Hi, everybody. We're recording this after the fact. We realized at the end of the episode that there's a discount code to get this new wonderful Hanson volume, the Australian Play With Uthro. So we thought we'd record a little snippet here to give you guys the code up front in case you get tired of hearing Greg's jokes about midway through.
Hannah, tell the people how they can save a pretty penny on this. Handsome but expensive volume. Yes. So you can save 30% if you order the book through the PSU website.
That's psupress.org. And if you use promo code NR23 NR2323, you get 30% off. And then it's not only beautiful but also cheapish. That's NR is a natural right.
And now that we've got business out of the way, on to the wisdom. Welcome back to the new Thinkery. My name is David Barnes with me as always is my good friend Alex Priyu. How are you?
I'm doing well. How are you? I'm well. I want us to say up top, rest in peace to the political godfather of the new Thinkery, Stoveo Burlesconi.
That's right. He's partying at that. Boom, boom, boom, party in the sky. Yeah.
And I promise people on Twitter that I would tell the story about when we were in Italy doing archival research with Manseal and actually had dinner and then posting all festivities with Burlesconi. But I can't. We do have a patreon. We can do that for premium members.
Let's say. And the member of the podcast who's about to join Burlesconi probably closes. Greg, the prayer. How are you?
I'm great guys. I'm so happy to be here where I got to tell you today we're going to offer a solution to the problem of piety so that nobody has to seek the solution for him or herself. I'm very, very thrilled with that. Very good.
Yeah. Yeah. We'll get there. We'll get there.
Yeah. Really quick before we enter to think all the three of us are quite excited for the show. We're showing a kids later on in life too, right? That's right.
You're 15. You're having a very elite. Yeah. That's right.
I mean, my wife's having the child. Not me, but yeah. So who do we have on today? We have two guests.
They're the co-editors of the volume recently came out. Leo Strauss on Plato's Uthephro. I love Alex is showing the book for the listeners at home. Yeah.
I appreciate that. The folks at home are really appreciating you picking it up and showing it to us. It's a podcast for the hundredth time. It's a podcast.
I'm just working on my presentation for this one. Especially becomes a TV show. Oh, I see like Donny. Yeah, I see that.
The 1948 notebook with lectures and critical writings, the co-editors. So does our bank of in Hennes Kerber. Let me give a quick introduction to him. Hennes Kerber is postdoctoral fellow at the program on constitutional government and an affiliate of the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University.
He's written many works on Strauss Godimer in Lessing and our second guest is our makeup. Those best friends column, Sargo. And he is professor and director of the philosophy program at Roosevelt University. He's also the author of many, many works on Strauss and on Strauss on Hobbes as well.
And co-editor of Volume I, Quite Like, Mastery of Nature, Promises and Prospects. And most noteworthy for today's podcast. He's also president of the Leo Strauss Foundation, right, which helps out struggling youth, I think, working, trying to get into S. A.
Tearson, is that right, Sargo? Yeah, I can't say. So welcome, guys. We're so excited to have you.
This is, we should say, I'm front. This is going to be a two-parter. First part, we're going to talk just kind of nuts and bolts. What is this notebook?
How does it fit inside? What are the documents in this? Because this is, I got to say, a very rich and full volume. And then afterwards, we're going to do a second part, which I see will be released next week from when you're listening to this.
We'll get a bit more into the substance of the notebook, Strauss's lecture and the arguments and maybe some of the interpretations advanced in this volume just generally. So, yeah, I think this is going to be a real treat. I'm really excited for this. I know Greg is too.
He's been freaking out like a little school girl in our text message. Yeah. He sent his R and Hana some emails and long email, a question that a friend of his asked. And then he said, Zwinks and like, I just said, no.
And then the question was terrible. And the stop. But, you know, one word you didn't use, adjective you didn't use to describe the book, though. I know you would have included Alex's unique.
So this is a unique project that's so wonderful. Could you just, it's not like, oh, another Strauss volume, which there are many. No, no, no. This is for the first time ever of its kind.
So either Hana's or Seddis or could you describe what's different about this publication? It's the, it's an a notebook. It's a pen tab notebook. I think that business company, we looked at the manufacturers, the notebook from the 40s.
And it's Strauss's personal line by line commentary on work and classical work, novel time dialogue, nothing like that has been previously released, complete interpretation of the dialogue from his own archive. Wow. How did you guys find the notebook? How did you guys find each other?
I assume dating app and like, how did you decide that you wanted to work on this together? I mean, did you stumble on the notebook? Did you know that you have you have the president of the Leo Strauss Foundation? You have access to Leo Strauss Center?
Like, just give us some like, how did this start? You remember the name? What's the name of that app? Ice Tinner?
I don't know. No, no, the Strauss CnApp is different, Greg. Oh, okay. Yeah, we should have, we should make a Strauss app.
We should make a soul. Yeah. A soul is with long. We got to know each other a while ago.
I guess in 2010, 11 when I was a visiting student at the committee in Chicago, committee on social thought, and I don't know, I'm German. So I have one or two scholarly bones in my body and I worked in the archive. And at the time, Nathan Tarkov, Strauss is literally executor said, for some reason, it's always you foreigners working in the archive. The other guy who's working in the archive is Zarko and taking our jobs.
Alex, and I'm tired of it. It's really deep. And so Zarko and I got together. And I think at the time we read the another notebook by Strauss, the decart, a notebook on decarts, the school de le mentod.
And that was very good. And we were both interested in the youth of for and then we decided to start editing the youth of for and to be honest, it took us longer because we were both distracted by other projects, but we're very excited that it's finally out. And I can only second what Zarko has said. This is, I think, truly a new and important moment because it's new material coming out of the Strauss, not last the Strauss papers, because the other stuff that has been costhumously edited before falls into other categories, right?
There are other important things like, for example, Strauss's Hobbes book from the early 1930s, which Zarko has translated into English. It was written with publication in mind or also some of the lecture manuscripts, like progress or return or three waves of modernity or on the interpretation of Genesis. Why we remain Jews? So many of the important lectures were not published by Strauss himself, but only posthumously, but they were also written with an audience of mine, right?
And then we also have the correspondences, which were, of course, private and not a fragment for a broader audience. But this notebook is really sort of Strauss writing notes to himself. I mean, we're pretty certain that he wrote this in preparation or it's pretty obvious that he wrote this in preparation for a seminar. He taught in 1948 in the spring semester of 1948 at the new school where he taught for about a decade when he first came to the States.
But it's unlikely that he read a line by line commentary out loud and fast. So it's really you can see him working through the text, working through the dialogue on his own. It's also pretty obvious when you look at the notebook that he went through it again and again. So he, the notebook is written in ink, which is we're very grateful for it because he's just handwriting as most people know by now.
It's somewhat difficult to read at times, but this is written in ink, but then he uses a red crayon and a pencil and goes through it again and again and really sort of marks his own notes and works out an education in the course of writing the notebook. And it's kind of amazing to be able to follow him sitting at his desk next to him, seeing how he develops one of his truly, I would say, amazing interpretations because the interpretation of the youth of the pro that appears or the reading of the youth of pro is one of a kind. Right. I just have a quick question.
I mean, do you think that in the back of his mind, as you guys are reading this, did you think that maybe he held out the prospect in his mind of these being public? I mean, he kept them. Yeah. He wrote them in ink, which I hear that a lot of times he was famous for having used pencils.
So like, you know, he used ink, he kept them. Do you think he thought maybe somebody would like these one day or would have been aware of that? Yeah. And I mean, in some things he does cross out this one was not nothing crossed out.
There's a erosophanes interpretations that are completely crossed out, but preserved anyway, and there's different explanations of why he would leave something in the archive. But among his, I guess we should say what an activist means remains, not literary remains. Yeah. You're not going through his coffin and finding pockets of notes.
Okay. Good. I thought he was going to close it like that, though, or something. I mean, we have to emphasize this.
He kept everything, every little thing. So notes written literally on the back of an envelope where he sort of has two liners on the youth of pro cross out completely. He will keep that envelope. So the archive is really expensive.
And if you want, we can, we can talk a bit more about it. Yeah, go for it. Yeah. I was like to hear that.
I think I think there's a lot of intrigue. I mean, part of this starts with, I think the, for decades, these course transcripts were circulated privately, mostly guarded. And now this is obviously as you yourself know, the new stage. I think people are just curious, like, what is there, you know, any, any, I mean, one question I have and you can maybe touch on this as you respond is any sort of interpretations of stuff that he didn't teach and didn't publish on sort of notebooks on works.
We don't even know that he was necessarily engaging with at least at that level. He mentioned the discourse. I mean, the discourse on method is one such example already. No, the collection of straws, this paper is very extensive.
So the most extensive collection is held at the University of Chicago Library and it comprises about a hundred and something, a hundred and four or five boxes. Each archival box, like a massive boxes contains a number of folders. So usually around 15 or 20 folders and each typically is on a specific topic. So something like natural right, a lot of notes on natural right.
And one such folder is on the youth of pro. This folder contains a notebook. It's a spiral bound pin notebook, as as Archo mentioned, and then how many notes are going to be 200 loose joclin additional notes. We've selected a few to give people an impression and also to supplement some of the readings.
I'm pretty sure that he had some of the loose notes stuck into the notebook, but that has not been preserved as often the case in archives. So they get reordered registered sort of people working in archives, professionals do their jobs. But among the other stuff in the archives are about a thousand letters to and from Strauss in German English, French, Latin, and notes of all kinds. I mean, notes Strauss wrote in preparation for lectures, seminars, but also for the books he was writing.
So something that Zarko mentioned is before he was writing Socrates and Aristophanes, he wrote an analysis of all the plays that could have been its own book. Right. The archive also contains manuscripts and typescripts of the books and articles that he's written. So one thing that you might have seen is when he wrote thoughts on Machiappelli, every paragraph that he had had sort of its own heading.
So there's the first line of the paragraph. He numbered the paragraphs and the first line was sort of a stop heading for the for that paragraph. And finally, Camaré published those in his book, Political Philosophy and the Challenge of Ruth Field Religion. They also the audio recordings, which have been made available pretty widely by the Strauss Center and personal stuff, like Strauss's passports, official certificates of his honorary degrees and other fun little things.
And something there's no underlying key. The letters of recommendations are generally not not available because they concern people who are studying people. Why? The paragraph headings is driven of some books.
So, for example, for Abby's, how for Abby plays those laws as paragraph headings that Risuna Mazi published those. Socrates and Aristophanes also has paragraph headings, the whole book. Wow. See, this is maybe a specialized audience that's stunned by the things that are under headings.
Well, I think it's still quite interesting. I mean, you know, the, you get a sense for how he worked. I mean, he dated everything, right? He would write.
Yeah. It was interesting to see. I've always had this question. It'd be interesting to see if maybe a short volume of just day to day what he was working on.
It would be really interesting to just say, oh, from these dates he was working on this book and then he paused to work and he was teaching this simultaneously. It'd be interesting to see if in a very kind of summary fashion, a kind of chronicle because for a guy who dates everything, you should be able to, obviously, this requires an immense amount of work because you have to sift through a lot to get this. But it would be interesting to see to what extent we can even map out his day to day intellectual life that seems extremely rare, right? Well, I know how does he was working on something which can become the backbone of such a, such a study, because it's public lectures.
I don't know if you want to say a little bit about that because he gave so many. Yeah. There are no way to become the skeleton for this. Yes, I'm writing a short book on Strauss's public lectures.
So it's a very little known fact about Strauss. And he came to the US and had virtually no teaching experience and then became one of the, became obviously a very successful teacher with robust school, but also gave about its unclear eyes suspect that it's something about 250 public lectures at colleges, universities, and Jewish learning institutions of various types. So I have, I'm writing a book with case studies of specifics, such lectures, one chapter on the Jerusalem and Athens lectures I recently published. They've been four or five lectures on Jerusalem and Athens.
And I have a list of something like 207, currently 207 lectures that I can date and typically also have the titles for and so on. So, and I think the notebook to me is partly interesting for a similar reason. I'm interested in the practice of how Strauss worked, like how he read, how he wrote and how he sort of lived his scholarly life, right? So how did this work?
And the notebook gives us an idea of how he read books, how he came up with interpretations, how he was testing his own exegetical ideas. I don't want to add a little bit. I'm not going to put a few more. The note, the notebooks have these headings or headers and the same history of the guide where he identifies the six or seven threads, main threads in a book.
So this one, you throw a Socrates crime, Socrates piety, the problem of justice, the problem of piety, that kind of thing, the guide has the address, seed, intention, metaphysics, the theology of the Torah. So, and then these are the things that are underlined and read to just give an example of. Yeah, that was something conspicuous as I read the notebook, how much you would just use the same sort of statement again and again, almost like so you could track and go back to question the party, the problem of justice, the problem of piety, whatever what he was concerned with so that he could track his thoughts and it makes it easier to read it away. Otherwise, you might be unclear about what to connect to what it definitely helps.
And so I think one thing that's not just the notebooks were unpublished, obviously, in the word of justice time, but also his lecture was published, right? This 19th lecture, there's also a draft from a lecture from 1950. There's also a translation by better daddy that he apparently did in a, some sort of course with him, which once would be an after 52. Right.
So, and then there's correspondence which came out in some of the notes to the introduction, I noticed there's a mention of how the youth that wrote kept being something that he'd talk about. And so I think one of the curious things is that you get the sense that the youth of a really matters to Strauss's work and he never got around the publishing. I know how much you've written something on a proposed volume. So I thought maybe it would be helpful to just chart generally because we'll get more into the substance later.
Generally, what's the significance of the youth of the flow for Strauss's thinking and in his path of thinking why when he was working on it and why, what sort of objectives he had or what sort of projects he had with the youth of throw in mind. And then, you know, what got in the way or why was it published? It doesn't seem quite significant. Some of the things he's saying here and yet it's strange that nothing ever came of it as far as a publication is concerned in his lifetime.
Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right. I mean, if you start out thinking about which platonic dialogue might have been of importance for Strauss, the youth of throw would be up there among your top five, maybe because I mean, he's famous for the recovery of classical political thought and for sort of emphasizing the theological political problem. And the youth of throw is certainly the platonic dialogue on the problem of Heidi and one of very few dialogues where the question of what the gods are, what what what one of the few dialogues where theological questions are obviously the forefront of the issues discussed by the interlocutors. And if you sort of make these assumptions and then look at Strauss's books, it's kind of curious that the youth of throw is strangely absent.
I mean, the youth of throw doesn't obviously he hasn't written all that much about the youth of throw in his published writings, but he doesn't even quote it really. I mean, at the beginning, especially in the Schmitz essays, there are certain important references that he makes specific passages, but he certainly doesn't develop anything close to an interpretation and anywhere. And when you then sort of go to the archive and first of all, look at this look at the 1952 lecture, so the lecture that was posthumously published that came out in interpretation in the best version, that is a massive achievement. I would say it's one of Strauss's truly great interpretations.
It is, I would say, among the youth of throw interpretations, one of its kind, it's the only interpretation that makes the first interpretation the sort of the center of gravity of that dialogue. The first definition. The first definition of. What did I say?
Yes. The first definition is the center of gravity. And that is an idea, an interpretive idea that is amazing and extremely helpful to unlock the dialogue. And then when you dig deeper, you find this notebook, which shows that in 1948 he taught a class and devoted obviously a lot of attention to the preparation of this class.
And then if you dig still a little deeper, you find that 1950 lecture draft that Alex mentioned, that is somewhere in between. It's pretty close in many respects to the notebook, but it also makes one or two steps the beyond the thoughts that you can find in the notebook. So for example, he has seemingly not noticed in the notebook the strange absence of the term soul in the youth of throw, whereas later that becomes one of the crucial turning points for his interpretation. And then he also realized that when you look at his correspondence that he tried to publish the youth of throw lecture or the text he produced based on the youth of throw lecture a couple of times.
So he thought about including an essay on the youth of throw in persecution at the art of the book, which would have really changed the character of that book obviously. Then in the late 1950s, Alex alluded to that he had a book project with the University of Michigan press called Jerusalem in Essence, which he had signed a contract and got an sizable advance payment in which he wanted to include a lecture or an essay on the youth of throw. And then also later on in liberalism, ancient and modern he thinks about publishing. He thinks about including an essay on the youth of throw.
And really throughout his mature career in the US, he's thinking about publishing something about the youth of throw and then as you say, it doesn't come around to him. That's liberalismation in 1968, right? Yes. So it's 20 years after this notebook.
And do we know is it the same lecture or version of this lecture? He was thinking of, I mean, there's every indication that his statement in this lecture and in these notebooks, as he's working through stuck with him and he endorses them for decades, right? He doesn't seem to seriously, I mean, we don't know that, but it seems like he wanted at least this. Yeah, I don't know, maybe you have something to say.
I mean, why did he not? He's considered it, but he didn't. And there is this question which Ronan Berger has been dwelling on and pointed out that this stuff doesn't distinguish between the holy and the pious, sufficiently in the lecture or in the notebook. And he does acknowledge that in letter two, self-energetic.
So that's one reason. So you'd have to revise it and never get around to revising it. You could say maybe the discussion of the minus and the laws that he prepared would have taken care of the main points. And I don't know what would be that.
I mean, another possible interpretation, the symposium, of course, is the only dialogue on the God, which he did plan to get published. We added by the study and get published. But I don't know, so there's a couple of things that he needed to revise it a little bit. And he calls it something like that's a reading, but not an interpretation.
It was the other way. It's not an interpretation. So in a letter to Joseph Cropsey from 1971, she says, I wrote on the youth, what I wrote on the youth, what I wrote on the youth, was a lecture, not an interpretation. And I overlooked a very important point of which I became aware only later.
And we can say that, which we're guessing is this point. So in a few months later, in an unpublished letter to Pranadeti, he says, for the folks at home that in the dialogue itself, Socrates uses a term, a pious and holy, seemingly interchangeably, but with a view, it's a sort of noticing that youth of road doesn't pay attention to the going back and forth between the terms. Sorry, that's just a small point. No, that's a good point.
So in this other 1971 letter to a separate letter, he was one of his very close students. He writes, quote, if I should succeed in completing my essay on the laws, so this is his last book, which he did finish or almost finished, I would like to restudy the youth of the world. And I would like to know if any recent commentary or study it, which I might look, and this is the end of the relevant quote. So it's kind of amazing, right?
In 1948, we know he had worked out an education. 23 years later, he thinks about re-studying the dialogue. I mean, it doesn't speak in favor of my personality structure, but if I had this lecture lying around, I would certainly publish it. It's extremely high standards.
So I would correct your tentative suggestion, Alex, that he endorsed this. I think he clearly did not endorse it. It's not Strauss's last word on the dialogue. But I think it is extremely helpful to think through the issues, think through the dialogue.
And also it is extremely helpful to understand Strauss's thoughts in the late 1940s and early 1950s. And the difference between the two, I mean, if he intended to publish a version of it in liberalism, that's what Alex was saying. Clearly he endorsed the chunk of it, bulk of it or something like that. I don't know what's this.
Maybe you should make clear what's mistaken this, you know, Hoseon piety versus holiness. I'm not sure that's the same as Ronna Burgers. He doesn't want to learn from you to throw about the divine. He's not being Socrates, but about what's by it.
The human virtue of what is holy, which is what the gods or something else. He doesn't really know much about the divine. But there will be one way, but I'm not sufficient. And I was the one who brought up Ronna's suggestion, but I don't recall her emphasis here.
What she or remember, do you remember Alex? No, but I mean, that's the division that always made sense to me that the gods could be holy, but not pious. It would sort of be strange to think the gods as pious. Yeah.
And if they're not pious, if you're imitating them, you're being impious. Right. But the claim would be though that maybe this is something we can touch on in the second episode. But then the implication would be well, if it does mean holy, we could still be holy in imitating the gods, right?
If the gods are somehow holy, maybe I don't know. Right. Let me throw in another sort of question about this, which is it's striking that in his notebook, he talks about the Euthofro and the Krito. When he goes on to publish his interpretation of the Krito, though, he cares about the apology.
And so I thought maybe because we're going to get more into the Euthofro in the second part, I thought maybe you could say a couple of things about why he paired the Euthofro with the Krito and in this notebook and what effect this has in separating them. I remember reading some interesting thoughts on that. I think it would be just interesting to me here. It's probably my part because I have a short statement on the Krito.
What's the effect of pairing the two? One question that the Krito considers is the question of justice. There's always one aspect. And in the Krito, they're in the Krito commentary.
I don't know that they came clear in our earlier comments. The notebook contains the commentary on the Euthofro, a line by line commentary in the Euthofro, as well as a line by line commentary on the Krito. And we have the recollections of the late David Lowenthal. You guys had him, frequent guest of your show.
Once he then asked before we could have him again, but we were playing half a month for Shakespeare. He said the apology was a major part of the course. He remembers correctly. So he resolved the problem by what would be the opposite.
Not pairing, but having this menager trial of all three dialogues. So really teed us up for a joke there, but we'll just let it go on by. Sorry. I thought I completed the joke.
Yeah, you did. I was going to naively ask what's a Menager 12 because I'm a simple ten. I don't know these things. So it's a Menager 12 stresses there.
He must be just watching from the corner or something. I don't know. He does. I mean, he's one of the notes.
They're not so many as the book at you. So it's a well, come on. We got to publish those next time. And then whether or not they're they're they're x rated.
So I just go back to the justice issue that whether the Socrates is just and there he speaks in the Crieto part of the notebook. He speaks of the philosophers transcendence of justice. And to regards one of them that he sees justice is the condition of society and society and society in the condition of philosophizing. So thinking of justice as an instrumental good.
And then the second one that the philosophic philosophical politics is a case of justice, hierarchical justice. That is the philosopher justice is not quite meaningful. It just is means that's a point in Aristotle and a non controversial point in Aristotle that justice means unequal things to people equal things. So to speak.
That's something one can learn from the Crieto. I don't think I have anything to say through a point about what happens when you pair it with the apology or unparrot the apology is there. I mean, maybe, maybe, maybe what happens in the Klein-Fester where he published the study of political philosophy. What is the effect of the combination there combining the Crieto with the apology?
Yeah. Yeah. I just thought you were going to get the question. You're the guest.
No, it's very simply to show the well, I'll take to one is that to show you that the the insufficiency of looking at a single dialogue for laying out Socrates' position, that's part of it, right? So the extreme emphasis on law by the missing the Crieto versus law breaking this in the apology, which then of course touches on D.P. logical questions as well. I think that's just off top of my head.
I wasn't prepared for that question. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good one.
I mean, and I thought that the theological dimension is underplayed in when you pair it with the apology, but that's not really. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's still there, but you're right.
It's underplayed. Maybe that was the effect. Maybe it was intended effect was to diminish mitigate the how clear that is. Yeah.
I mean, one of the themes, again, we'll get to this in the second part, some more of it. It's good to have a little sort of anticipation, but I think one of the themes of the essay, obviously, is this idea of this irritating half-truth as you guys. Yes. And so one way to think about it is that by excluding the youth of Rodeys moved on before this irritating half-truth, maybe to the another part of or the completion of this half-truth with this larger image of the philosophic life outside of the constraints of the question of Socrates, Piety.
Mm. I mean, great. Yeah. So that's a good suggestion.
Strauss is also in the 1952 lecture, very clear that the youth of throw, according to him, is an unusually radical dialogue. Right. I mean, we tried to understand earlier why Strauss did not publish any of his pieces on the youth of throw, or most importantly, the worked out lecture from 1942 to 1952. And it might have been that he didn't come around to understand the difference between Piety and holiness.
It might also have been he might have had other reasons and one possible reason is that it just the theological questions are discussed here more clearly, more radically, more overtly than in many, most or any of Strauss's other writings. I mean, I think that's probably why I find it extremely helpful as someone who's interested in the core issues of the youth of throw is here. We get to hear from Strauss about things like the primacy of the ideas versus the primacy of contingency. That is something that we don't often find disgusting and Strauss in such explicit terms.
No, we should definitely get to that. Can I just specify what the half-human is not easy. The irritating half-truth irritating to whom and what irritating me, one preliminary formulation of the every time I have to do this is the obverse or 50% of something and the other side is popular. The irritating half-truth is that the gods don't exist and Piety superfluous or Pities false.
It's a refutation or something like that. And the other one me calls it popular. It's more than irritating, by the way. That's like, sorry.
It's irritating in the sense that the neo-life explains why there's so much Piety or something. But actually, it's not quite. It's not even that because you're irritating half-truth already includes the statement that Piety is needed for society or for the man. It's nevertheless irritating.
Now, is irritating a slur or is it in any case half-truth is a slur because it's not completely clear at least what specifically it is that the Pities is unnecessary superfluous or excessive. Super superfluous would mean extreme and excessive false or impossible and excessive peritone. The Greek word for odd and excessive. So it's something about irritating half-truth.
It has to be dropped because it's kind of goes to the heart of things and it's more to the second half of the time. Yeah. Yeah. So let's hold up because I think Wade has a very interesting way to handle it, who contributes an essay, his interpretation of Strauss' lecture on Piety.
He has interesting suggestions that are helpful here. Not to pivot completely and if you want to return to the subject, please let me know. But the one thing that I think is interesting in this volume that we haven't talked about is Strauss' marginalia to the Greek text of the UFO, which just made me, of course, like, to put a whole episode just to the archival stuff. How many of his books remain with all these markups?
I mean, you sort of wonder what's going on. I've gone through a lot of the stuff at the Beno Dedi archive. I was there when some were in grad school helping scan and photocopy things. And I found one page where he was trying out different titles for his book on the crickies and fagers, crossing things out, rewriting different ones.
And then also Doodles of Birds. He was apparently very good. I see drew pictures of all the different birds in Herodotus on one page. There's all sorts of funny things and interesting, obviously reflections.
But Beno Dedi's books, I think, were dispersed. Some of them were Yale, some of them went to friend. Private collection. Yeah, private collections.
I mean, I have a copy of Klein's trilogy book that was apparently owned by Anastoppa, which he marked up, which is kind of odd pairing to think of. But Anastoppa probably read everything that was written. But I would have just, how much of these marginalia, these kind of notes in his books, how much of his own sort of library remains? So far, his library is largely still all complete.
It's not entirely complete. So some of the books were given away at various points. So I know, for example, that the trousers, Machiavelli editions are in private possession. And some of Strauss's own books, so his own copies of his own books in which he made corrections in marginalia, some of which were published in the German version of the Kuzamat and Shrift and the collected essays are in private possession.
But Strauss's library, as we speak, is still complete and in one hand. Yeah, I think there are discussions going on because obviously it would be great to have long-term access to them. So, for example, I'll give you an example. Avant's, Hannah Avant's, Marginalea, or Skant, and you can just look them up online.
And it's kind of cool. I mean, to give you one example that most listeners here will care about, she has two books by Strauss that she partly read and underlined and has a few marginalia notes on. And some of that is pretty remarkable. So, just to give you a sneak peek, there's an addition, a German addition of Heidegger's being in time, which Strauss comments on pretty excessively in the Marginalea.
But Marginalea notes are, I mean, I don't want to overplay the Strauss's handwriting is so hard to read argument, but the Strauss's Marginalea are definitely hard to read. So, we alluded to this briefly before, Strauss, for some reason, loved to write in pencil. And he didn't like to sharpen his pencil apparently. And some of these Marginalea, you really have a hard time figuring out whether it's Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, or German.
And since it could be any of the above, it's... Is there a usual argument? Is there a usual argument? The Hebrew is Uwaki.
I think the Hebrew is can be ruled out. Is there a there? Is it usually right in English or in German and Marginalea? Or is it legal parts?
It really depends. So, when he thinks of a Greek word, he writes it in Greek, or an Arabic word, he will write it in Arabic, similar with German or French. But most of his... If I had to guess, and partly shooting from a hip here, but I would say that 90% of his notes in during his time, written during his time in the States, are written in English.
Like the notebook, for example, which he wrote largely for himself, right, in preparation for seminars. But that was obviously written in English at a time when he was pretty comfortable. That's fascinating to me. Maybe not entirely comfortable.
Do you write notes in German or English to yourself when you're reading? It depends on the author. So, when I typically write about Strauss and American authors in English I also take my own notes in English, whereas when I'm writing or reading a lesson, which is my day job, and other enlightenment figures I typically write in German. It's also like the language you're reading, right?
And I think Strauss says pretty clear. The only example that comes to mind where he writes in German later on, somewhat consistently is in the Heidegger notes. Is that right, Sir? Yeah, for sure.
In the Heidegger notes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of 50-50, but there's a lot of German there.
And there's a whole pages where he would write out something in German, which is unusual at that point. But there's, I mean, I'll give an example since it's too much of a teaser. And I wanted to say about the Benedict translation very quickly. When Heidegger cites the question of time when he cites physics, delta, no soul, no time, Strauss has a marginalume, let's say, to Lucretius book one, I don't know something like 500.
So this is by itself, and he's very spare. He's very very easy to decipher because he's so gracious, it's something. And there's a number. And you have to then compare physics with Aristotle and the Newton's understanding of time and mortality and soul.
And the Benedict translation is a little bit later than 50-20. Yeah, it is from around 1960. If you own an old copy of Mucin Maris Parabi's Plato, you see an announcement that the lesser dialogues, interesting, the lesser dialogues will come out of Plato's will come out in three volumes. They'll be edited and translated by Ellen Bloom, obviously the ionic organism, the minus and the user for what's going to be one of them.
One of them, the translation. Yeah, I remember seeing that wondering what eventually happened to that because obviously that's became the roots of political philosophy. And that's another question on this. On the subject of Strauss' handwriting, you kind of half-anserted this on Twitter by Joey Keegan, who's a graduate student at Tulane, and says, how in the world do you read Strauss' handwriting?
You answered that with practice. But you really carefully avoided the second question, which is, do you think he deliberately wrote, allegedly, for esoteric reasons? No. I mean, Strauss' handwriting isn't notoriously hard to read, right?
And to most people, I've put some of the manuscripts on Twitter that we feature in this, or photos of some of the manuscripts on Twitter. Of notes that we feature in our volume. And it looks a bit hieroglyphic. And I think it is hard to read, and especially after his heart attack in the mid-1950s, gets a bit harder.
And towards the end of his life in the 1970s, it gets extremely hard. So there's one lecture that I just recently became aware of that he wrote in 1973, I think, and on the laws that is very, just very, very shaky, the handwriting of an old man. And that is hard to read, was noticed by many of his contemporaries. So if you read the correspondences, like, yeah, how Kluge has his wife, disciple Strauss' letters, and Kahlouvitz says somewhere that the Rockefeller Foundation, which paid Strauss' fellowship during the 1930s, would do good for the world if it paid for a typewriter for Strauss.
And that's certainly true, Strauss acknowledges that. But I think it is important to avoid, I don't want to give feed, I don't want to feed the misimpression that Strauss' handwriting is bad or messy. It's certainly not messy. It's highly regular, and therefore you can learn it.
So to just give you an example, the word the THE is like one wiggle in Strauss. And once you've realized that, you can pretty easily identify it. And he also writes the same words or even the same syllables in the same way in different places. So it is pretty regular, at least for certain periods of his life.
Certain phrases. And you can read it. You can learn to read it, I think. And there are passages and sometimes words where Zarka and I will puzzle over them for weeks.
And then sometimes when you know, you know, when you know the word, it's easier. And I think we both have, it's our experience that when you know the subject, it's easier to read something. It's much harder when you just have one random note from some folder. It's very hard to realize what you're seeing.
And to answer that question, was Strauss' handwriting sort of a way to be esoteric? I think that's really not the case. Strauss' handwriting is the handwriting of the man who wrote a lot with his hand. And he was clearly thinking out, sort of not loud, but thinking out on page.
And he wrote notes to himself. I mean, sometimes he had to pay a certain price for his handwriting. So to give you one example, the lecture that we recently published in interpretation, on higher education at the crisis of our time, that Strauss had to read out in front of 900 people with TV cameras present, apparently. And the lights were kind of blinding him and he couldn't read the manuscript of which he himself admits it's not of perfect readability.
But there again, that is written pencil and pencil or pen that makes a real difference. So we all have to be grateful to Milium Schaus, who gave her husband, Waterman, in 1938. And thereafter, it's much easier to read it. And we all have to raise a glass to Milium tonight.
You know, I mean, my handwriting is pretty bad. And I can't read after a while. I can't imagine that. I feel like Strauss by the time he gets the other word, he has no idea what he's read to me.
So I'd like to transition to this point to asking about you guys own an electrical experience. But before I do anything, just we're going to get to the substance of the stuff in the second episode. For the first episode, any sort of concluding thoughts, anything we missed that you guys want to mention about the projects, doing it, where are you going from here, where are the next steps? Are there other books in the pike?
Like did you find any note? Like, you know, Bloom is a jerk and we should fail him. He's shaking head. He has to go naturally.
Like any other nuggets you have for the books at home before we transition to just talk about you guys. We can just mention some more. I think we should delay that as infinitely. But I think there's also a notebook on the statesman that's quite remarkable for me.
The jewels really are the guide, which is a complete commentary. That's the longest. The whole guide on the whole guide. And I'm going to jump to because I noticed that introduction to the penis translation of Pines is really only on part one.
It goes up to two, which is what Strauss intended to clarify for himself, the planless mess of part one of the guide. But there's many sections and stretches that we don't have any commentary. The earlier commentary. So the guide would be a remarkable thing.
And then a statesman, later statesman. That's the most remarkable seminars he ever taught in 1954. And it's a complete interpretation. The end line by line, longer, of course, whether it's the dialogue is longer.
So those are two teas or other things surprising things like a course on the US Constitution. At the New School of Interclusion and Independence. And there's these more religious writings connected with you for a Pascal and Kierkegaard. So those are the things you guys are planning to publish some of these or all these or Hahnis being German.
I suspect an encyclopedic system of these things. I think something like, I think at least there could be ten good volumes of such materials. Wow, that's great. Well, at this point, let me just ask you guys about, we have guests on, we asked them about the running electoral history.
So two kind of focuses here. One is just how did you get into a little philosophy generally? If you always know, were you a young kid, did you have an opponent by accident? And then the same kind of question for you.
How did you come to be interested in Strauss's works? Hahnis, why don't you go first and insert? So I had as a high school student, I had to become a historian, study history, and then I got to know Anna Mansfield, who you've had on the program. And she introduced me as a high school student to the seminars of Heinrich Meyer at Munich.
And I've learned a tremendous amount from him. He didn't teach the first couple of years that I studied philosophy in Munich. But I got to know him very well when I was at the University at the Committee on Social Thought in Chicago and have studied under him. And my plan had always been to read lessons since a young high school student.
And I had planned to do that in a more historical fashion and then got to writing on lessons for my PhD. And that was my first book. And Strauss was, for me, at the beginning, a distraction. I mean, I still consider it my sidekick and sort of my luxury program.
It's sort of fun for me to work on Strauss and fun to do this archival work. And I really enjoyed doing it. But now that I've decided to write a book on Strauss, I have to be a bit more serious. I've started to consider myself as a Strauss scholar and I've published the Fair bit on Strauss.
By now I plan to do more of that soon. How did you find a lesson? Just you said you said you... I think it's a household name in Germany.
So his plays are still very much put on stage regularly. And Nathan Wise, who's most important or at least best known work, is read by every high school student in Germany. And we read it in high school and it really made a deep impression on me, even though I wasn't able to quite articulate it. And right now when I'm not working on Strauss, I'm doing an English language translation of me.
I'm working on an English translation of Nathan Wise with Martin Yaffy. So I'm coming back to that and I'm very excited about that. Well, we'll look forward to having an episode on that when that book comes out. You'll have to do DeFragist as well.
When I was studying Nietzsche's Bianca and Evil, I went to find an English translation. The last one was like a hundred years old. It was just so dated. And less things were not in print anymore in English.
Yes. I mean, less things work have not been systematically translated into English. Most of his smaller lesser known plays are not in print or in print with really inadequate transitions. So in the fall in Chicago, we'll do a staging of Filotas, one of his very early fun plays.
There's a new translation in the works as well. Very cool. Well, Zarka, what about you? How did you happen upon the fair lady philosophy?
I grew up under communism. My father, my late father, was a philosophy professor and a sociologist. Where did you grow up? I grew up in Bulgaria, in Sofia.
Naturally. Naturally. I grew up in West Berlin, obviously not under communism, but still seeing it sort of at near distance. Yeah, sure.
Well, I think, yeah. And I went to, even though I grew up under communism, I went to Elise, which was the eccentric daughter of the dictator, was interested in ancient stuff. So she asked her father to allow the reopening of a classical essay. And I was able to go there.
So we studied Latin and Greek. And that's that. Did you know the daughter or was this a different generation? I think she looked up.
I think she either committed suicide or anyway died around just before I joined that. That can ask you. But not because of? Not because of you.
I mean, it was certainly somehow connected with the fact that she was also interested in opening up such schools. Right. Yeah, sure. That makes sense, actually.
Yeah. And you and your parents just had a, they sort of knew that that would be good for you. You knew it would be good for you. And you, when I was actually my sister who won there first and she was one of, she had to do this day.
She was one of the top Latinists in Greece, Latin and Greek, rather easily. She's one of the, she's the university of Kentucky. She's one of the people who speak these Latin. Yeah, there's a big institute there.
Yeah, she's right. Yeah, yeah, she's a little bit less. Okay. And then I, so I read Locke and Herodotus when I was a teenager and then I heard about Strauss, very incidentally, I went to the North Carolina first and then someone actually a student of Christopher Brolls who never published anything told me about Strauss and Jean-Puet, but then, but then Georgetown I heard even more and then went Chicago.
Any influential teachers? I mean, I mean, I mean, I, I mean, Jean-Puet, I like Jean-Straw, these are not people and then I go to Jim, with Pierre Hasner and the, and the, and the, and the, and the, and the, and the Tarko Graflerner, and I'm going to admit because I'm listening too many. Joseph Kroughsey. Very good.
And honestly, you mentioned some names too, but any other teachers that were instrumental along way, even at the beginning. Yeah, I mean, Ralph Lerner was. I didn't mention Ralph Lerner, my advisor and father, like figure. I took him for granted.
Yeah. Yeah. And then I was a professor at the University of South Carolina, Nathan Tarko, Robert Pippin in Chicago, where, where influential and certainly, and, and also Ralph gave me the best piece of advice when I was worried that philosophy. So Robert Pippin told me writing on a lesson in a philosophy department is professional suicide.
And Ralph Lerner said, for you writing about anything else is spiritual suicide. And that was very, very good advice and helped me along the way. And we'll see who was, who was right. I mean, it's entirely open with her.
And wasn't right that it was professional suicide. And I also had great, so my, my lesson work is very theological and I had great theologians in Munich with whom I worked, especially a guy called Joachlousda. He was extremely helpful. And there are others in Munich.
And I've been very fortunate at the University of Munich. I was sort of at the end of its most famous days. So I took seminars with Dita Henry and there was a seminar with you and Habermas, which was very important for me. And there were people like Christian Maya, a very famous historian who wrote on Greek and Roman History.
And so I was extremely fortunate at the University of Munich having a lot of great teachers. Yeah. Wow. I think this is a good time to end.
And as you heard, Hennes is having trouble getting a meal, right? Your spirit is fed, but not your body. So everybody should go pick up Leo Strauss on Plato's, the, the, who's the press? Alex.
Is this from Penn State University, so what's the title again? Leo Strauss on Plato. You can read it, Greg. I'm holding it up.
But it's the concept. The 1948 notebook with lectures and critical essays ended by Hennes Gilbert and so does our makeup. The press put out library copies of this book in there, 75 bucks, but there's a good way to getting a slice of that cut off. If you order the book through the universe, the Penn State University Press website and use promo code NR23.
So NR and then two, three, you get 30% off the book, which makes it somewhat more affordable. Yeah, worth every penny though. I know the paperback coming out officially, right? Yeah, for sure.
Yeah. Yeah. Natural, right. And Michael Jordan's Jersey number in our 23.
You heard it here, folks. You get no additional discount. But thanks for listening. We really appreciate it.
As Darco, we really appreciate you guys being here and folks at home stay tuned for next week's episode when we follow up with a little more substantial interpretation of the dialogue, the Youth Throw in Strauss's interpretation of it. Take care, folks. Don't forget to like, rate, subscribe, and subscribe. See you next week.