Leo Strauss' What is Political Philosophy?, Part II

Welcome back to the New Thinkery. My name is David Barr and with me as always is my good friend Alex Priyoh. How are you doing Alex? Doing well.

What's up man? Not much, not much. We're with our good friend Greg McBrayah. How are you Greg?

Doing great. It's good to see you guys. It's good to see you. You know right before the show we chat and we were reading a rate my professor of somebody that's in Alex and Greg's generation let's say that's teaching political philosophy.

We'll just leave it at that. And the reviews were insanely negative and one of them, I'll try and cryptic. But one of the reviewers said that they had taken a course with this teacher and disliked it immensely and then ran into him a few years later and was reminded as Greg put it, he had not done his duty to his fellow citizen and went back on my professor four or five years later to leave a warning review. This guy's so bad.

I mean I'll tell you I was reading another number of our generations, my professors. I don't want to say his name but the review was who the hell smells flag with two g's that's dumb as fuck. I don't want to say his name. Yeah, that seems fair.

What are we doing tonight? That's a continuation. We're doing part two of what is political philosophy. Leo Strassa's seminal essay.

The list pronounced seminal. Seeminal. Seeminal. Serious.

You know, because it is the seed. The semen from which have sprung, whatever. And this is on the classical solution to the problem of political philosophy. You excited Greg?

I'm very excited. I'm very excited. I will say here's like one of the things I you know, I try to outline this right makes sense of it. And one of the interesting part one is about the problem of political philosophy, which quite frankly I wasn't entirely satisfied.

I put my finger on what that problem is. And in the second part of the essay, the classical solution, I'm also not 100% sure that I found the solution. Although I think I found it in the third essay. I think the classical solution is not located in the second section on classical philosophy.

But let's see if that's right. That's really interesting. I think I finally put my finger on the problem of political philosophy, which I think might actually only be articulated in the second. But you tell me if you think this is right, the problem of philosophy is twofold.

Number one, what is the best life and what is the good society? I mean, those are certainly the questions. I took the problem to be alluded to in the first part. Right.

I agree. As the second paragraph is where I see it to be. Yeah, it's where it's definitely I'm still about a bit more. But this question of serious discussion of serious issues, concerning the ends of actions and our tendency to pass them off as value problems.

And I certainly think he goes into that a bit more in part two, that's for sure. Right. Yeah. But I think those are related to the questions.

Okay. Cool. Would you want to do want to smell that a bit more? So I don't really, maybe we should recap the first section.

Maybe that's kind of where we're kind of circling around. So this essay, what is political philosophy is divided into three main sections, the problem of political philosophy, part one, part two, the classical solution, part three, the modern solutions plural. And so one of the questions that you would think there'd be an obvious clear answer to would be what is the problem of global philosophy? And then the other things for which I think you would find clear answers would be what is the classical solution, what are the modern solutions?

Now we are prepared parts two and three. So I feel a little more confident about the solutions. But it was only after I'd gone through the solutions that I saw, what I think partly the problem is, or maybe the problem with little philosophy that's not possible now due to the prevalence of something like historicism. But that wouldn't explain how classical political philosophy has an answer to the problem if the problem comes after it.

So the first, the first part of the essay, the problem with the philosophy is divided into a number of sections. I have it at seven sections. It discusses the emergence of political philosophy, provides some definitions of political philosophy and philosophy, go back and listen to the first episode in the series to get them. And then it sort of goes through a series of alternatives to political philosophy, political philosophy, political theology, political science, book knowledge.

Then it sort of tells us where things stand today in the 1950s. And that's that political philosophy is in the state of decay. And then why we're in that state of decay is due to science of history, which is to say social science, positivism, and historicism. And that's where the first essay ends.

And we finally get in the central section, the solution, the classical solution, that's what we're talking about tonight. And what's the overview of the second section? Do I do that? Sure, I can do that.

Sure. I actually made my outline. I'm not sure if others did as well, but I have this classical solution consists of 17 paragraphs, 17 paragraphs, 17 is a pretty significant number in ancient book thoughts, the number of nature. I have the second essay part of the essay classical solution falling into four parts.

The first paragraph is simply a description of classical political philosophy that Strauss's word description. And then the second part is a comparison of classical political philosophy with quote, all later philosophy, and quote, that's mostly modern philosophy. That's the next two paragraphs. So the first paragraph, 27, the second part is paragraph 28 to 29.

The third part is just about classical political philosophy. That's paragraphs 30 through 38. The first half of which focuses on Plato's laws, that's four paragraphs on Plato's laws. Wait, you jumped a number because you start from one and then two, three and 30, 30.

Oh, sorry. Sorry. Sorry. I did two sets of numbers.

Sorry. I did. Sorry. I numbered it straight from the essay and I started over again in section two.

So I'll do section, I'll just do the section number. So begins in paragraph 27 with description of classical political philosophy, and then a comparison of classical political philosophy with all later philosophy, that's paragraphs 28 to 29. And then a long discussion of classical political philosophy paragraphs 30 through 38, the first half of which is devoted to Plato's laws, there's a transition. And then the next four paragraphs are about the regime.

The fourth part of the classical solution is objections to classical political philosophy. That's paragraphs 39 to 43. The first paragraph is a statement, a summary statement of the objections. Number one, classical political philosophy is anti-democratic.

Number two, classical political philosophy rests on untrue cosmology. The next two paragraphs, paragraphs 40 to 41, respond to the claim that classical political philosophy is anti-democratic. And the next two paragraphs after that 42 to 43 are a response to the argument that classical political philosophy is based on a cosmology, which has been proven to be untrue by the success of modern science. That's paragraphs 42 to 43 again.

And that's the whole of part two, is I have it. Okay, a few things stand out. Right. Lengthiest treatment of a single author and single work is Plato's laws.

Right. I found that really weird and un-theological elements to it. Right. And then Aristotle, the regime is discussed, but the politics isn't brought up.

Not obliquely, yeah. It's written to in that paragraph on regimes, I would say. It's in paragraph 12. It comes up explicitly, there's a comparison between the constitution of Athens and the politics.

That's right. Nothing like a thing, and the funny thing is that you get the laws and then you get a paragraph four through seven in my, so four, five, six, seven, that's four paragraphs. Then in eight, you get a transition from the laws. And that discussion of laws ends up getting into the apology.

And then there's a discussion of the credo, but not explicitly, just kind of touching on it. Then there's the transition that he returns to the laws only to use it as a transition to the regime. And then you get four paragraphs on the regime. And the funny thing about that is you would expect in that whole part some kind of reference to Plato's Republic, especially since a lot of what he's talking about seems to be cripped from the Republic, at least in paragraph eight, but also in paragraph nine.

And so it's not just the weird that he talks about the laws, but it's weird that he doesn't mention the Republic in this discussion or introduce it. I imagine this has something to do with the fact that he's speaking in Jerusalem. And the laws gives the gentler motion from divine law to something like philosophy than the Republic does, which just exists of this sort of abrupt refutation of Catholics. It's especially strange considering the title of Republic could be translated regime.

Exactly. I mean, it's like that's what you would expect. Yeah. Any idea why he's focusing on the laws?

Aside from what I just said, I mean, it strikes me as it's appropriate to the the situation. It also strikes me that it's a kind of retelling of the discussion in part one of the emergence of political philosophy. Right. So in part one, you already mentioned as I'll just say it again, he kind of spends what is it like a few paragraphs, limbing political philosophy against political thought and then political theory and then political theology, etc.

You get a more direct textual treatment of the emergence of political philosophy or how specifically it might bring itself about in another place. In that sense, you might wonder to what degree does the discussion of the laws here is it meant to reflect on stress as own procedure, right? That this is, you know, he's talking about it and perhaps in the most extreme form of forbidden practice in the city that forbids that practice, at least as a matter of tradition. And at one point, he says in that discussion about drink, he talks about the long treatment of wine drinking in the laws.

And he says the following, he says, the old men with whom the Athenian students are speaking, their habits and their competence make these men impervious to suggestions for improvement. The Athenian induces them to participate in a conversation about wine drinking about a pleasure that is forbidden to them by their old laws. The talk about wine drinking is a kind of vicarious enjoyment of wine, especially since wine drinking is a forbidden pleasure. Perhaps the talk reminds the two old interlocutors of secret and pleasurable transgressions of their own.

The effect of the talk about wine is therefore similar to the effect of actual wine drinking. It loosens their tongues, it makes them young, it makes them bold, daring, willing to innovate. They must not actually drink wine since this would impair their judgment. They must drink wine, not indeed, but in speech.

I wonder if that's meant to be a sort of reflection of what he's doing. He's giving them a kind of a glimpse or perhaps a reminder of a kind of youthful skepticism or something. That would be the furthest I could go. One small point is that the mention of wine made me think of course of the symposium and the law is being almost the most conservative of Plato's political writings, right?

I mean, they're all old. There's such deference to ancient law givers. And I'm just also curious about his remark this on page 29, the first full paragraph, the fourth or thirtieth paragraph if you're counting at home, where he says that he's talking about the laws ostensibly because the laws is Plato's political work par excellence, the character of classical political philosophy appears with the greatest clarity in this work. So I guess maybe in addition to what we're saying for the location, the argument here would be that the republic does not present with the greatest clarity, Plato's political teaching par excellence, that it's something else.

I interpreted that's funny. You brought that up, Greg, that was the paragraph I was going to ask about. I interpreted that paragraph more radically, namely, and it's just a few sentences down. The conversation takes place on the island of Crete.

At the beginning, one receives the impression that the Athenian has come to Crete in order to study there the best laws. But it is true that the good is identical with the ancestral, the best laws were Greek would be the oldest Greek laws, and these are the Crete laws. But the equation of the good with the ancestral is not tenable. If the first ancestors were not gods or son of gods or peoples of gods, etc.

I thought that Strauss was obliquely towing with, he himself is the Athenian that ostensibly come to the holy city to study their laws and never lose sight of their laws, as he says, something like that at the very beginning. But what's he doing now? He's potentially interrogating the ancestral right before them. And I didn't know if this was his version of a joke or...

Well, just a few paragraphs later. I think it is a joke because he's... So the reason to study them is because their laws may have been originated by a god, but a few paragraphs later on, page 33, at the bottom of the page, he says, well, if the originator of the Crete in law is not a god, then the cause of the laws must be human beings, the human legislator. And so he raises the prospect that, in fact, their laws are of purely human origin, which could still be something fundamental to study, right?

I mean, this is something I've been working on in my own research right now, looking at Zenef and his regime of the Spartans. How is it that humans can create laws that come to be held to be divine? That's an interesting puzzle in its own right. I mean, how do the Creteans pull this off?

How do the Spartans pull it off? How do other people pull it off? I suppose that you guys are going to initially suggest, how did the Jews turn the pulley this off? Moses, etc.

Anybody who's curious about Greg's true thoughts on Moses go listen to our episode of Machiavelli chapter six, where you get the little loose lips. I think that's exactly David. I think you're exactly right. When I see the discussion of the laws, the more I read through this, the more reminds me of what Strauss is up to here.

Can I return to something Greg, you brought up about what laws are not the Republican political dialogue par excellence or political work par excellence? Go straight. I mean, you look at the Republican, you get this very brief treatment of Keflas up front and it ends with Glaukon, who's apparently, you know, beyond the religious realm, sort of falling for this highly or sort of quasi-religious sort of mixture of philosophy and religion at the end with this afterlife myth in the Republic. And you get the sense that, while Keflas himself might not be the sort of person Socrates wants to discuss what he might be, he might do well to go have a discussion with some old pious men.

And the problem is, is that the only kind of men like that in Athens are the strange sort of medic Keflas who's come there with like, you know, an arms factory. And he's only turned to piety late in life. I mean, he's not, then a sustained pious believer is right. No, no, I mean, that's, yeah, and that's, I think it's often the case is not growing up and staying in his ancestral home either.

But he complains, all of his friends complain that they're, you know, they miss the pleasures of youth. And you have to imagine most of these friends are going to be Athenians. So they're already far gone. Like, we're three generations into Athenian corruption now.

But you go to the, so the laws, it seems to be play as we have saying, well, if Socrates had left, this is what Strauss is spelling out, Socrates had left instead of dying for the sake of philosophy. If he had gone off, this is the kind of conversation he might have had. And it might have actually been necessary because he couldn't have this conversation in Athens. The closest he got was maybe capitalist or youth different, something like that, maybe ion, even but even still, it's very different from old men who have been raised under many generations of good laws.

So that seems much more political. It's much more in the cave and beginning from a much more, I mean, the basic opening question is a very basic question who gave these laws. God, okay, that's where we're starting. Rather than this weird sort of guy who's in a mercenary position coming to Athens to sell weapons to a crazed populace.

Yeah. Can I raise another question? See what you guys do. Yeah.

So according to our language, it's correct. It begins with the treatment of modern or all post classical thought. Right. And specifically, the point he's trying to make is that modern thought is derivative or abstract.

And then he gives an example of the I, thou, we distinction as boomer, right? Or boomer, what are we calls name? That's not booby. That's just an odd, like, anyway, go ahead.

Well, I mean, that would make sense, right? Yeah. And then it ends with a discussion of contemporary thought. I know why do you think he bookends it this way?

Like the first section, this happens really in the first two sections, most of all, in the first section, he's kind of working his way out towards political knowledge. And then he just completely goes into a critique here. He's got a different structure, modern contemporary, classical, and then contemporary. Why does he do that?

It's an odd structure. It makes sense in the first one, but not. Is it true that boomer was Jewish? Jewish?

Yeah. So I mean, I mean, I, I'm not going to, just oversimplify and vulgarize it. But like, you know, this is a shout out to people with whom people in the audience were unfamiliar. And so is it just constantly pointing out the anatocities of thinkers that people held in high steam?

I mean, this is like, I don't know if he was that I guess we would have to ascertain his status in that community. I know Boobah wrote a lot on mysticism. I don't know his thought, but I don't know if he was respected shortly, but I don't know if he's third rail or I don't know, a household. I thought he was really well respected and admired.

And I think, okay, okay, okay. I mean, I don't know. I mean, it would go, it would go some way, I think, Greg, in maybe addressing how much modern thought has infected contemporary Jewish thought. Whether he's a friend or a foe, right?

Like, hey, here's this person, this is already abstract. It has a characteristic of eternity. You'd be far better off returning to a much more basic set of language. And he talks about this, how the classics spoke in language that would have been common, though they see beyond, would have been common to an enlightened statesman or enlightened citizen.

It would make the case for the classics being friendlier than even, you know, a sort of, and even if he isn't, I mean, this would be a sign of a way to get around him. So I will just say that I have consulted with an authority whose wisdom I trust. And I quoted, Boober became the best known Israeli philosopher after the creation of the state of Israel in 1848, 1948, she didn't. Yeah, I just like to ask if he was considered a heterodox thinker.

Oh, yeah, I don't know about that. I mean, I remember studying a little bit of philosophy of religion class in college, but it was a long time ago. I have an edited volume of his, I think it's titled Tales of the Hest in Him. It's really interesting, cool myths, you know, and stories of golems.

They all look like Alex, right? He's just pouring some wine since I've been cleaved from from my sister-laws. And that's another silly question, maybe, but it's page 27. Like, okay, so Plato's laws, that's, this seems like this essay, what is political philosophy seems like, maybe the essay that a student might turn to first when they encounter Strauss, like, okay, what should I turn to?

That seems like the appropriate starting point. And they might be the little bits put off or perplexed by the notion that there's this long discussion of Plato's laws. But also someone who maybe is a little more steeped in Strauss might wonder why the class was solution is limited to Plato and Aristotle and not, for example, Xenophon, to whom Strauss devoted so much of his studies. I mean, why is he not mentioned here, not even in passing?

Oh, to say nothing of a few other things, right? No, no, I mean, but just other cities. Yeah, yeah, right. Aristotle needs to just play to an Aristotle.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't have the answer to that. Just a question that I face considerations, Greg, obviously.

I mean, it's, I mean, it's, it's, it's curious. I mean, he has this, you know, because we're going to do the next episode on the modern solutions, but there you're going to get, I have two answers possible answers to why I'm just worth it. So here to amplify the problem in the essay on the modern, he lists, you know, he's like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, all these guys here, it's just Plato and Aristotle, and that's it. Now, maybe it's, maybe the point here again would just be the classical solution singular.

Maybe the notion is you don't need to mention Zenithin because in fact, Plato, Aristotle and Zenithin, at least insofar as they provided an answer to the classical, to the problem their classical solution was the same. I don't know if that's right. But in other words, there's a laundry list of modern philosophers, but with classical philosophy, just these two, Aristotle and Plato is, you know, I, I enjoy Aristotle's, I always read him kind of superficially, because he's hard, but does he offer a critique? Is he largely in agreement with Plato and Zenithon?

Or would keeping or would would staying silent on Aristophanes, a philosopher who stressed about an entire book, an reputation of his works, he performed more substantial reason. I suspect you may be right that there's a disagreement, because even here when he discusses Plato and Aristotle, one would never, if this is all one knew about Plato and Aristotle, one would never come to the, come to the opinion that Plato and Aristotle different anything. They're presented here as sort of being on the same page, and no illusion to any differences between them. And yeah, Aristophanes, I don't think Aristophanes would share their solution to the problem of political philosophy now.

Maybe it's time to just say the answer of what the solution is, by the way, and I think it's not in part two, I think it's in part three. And we need to mark this for all the undergraduates. Right. So this is on page 40.

This is in the first paragraph of the modern solutions. There he says, the classical solution is the aristocratic republic or the mixed regime. So in part three, I think we get the answer to what the classical solution to the problem of politics is. Now, the reason I was bifurcating that earlier is because we'll have to see if this is maybe explicit, but right now I'm only remembering it being implicit.

But the classical solution to the best way of life is the life of the philosopher. There again, I see, I think you can see why Strauss might not make that explicit in Jerusalem, but because this is so much more, okay, fine, a virtue aristocratic republic, that's not nearly so offensive to folks. And so Arizona played on one hand, I think would agree that an aristocratic republic is the best regime. It's not clear to me that that's where Aristophanes would fall.

Just to be clear, he says it's the aristocratic republic or else the mixed regime. Yeah. So one or the other? Or anything turns on or else else, else meaning if you can't have it, get the mixed regime, right?

Well, well, maybe, but what alternative might be, I mean, Strauss always plays with this in other authors. So he draws our attention regularly to are these ores, I forget what the exact grammatical terminology is, but like, is this or I mean, it's the same thing, or is this or a disjunctive this or that? So like, or can mean, you can example where you say orvis this or that, whereas the same thing, right? Georgia or the same thing.

If George or the peach state, right? Like, oh, it's the same thing, but here, it's, you're right, it seems to imply there's a disjunction, but I would just keep a lot of the possibility that they might be the same. Well, I'm just thinking about in natural right in history where he's much more explicit about the fact that the best regime exists only in speech. And he says that he, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right.

It's indicative of the classical solution to this problem that the second best would be the mixed regime. Right. But the reason that the mixed regime would be second, if we're going to take this or as disjunctive, right, is precisely because the best regime exists only in speech, right? That there is no regime that's simply conducive to the philosopher.

And therefore, you know, it's not going to be actualizable. And therefore, you have to settle with a sort of moderate balance of the factional interests of the many poor and a few rich by mixing their offices and balancing them against one another in some way. But he in a way, I think kind of suppresses that problem here, right? And therefore, the tension between virtue simply and virtue as conducive to this or that regime, right?

And therefore, you'd want to draw, you'd want to say that the distinction he applies to Hitler's Germany, back on page 35, when he's discussing Aristotle, where he says a good citizen in Hitler's Germany, Martin Heidegger, would be a bad citizen elsewhere. That seems like it's just a condemnation of bad regimes, but it turns out the point needs to be generalized for more that the partisan virtue, as he puts it later, has no regime in actuality, and that he finds himself somewhat not at home in any machine. That issue, I think, is highly suppressed for obvious reasons. So is another stab at the problem of political philosophy is that there's no harmony between the best way of life or an individual and for a community.

And so the classical solution is, okay, fine, then we'll go with a mixed regime, whereas the modern solutions are trying to harmonize that to a much greater degree. And does that mean that the modern solution that they're fundamentally confused about the degree to which it can be harmonized? I think from Strauss's point, if you can answer that, we ask that they haven't fully thought out the consequences or the problems that would be associated with their solution. So I'll give you one small example.

In the memorabilia, book one, I don't have the chapter off the top of my head, but it's Zenithin makes somewhat clear that Socrates has thought about a biconian sort of version of science and determinate was a bad idea that to unleash science in the pursuit of relieving man estate would be to make possible serious problems. And that's just not something that the agents were willing to stomach, I think. We should discuss the passages on technology that come up in the stuff about modern democracy. But just to connect this point with back in part one, Para Raff 23, he talks about the rejection of value judgments based on the assumption that the conflicts between different values of value systems are essentially insoluble.

He makes reference to college here. He says, you need a comprehensive critique of evaluating reason, but you don't get something like that. This is where he does the only time he uses problem in section one. And he talks about serious discussion of serious issues, and then being passed off as value problems.

I think what Strauss, if you can put these pieces together from Para Raff one of part three, and then this discussion of Aristotle's constitution of Athens with the politics in part two, and then this passage here, you get a sense that if you take the claims of various ends or various goals of regimes seriously, and you evaluate that in terms of the promise to provide human excellence or the complete human good, which you end up discovering is a tension between the good citizen and the good man. That's the point that's brought up. And then you get the problem that the best regime exists only in speech, and you have to be left with some optimal regimes, and the best of which will be the mixed regime. All of that issue, which he had spelled out just a few years earlier, four or five, six years earlier, whatever it was, in natural writing history, is completely suppressed.

And that would take us in, I mean, this is maybe getting back to some of the stuff you were mentioning about Xenophon. That would take him into a much more fraught area. Obvious reasons I think he has to pass this off as an issue that only affects the Nazis and not Israel. And he even brings that up when he's discussing the distinction.

He alludes to this very briefly. This is in part two, paragraph 12, that discussion of Aristotle, where he talks about the partisan of virtue in the Patriot, the tension between one's own and the good. And he says that the Jewish equivalent of this relation might be said to be the relation between the Torah and Israel. You might have to give up on Israel if it somehow falls short of the objective of Torah.

That would be a tension you could say between the mixed regime and the best regime, perhaps. But again, as filtered from this, this slides. And the end of that paragraph is now on top page 36. I will say that early in my career, I was tasked with teaching comparative politics, despite having had zero graduate courses on the subjects and only one lowly undergraduate class from a grad student when I was an undergraduate.

And so as I thought about how to teach this class, I thought, I don't have no idea. I just thought, I would be there, because I just thought, that's the natural starting place for trying to understand regimes. And man, I tell you what, I just having to teach yourself in the context of a comparative politics class led me to see things I hadn't seen before. So for example, this is the top of the page in the language of classical metaphysics, the father land or the nation is the matter, whereas the regime is the form.

And then again, it clicked immediately. But I was like, Oh my God, the four causes is exactly how Aristotle looks at regimes. I mean, you can sort of go through the causes and figure out what a regime is. And then I just sort of use that analysis for looking at various regimes around the world.

And just one small kind of throwaway thing is that I may have mentioned this on the show before, but when trying to figure out the final cause of a regime is I found it sort of a nice sign of the goal of the regime is how the rulers dress. So for example, if one wants to look at the United States of America and what its goal is you could look at our leaders and notice that they wear business suits. And if you want to look at say figure out the goal of the Iranian regime is, for example, you could look at what Alex's ancestors were and and is you know, you could get an idea of what their regimes about right. So the roads are clearly a sign that there's some kind of of the opposite of the word.

But what's that means? They're sleepy. It means they're sleepy. Exactly.

Here's a great line on this end of paragraph nine, page 34. Yeah, I'll read the whole thing, but the very last line is the most just we may try to articulate the simple and unitary thought that expresses itself in the term, politaya. That's the Greek word meaning regime or quality as follows. Life is activity which is directed towards some goal.

Social life is an activity which is directed towards such a goal as can be pursued only by society. But in order to pursue a specific goal as its comprehensive goal, society must be organized, ordered, constructed, constituted, in a manner which is in accordance with that goal is this however means that the authoritative human beings must be akin to that goal. So how do they have to model it on some level? Yeah.

So what does that mean? That are two people running for president right now are like 80 rolls at ones like, you know, under like, I don't know how many indictments and the other one is like we get into Bernie's being propped up by the deep state. Well, I mean, this is why people refer us as a guarantee, right? Like the rule of the old, boomers have all the money like Alex's dad has five houses.

Meanwhile, I have one shackle barn, you know, and not even shade anymore. Yeah, not even shade anymore. Yeah, they're trying to chop down Greg's only oak tree in the back. These things like right stupid, non right tree cutters.

We should do we should do an episode and we can run these as as political philosophy of the deep state. See, I'm just out of four, right? Probably pretty far actually. If you do the paragraph on technology that you want to do, let's do that.

This is really important. Yeah. Yeah. The observations that Strauss has here are so helpful.

Forward. Yeah. Was that go forward? Yeah.

Do it. Move ahead. They're so helpful for trying to detect it. What?

Try to detect it. What is teaching? Try to detect it. Well, hold on Greg, wait, wait, wait.

Where is this? Strong word. I guess word. You keep Greg has like five, six, I think it's from a movie.

It's from a movie or go forward. Five, six times run us to complete standstill. Can we just call us out? You're not going to notice this in editing because Jake is a complete grow.

But what is going on, man? Are you all right? Yeah, I'm fine. It's not too late.

Are you off your mens? No, no, no, I'm fine. I've been insinuating the lyrics of the song, whip it. That's what I've been doing.

Okay. See that. I knew I all right. Crack that whip.

Go forward. Go forward. Move ahead. Try to detect it.

It's not too late. Hold it up. He's looking off to the sides. You see, he's looking at his other screen.

He's off to the side of reading it. He spent time while we're trying to discuss this important seminal text. Right? The seminal text.

He's before the creams. Before the creams. It's out too long. You must live it.

Okay. Is that your system? Yeah. I did that.

I did that. Go on, Alex. I love learning technology. You know me.

Yeah, seriously. Nothing makes me anti-tech more than Greg's ability to Google D the lyrics. But he, yeah, the stuff about tech is interesting because you get the sense from a stressless treatment of this here. And then it also is on liberal education that part of the problem the agents were living with was an economy of scarcity.

And that this means that education is necessarily the preserve of the few. And therefore you need to establish an aristocracy otherwise nobody gets a liberal education. And it's clear right that modernity is trying to remove this problem. And therefore it creates greater flexibility.

I think this is so helpful for thinking this point, which makes it a number of places is really helpful for responding to some of the critiques of ancient thought with its endorsement of slavery and all that. It's so easy to think, oh, well, why do they need this when one, you rely on technology to do work that slaves would have done. But then two, you also outsourced the rest of the slavery to China and Indian places like that. That modernity is really, yeah, I know you're a fan of that, David.

David just gave me a thumbs up and you all can't see it. He's constantly getting away with this kind of stuff. But you do get a sense from this sort of framework that with technology, you have a new political problem. People are freed up for leisure.

They have access to time they didn't have before. They are therefore entitled to or have a more reasonable demand to political participation than they would have had if they were without access to education. It definitely the spread of literacy, all of that sort of makes this the political models of the engines at least have less immediate traction, not to say their principles. Yeah, correct.

But yet Strauss seems to imply that the benefits of modern technology do not resound the benefit of liberal education. It's kind of a paradox, actually I've read a paper on this, the paradox of modernity and liberal education. Now it's available to more of us thanks to technology, books, the internet, I mean people who listen to the new thinkery. You can get a liberal education while you're getting your steps in right here.

We've done four years worth of episodes. That's basically a college major. But yet none of us do it. I mean, it even says, what today goes by education very frequently does not actually mean education proper.

More often it's instruction and training. So despite the fact that technology has made it more available and that we actually don't need slaves or if we do, we outsource them. We're not turning to the things of the life of the mind. We're turning to sort of watching reality and eating Cheetos in a lazy boy that also has a toilet on it.

You're mixing stress now with what's it called? Theocracy? That's right. Beighton.

He makes a really powerful point here. He does not discuss it at length. He really just spends this like third of a paragraph or like, yeah, third of a page on this. But he ends with this really powerful places.

The difference between the classics and us with regard to democracy consists exclusively in a different estimate of the virtues of technology. But we are not entitled to say that the classical view has been refuted. Their implicit prophecy that the emancipation of technology of the arts from moral and political control would lead to disaster or to the dehumanization of man has not yet been refuted. I encourage everybody to go listen to the episode we did with my former colleague, our friend Paul DeDuke, about this.

He really spells out this implicit prophecy. He's done great work on this. But it's kind of interesting. It made me wonder, what would it take to refute this prophecy?

I mean, you can see how the prophecy could be confirmed. But how do you refute it? I mean, if it's a prophecy, it could come in. Weird word choice.

10 years or 100 years of prophecy, just because it said before the fact. But here, I guess this might point is making an early response to David. It's like in Zenithin's memorabilia, as I mentioned, I think you see before the fact Socrates condemning the conian science. So it's prophetic insofar as it's said before.

But it seems like that same before is not divinely revealed. It seems like that same before is based on having thought through the consequences of unleashing science. And so what I would say, I'll put on my sort of classical little thought, friendly hat for a moment, say, I think they're correct. Releasing science from moral and political control has opened the way to disasters here for unseen and to dehumanization here for unseen.

I mean, like to state the obvious, you can't get the holocaust without modern technology. And you simply cannot kill millions of people in a short span of time without scientific progress. And this is why you're for this, why I'm for the gradual control of science. That's exactly right.

So we don't get stuff like the Holocaust nuclear annihilation is not possible without unleashing scientific progress. And so I would, what I would say is what I take Strauss to be pointing to here is that the Socratic saw the consequences of this and chose not to pursue it. That they thought that they thought this was a mistake. In other words, that you and I is rather far seen though.

I think so. Yeah. I mean, literally, Socrates talks about being able to control the wind and climate, for example. And so which by bacon takes up explicitly as well in the New Atlantis.

So yeah, I mean, this is even in Jacob Klein's book, Greek mathematical thought in the origins of Al. He shows how the agents conceived of theoretical logistics, which would be a a calculation, something like multiplication, division, etc. on a purely theoretical frame that would deny the unity of things. And it might lead to something like the denial between discrete a continuous number, which is the basis of modern natural science is the sort of full malleability of nature.

And then they just decided this isn't worthwhile. This is not a path to go down. This is why it's such an important book in a way, it really frames the ancient modern divinuses, the premises of modern mathematics. And they're really to put a finer point on it.

One of the big differences between classics and the moderns is, I mean, the classical solution really isn't a solution. There's no answer. Like, there will be no end to the ills for humankind. That's the answer.

Whereas the moderns actually think, no, we can actually solve this. Can we can we can we, I don't want to jump on this too much, but maybe this is somehow like, do you want to talk about Strauss and aliens? Sure. He says, owners or extraterrestrials.

What foreigners? Foreigners or extraterrestrials? I don't call them aliens. I call them the Athenian stranger.

He's a foreigner. And they, I call them undocumented immigrants. I see. I mean, they have documents, but still we call them undock.

Right. Anyways, there's not a right documents. I hear they even have voter registration. Now, anyways, paragraph 15 on page 38, he says, talking about democracy and it's creeping conformism, which is I would you were alluding to with like the the idiocracy stuff, right?

He says, beings who look down on us from a star, these gods are aliens. Anyways, they might find that the difference between democracy and communism is not quite as great as it appears to be. When one considers exclusively the doubtless very important question of civil and political liberties. Although only people of exceptional levity or irresponsibility say that the difference between communism and democracy is negligible in the last analysis.

It's this is if you can figure out what the hell he's actually he's agreeing with or not agreeing with in this. That's one. And I'll just say one thing, after mentioning a story, he then goes into the problem of cosmology. I don't know how these are linked, but these are questions I have.

First of all, I think he does think that communism and democracy are not that far apart. Right. So communism is sort of the political regime culminated by the second wave of modernity and liberalism is the regime from the first wave. And so there's still both modern types of regimes that don't recognize that the ancient world is the profound difference.

But the second thing I'll say is I'll say, I grew up under a growing West Berlin, which was democratic, but surrounded by communist regimes. And I will say I have had my entire life up until the last few years. Like I have had a strong sense of privacy. But it seems like increasingly in the modern world, it was like I finally got on Facebook when I realized that Facebook knew stuff about me even though I wasn't on it.

You know, like there's I think there's increasingly like you just can't keep your right to privacy anymore. And so like it's just kind of giving up. I'm on Twitter, thanks to Alex, you know, just waiting to do that. And I took pictures of my house and my kids and my, you know, my wives and you know, like just it's just it's amazing how after we seemingly sort of just given up things now that previously we would have fought to keep private.

It's just kind of blows my mind. I don't want to sound like a Cassandra, but I mean, TikTok for God's sake. I know that I'm clearly our listeners are on that abhorrent thing. But I think Louis CK really put the nail on that hit the nail on the head is when there was easy pass email.

Yeah. Everyone said, people got irate because they're like, this is giving up. You're people going to know where you are. They're going to tell you if only that were it.

When you went through a tool. Now they're right. You're plates. I got to take it the other day.

They got a picture of my face. Yeah. I look cool as fuck going 50 and 30. But like, I do I'm like just chill.

Yeah, you're like, you're like a freaking gangster man. I mean, like, it's hard to take a picture because I had like three to four Latinas in my car. And for some reason, they don't show that. I think that's that's why you're going so fast.

You're going to go. Yeah. No, no, I got to get home with these girls. Yeah.

But no, your cell phone, it's more always there. Even commit crimes because my grandfather only only used cash. Yeah. Yeah.

But some of those things, they'll phone towers. So now people are getting caught with crimes because they just have their phone on them. So please know exactly where they're right. Yeah, it's not sporting in some way.

And I mean, it's partly just but partly seriously, like the relationship, it seems like if you're going to have a free state, the relationship between the state and the criminal should be somewhat sporting. Like, how do you write a detective now? Some geek sits on a keyboard and figures it out, right? I still think we're based on murder, but I thought this one through you have to do it in the wilderness now, right?

I mean, like, you essentially have, you need to burn our cell phone, you need somebody that can have your album, I should have to leave your real cell phone at home, you have to figure out the right route. So there's no better yet, the heavier real cell phone be moving around and getting geo located in places. Oh, that's good. No, I found the easiest way to do this is going to hike with somebody to a beautiful view from a cliff and just push them off and say, no, no, that's what I was going to say.

But then it doesn't matter. No, that matters. No, I witness it. Hopefully.

If you want to keep killing, they're like, man, every time that goes on a hike, somebody dies. No, I think this is why Colombo is a more interesting detective show than the all the CSI stuff, right? All that, like, I find the detective shows that are about, you know, using modern science to find the criminals I find them totally uninteresting. There's no psychologizing whatsoever.

What happened in Colombo? I don't think I've seen a single episode. So Colombo, I mean, like, it changed a lot of our time and like, they rebooted it several times and by the end, it was sort of pretty campy and terrible. But in the beginning, the episodes were pretty serious, I think, psychological analyses of what kinds of human beings make crimes.

So kind of like rope, maybe, in that regard, like where he sort of diagnoses what type you are and can figure it out. Usually the criminal thinks he's smarter than Colombo. Colombo, I mentioned this on the show before, but Colombo was modeled on the detective from crime and punishment, who in turn was modeled on Socrates. And so Colombo ironically, which presents himself as not very smart and confused and the criminals typically think they're smarter than he is.

They're just kind of fun. Yeah. Cool. I'll check that out.

Yeah. We got two more points. We have to touch on at least briefly and mention, right? 16 and 17, which respond to the second objection.

Crack that whip. I'm going to crack it. I'm going to touch it. So paragraph 16, here he gets to the issue from the introduction to natural right in the history.

Cosmology. The relationship between ancient cosmology. But he doesn't raise the issue that he does in natural right history that we can throw aerosol out because it's based on this antiquated cosmology, right? Well, he raises the issue issue that is bound with the antiquated cosmology.

Okay. And then he says, I'm sorry, natural history says they're divorceable. And so you don't have to worry about it. Right?

No, sorry. That's the main thing. He says, look, aerosol is one thing. It's totally separate from his politics.

So you're not to worry about his cosmology. But in other places, he seems to imply that no, they're actually yoked and it is a problem. Yeah. And in the introduction, it actually, this is like the most massive problem that we can't go into.

And a few years later, he publishes this and he literally devotes a paragraph. Yeah. Very long. Sometimes he has like five page paragraphs.

But this is not it. And he just says, in response to the claim that classical political philosophy is bound up with an antiquated cosmology. It's been refuted by modern science. He says, classical political philosophy viewed man in a different life.

It was originated by Socrates. And Socrates was so far from being committed to a specific cosmology that is knowledge, knowledge of ignorance. Knowledge of ignorance is not ignorance. It is knowledge of the elusive character of the truth of the whole.

Socrates then viewed man in the light of the mysterious character of the whole. He held therefore that we are more familiar with the situation of man as man than with the ultimate causes of that situation. We may also say that he viewed man in light of the unchangeable ideas, i.e., which is that is to say, of the fundamental and permanent problems. For to articulate the situation of man means to articulate man's openness to the whole, the understanding of the situation of man, which includes then the quest for cosmology, rather than a solution to the cosmological problem.

There's that word again, was the foundation of classical political philosophy. I mean, it's not by any means a full exposition or an account, a sort of textual account, but as far as like an alternative view. I mean, he gives a remarkably succinct and clear statement there. Yeah.

I mean, I think this is a little bit tongue-in-cheek and a little too easy. But I also think that it's a mistake. I suspect when he talks about the antiquated cosmology, he has in mind more aerosol, so Socrates is a dodge. But I think that aerosol is similarly not committed to the cosmology that he presents.

I'll just assert that. I don't think I could defend that off the cuffs. But he makes the same move in chapter one of natural and history, incidentally, which is whenever he needs to avoid the dogmatism, he just goes right to Socrates. I'm not going to get involved in, and here I think he's kind of helped by the distinction between the historical Socrates and the Socrates of Plato, Xenophon, and Ersophanes.

And he can just say, okay, look, all right, you want to talk about plainness and Aristotelianism, but there is also Socrates. And if there's a Socratic pulse in Plato, Aristotle, you might want to take what I think about Socrates, and extend it. Can I read just maybe the end of the final paragraph? I find it.

Give it a pass to Slit, my friend. All right. So one of the beauties apparently of classical plasmid philosophy is that it avoids two opposite charms. Strauss says, men are constantly attracted and diluted by two opposite charms.

The charm of competence, which is engendered by mathematics and everything akin to mathematics, on the one hand, and the charms of humble awe, which is engendered by meditation, excuse me, on the human soul and its experiences. Philosophy is characterized by the gentle if a firm refusal to succumb to either charm. It is the highest form of the mating of courage and moderation. In spite of its highness or nobility, it could appear as Sissophanes are ugly.

When one contrasts its achievement with its goal, it is necessarily accompanied sustained and elevated by eros or love. It's graced by nature's grace. What's up? We're going to go back to that.

No, that's a nice. That's a doozy. I mean, the two opposite charms seem like, look, I can't tell you how often I encounter human types who are charmed by one or the other. These two charms, right?

Like, we can know everything with kind of mathematical precision, or we can't really know everything. And so therefore, we're left in the state of awe in the face of the mysterious character being. And right? People give up, where they latch on to a sort of, I don't know, clear answer.

I mean, there's something here. There's a tendency to reduce heterogeneity to homogeneity is what it is. And then there's, and that's the heterogeneity of ends to something like a sort of homogenous understanding of being, right? All being is one, right?

Reducing things, right? Like reducing the phenomena. Yeah, and reducing something like a sort of organic, you know, leading organism to, you know, non-living things, right? indicative of the productive arts and crafts, right?

There's a similarity there. But then there's also the tendency to just forget about the whole, right? And I think this has something to do with that. Oh, it's funny.

I didn't think it was a forgetting. Well, I mean, if you used to come to one charm, you forget the other, right? Oh, no, sure. But I mean, yeah, of course, to find an essence of forgetting.

But I meant, I meant this sort of, it's not a forgetting about the whole, oh my god, the whole is so complex, I couldn't possibly understand it. Yeah. Okay. Well, yeah, and that, or that the heterogeneity does somehow link up with the opportunity.

I like when heteros and homos link up. You would. You fail to see that that makes you a homo, right? What?

A homo, a homo who has succumbed to the charm, gently, if firmly. I guess this is the kind of stuff that you're going to get at UATX folks right here. You're not getting dangerous ideas there. This isn't like, you know, I can get this in the Herbs program.

Can we talk about heteros and Herbs? Herbs? Can we talk about this? So, these last lines.

I read them. Yeah. No, no, these last lines, I want to dwell on them a second, okay? Right.

He's talking about arrows and he talks about the mating of courage and moderation. That's right. Was that? It's right.

Well, go forward. Stop it. And he says it is high and it is noble, but again, appear ugly when you look at its achievement and light it up to all right, it wants to know everything, but it only knows that it knows nothing, right? It's aware of the mysterious character, however you want to put it.

And then in light of this appearance, he mentions that it's sustained and elevated by arrows. And that's meant to be a counteract to the incorrect appearance that doesn't align with its highest, highness or nobility. And then he calls this a kind of grace. What the hell is going on?

I don't understand. There's so many angles. Like, is the highness or nobility actually seems to be saying that it is, and its highness consists in its refusal to succumb to these charms. And then it has this alternative appearance.

And yet somehow, it's a company sustained, elevated, but not characterized or essentially arrows. And then this is somehow related to a grace of nature. I mean, I don't know, can you make sense of what exactly he's driving at here? The cream sits out too long.

Yeah. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. No idea. When something's going on, I have no idea.

Okay. What is this? Are you going with him? I'm going with it.

I googled it. You guys, all right, guys, listen, we're over an hour at this point. I mean, we're about we're over an hour. We got to stop.

If you guys are dissatisfied with the fact that my attempted decipher, some of the most mysterious lines in Strauss has been detected by by Devo Liris. It's not too late. Please block Greg on Twitter. Whip it.

All right, man. Good. What is political philosophy? You must whip it.

Those guys are much of perverts. This episode is not is not graced by nature's grace. It's grace. The past is live.

Let's give the past a slip. I mean, that's classical political philosophy right there. I was saying that earlier. Yeah, that seems genius.

Thank you. I just I feel like the only thing left to say is, look, our listeners should like, raise, subscribe. It's not too late to whip it into shape. We'll see you next week.

When we do the third in this installment of whip, what is political philosophy? And the last episode ever of the New Thingers.