Welcome back to the new Thinkery. My name is David Barr and with me is always my good friend Alex Brieu, how are you doing Alex? Doing well. How are you David?
I'm well. And our good friend Greg McBrayer. How are you doing Greg? I'm doing great.
It's good to see you guys. It's been too long. It has been too long. We're in contact with each other hundreds of times a day.
I've seen still pictures of David. A lot of pics but nothing video where I've seen his face. Yeah. It's good.
It's a proof of a I see lots of videos. He always FaceTime. We've got all the enough numbers face. So Greg, we were talking right before the show about how the three of us, I probably would have met Alex later.
Right. And Greg, you were kind of instrumental in solidifying a relationship with Charles and saying, hey, this is the guy in the dark room. But we almost didn't attend Maryland as a graduate student. That's true.
Funny story to tell. I think there's enough times past right? And we have enough friends. Yeah, sure.
I guess just planning for tonight and we've got another episode on Strauss. I was just reminded of when I was at Planted Graduate School. And at the time I was dating and very much in love with the woman who became my third wife, Eunice, she was Spaniard. And she was going to grad school at the University of Virginia.
And so I was also contemplating going to graduate school at the University of Virginia. And I met with some people there, including James Frost Clay. And I also met with the leading Plato scholar at the University of Virginia and the government of politics, what it was called. And we were talking for about a minute or two.
And he sort of quickly realized based on the people I'd studied with, Bob Bartlett, Emory, and a guy named Gene Miller at the University of Georgia, he said, oh, you're a Straussian. And I said, well, you know, I'm open to other things, you know, but yeah, a little bit. He's like, oh, why don't you just, we'll go find someone else for you to talk to you. And he just sort of escorted me out.
That was the end of my interview at QVA. The story. Was it an official interview or you were just talking? I don't remember exactly, but I was, I mean, I don't know.
It's odd in the government politics that there are Americanists in the Strauss School, yeah, populate their politics department that are friends of ours that have been on our show. Yeah, it's a perfectly fine department. One of my only students who's gone on to complete a PhD just finished a PhD everyday. So I encouraged him to go there.
And he said I'm a major in some other folks. Right. But I did not go there. Oh, Sean Dodor.
I was, I was, there reminds me of a, um, this was really funny. There was a Strauss, uh, seminar at, um, the new school way back when I was still in undergrad, it was in 2004 or something like that. And I forget who it was, but somebody mentioned, one of the presenters mentioned that somebody had, and this was like the biggest name. So it was Stanley Rosen was there and Werner Danuser and like all the big names of people who were still alive.
Yeah, I'm seeing Hammer was there. Yeah, I think Jaffa was like, Oh, you tell me, Alex, you tell me this way that all of these old stuff. All right. No, no, I was being rude.
I'm sorry. Good. You were telling me that that's all these old Strauss hands like they're clothes were in patterns. No, it was a, I thought you were going to be able to do the rosh, the roosh guys.
You know, the roosh guys are this whole theory about Strauss. No, we told that one. Yeah. But they, uh, one of them came up and asked Bill Crustle questions like, Oh, rock.
This is not a form. Right. It's like, Oh, rock. Oh, one.
Then these Strauss things just like took this guy by his, like, uh, um, by his, like, collar and his belt. They'd used his head to open the door. Like, you know, with that, uh, that cowboy guy. But anyways, um, back to the main point, one of the presenters was talking and he said, Yeah, somebody wants to ask me if, uh, if I'm a Strauss fan and he responded, uh, well, I don't know, it depends what you mean by that.
And he, and he realized that was sort of like, uh, you can't give that response to sort of like if somebody would ask you, um, are you a leper? And he'd say, Oh, well, it depends what you mean by that. It's a red flag unless you say no. Right.
Right. Right. Right. I realized that I was trying to have an hot day with the interview.
I was like, well, you know, depends on what you mean. You know, what I've noticed some people do now that have gotten, uh, PhDs under Strauss, or even, you know, master's degree, they'll kind of whitewash the CD by doing something overseas, like Game Bridge or Oxford. Have you noticed that? There are a few, there are a few names out there.
Um, where I've noticed that they kind of paper it over, which just finds me, right? Because it always comes out. Can't hide it for so long. No, no.
Um, we're trying to hide it. Obviously we're out there. We're out there. I'm out.
Yeah. They should have an S to that letter, super LGBTQ is. Yeah, like your friend. You have some of us will get real jobs that we, you know, you know, sorry, do you speak about the real job?
And did you see this data leak at Ohio State this in the last week or two where they have the, all the information from all the faculty searches they've done for like the last 10 or 20 years, something like that. How do you not, man? You guys should, oh, it's like we can't, uh, well, you should, it explains a lot why so many of us had so many hard times trying to find a job for the last 20 years. It's pretty, pretty, pretty.
They're actual, they actually have the notes. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Just have names. Um, I even look for names, but we should put on our, on our, on our, like, letters that were Strauss, you can change the A to an X, Strauss, and, uh, and just, and then they'll be like, what the fuck is this? I don't know.
I got to hire this guy. Otherwise I'm not up on, and then they can go around saying, you know, right, right, right. We're protected class now. Yeah.
Uh, but we're not just drowsing, right? We have a broader reach. Our audience includes, um, dishwashers, for example, and financiers, financiers, doctors, they're all, they're all, uh, Strauss curious. Uh, you know, one thing though, when they bite, he's not a Strausian.
He's honorary. Yeah. Um, or though unless Eric Adler's goal is to convert us, oh, the class is this or something. Oh, yeah.
That makes sense. But you know, I was thinking just now, when we talked about Strausians, at least when we were in our late 30s or early 40s, uh, it was more of this, it wasn't underground, but it was still a dirty word because it was in the time of Ann Norton and the Iraq war. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. And it was, uh, it was not a nice thing, but I feel like the thing has been taken out of it. It might be more of us. I don't know.
Yeah. Now it's like, uh, cool. You almost don't want to talk about it, right? Right.
Um, you know, it's one day. Okay. I don't guard the next thing, right? So that's why I'm now in the gray area.
No, I like your idea. I read, I read Xenophon and then I, I, I lay in Congress with my cattle. Can we say that we're persecuted people? I would think so.
We, Strausians, I mean, I literally was another time, seriously, this is actually serious. Another time I was at a job interview after this, after I had my PhD and, uh, one of the interviewers said something about that and it was clear that the interview was over that point. That's a real story. That was the university in Maryland.
I won't name names, but I mean, there was, uh, I wrote for tenure track gig, you know, I can't reveal any of these names, but you know, instantly that a professor, uh, friend of ours, I worked close with, was told in no uncertain terms by other faculty members when you leave, like none of your ilk will be hired. Right. Right. Right.
That's me leaving my last job when he was talking about Zuafiles and I don't think that that's fair to me or Zuafiles, but um, just understood, just misunderstood. But we are talking about Straus today. This episode is another episode in our series. I don't remember when the last episode in the series was, but this is our series on natural right in history.
Banagar was on the last one, right? That's right. Banagar was on the last one. We're gonna continue.
We're gonna continue. We're gonna continue our guests, but this one's just the three of us, just the three of us, the three of us. So listeners at home, you can just skip this episode and go on to chapter four because this is just the three of us and, you know, what do we know? And we picked an insanely difficult chapter to tackle.
Right. Right. Good luck. Good luck.
So maybe, um, we didn't do this, but maybe a little bit of situating. This is the third chapter. And so, um, we should talk about just briefly where this is and the grand scheme of things. What's chapter one, chapter two about my way, chapter three.
So chapter one is what, historicism, basically? And then chapter two, so historicism being, uh, the notion that all thought is radically, uh, determined by its historical circumstances. And then chapter two is largely about Weber. We did that episode with Banagar.
And I think that it's about Weber because it's a social scientific attempt to rescue science and the face of this historicist attack on the basis of the fact value distinction. Um, I think Strauss is sympathetic to Weber, but ultimately thinks that Weber solution doesn't work. And so there's this weird chronology in the book. Like we begin with the contemporary problem.
We look at a failed contemporary solution and then we're all the way back to pre-Socratic philosophy in chapter three. So it's like the current situation, a failed attempt to respond to the current situation. Okay, let's start all the way back over with pre-Socratic thought and the origin of the discovery of natural, right? I think that that's right.
If you want to add something else out. Yeah, I'll also point out, I think that's right, but I'd also add there's a kind of synthesis, right? Because um, in chapter one, Strauss early on, it's the only time he's mentioned conventionalism before chapter three early on, he refers to a kind of similarity between the radical historicist or Hidogarian position and ancient conventionalism, though they're not strictly speaking equivalent. Um, you get this as actually that ancient conventionalist is far deeper.
Uh, and then also the Weber chapter ends up showing that, that Weber wrestled ultimately, uh, with the question why science, right? That the basic issue is the reason in revelation. And so chapter three shows how ancient conventionalism emerges out of a critique of the sacred or divine law. And so you could say he's trying to take the sort of issues that these two, uh, sort of contemporary schools are sort of dancing around, um, and he's trying to go and understand them and what he refers to as their sort of natural, uh, context or original context and present the natural understanding of these two phenomena.
And so it's, it's, uh, in a way, it's, it's a pretty, and it's so detailed. This is just a very superficial take on, but it is such a, uh, sort of intellectual feat to have sort of synthesized all this in that way. So Alex, you make the case that it logically flows from chapters one and two, but you don't think he could have started with this in teed up chapter one and two somewhere in this chapter, had it begun. I mean, he could have written, he could have written it differently.
There are some internal references and a certain language that's borrowed that's obviously coming out of chapters one and two, I noticed it more with chapter one. Um, but, uh, I only ask because I was wondering if he's trying to key up the reader kind of to arouse their interests like, hey, this is a pressing prop. Like we have these pressing problems of the day positive as sources. Uh, and you're like, Oh, what am I going to do to get out of this morass?
And he goes, well, don't worry. What, what, what's start from the beginning here? So I don't know, just just a pedagogical thing. I think so.
Yeah. I mean, if you look at the whole story, we've talked about this, we look at the structure of the book. He starts with the contemporary goes to the ancient, goes to the modern to the sort of, you know, it ends with Burke and it looks like a sensible kind of, uh, um, conservative ending to it. But these middle chapters, I mean, I, when the first time I read chapter three chapters one and two, I was like, what are these schools?
This is all new to me. Like vaguely got it from just how so much of it's trickled down into common opinions, but chapter three and chapter four as well. But chapter three, when you start this middle pair of chapters, it is so powerful, like they're the rhetorically is unbelievable. Just he's recon spent and we should talk about this a bit, but his ability to reconstruct these ancient threads of argument, a lot of which is, is not just summarizing works or something like that, but putting it together piecemeal and explicitly at one place as I have to do this.
But early on, he's just, it's completely, he is intellectual effort in constructing these arguments and reconstructing this sort of logic, you could say, of, of the origin of philosophy. Is it fair to say that it's a kind of conjectural account of the beginning of philosophy? Yeah, I think that's, that's right. Yeah.
Or because we can't actually actually account. Yeah, it's not purely historical. Right. I wouldn't want to call it conjectural.
Like, oh, well, we just aren't, I think what you mean by conjectural is something like he's trying to distill it to his assets or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
You mentioned real quick before we move on too far that the previous chapter, chapter two ends with this, um, this notion of the real problem with Weber is his inability to understand science and opposition to revelation. And this really emerges in this chapter as well. I mean, there's all these references explicit and implicit to the Bible, which is curious for a chapter on what's called, you know, it seems to be about pre-Socratic things. It just seems like a whole other world to refer to the Bible.
And I'm reminded of the two epigraphs as well to the entire book, which are also to the Bible, right? We have the reference to 2nd Samuel chapter 12 and then a reference to 1st King chapter 21 that opened the book. And so one of the, one of the curiosities I was, I guess I was planning to talk about it a little later, but one of them, there are several curiosities in chapter three of me. And one of them is, is the way in which he deals with the Bible.
He sort of seems to import, I mean, this would have been sort of foreign to, to the Greeks, right? This notion of the Hebrew Bible and these sorts of problems. And he seems to assimilate pre-philosophic Greek thinking to biblical thinking, if that mean fairly explicitly actually. So.
Yeah. And it's, and it's strange because, I mean, he cites that famous passage in the Odyssey about the Molu plant, right? Right. But that's the first, I mean, Homer's the first source we have.
So whatever Greek he's talking about, where he's, that's that weird Greek who discovered it 26 hundred years ago. Yeah. Or earlier, right? Or earlier, right?
Yeah. I mean, it has to be pre-homeric. So he has to sort of, out of the echoes or the fragments within the Greece and given his knowledge of the Bible, try to spell this out as best he can. Though he doesn't, I mean, so we should maybe give an outline, but I mean, at least this part, the developments where the emergence of the discovery of nature is outlined really in the 1st 12 paragraphs or maybe paragraphs 2 through 12.
And he talks about how these certain pre philosophic distinctions when combined and then expanded, give you this idea of nature, he doesn't actually treat whether that's valid, a valid move or not, or whether this is something unjustified on the part of these first philosophers. So it's pointing to the Bible and it's in a way showing the emergence and triumph of philosophy. It's sort of coming into its own. And so it does have that.
But the whole question of which way to live, right, of reason, revelation posted at the end of chapter 2, I mean, I think it's clear to anybody who's thought about this is not an adequate treatment with respect to that question. It's merely a sort of treatment of the logic of development without this sort of counter response or the attacker, the critique from the perspective of the believer or the illusion. Well, I will say that I think that three kind of lays the groundwork for chapter four, where he lays it out more clearly. So I see three as doing some preliminary work groundwork for chapter four in some ways.
But let me give a brief outline as I see it. And then I'd like to summarize very quickly what I take the argument to be in very simplistic terms and then we can make it more complicated, but David has something first. No, that's great, Greg. That's actually what I was going to ask for.
Okay. I think that the concept of natural right is difficult to understand. It's employed in seemingly different, well, actually in different ways by different rich philosophic traditions. And everybody kind of uses it as an instrument for their various ends.
It's very, very hard to add. It's at once easy to grasp and then it's seemingly difficult. So I'm breaking it down in simple terms, or at least natural right as you think Strauss understands it. Right.
I think that's helpful. I think for first time listeners, yeah, let me just do the outline of the chapter first. I have, and I noticed that Alex might have a slightly different division than me, so maybe we could talk about this. But I take a big guide in the three parts of unequal length.
The first part is a very long discussion, the paragraphs that Alex just mentioned about the discovery of nature. How did that happen? And I'll come back and tell that story in just a moment. Within the second part, the longest part, I think, is a discussion of conventionalism.
Now that second part can be subdivided into various parts, philosophical conventionalism, he also takes up specific thinkers, including Epicurus, especially in the Cretius. And then the third part is a brief outline and critique of pre-secratic natural right. Very, very quickly. So I can try to address David's question first before I go through the parts a little more clearly.
What does natural right mean for Strauss? In the most simplistic terms, which therefore is going to not do full justice to what's going on here. Look, is there anything that is right or just by nature? Or is all matters of justice or right or fairness simply matters of convention?
Does it vary from place to place and time to time? Is there anything that is simply just according to nature? The closest analogy that Strauss will use in this chapter is health. Is there an idea of what it means naturally for human being to be healthy, even if what it means for a particular human being to be healthy varies at age and time and place and stuff like that?
And so is there something that is right? I hesitate to ask you something. Yeah, we're always basically. We're not.
Yeah. And Greg, really quick. We've done a 150 episodes. We've never used the raise hand feature on Zoom.
No, I can't be respectful because it can be distracting if you were to raise the hand. Thanks. No, thanks. I appreciate it.
I don't want to complicate this too much. No, no, go ahead. You're another natural word. It's not big and natural law.
Not big and natural, but it's a natural law. Maybe that is a kind of natural law. A natural law. But what's it?
Yeah, sure. It's possible the difference between natural right and natural law. You're asking a simple question. This is a very, very complicated question, very difficult question.
It's the root of a very big disagreement between a guy named Kerry and Jim Kerry, James Kerry, and Strauss. He just wrote this book on Strauss and Natural Law recently. Very simply, the difference would be natural law. I mean, some ancient Greeks thought that natural law, to speak of natural law to Greek would almost be a contradiction in terms because the word for law is no most the word for nature is fusus.
So it would be weird to speak of something that is simultaneously natural and conventional. It seems to be in some opposition. So when most folks speak of natural law, they mean that there is a clearly articulated or articulable, if that's a word, set of rules that are always in everywhere valid. Do this, do not do that.
You can see with the analogy of health that natural right is more like health. There are rules of thumb, and it's more like this is what a healthy person would do. And in this circumstance, so it varies. Natural right varies in a way that natural law does not.
You couldn't come up with laws for how to live, how to sort of affect biological health. And it would be strange to try to do so. So I think from the point of view of the the partisan of natural right, natural law is looking for things that don't exist. And you can there's this famous passage in one of Zenofen's brains where you know, put down on left hand side all the things that are right or just and on the other hand, everything that's wrong.
And then he quickly actually, he's quickly shows the guy will that in some circumstances the very thing you said will be unjust will be just here in a set in the other. And so what actually I think is right show is that what is just varies. But the very and this actually does get to the heart of what Strauss is talking about. Most of these conventionalists look at the variability of justice and infer or conclude, I suppose, that therefore justice is conventional because it varies its conventional.
I thought that's helpful. There's a good example I think I heard from Harvey Nancefield is that a principle natural right consists of certain principles, or principles of justice. And one of them might be something like first come first served and that manifests as the law of waiting in line in the United States in Italy, it manifests as brawling, right? So it is just a matter of fact first come first served.
How that how that's organized or how that's manifest as a sort of rule is a different question. But I think just to underscore one point that you made, but I want I think you made a bit more loudly, it's it's very old, it's variable thanks to the circumstances, the circumstances demand a prudential sort of application or adjustment of the principle to circumstances, much as with health, right? The amount of medicine will depend on the size of the person, the type of medicine will depend on the condition in which they find themselves, right? And nobody would therefore jump from that variability and say, well, there's no such thing as the healthful.
No, they would say it's there's a naturally helpful thing and it follows from XYZ. Right. So that was really helpful. I'm going to try and tell the story of health velocity emerged, according to Strauss, and then Alex can pepper, you both can pepper in with questions or answers.
Oh, thank you. No, I meant that it actually is you guys can correct me. Not as you guys can just add your little jokes about those things. Please do go on.
Yeah. There's Rachel and Henry Kissinger died. All right, moving on to Greg Starry. Get out, Jake, but that's actually the emergency.
I don't believe anything you ever say about anyone dying. Well, that's a good point for listeners at home. I'm not going to name names here, but once I was in the company, a very distinguished person who's going to bar text me and says, yeah, very famous political philosopher. You want to go on there, both dead.
It won't be that long. Well, the one guy who got on David did not know I was with this one guy and he texts me. Oh my God. This other guy has died with whom the guy I'm with is very good friends.
And so it's I'm like, oh my God. And this other very elderly gentleman says, well, what's wrong? And I said, well, so and so has just died. He goes, that can't be right.
I just spoke to him yesterday. And I said, no, my friend says he took his own life with a shotgun. He's like, he's not suicidal. This doesn't make any sense.
And so then I go home and I'm like, I got you. And I'm like, you just made me look like the world's largest in front of like one of the guys most of this entire world. What Greg's leaving out also is that for the months that followed the years, I think, and actually I don't know. You do this every time.
Like, I'll come up with like a fake email. And I'm like, Hey, Greg, this is so and so from so and so school. I don't want this repeated too far. But XYZ eminent Strauss and film the blank has died.
No, please alert other eminent Straussians who use her discretion. So folks at home, anytime David gives me any bad news whatsoever about anything, I don't believe it. Yeah, I have this. This is trust.
I distrust and I verify. All right, we got to move on, but we need to eventually tell stories about how we crink called Joe Cropsy. But that's another thing. Another one was I talking about the origin of philosophy?
Yeah, you're about to do something really deep. Well, now I'm all off my children. I'll do a bad job. But Strauss is clear that philosophy emerges before the emergence of political philosophy.
And it emerges, what do you guys can't stop trying to throw me off my game. So philosophy comes first. I just might always crack like a teenager there. And it emerges on the basis of an inquiry into the first things.
So that's a big part, right? So what are the first things come from? So there's two kinds of facts that emerge, and they both seem to be related to religion. And one of them is about the very first things that we know about are typically stories told to us, religious stories told to us by our ancestors.
And so on the one hand, we're trying to figure out what these first things are. And on the other hand, we recognize that there's a variety of law codes in the world. So we as a member of a kind of political community or maybe a social but not yet political community, we have a set of laws that have been handed down to us by our ancestors. We come to identify that with a divine law.
And then we sort of want to know what the first things are. And we also come to recognize that the stories that we hear about the first things are not the same as the stories that other people tell the first things. Now, these divine law codes on the one hand, they can flip in their provisions and admonitions. So on the one hand, like one religion will say, eat pork, and the other religion will say, don't eat pork.
So there's that. And that's problematic. But Strauss points out to the more problematic contradictions between law codes is that they give competing accounts of the first things. Some say that there was nothing first or some say that the gods were born from the earth.
And so that's the really problematic thing. So somebody Greek, apparently, 2600 years or more ago, became aware of this, that there's the difference in law codes. And there's we're trying to figure it out completely double this because I don't have my kilter, but we're trying to look for the first causes. That's important.
Furthermore, nature, this is actually, I'm going to quote Strauss here, this is page 88. The discovery of nature was guided by two fundamental common sense distinctions. Nature was discovered by man when man embarked on the quest for the first things in light of the fundamental distinctions between hearsay and seeing with one's own eyes on the one hand, and between things made by man and things not made by man on the other end quote. So convention and hearsay seem to be spurs for helping us to discover nature.
Yeah, I think one thing I would add is that Strauss begins with what he calls the pre-philosophic equivalent to the idea of nature, custom way. And this undergoes a series of permutations and chapters and paragraphs four through eight. And then again, in 11, where he goes from customer way to the ancestral, then because the ancestral version must be God in the handout law, it's divine law. And that's based on kind of obedience to authority.
And that's then referred to as a kind of divine revelation. Right. So the authority comes to a revelation of the law. And then this is changed in chapter 11 to divine code, paragraph 11, paragraph 11, sorry, divine codes and sacred accounts of the first things.
And then at the end of paragraph 11, he drops divine codes and he just goes to sacred accounts. So there's, he doesn't trace that development, but I wonder when you go from law, right, divinely revealed law or the sacred to sacred accounts, whether you've already gone a step outside of Jerusalem as it were, right? You've taken the law and you've distilled it into a kind of argument or series of claims, let's say, and you've now turned it into something that philosophy. So that's one question I have is, in that series of moves, I think certainly by the end, I want to raise a red flag about what's going on.
But where along the line might we want to sort of question whether in this philosophic reconstruction, one might have gone too far, right? At least to me, it seems like that bit about sacred accounts creates a wedge for philosophy that might not have been there when you had divine martyr-like codes. I have two questions or thoughts. One is it seems like the religious thing, just speaking broadly, does two things.
One, it tells you a way to live. And the other is, it tells you what the beginning of the universe is like, the origins, the first things. And somehow, those are connected, by the way, right? So that's really important.
And secondly, I wanted to press back a little bit on the idea that there's this movement, maybe you're right, but I see this fluctuating going back and forth between non-Greek things and Greek things throughout the text. So even in one of the earliest examples that you just mentioned about speaking about the customer way as the pre philosophic version of these things, he says, well, barking and wagging the tail is the way of the dogs, menstruation is the way of women. Gobbling down hot dogs is the way of David Barr and doing crazy things by madmen is the way that madmen do it, just as not eating pork as the way that Jews are not drinking wines as the way of Muslims. So it seems like it's Greek things, but then also the two examples, specific examples are Jews and Muslims.
And the actually the reference to the menstruation is the way of women is an unacknowledged explicit quotation from Genesis, in fact. Yes, Sarah, right? Rachel, I think. Is it Sarah?
Is it Sarah who doubts whether? What do you think? Is this the one that she says at this age, I'm the bear child, children are. One thing I'll just add while you're looking that up is that there's a where you don't see footnotes.
So like in paragraph three, there's the first footnote about midway through the paragraph, and he said what you'd expect at the site, especially this passage from the metaphysics. But I think that implies that the rest of that paragraph and even the paragraph afterwards are Strauss's addition to what the ancient sources provide, right? And you see this often a good key to reading natural right in history is that often a lot of the paragraphs, most of the paragraphs maybe end with a footnote that provides all the citations for what he said in the paragraph. But sometimes the end of the material being cited is before the end of the paragraph, and that tells you where Strauss is making his own inference or own addition, right?
And so this whole part, just to support your point, this whole part would be Strauss's sort of interpolation from another source, maybe an unsighted source, but not a Greek source into this sort of otherwise Greek narrative. I just Googled it, and it's actually, this is such a great little reference. This translation is awful by the way, this is hilarious. So it is Rachel, and it's an excuse for why she can't stand up in the presence of her father, right?
It's because she's having the thing that's the way of women. But this translation says literally I'm having my period, which is a terrible translation. This is the new international version. So anyway, I don't know where you want to go up there.
Yeah, so yeah, I mean, he's definitely using these other sources. But yeah, I guess my point is even as he's shifting between them, he is sort of slowly unraveling what is meant by custom or way. Right. And when he's sort of making observations, and he says, well, by custom, we mean really the ancestral way, right, or the ancestral customs.
And that means ultimately because of the nature of the ancestral, if they're going to be superior, I say it has to mean something like divine law, right, based on kind of authority or revelation. But for me, whatever else you want says about these, these initial moves, to me, the shift of sacred accounts to changing a law into an account, it's not clear that the law is presented as something to be tested or examined or argued with, right, in the way that an account sort of invites, right? Well, the Bible claims this, no, the Bible asserts and you must believe this. Yeah, and you're not supposed to look too deeply into these matters.
Not at all. Yeah. There's issues with that, but at least in the strict obedience sense, you would think not. But the other thing it does just work quickly, the quoted I read from Strauss, it confuses the ways of Muslim and Jews with the ways of dogs, right, the idea being that dogs have natures.
So it seems to be attributing, it seems to be asserting that the difference between members of different religions is a difference in kind, or difference in race or guinas. But it's not. So it seems to miss a tribute things to human nature for us. That like the particular group of people, it's almost like you would not even look at other communities as people.
They would just be a right, lydians or whatever. Yeah, yeah. That's exactly right. But the way this so in paragraph 14, he returns to the customs way thing, and he kind of spells out the final point, he says, once nature is discovered, it becomes impossible to understand equally as customs or ways the characteristic or normal behavior of natural groups and of different human tribes.
The customs that natural beings are recognized as their natures and the customs of the different human tribes are recognized as their conventions. The primeval notion of customer way is split up into the notions of nature on the one hand and convention on the other, the distinction between nature and convention between fusus and nomos is therefore co-evable with the discovery of nature and hence with philosophy. One thing I'll say is that earlier on, I think a paragraph of three, I want to say, he mentions the he calls a custom the pre-philosophic equivalent of nature. But it seems like custom here is the pre-philosophic equivalent of both nature and convention or nature and law.
And that to me, I don't know if it's maybe just sort of saying that the word you would have used for nature before was custom, but you also used it for other things. But maybe he's suggesting a far more difficult point, which is something like, I struggle to put this even in words, but something like the word law or something, that meant something like nature initially or something like that. I don't know how to put this. That might be just repeating your point, but it just strikes me that there's a slight place.
Isn't there something like this in Hesiod where law spoke another way that might imply that like there's the law of Zeus and then at one point there's the law of not nature, but what's the the law of the wilderness, the law of the outdoors, there's some phrase that uses that has some nature sounding kind of thing. You don't know what I'm talking about? Okay, well, in any of that, that's interesting. David raises the question.
Yes, David. Thank you. Before we go any further, especially for stupid people like me, one reads this third chapter and you were inundated by these different classifications of natural right, but sometimes he's like, there's pre-socratic natural right. There's this kind of natural right that seems to come from the Bible.
And then he's concluding with something called like, Socratic natural right. So is this understanding on a continuum or how many different types of natural right is he building up to Socratic natural right house that different way? Is there an arc in this chapter or what are we dealing with? What classifications are we dealing with?
Because it gets complicated, at least for me rather quickly, I don't know if listeners are like, all right, is there this Greek natural right? But then is there is the Socratic natural right different from what we were talking about with the Greeks? Does that make sense? Yeah, there's something you're getting at a real big difficulty in chapter three, especially in relation to chapter four.
And Strauss has done something very tricky, I think, in separating out the discussion of the classics into two chapters. What you get in chapter three, you get an account of pre-socratic natural right at the end as Greg pointed out. But you get, and we're skipping a little bit, but this is the, this is in a way, the, I think, the, sort of need of this chapter about conventionalism. We get something like the following statement in, where is it, when he starts the discussion?
On page 97 in paragraph 24, he says, we are compelled to reconstruct the conventionalist argument of scattered and fragmentary remarks. And so he engages in a, in a sort of construction of this, but it's highly dialectical. There's constant objections of a Socratic nature, I would argue, especially the further you get along when you get to almost like a distillation of Socrates debate with the Semicus. So you get the Socratic defense of justice against the conventionalist critique, which gets you so far in the understanding of natural right.
And then in chapter four, you get the full promulgation, you could say, of the ancient doctrine of natural right, which he says at the beginning of that chapter is developed, it was originated by Socrates and developed by Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and the Christian thinkers, talk about collapsing a lot of, and he's, this means especially Thomas Aquinas. So he now collapsed about 2000 years of history into one doctrine. And I think one of the big questions about the central two chapters is whether the Socratic defense of justice against conventionalism, whether the understanding of justice you get out of that is compatible with the fully promulgated doctrine of natural right that you get in chapter four. And my crunch, and I don't have a full argument about this, my hunch is that they're not that perhaps the truer, our understanding of Socrates is the sort of subtle Socratic thread running in chapter three, that sees the defects of conventionalism, and yet it doesn't maybe get you all the way to the full doctrine that you would perhaps like.
Yeah, let me try one. This is again, an oversimplification, but originally, we all thought that what was right or just was our way. And that way was guaranteed by our ancestors and ultimately the gods. So the movement seems to be, we believe in right, but it's not natural right, it's God given right, God given justice.
The emergence of philosophy leads to the philosophers recognizing that every different group of people says their way is the right way. When in fact, it's just, you know, they eat their dead, they bury their dead, it's all convention. And so the emergence of philosophy leads to, I'd say, Strauss is sympathetic is like understandably in a way, leads to a rejection of the idea that there is anything right by nature. So it's like, our way is right, no way is right.
And then gradually, the emergence of pre-Socratic natural right, which is somehow inadequate, but then gets replaced by Socratic natural, classical natural right in chapter four, next chapter. If that's, that's very oversimplified, but maybe that's, maybe that's, I think there are also statements in prior to the pre-Socratic natural right, there's statements of a Socratic character, I'm trying to find the exact that I think are quite interesting. Like when he's talking about law and justice, so it's page 100 to 101, paragraph 28 to 29, where he brings out how different societies hold different views regarding the principles of justice, how the views contradict one another. And he says the disagreement regarding the principles of justice seems to reveal a genuine perplexity aroused by a definition or insufficient grasp of natural right, a perplexity caused by something self-substance or natural that eludes human grasp.
So there's like a perplexity related to nature. And so then a little later on the top of one of what he says, does not the unrefected universal agreements specifically as, sorry, let me go back a little bit, he says, this suspicion from where it slows out, this suspicion could be thought to be confirmed by a fact, which at first glance seems to speak decisively in favor of conventionalism. Everywhere, it is said that it is just to do with the law commands, but it's just as identical with illegal. That is, with what human beings establish as legal or agree to regard as legal, yet does this not imply that there's a measure of universal agreement in regard to justice?
It is true that on reflection, people deny that the justice simply identical with the legal, that they speak of unjust laws, but does not the unrefected universal agreement point to the workings of nature, and does not the untenable character of the universal belief in the identity of the just with the legal indicate that the legal will not be identical with the just reflects natural right, more or less dimly. The evidence of due spec eventualism is perfectly compatible with the possibility that natural right exists. And as it were solicit the indefinite variety of notions. And here he's referring to the Republic and the memorabilia in the ethics and a fragment of Heracles.
Just like the variety of diets proves that there is the idea of natural healthiness. And Keto diet, the Miami Beach diet, it all proves that there is an idea. Yeah. So at this point, there's a kind of a socratic observation about the sort of necessary interdependence or interrelation of our ends, right?
That the noble will always have a certain structure though its specific content might change depending on circumstances. And likewise, the legal appeals to the just and assertive self is just while falling short of it and does suggest that there's a kind of sort of lurking towards or grasping at groping at justice, but always falling short. And this would also suggest that there's something inadequate about law, about the sort of nature of law, its propositional form, even you could say, in trying to grasp the nature of justice. But this notion of right is highly elusive.
And it's not clear that you therefore get something like natural right in the firm sense, certainly nothing like natural law would hold. Yeah, I think that's right. I'll explain how it maybe I already did this well. I'm not sure.
But explain how conventionalism seems to be the, I want to say natural consequence of discovery of nature, but without. Yeah. So this is like way back in one of paragraphs 15 or so. Yeah.
Yeah. In paragraph 16, he says the emergence of philosophy radically affects man's attitude to a political things in general towards laws in particular, because it radically affects his understanding of these things. And so you get this, you get this sense that there are real political consequences to the discovery of this idea. And we live in a time where we are sort of lamenting that nobody even believes that there's anything by nature just like they won't even take that idea seriously.
Where he's laying out here is that actually that idea is incredibly volatile and has massive political consequences from the perspective of the ancient or pre philosophic city. But one way to resolve this problem is to assert that nature is the ancestral authority, nature is the original thing. But this, Strauss says actually covers over just how radical the discovery of nature is that, and he uses the example of Socrates that even Socrates, who seems very conservative in his practical conclusions, could according to Aristophanes, be understood to repudiate and practice the most natural authority that of a father over to initiate father beating. So that's just the beginning of that.
But he spells this out over to curious mention of Socrates, by the way. Yeah. Yeah. How many times does he mention him?
Did you have you traced that out? Oh gosh. In this chapter explicitly, is that the only one in this chapter? I don't know.
Yeah. As Socrates versus the Cratic, right, not counting references to pre-Socratic or anything like that. There are a lot of footnotes to the memorabilia in Republic and other phonics and semantic dialogues. But I want to say until the very end, again, where he seems to return, sorry.
But this one's clearly anachronistic. He's talking about pre-Socratic and emergence and discovery philosophy. And he's like, oh, by the way, just like Socrates. And he's like, wait a minute, that's later he's after the discovery philosophy.
Do you have an answer to that? There's a mention on page 85, if we take Socrates as representative of the quest for natural right, which is interesting. Socrates discusses natural right, not only in the presence of young men. So that's when he's talking about right, right, right versus the laws.
And then there's the instance we're looking at any discusses him again at the very end, next paragraph. But it's prior to Socrates and then pre-Socratic. Yeah, pre-Socratic, pre-Socratic. And then there's footnote 47 on page 117, which is right towards the end.
Right. It's affecting the world to the Credo at the very end. And then he's mentioned in 118, but only again, in contrast to pre-Socratic. And then in the very last paragraph in the discussion of the Credo, but it is very, very spare, especially when you compare it to how many Socratic dialogues and how many Socratic arguments, like the whole discussion of the game of thieves that Sratz has, which is an incredibly powerful discussion and the critique of the Saugres, no mention of Socrates there, even though it's obviously dependent, of course, the footness of Socratic sources.
Right. Which I mean, that might be a way to go back to my earlier argument. That might be Strauss's way of suggesting that there's greater agreement between Socrities and the conventionalists in chapter four, let's not, not to say wholesale agreement, we don't want to reduce it. Some sort of, some people will go to that extreme.
I think that's too far, but there is a kind of a greater overlap than we might be willing to. Yeah. And he says even the devotee of natural right has to concede that the city does actually look a lot like a gang of robbers. Yeah, for policy, for sure.
Yeah. Which he's, he's, there is that moment in the game of these arguments, this is not often enough noted, but it's introduced by saying what is the most unjust city and he says basically Athens and Imperial. By the way, I'm sorry, David, always reminds us like, what is the gang of things like this isn't in the midst of laying out the conventionalist argument? Yeah.
What is the gang of these are like, what is it saying basically? Yeah. So the reason he brings it in here is because stress points out like, okay, justice might be necessary, the internal workers in the city. What about in relation to other cities?
He says, well, maybe they're just also, it's like, no, they're typically self interested. And if you're going to be self interested in foreign policy, why not be self interested as an individual, which is exactly what happens if you trace the Thucydides and then you see the echoes in play that you can see the exact same sort of inference implicitly being made by the Athenians. And so that the city looks, it's just looks like a simple agreement to work together to complete great injustice against other groups. And so in the Republic, the way that shows up is Socrates gets certificates to agree that the best city is the most unjust one that conquers the most other cities.
And it's basically Athenian imperialism there. And so at that point, it starts to look like, at least according to this conventionalist argument that justice is at least one of the foreign policy that comes inward, it becomes self-defeating and self-destructive. But should we talk about the cresis hedonism? We should probably talk about the difference between vulgar and philosophical conventionalism.
Yeah. Maybe we should let David talk about vulgar conventionalism. That's my specialty. It's the light devoted to bodily, I'll trace this out.
Sarenedopolis. What was that guy's name in the ethics? The pleasure man? The guy with the long throat?
It might be. His name starts with an S. Sarened and so the first is Strauss lays it out. One of the first ways that the philosopher or the conventionalist starts to understand things as well, all these things that are just conventions and I should live a life devoted to bodily pleasure.
So principally eating, drinking, and the other thing, night, time, teamly time. But in the daytime, when it's not supposed to happen. Afternoon, Dwight. Skyrockets and flight.
Big fan myself. Yeah. So that's it. That's what, I mean, we're doing this somewhat slapdash.
But you recognize all these laws aren't actually sanctioned by the divine. They're just ways that people are trying to beat you into living a fairly conventional life and these prohibitions don't make any sense. They're no hell. You're not going to die.
So why not just sex drugs rock and roll it up? In fact, I mean, the fact that their conventions, the laws forbid you from pleasures, it's in the direction. It'll only forbid things you might have to do. Yeah.
Be enjoyable so that you start. And so it becomes oriented towards hedonism. But then Strauss points out on page 109, the most developed form of classical hedonism is Epicureanism. Epicureanism is certainly that form of conventionalism, which has exercised the greatest influence throughout the ages.
And Strauss knows this because he has a whole chapter on Epicureanism and his first book on Spinoza. So he's aware that this has greater traction than just what he's treating here. But he continues to go, Epicureanism is unambiguously materialistic. And it was in materialism that Plato found the root of conventionalism.
He makes a reference to the laws. But you could say here that the sort of bodily sort of observation of the vulgar conventionalists, that there's certain things that are pleasing to the body, perhaps point in the direction of looking away from these sort of superhuman causes, or of which the highest, you know, the superhuman being might be God, but it could be something like the forms or something like that, toward the bodily or pure materialism. So Epicureanism is especially Lucretius, which he, Lucretius is day re-remeterra, which calls the greatest document of philosophic conventionalism, articulate this fuller, more philosophic view of which the vulgar version is a kind of pale sort of grasp. I think one of the greatest puzzles in this chapter, that's a dark book, by the way, sorry, this dark.
I think one of the greatest puzzles in this chapter is how favorably Strauss presents Lucretius or philosophical conventionalism. But it's, it's, you know, yeah, go ahead. But he says elsewhere. Is it where is it?
And maybe it's in a letter that in Lucretius, you get the- I want to die the life. Oh, sorry. Because that one where you're gonna make it joke. No, no, I think he doesn't say something like I want to die the life of Epicurus or something.
Anyway, go ahead. Yeah, he says, he says something like Lucretius is the purest articulation of the philosophic motive on page 113. He gives a glimpse of this. He says, however comforting the belief in active gods may be it has engendered unspeakable evil, so the only remedy lies in breaking through the walls of the world at which religion stops, and becoming reconciled to the fact that we live in every respect in an unwalled city, in an infinite universe in which nothing that man can love can be eternal.
The only remedy lies in philosophizing, which alone affords the most solid pleasure. So it's sometimes, this is to go back to David's point, but as the bleakest view, it demands the most of the thinker. It might be overstated. I don't know how Strauss would respond to that, but it is in a way that the bleakest view you could have.
But he doesn't really, I mean, it seems like he tries to attack philosophical conventionalism. At every time he doesn't quite succeed, he then just drops into vulgar conventionalism, refuting vulgar conventionalism. Back to vulgar, those stupid hot dog eaters and sex crazed maniacs. Lucretius, Lucretius, serious, back to these idiots.
It goes to like, through semicus, and then it goes to long discussion about how unserious philosophers are. And maybe this is part of the rhetoric. I mean, the way we just talked about, we went to vulgar conventionalism before the philosophicalism, but he actually gets to philosophic conventionalism after before the vulgar conventionalism, so that you get this kind of impression as you walk away from it, that at least there's something ridiculous about conventionalism in these later forms they talk about. And we should mention this paragraph on the cretius is the longest paragraph chapter is like two pages or something.
More than that, we must make a distinction between philosophic conventionalism and vulgar conventionalism. Remember what happens when that was the funniest thing in great school when you get to school? I see that's in my kids from time to time. Just scream out in class.
One of the main problems with pre-socratic philosophers, and this maybe we'll take us into part four, and this is something we haven't talked about all, and it's something that I hammered on one time when I had to work on chapter three, one of the problems with the pre-socratic philosophers that emerges in chapter three is they presuppose the existence of nature. This is really problematic. In other words, they assume they have an assumption as a starting point. They assume religion is wrong, and Strauss goes back and forth between he's the one hand and the Bible on the other.
They fail to take seriously the religious alternative. And I think therefore one of the main problems with conventionalism is Strauss lays it out here, or one of the problems with pre-socratic philosophy, with non-political philosophy, that is, is it fails to reflect sufficiently on its own origins or grounding. We didn't touch on this at all, and I should have I apologize. Like it once the pre-socratic philosopher rejects convention, it just assumes there are principles that are eternal.
And you can imagine the number of pre-socratic water is the thing of everything, or this, that, and the other. And that if that's not somehow known or reflected on, then the very basis of philosophy is dubious. Yeah, can I can I state on this paragraph 13, I ended up going on a long digression on this, but he says, these proper peace propositions follow from the fundamental premise of the philosophic quest that no being emerges without a cause, or that it is impossible that at first chaos came to be. And that's easy.
The first things jumped into being out of nothing and through nothing. This is I mean, this is the principle of sufficient reason, right, which strangely is not articulated until lightness. So something very strange happens here where the assertion of nature suddenly drifts into a modern. Well, we didn't even talk about this either, but Spinoza features prominently in this chapter as well.
He's a modern. Yeah, and there's allusions to Hegel. There's a straight-up Hobbes towards the end, right, in the 18th century philosophy. So there's something very ongoing on here with a lot of modern thought trickling.
I wonder whether and I mean, the more. A lot on that. Yeah, go for it. Well, there's the credit philosophy and pre-socratic philosophy, and you can understand pre-socratic philosophy to be philosophy that chronologically predates Socrates, or you can understand it as a fundamentally different approach to philosophy.
That's always possible insofar as philosophy is possible. And so there are later pre-socratic philosophers, it seems. And I think I take by that straws of saying these later philosophers, even modern philosophers, that he's identifying as pre-socratic are people who have not reflected sufficiently on the theological problem, if you want to put that way. Yeah, I mean, another way to put that is, well, I mean, there's the conventionalist link between chapter one and chapter three, but there's also this way.
He has to reconstruct the conventionalist argument. It is his own creation out of these fragments. And one question you want to ask is, well, why is it fragmentary? Well, we have loquicius.
That's about hedonism. But one of the reasons I think it's a poem, it's a poem and it sounds very weird. Yes. It's a musical kind of thing, which is very non-atheistic, it seems.
Honey on the wormwood. That's it. It's also a key on your list topic that it's not something that's going to be approachable by people. But there's a sense in which Strauss, I think, he points out that the vulgar conventionalist try to be explicit, but they can't be explicit because the issue they're getting at is ultimately condemning the city.
And so they have to appeal to typical ordinary views, like rather conventional views, even though they don't believe them. And this happens again and again in Plato. But I think the suggestion maybe that's just as making is he has to reconstruct this argument because the ancients were smart enough not to make it. But we live in an age where there's a version of the confencialist argument in historicism and in the fact value distinction as well.
That's that's really quite dangerous. And so one has to articulate the defense against it much more explicitly than one has before. That's I think just a way of getting back to that prior point. I thought, I thought, Australs was sort of saying, yeah, yeah, modern pre-socratic like it.
I think the reason we don't have the pre-socratic is because they were overtly atheists. And therefore, there was not as many people invested in the preservation of those writings. That's got to be part of it. Yeah.
It is strange. Like when you read the Parmenides fragments, the fragments of Parmenides poem. One of which he, oh, I'm sorry, Tera Clients. He goes here.
Yeah, Tera Clients. He refers to the Parmenides poem. But when you look at Parmenides poem, and then you look at the doxigraphical tradition, which is to say the accounts of what Parmenides thought, almost all of them are referring to his natural science fragments, which are like the way of error. And then the other ones that are preserved are sort of scattered about, but most people were concerned just with the physics, right, the more philosophical, not with the sort of political reflections, which would go to say that there's this, that part was neglected, perhaps for reasons.
David, you had a question to take us out. I'm not sure it's entirely appropriate yet, since we haven't finished the book, but I was just wondering if you guys were persuaded by Strauss's account of, or I don't know how to face this, not his account of the origin of natural right, or his progression, but where he concludes, is it perseudio? Or rather, do you think that Strauss is up to something here that is more than just a descriptive account of a philosophic concept? I mean, it's certainly, it's...
That's an obvious question. I mean, Mark, we can... No, I think it's... I see what you're sort of groping at, right, other than just your hot dog in the dark, but the...
I know what that one is. You got to find it underneath all the... Anyways, but there's a kind of... I mean, we've raised the issues about what we take to be certain, not inadequacies, but certain sort of lacunae in his account, like gaps in the account that need to be filled in, and that you sort of have to figure out for yourself or look elsewhere in the book.
It is highly constructed this account, right? And some of the pieces aren't in order, and then there's, of course, I mean, my big question I mentioned this before is how this account relates of Socrates that's implicit towards the end of book, being the responses to conventionalism, and the dialogue there, how that relates to the account given in chapter four and whether they can be reconciled. I think there's... So it's...
I mean, it's persuasive. It's incredibly powerful. What he's done here, I mean, I mean, remarkable, like the intellectual ability and the ability to distill a thread of argument or conversation, but obviously there's more than needs to be said, it seems like the earlier part of the conversation is conjectural, he talks about piecing it together from fragments, right? Some of this almost seems like Strauss's invention or a project.
Yeah, I would say it's constructed in that way. I don't know about it. Really? I don't know.
It seems like when he's trying to draw on the Bible and find some kind of Greek way, that's obviously him building that bridge between Jerusalem and Athens in a way that gets you to Athens without criticizing how you get to Athens like that. That dialogue you don't get. Right. Later on, it's more textually based, but still it's highly constructed.
I think what you're pointing out is that this is somehow spelling out the logic of this discovery on a sort of theoretical plane with reference to sources rather than just a sort of textual exposition. Yeah. It's not right. It always sounds better coming from you.
Yeah. On that happy nose, good. Yeah. What's the next chapter?
What's the next chapter in this book? Or... Well, it's been a pleasure going for you to like, rate, subscribe. Simpooks.
Simpooks. And pics of your band. Well, you realize 99% of our audience is male, but thanks folks for listening. And we'll see you next time on The New Thinkery.