problems. No, they're coeval with human thought.

So right, grounded in something like, so this is where I think he's really, it really shows you something, right? Because it carries, you can say the modern critique to such a radical extent that you're forced to ground philosophy in man, rather than in a sort of eternal reality. That's, that's where I think things get very difficult. Yeah, I think that's right.

I mean, how do you do that? I mean, it's very, I don't know, I find this part really mysterious, because you have to stir something like, and this is where it all seems like Kantian, and we should keep mind, Strauss is roots in, in Kantian thought, right? And neo-kontianism. But if it is just based in a critique of man, or an understanding of man as man, then it is a very modern skeptical position he's charting out, and not one based on a sort of full understanding of the whole or something like that, or even a partial understanding of the whole, it's somehow grounded in man as man.

And that's, I don't know, I find it very hard to write about yet around this possibility. Yeah. Yeah, that's kind of what I was literally too early, I suppose, when I was trying to press it. Yeah, good.

I have a small nitpicky question. On page 22, Strauss says, and I only point out, because he's using the same phrases later, so it's not a very helpful sort of thing, but it seems to us that what is called the, quote, scare, quote, experience of history is a bird's eye view of the history thought. Here Pete's that phrase, birds eye view on page 75, I believe that's in chapter two or three. It's in chapter two, it's the aircrafts on revelation.

Yeah, exactly. And so I was imagining, therefore, there's some kind of a connection there between the reference to revelation and the references to sources, which we can try and tease out. Maybe when we get to that second instance of the bird's eye view on page 75, but that's not for tonight. I just, I'm going to let you have any thoughts on it, go for it, go ahead.

No, I think that's worthwhile. And I think we should save that. But also on page 22 is where you get this comment. This is paragraph 17.

We ought therefore to welcome historicism as an ally in our fight against dogitism, right, which is so counterintuitive. That comes up again. A little later, I think, in the discussion of Socrates, also on the question of revelation in paragraph 26, oddly enough, age 20 to 29, I think that's where revelation is. Why are you laughing 26, Machiavelli?

Yeah, isn't that 13? It's not for God. Yeah. Where is the word revelation?

Yeah, he revealed us six lines from the bottom, and the revelation one line down. Yeah, yeah. So we are absolutely ignorant of the surprises which fate may have in store for later generations of fate may in the future again, conceal what it has revealed to us. But this does not impair the truth of that revelation.

So there's, I think, a sort of, sort of, which a threat in this sense that's never really brought fully to the surface that historicism bears something in common with the position of divine revelation. And that would, I think, go to the point about why Strauss finds it such an important, if this is the sort of most formidable version of the position of divine revelation that has kind of academic currency, it would be incredibly useful in helping clarify what Waspy is. You don't think he's using historicism as a stocking horse? Sure.

It might be. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I think that's possible for sure. I was once in a, what was this thing? Those, like, oral exams we had in storehouses? No.

But, uh, you know, how you sit there and you like talk with the tutors and one of the tutors, I want to name his name, but he was like, every time I read the Republic, it just seems more complex. I'm like, yeah, that's what reading is. I just want to be like, anyways, another question I had. It's a hard book, man.

I'm sorry. I, I, like, this is hard. And I think I told you guys, before the first time I read it was in a class in college, Professor, Professor Simon, I was like, at the time I was like, I understand, now I'm looking back, like, what was he thinking? Like, that's insane.

It's interesting you bring that up. I was one of the straws of students. I once had this professor at kind of Gary Glenn, and he told me that. So when he was studying straws, I was studying this book.

And it was so difficult for the grad students that they would, they would kind of tag team different chapters to research the footnotes, etc. That makes so much sense. When he was just, it was hard going. I mean, I, I think you make a lot of headway just trying to track the argument.

One thing I'll say to people who are reading this is, is try to chart, I mean, he distinguishes them many times, try to chart the argument on behalf of now to right, and the argument on behalf of philosophy. In full awareness that the argument on behalf of philosophy is primary, the argument on behalf of now to right is secondary. And, and assess to the degrees of what one question I had, this only came up because I was, I'm in a reading group on the Republic chapter in the city of man, and he brings out Mcbeth early on, and a little later he calls it our example. And I just thought that was a strange phrase to say, our, is this your example?

You brought it up and you're using again to take on our earlier examples and that, maybe it's just a German, but then I, it's talking on page 18, he says, to the unbiased historian, the historical process revealed itself as the meaningless web spun by what men did produced and thought no more than by unadmitigated chance, a tale told by an idiot. So there's a clear, reference to Mcbeth. Just here's a general question. Where else does he recommend to reference to Mcbeth?

Right? If it was just a one word, he'd be like, oh, it's occasional. He doesn't hear, right? When he's talking, when he's basically, I think what his purposes is to outline this to credit cases.

And he does it again, when he's discussing Plato's art of writing in the big, you know, the first 13, right, right, right, right. So does he reference Mcbeth anywhere else? And why does he keep going to about it? Zero clue why this is?

I mean, you could take the interpretation of offers of Mcbeth in the city of man and maybe put it here and see how it applies to sources. But I just wonder if anybody's thought about this. Just to know what comes to mind Alex, what you might doesn't need to have an essay on Mcbeth. Oh, I have no idea.

I don't know. It's easier. Well, the nature of Caesar. No, it's in the back of the grand keys, it's in the back of the grand keys edition of our future for educational institutions.

That I say includes Nietzsche's interpretation of, I don't know, I was going to say I because Nietzsche constantly is referencing Mcbeth, isn't he? Yes. I'll put this in the series. I'll try to give a serious answer.

I remember that thought I remember that remark that he says that no one seriously attributes to Shakespeare the line of the character life is a tale told by an idiot. But I remember the rest of the lines. Isn't it signifying sound and furious? Right?

Signifying nothing. Something like that. What's the line? It's a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing for sound and fury.

It's not very signifying. But I actually remember thinking myself, because, you know, as Machiavelli says, some of the ancients put their wisdom in the mouth of someone else. I actually think that that's entirely what it's entirely possible that is what Shakespeare thought and that Strauss is actually signaling that that Shakespeare might have put in. This is not uncommon right to put your more radical beliefs into the mouth of someone as a bad character so that then the audience would dismiss it as not him.

Can tell a funny story. Always. I was teaching about that. I teach it often.

We were talking about that line and it was about life, whatever. It's a tale told by an idiot. I always try to encourage students to recognize that. I'm like, what do you think is going off this line?

Is to realize there's a Shakespeare talking about himself effectively. That's my life is a tale told. It's like, that's probably a pretty smart guy. Shakespeare.

Now, it could be deeper in the sense of idiot is Shakespeare's knowledge of ignorance. He's a soccer. He's something like that. But I had a student say, I think you'd want to say, yeah, it is a tale told by an idiot because it's told by Shakespeare and Shakespeare's an idiot because he didn't know algebra.

Well, I mean, I was actually wondering, that's terrible. Come on, come on, I said that. Can we give me? Now this is a thing.

I think he was **** with me because we didn't, what I do is I have them perform soliloquies and he gave one of the best performances. He looked me in the eye and he like made me blush. I was like, whoo, and it was all. Alex, he was trying to confront your power.

He can never allow that to happen. Yeah. Okay. Well, I was going to ask you, do you think there's any chance that Shakespeare meant idiot in the Greek sense?

Maybe. Like a smart guy? No, just like it's a tale told by a private person as opposed to a as opposed to a public man. It takes me on greek being the guy that just keeps to himself.

That's the poet, right? Yeah. And that's the poet who writes about people doing public things. Shakespeare didn't know Greek idiot.

It's all Greek to me. It's what I'm thinking. It did. Oh, you got me.

That's true. Maybe one, this is where I thought you were going to, but maybe another angle on this is stress. He was like another angle later as a foolishness of non-literary interpretations, and then he later gives right in relation to the sacred law and to divine beings, right, or supernatural beings that dispense with Macguth's faith. I wonder whether maybe that's a suggestion about the faith.

Faith, faith, faith, historicism. Yeah. I don't know. But I wonder, does he folks at home well versed in stress?

Does he stress anywhere else to use this Macbeth example of these two moments? Right. You know, first of all, David Seanus is guns, which are heavily bruised. Second of all, folks at home is my life.

Lesions? I think those are lesions. You look like Tom Hanks in that very sad movie. A lot of plagions.

He's like, are they abusing you? It's like, no, it's what it feels like to go against Greg McBrayer. I remember Greg McBrayer, by the way, he sent us a video off of high school and he was a receiver. He had a white hands t-shirt tucked into his pants and then greased out hair.

And it's the red pack rolled at the sleeve. Yeah, it's like, come on, man. No, it'd be fair. That's because I went to high school in the 50s.

And then he was saying, was it was the 1350s. That was funny. It was a good place to end. Yeah, what's next for us?

So we can't announce our guests as having you an ask. We have a guest in mind. We have a guest in favor of chapter. Wait, does that fellow from Boston College have a book on them?