Strauss' Persecution and the Art of Writing | The New Thinkery Ep. 46

Welcome back to the new thinkery. I'm David Barr with me as always. It's my good friend Greg and the prayer. How are you Greg?

I'm doing great David. I'm so good to see you. I asked you to look full of life and joy. Yes, you expecting to expect child.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Any day now, even then we'll see how it goes. Yeah.

And Alex, how are you Alex? Doing well, David. I wish you a little higher energy. We've got a great topic today.

We got a lot of people excited but you are non plus. No, I know he's low E. Non plus means perplexed. Yeah, he's not non plus that's wrong.

But I use that word incorrectly for years Alex and then I looked up and was like, Oh man. So this happens every now and again. No, today's topic is interesting. I'll try and go by just that.

I'm afraid his name's David. Next point at the end. Maybe that'll pick him up some. Yeah.

So anyway, today's topic is Leo Strauss's famous essay persecution in the art of writing. Strauss is somebody that we're all connected to by I think one degree of removal. We're obviously except for Greg who's somehow both older than Leo Strauss and still alive. But each of us have had we've been taught I don't like to use the word trained.

We'll get into that too because it sounds like a call. We've all been branded as Strauss. He was talking puppies to training isn't the worst term. Yeah.

Yeah. And and so Leo Strauss was a German Jewish immigrant who fled the horrors of the Holocaust first of Europe and then he gets an appointment at the new school. He was born in 1899, I think. At the new school, he teaches there for a few years and then moves on to the University of Chicago.

He was there for a decade. He was there for a decade with a random one, I think a few other famous people. But it's just an interesting move over to the University of Chicago where he spends multiple decades. I think he does a quick trip out to the West Coast to Claremont Graduate School before finally settling with his good friend Jacob Klein retiring at St.

John's College in Annapolis. So Strauss is famous for many reasons, but I think it's really he helped revive political philosophy almost single-handedly and helped revive many of the themes that animate the discussion of political philosophy today in the United States, also in Europe, but he had fewer European students. So really his students, especially those during the Chicago years, have are still operating as wonderful professors throughout the country. And you can find them everywhere.

The best schools to small liberal arts schools to public universities, Charles Butterworth was my teacher at the University of Maryland. There were a chock full of Straussians at St. John's College in Annapolis. Alex studied at Tulane with Ronna Berger and Richard Valkley, who were both students of Straussians, students of Strauss's students.

And I'm already lapsing into kind of course-formed by using the word Straussians because we haven't quite explained what that meant, what that means or what Strauss wrought to the point where we can use his name as an ism. So maybe we can talk about that now. I think Greg should jump in here. He was supposed to talk about some core ideas or core distinctions and I think step to stage.

I think look, Straussians are not a unified group, but I do think there are certain basic concerns or distinctions invoked and sort of topics focused on that do you give it as nevertheless as it is some kind of unity. Much like rappers, there are the West Coast, East Coast, and they war upon one another, both looking in private. We bring it all together here. We do bring anything.

Let me say one thing too. Strauss got a bad name. Much of that came prior to the Warren Iraq, but it really intensified because of two authors and Norton in a Canadian name, Shadiya Drury. Don't forget that delirious.

I was one of those people who tried to rule over Virginia and heard a LaRouche ad for present where he talked about the evils of Strauss. So Strauss is, there's a lot of bad information, terrible scholarship where people said that Wolfowitz was a Strauss student, it's not true. Somehow Strauss is responsible for the neo-conservative outlook on foreign policy. We had Bill Kristalon as a guest in a wonderful episode a few episodes ago and as far as he knew, his father may have interacted with Strauss, but he was no Straussian.

So anyway, so that's in the background. So there's that Warren Iraq stuff, and then there's people that mistrust his hermeneutic or that had problems with his students, some of whom were quite outspoken. You have Alan Bloom who ruffled feathers and you have Harry Jaffa who ruffled feathers and you have all sorts of other people. And so Strauss's name, I think gets unfairly maligned thanks to the reputation of some of the students.

If you want the best, the best, most unfiltered understanding of Strauss, go to the Leo Strauss Center website at the University of Chicago and listen to the course transcripts. They have course audio, they have transcripts, they have audio for like over 20 years of his courses at the University of Chicago, listen to how he taught, listen to what he says in the classroom. I think he'd be hard pressed to find a more gentle and humane teacher than Strauss. So I just wanted to say that.

Well, that's really helpful. And you mentioned that Strauss was central to the revival of the serious study political philosophy. That's definitely true in the United States in the 20th century. I forget who the guests we had on, a couple of guests ago and they were talking about the main political theory textbooks prior to this, but it was Bill actually, I thought I was calling Wood in the sort of high level, broad overviews, treating these thinkers as though we've progressed and we sort of know more than these guys.

And you asked me what's central to Strauss, I would say, I'll develop some themes for a moment, but the biggest one is sort of really treating authors with a great deal of respect, treating texts with a great deal of respect. And in my own case, you know, I didn't hear the name Strauss until I was out of college. I didn't know that I'd been a student of, someone who was a student of student of Strauss at Bob Bartlett and University where I went to undergraduate. And what really, I mean, he didn't sort of, there was no indoctrination, there was just sort of, hey, open play with this protagonist and let's read aloud.

Let's treat these off authors as though they're at least as smart as we are, probably much smarter. And let's take seriously that this book might possess wisdom and might actually have something to teach us and that if we find some flaws in there, maybe there's something more going on. So for me, like I was a student of Bob Bartlett, he was a student of Pangol who's a term student of Strauss, we, David Knobov said, what about us? Who was a student of Strauss?

And my master's thesis advisor was a guy named Sheenie Miller who had Strauss and Hayek in his committee of Chicago. So this is, that's my indirect link. But when I was educated by other non-Strawsians, a lovely Catholic philosophy professor at Henry was a big influence on me and I was in Harlem. There are other influences, but I seem to really take into this approach to text, which as I mentioned, is just sort of, I mean, really it's just about opening up the books and reading them aloud, kind of what we've been doing on this podcast, trying to have serious conversation about these texts.

And I would just, I'll re-estate one more time that we think that these guys probably know more than we do. And as opposed to the older way of looking at the text, as we know more than they know now, with the benefit of high say, we can understand things better. So I'll just touch on a few of Strauss's central themes in brief and then transition us to the theme for today that was one of the big distinctions that Strauss draws is between ancient and modern political thought, another famous distinction is between reason and revelation. And then we'll talk about esotericism here, just a moment with regard to ancients and moderns.

There's one way of looking at the history of philosophy or political philosophy, even as sort of progressive that there's a kind of things are continuously changing. And I think that this is actually quite a common way of looking at the history of political thought, that there are these minor modifications along the way. Strauss comes along and says, no, there was a clear break, and there's a serious fundamental distinction between the ways that the ancients studied political phenomena and the way that the moderns studied political phenomena. And on the one hand, that means the ancients are the Socratic, so Plato, Aristotle, and those who were influenced by Socrates.

Strauss marks the beginning of the modern period at Machiavelli, which prior to Strauss in my understanding, folks marked the beginning of modernity much later, they didn't recognize the role that Machiavelli played in setting modernity on its footing. And by the way, Strauss himself didn't recognize early in his own career. He sort of traced it to Hobbes, one of his earliest manuscripts was on Hobbes, and he's just the political philosophy of Hobbes. And he later recants that I said, look, I made this book is still pretty good, but I made this fundamental error in attributing Hobbes, attributing two Hobbes, the title of founder of modernity, it's actually Machiavelli.

Let me just out a couple of the big differences between the ancient world and the modern world, and then I'll move to the second one, which by the way, the second one is tied to the first. The ancients were, geez, they were much less optimistic about hoping to have a serious profound political effect in the world. So philosophy was the privilege of a few, and mostly you just kind of talks to one another and maybe improve politics on margins. But beginning with Machiavelli, the moderns, their project is to change the world.

I mean, in a way Marx is sort of seeing the modern song and he says, philosophers thus far have only sought to understand the world, the point is to change it. Right, so that's a pretty big distinction. There are some others. I think one of the other big differences between ancients and moderns is how they treat religion, which leads into Strauss's second central, and I would say the central theme actually of Strauss's total thought is a reason versus revelation.

Agents tended to treat this question with a much greater degree of respect and humility, I would say, than modern steel. Beginning with Machiavelli, there's a sort of full frontal assault on religion. And in some cases, even in an attempt to try to persuade folks to not even worry about this problem as a fundamental problem, right, don't take religion seriously, these kind of things. For Strauss, the reason revelation alternative was one that would persist at all times in all places.

It's sort of coeval with the human condition. There's two, the third, and this is the one we'll talk about today, and Alex I think will tell us why we chose this particular theme. Look, we're all Strauss. We've been doing this, I don't like blaming myself, but it's fair.

We've been doing this podcast. There's been the Strauss and undercurrent, and we decided, you know what, we should probably do an episode on Strauss. And there was some discussion on what to do, and we decided to settle on this question of esotericism. So what does it mean?

I'll give a very broad, simple, account of what it means, and then we'll sort of problematize it as we go through the rest of the episodes. On the most superficial level, Strauss taught that most serious thinkers had at least two teachings in their writings, an exoteric teaching and an esoteric teaching. Now, that means by the way, it's an exterior teaching and an internal teaching, so that there was a surface reading of a text and that there was a deeper meaning to a text. Now, problem-sizing just a little bit, the external reading, the surface reading was to satisfy most people who would read, and the esoteric internal was meant for the few, those philosophers, or maybe potential philosophers.

You know, well, that's not the limit of what's going on here, but that people sort of didn't communicate openly in the past, I think, in their writings. Do you want to add anything simple to that or perform a one? Yeah, just to connect it to the ancient, modern distinction, you touched on this briefly about the optimism of modern thought as having an effect on the world. I think just to sort of clarify the distinction about the ancients, it's almost an ontological distinction.

That is to say, a distinction in being itself, that there's a tension between our communal or political life on the one hand and thinking they cannot be reconciled. Now, there's various reasons you could say that. It could just be persecution. It could be that what reason uncovers is not conducive to something like political action.

It could just be that you start to pick apart, you know, nobleize as Strauss puts it at one point, and as people make a lot of it. Then you go to modernity and you see with Machiavelli, this focus on effectual truth, a truth that can be effective in life that cannot be useful, as he says, to people who understand it. Or Bacon, who says that knowledge and power come into one, he's concerned with that part of knowledge that can be powerful and therefore amenable to politics. And so the reason the ancients, how agents and moderns are going to stress both the practice of form of hiding their thoughts, but the ancients, he maintains, have a different basis for it.

And that basis is this fundamental tension between, as he puts it elsewhere, between philosophy and the city or between thinking and the political community. And the modernists thought that we could enlighten people to a certain degree in improve politics, and that their astro-terrorism is a little different. That's right. Yeah.

Perhaps even it was some of them, perhaps we could enlighten them wholly one day, right? You're just hiding the truth because you don't want to get killed. That's going to be the most important. You're just hiding the truth because you don't want to be killed.

But if you can get people to start thinking a little different way, eventually there could be a time when people can say the thing that you would like to say, but won't have a sort of political prudence. Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. Sorry. And I just want to underscore this again.

This idea of this manner of writing is not unique to Strauss. There's a wonderful book by a man named Arthur Melser, I think, titled Philosophy Between the Lines. And Bill Crystal did a wonderful interview with Melser on his podcast Conversations, all about that book. And it's a history of esoteric writing.

And what he demonstrates, and then it has an appendix that he's made for beyond the grind out. Yeah. For anybody that's curious to just look this up, the famous thing. He keeps adding to it online, because it's constantly growing, because there's so many examples.

He has one in the book, but he has a version, I think, on his website or something like that, that just adds more and more examples of philosophers suggesting this. Yeah, sometimes very explicitly saying it, about their writing and about the writing of other philosophers, of their peers. And so this so Strauss's great contribution, one of his great contributions, so since we're talking about esoteric writing, is contribution to esoteric writing is a reminder or revival of spotting this kind of work. Right.

I mean, the best, okay, so let me know that was great. I'll stop there. No, that was really helpful. Can I do something this isn't an enough show, but so esotericism can sound, we have different kind of audience members, we have Strauss in the audience that I've done with this means, but that way people who are like, what does this mean?

It sounds as if it's a character, so it sounds so terrorism, it sounds like a loop in these things. Somebody's got a common sense account of this and I'll try and walk through it. David will helpfully play along with me here in just a moment. I'll ask him a couple of questions, but all this is really saying is something that I think almost all human beings common sensibly agree to, okay, that you say different things to different people.

Very simple, right? You speak to people differently. Let me just, David, if you'll amuse me, what did you do yesterday, David? I went for a run.

Great. That's exciting. Okay, now, see, he went for a run 10 miles. Those of you who listened to the episode on Socrates and symposium, 2.5 miles.

All right, now here's what I'd like to do. So David, I want you to imagine that your child asks you what you did yesterday. How would you respond to your child? What did you do yesterday?

Daddy, I love you, Daddy, Daddy bar. What did you do yesterday? Daddy, I went outside and I played in the sun. Okay, now imagine that your wife asked you what you did yesterday.

Yeah, I devoted two hours to getting in shape so I can live longer as the breadwinner of the home. All right, very good. What would you tell your doctor? You did yesterday.

Same. Yeah, more clinical, though. Yeah, okay. Now imagine that we're not recording and Alice asked you what you did yesterday.

Munch of bullsh**. See, exactly. All right. So this is a similar example.

We are recording. Yeah, we are recording right now. But the point is like, this isn't I don't think this is that problematic. I think people actually know this.

You speak to your mother differently than you speak to your front buddy Chad, right? I mean, like, that's just the way the world is. Well, my favorite example is you the story of Santa Claus, right? We have to talk about Santa Claus and do with our children in one way.

And then we talk about amongst ourselves and grownups. So they're salutary things. They're a multiplicity of reasons to engage in esoteric writing. They're all kinds of reasons.

There are reasons or persecution, which is our great theme of today. But I think one of the things that people think is that it's necessarily nefarious or subversive or something like that. And this is why I'm not simply well, like, well, my buddy doesn't need to know about my dietary habits. I can just tell him, I was reading and had a drink or something like this.

But sometimes it's just selectively telling people stuff or even their capacities. Like you're not going to explain to a child what you're doing because of your cholesterol. Right. I mean, and their teaching is a good example because I go into class and I could analyze, you know, if we're reading the Republic, I could analyze the Greek in great detail, right?

Sure. And I could break down what I think is interesting that's happening on a sort of grammatical level of the text. And all my freshman students who are engineering majors and none of them has any Greek are just going to be left in the dust. Right.

So I have to simplify the meanings, simplify what I think is going on. And sometimes even just gloss over problems, because I have to move on. Yeah. Even if I do start getting into those problems, I have to get them a rudimentary form of it.

Right. And that's a kind of pedagogical function. But then I think there's a different one, which is if I get pulled over by the cops, I'm going to say, yes, sir, yes, ma'am. I'm really sorry, I didn't mean to be going so fast.

You would deny the forever part of a person's drugs where it's like you're driving too fast. I'll be like, shut up old man. That's actually a real life example. Yeah.

So I think we acknowledge that this happens now. When it comes to something like political authority, and when it comes to something like what are considered what's considered acceptable in polite society, yeah, a high degree of this happens. So we would love to we would love as members of the New Thinkery to give you guys an unfiltered uncensored uncut raw version of what our conversations actually sound like. But we all have to stay employed.

So at least David and Alex do I don't know the problem. Yeah. You're already getting your social security checks. So I wanted to spell some sort of myths around this.

One of the reasons I want to do this is because this is this is easily the most controversial of great Strauss's writings and the one that gets consequently most mischaracter. And we mentioned people like Ann Norton and Shadi Dury who are very unserious, but there's some very serious scholars in the history of political philosophy like POCOC and Skinner and people like that who offer a comment very brief. They never really give it a thorough treatment offer comments on Strauss's method, setting it aside and continue to do what they do. So I'll raise a few of these.

So POCOC says one of the problems with giving an esoteric reading or reading between the lines is that whatever you come up with is going to be non falsifiable. That is, you can't disprove an esoteric reading. And that means essentially that you have free rain. Now there's something true to this.

And I think Strauss acknowledges this as we'll see in the text itself that there's inherently going to be controversies that arise in a lack of confirmation. The difficulty is that's kind of the point. If you're trying to avoid people being able to prove that you think something's something's if you're trying to avoid people trying to prove that you're saying something that's that's unallowed or that's not that could get you persecuted, you have to put it in a way that can't be demonstrated. So there's a kind of subjective quality that he admits this.

Quinn Skinner, another famous commenter on Machiavelli's text, which takes me two assumptions. One is that to be original is to be subversive. I think this is an interesting claim. I think it's somewhat of a mischaracterization.

I don't think originality is a concern. But and the second one is all interpretations are insulated against criticism by the claims that its critics are thoughtless men. Now one of the things that I think makes some of these criticisms powerful is certain Strauss who's do engage in this sort of stuff. They dismiss those who disagree as ignorant.

They're oracular in their character. They say things that are really seem to be flights of fancy and not grounded. And I think sometimes avoid Strauss's own method. Skinner goes on to critique this manner of reading as leading to mythological accounts.

And I think he does that because he doesn't really delve deeper in some of Strauss's other methodological comments. There's also more recent piece by Guy Niv Adrienne Blau. And he points out that just because somebody says you need to read carefully does not mean they write carefully. But we have to also be aware of the fact that certain mistakes as Strauss are just too rudimentary, too obvious, too glaring, that people would have certainly been attentive to it.

And he also points out that there are degrees of carefulness in reading and writing. Again, I think this is something Strauss himself admits. So I think we need to take a step back and say, all right, whenever you hear about reading between the lines and how some people aren't smart enough to figure it out, there's always a tendency to see this as just sort of misalitism, arrogance, hubris. You're just going over the top with your own sort of sense of yourself, as this sort of deep thinker.

But we also have to pay attention to the fact that Strauss does point out that this is actually a phenomenon, right? It has actually occurred. And it's got certain difficulties that necessarily attend trying to figure it out. But it is a political phenomenon, an intellectual phenomenon, and what we need to look out for, and what we need to take seriously.

The problem with arguments and criticisms like these is that they reject on the sort of argument of grounds because you can't prove something for sure. Or because there might be degrees, you don't know how careful they're being. They reject the approach out of hand. But that is to reject, as certain people say, as my monadies admits that he writes this way, as many people admit that he's the best example, his introduction to the guide for the perplexed gives the best.

He tells you, he said, I'm going to give you like 15 ground rules for how to read my book. I had the right to read. So, I mentioned, you mentioned, I got you off. Let me mention this point.

I didn't jump in the code. Let me just finish this point. Just simply that, if you simply reject out of hand that this is happening, don't pay attention to actual evidence that it's happening. You've completely gotten rid of what could be one of the most interesting aspects of history or philosophy, and you've taken it off the table.

Sorry, I just want to finish the point. So, my monadies, here it is. Introduction with respect to the reader. This is from my monadies guide to the flex.

This is what translation is this I'm using, David? The penis translation. That's correct. Thank you.

Blow up. Yep. So, he says, this is my monadies. If you wish to grasp the totality of what this treat is contained, so that nothing of it will escape you, then you must connect its chapters one with another.

And when reading a given chapter, your intention must be not only to understand the totality of the subject of that chapter, but also to grasp each word that occurs in it. In the course of the speech, even if that word does not belong to the intention of the chapter, for the diction of this treatise has not been chosen at haphazard, but with great exactness and exceeding precision, and with care to avoid failing to explain any obscure point. And nothing has been mentioned out of its place, save with a view to explaining some matter in its proper place. And then he goes on and says, this is a little bit later, I was on page 17 in the translation by University of Chicago Press.

He says, one of seven causes should account for the contradictory or contrary statements to be found in any book or compilation. I'm just going to pause reading in for a second. He's just told you, I'm going to contradict myself and say things contrary to what I'm saying. I agree with you guys.

I think in the history of political thought, I can't think of a clearer example of somebody who who proclaims that he writes esotericly than my mind. And I'll just say though, as inside, I met one of the world's most well respected my Monty scholars from Israel, and he denied that. So even it's possible to deny that my Monty's wrote esotericly. People deny this, even though it seems so patently obvious.

So I don't have to go through them, but he goes through seven reasons why he would contradict himself. And I don't think that it's worth maybe the last one, this is the seventh God. And speaking about matters, very obscure matters to be matters, excuse me. And speaking about very obscure matters that is necessary to conceal some parts to disclose others.

He's told you he's going to just conceal things from the good. Do you have that passage in front of you? I wanted to get in before you close the book. The passage where he describes it as like an orb, a silver orb with little islets that show you.

Yeah, with gold inside. Gold inside. I mean, it's a striking thing that, you know, from afar it looks to be silver, which is beautiful and precious. But if you can see through little glimpses, you see that the core is actually of gold, but you can't see it unless you're they apples.

It was something interesting. There's no reason to read. I just, I just, there's another Alforabi a philosopher, my monadies, greatly admired in the introduction to his interpretation of the laws. Is it Greg?

Yeah. He has this parable of a drunk that's known as the non-drunk, an obstinious aesthetic that he pretends to be drunk. Yeah, he pretends to be drunk. Yeah, totally big difference.

Yeah. And he uses that little story to explain what he's going to do. That's exactly. And he says, Alforabi said, this is how Plato wrote.

Yeah. What's the story really quick? Sure, really quickly. This is the beginning of his palphorabi summary of Plato's laws.

Now, for Robbie and the church, it says, you know, well, the problem is you've got to really figure out how Plato wrote. And instead of telling you, I was going to tell you a story. There was once in a town, an obstinious aesthetic who had a reputation for wisdom. And somehow he ran afoul of the ruler of that town who wanted to catch him and potentially put him to death.

And so our obstinious aesthetic dressed in hobo clothes and pretended to be drunk and went to the gate of the town to leave. And the gatekeeper said, who are you? And the obstinious aesthetic says, I'm so and so would the obstinious aesthetic pretend to be drunk. And the guy in the guard laughs and lets him leave.

And then Alforabi says, thus he didn't have to lie. And so he told the truth, but somehow still hid what he was saying. And then by the way, at the very end of that, Alforabi says, in order to be able to understand people who wrote like Plato, you have to be one yourself. So Alforabi sort of very clearly indicates that he's up to what his at least what his Plato was up to, if not with the actual Plato's up to.

Yeah, that's right. Very good. Right. So the place that Strauss advances this thesis, most powerfully is in his book, Persecution and the Art of Writing, which is so named after the title essay, which is actually chapter two.

First chapter is a preface and then there's an introduction, which kind of lays out the basic idea, and then talks about how this is a revival of something to be found in medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophy. Chapter two is then called persecution in the art of writing. And then we get three more chapters, each on a different example or text. What is my monadies guy for the perplexed?

The second is on the gusari by Yudha Levy. And the third is on Spinoza's theological political treatise. And they're all very much focused on the literary aspects or how these people wrote. We're going to stick other all Jewish philosophers.

Yeah, that's another part. Yeah, they're all Jewish philosophers. So the book talks quite a bit about Islamic philosophy in the interest. Well, I was going to say, so the structure of the book and we'll get to this in just a moment, but really what's interesting is how medieval what Strauss is up to here.

So my monadies even Spinoza, of course, being an early modern. But the idea is that Strauss seems to have rediscovered, no, he doesn't seem to it. Strauss rediscovered esoteric writing through the medieval. Right.

And so this book strikes one immediately as extraordinarily Jewish. Right. Calevi monadies Spinoza, but then the first chapter actually is a revision of his chapter. He wrote for another book on Al-Frawdi.

So he removes Al-Frawdi from the title, I guess, to maintain the appearance of this as if they were going to lead Jewish book. But the first chapter is for Abi, a central, and I think the original chapter title was for Abi's Plato or something, but he changes it. So you get this, I mean, it's still all medieval. And by the way, therefore, I think you get an acknowledgement that David already alluded to that my monadies was deeply indebted to Al-Frawdi and his understanding of politics and how to write about philosophy.

Yeah. Sorry, you were doing it. Yeah. So let's jump into the first chapter, which I think you're sort of gone into, but I think that's a really important point.

He's clean. So he presents it like he's, look, we need a sociology of knowledge really, part of it would be sociology of philosophy. But if you want to really make a sociology of philosophy, that's not really starting something new. It's actually recovering something old, and this is this medieval aspect.

So maybe you can write it. No, no, no, go ahead. I actually have a question for you that I don't really understand. I found it curious.

Why would he say sociology instead of history? We get history of knowledge or something like this, or a story of knowledge. I don't know, maybe this will connect to what comes later in chapter two, but is it that sociology is more obviously linked to contemporary social science, and therefore, it's this problematic field. And so because we're doing sociology, it makes it harder to recover this medieval practice.

I mean, I don't know if I'm articulating that. No, I think it's because it's an established academic discipline. I think one of the, I mean, it's, it's a academic discipline that doesn't do, that can't quite do what it wants to do as far as it's based on these premises that are flawed, right? Which is why this recovery is necessary.

Yeah. And one of the aspects that runs throughout this book is that Strauss is very, very consciously writing for an academic or scholarly audience, right? This comes up specifically in the second chapter when he talks about how the modern historian proceeds, and then he gives some guidance for how they might proceed in light of his observations, right? He seems to be trying in a way to educate scholars in how they can begin to start working on this.

So I think he starts on sociology knowledge because it's an existing discipline. There isn't a sort of political science of knowledge, at least at the time. And so he starts from there. And then, so he shows that this is a concern we already have, yet it's somewhat underdeveloped.

And if it's going to develop, it needs to at some point, and he actually says at one point, it's going to happen with you. Like it or not eventually, they're going to have to take into account this aspect of persecution. So I think that's why he begins from there. Okay, only one small point is that he quickly moves from sociology knowledge to sociology philosophy, right?

Because philosophy is, it seems as a sub-branch of the study of sociology of knowledge. So there's something peculiar or a particular about the way that philosophy is done assisting from other forms of knowing. It was seen. Yeah.

So I guess I've already touched on this a little bit, but really what's going on in the first chapter is Strauss trying to reestablish or restore or recover this medieval mode of doing philosophy. And we've already mentioned this as well, but he really is focusing on, especially the Jewish, but also the Islamic medieval Islamic political philosophers listeners will have heard several of our episodes on Farabi with Charles Butterworth and Islamic philosophy generally. And we did a Veroise and Abazalee. And actually, we have three upcoming episodes on Maimonides, in fact, what's worth.

We're going to do eight chapters with Charles Butterworth, Joshua Perrin's, the dean of the graduate school, Lewis and Dallas, is going to give us an overview of the guide and focus on a few key passages. And David Barr is also going to give us some interesting insights into the guide to the blacks. We've got some stuff going on with the Jewish.com. So you choose some hemorrhoids.

Doing one of those shorter, my mindy and writings. Okay, thank you. That's right. That's right.

So what's interesting is that now if you're out there and you're not a Strauss, you know, you haven't heard this before, you're like, well, you're like any ordinary person, you're asking, what about Christianity? Why is Strauss focusing principally on Judaism and Islam? And I think that there are some answers there that are going to go a little bit beyond what we have to say. But I think that what's interesting about Christianity is that, and I hear him on page 21 in the text, trying to find this page real quick, what's interesting is that in the Christian world philosophy sort of gets sanctioned and it gets subsumed.

And so what's counterintuitive here is that Strauss seems to be implying that philosophy performs better actually when it's being persecuted. And so it's the accommodation of philosophy is problematic. As on page 21, he says, the official recognition of philosophy in the Christian world made philosophy subject to ecclesiastical supervision. And so unlike in the Islamic and Jewish world where Christianity always remained outside of the ecclesiastical religious authority in Christianity, it was brought under the authority of Christianity.

And therefore it wasn't free, it wasn't fully free to pursue philosophical ingredients in the same way as it was in Judaism and Islam. We'll probably have a push back on this. But there's also central courses that both Judaism and Islam are law-based religions, whereas Christianity is a faith-based religion. So while it is true that Islam and Judaism are concerned with the opinions of the inhabitants and adherents to its religion, Christianity is to a much greater extent concerned with the beliefs of its adherence.

Can I go ahead, please? Yeah. And so one thing Strauss says on page 19 as well, that's as he says, for the Christian, the sacred doctrine is the top of the page is revealed theology for the Jew and the Muslim. The sacred doctrine is at least primarily the legal interpretation of the divine law, which is to say that the Christian doctrine, because it is theology, it essentially has as part of its project a reason, right?

Reasing about the gods. And therefore it's more fundamental mode is something like persuasion. But if what you do is legally interpreting the divine law and applying it and saying whether something is listed or not, which you're essentially deciding is who should be punished and who should be not, and you're commanding people to obey when you've got much more practical. Yeah.

And so when you introduce persuasion, you've got room for philosophy in a way that you don't have it if what you're doing is commanding adherence. Right. But I mean, this is really counter to it. So therefore, I mean, what it sounds like, therefore, is the lesser philosophic religions are more conducive to philosophy, right?

The one that actually has quantum philosophic, it seems to be a problem. And I wonder what extent maybe I don't think this is this probably taking us too far field, to what extent modernity comes out of Christianity and therefore the later modern problems and why also terrorism goes away doesn't actually have some Christian roots. Yeah, what else, please? Yeah.

And I think this ultimately goes back to Plato's, across the just, when he talks about Plato's combining the way of Socrates with the way of the semicolon. You mean for Robbie, sorry. Yeah. So you said Plato, okay.

So you know what he meant? His book, the Plato got it. Sorry. No, no, no, I meant for Robbie, when he says that Plato combined these two ways, which is actually philosophy and rhetoric, he made philosophy more comfortable in the city.

There's an undercurrent here of Nietzsche that's, for instance, the esoteric exo-territ distinction is one advanced by Nietzsche and his book, Beyond Good and Evil and Strauss Love Nietzsche when he was young. And in addition, this idea that somehow Christianity is getting in the way of philosophy in a way that Judaism does not. I think that's also Nietzsche thought from the third chapter of Beyond Good and Evil. I think what's different is Strauss sees Farabi as diagnosing in a way Plato's blurring of the problem by taking a more rhetorical approach.

Yeah. So I mean, in a way, here is over into the second chapter. Do we want to move past the first chapter? If you don't mind, I have a couple comments left to say, we kind of already teased this out, but Strauss seems to have rediscovered esoteric writing in Maimonides, but then Maimonides pointed him back to Alvarabi.

And so he found esotericism in Alvarabi, and it's an Alvarabi pointed him back to the ancients who wrote esotericly. So I mean, I think the probably the common conceptions that Strauss discovered that Plato wrote esotericly. And that's not quite accurate. My understanding of history is the route to Plato was Maimonides Alvarabi Plato.

And in chapter one, which is basically an account of Alvarabi's Plato, I should at least make a couple of marks here. This is where I think the esotericism gets, well, I suppose esoteric. This chapter is more or less a commentary on a very short work about Arabis called the philosophy of Plato. The philosophy of Plato itself is a part of a trilogy called the attainment of happiness trilogy, which Charles Baderworth has translated.

The first part of the trilogy is probably called the attainment of happiness. The second part is called the philosophy of Plato. And the third part is called the philosophy of Aristotle. Now Strauss in this chapter makes the claim, a very strange claim that the philosophy of Plato presents Alvarabi's view more clearly than anything else that he wrote.

This would be a strange form of Arabis, but perhaps not in common for a scholar to put his thoughts most clearly in what appeared to be merely a commentary on the text of another. Let me just briefly say that the philosophy of Plato, the book by Alvarabi, pretends, makes pretense of being a comprehensive account of Plato's philosophy. It includes a discussion of all of the dialogues purportedly, although it doesn't actually it emits a few, but it's an invents a few to get right back up to the correct number of platonic dialogues. What's curious about Alvarabi's account of Plato is that if you took your philosophy 100 class, just about everything you learned about Plato, Alvarabi is entirely silent on.

Strauss's for Robbie, therefore, I think, takes it that the most popular parts of Plato's dialogues are the exoteric teachings of Plato's dialogues. It's the poetic part that Plato preserved on the outside as the sweet casing in which to bring in the fiber, as it were. For example, Alvarabi's Plato was silent on the immortality of the soul. Alvarabi's Plato was silent on the forms, which is to say, I think, Strauss's for Robbie thinks that the forms are Plato's exoteric teaching, not his real teaching.

In other words, yeah, go ahead. And this is Strauss's emphasis. This is despite the fact that the prevailing interpretation of Plato is neo-platism, which precisely emphasizes forms of immortality, according to them, that's like all he talks about, right? That's right.

Quite the first. Which I think Strauss interprets that to me that you cannot take Farabi as having been a non-careful reader of Plato because he would have gone with the most non-careful reading available to him. But as somebody who was a careful thinker about it, and therefore who understood, it was more to it, and therefore must have agreed to some extent with him in getting to these teachings. That's exactly right.

Therefore, he could have easily given a religious interpretation, but instead he gives an account that's very critical. So suggesting that those are Farabi's own views as well, right? Yeah, that's very good. Whereas, so this is a good example to press a little bit then.

So I think Strauss says this in this chapter, but in Farabi's most accessible political works, Al-Farrabi promotes a more conventional account of immortality and heaven and the soul. And as you get into his more esoteric works, that would get so in one work, for example, Farabi said, the soul of everyone lives after death. And another slightly less popular, he says, only the souls of the good live after death that we could annihilate it. And then, according to Ibn Tafil, who is a medieval Arab thinker who lived in Ndalusia, in Al-Farrabi's commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, Al-Farrabi says, look, all this, the more italic talk is that's old wives' tales.

So there's another example of potentially him laying out his less popular teachings and what appeared to be esoteric, or even just commentaries. Never again. Let's jump to chapter two now. Let's do it.

Yeah. So I want to, so in the preface, Strauss says, when he's describing what he talks about, he says, in the article, persecution, the art of writing that is the second chapter. I've tried to elucidate the problem of the relation between philosophy and politics by starting from certain well-known political phenomena of our century. So he's arguing that, well, I'm going to begin from something that's immediately obvious from contemporary politics.

He's written in his published in 1952, right? So we're talking about during the Cold War. Now, we have to ask what these phenomena ultimately are. He gives really two examples, to my mind, or at least two really particularly striking examples.

Early in the chapter, he gives what looks like a somewhat muted, but still pretty, I think, incisive critique of liberalism. He says, what is called freedom of thought in a large number of cases amounts to, and even for all practical purposes, consists of the ability to choose between two or more different views presented by the small minority of people who are public speakers or writers, right? So go into politics today and look at how many people choose their opinions based on what a party or a particular person puts forward, right? What a movement is decided to move on to, and you start seeing people constantly changing their views or getting worked up about things simply because they're talked about a lot, right?

That's your freedom of thought, Coke or Pepsi. If you go and you say, I think both Coke and Pepsi are really bad for your health and it can even lead to all sorts of medical problems, then you get into trouble, right? Now he continues. He says, if this choice is prevented, the only kind of intellectual independence of which many people are capable is destroyed, and that is the only freedom of thought which is of political importance.

So here he's arguing, I mean, it's a pretty, I think, a familiar thought to a lot of people that, well, one of the ways you control opinions is by giving people the illusion of choice by choosing between a few acceptable opinions, and people get happy because they feel like, oh, and now I'm really thinking independently. Meanwhile, they're choosing between two or some others. That's a kind of critique of liberalism. Then a little later, just a little page later, he gives an example of a historian living in a totalitarian country who seems to be endorsing the official interpretation of the history of religion, but subtly is pointing in the direction of liberalism, right?

An endorsement of liberalism. He puts the most ugly statements of this official interpretation to the forefront and puts the most beautiful statements quietly and quickly about liberalism, right in the middle there. This he says is like giving something a taste of a taste of forbidden fruit. Now this actually does happen.

There's an interesting example of the Russian composer, Shostakovich, being forced to write symphonies by Stalin and putting in underwhelming passages in what seemed to be patriotic pieces so as to indicate his own displeasure, right, or the darkness that's beneath the surface of this. The official account of life is great under this totalitarian country. So what are the political phenomena he's talking about? It seems like it's all political phenomena, right?

What he's offering here is, well, one of very, I think, a much more pronounced critique of totalitarianism with the sort of subtle liberalism, and this is sort of edifying for his readers in a liberal democracy, but also subtle indication quietly that even in a liberal democracy, the restriction of opinion exists and the illusion of freedom is there, which therefore raises the question of, well, what is freedom really or what is freedom of thought actually beneath all these all these illusions. So Alex, what are some of the main principles or axioms of esoteric writing? Can you give me some examples or? Yeah, he has two axioms that he gives.

Now, this is on page 25. This one, I think, is much misunderstood. Well, they're both on 25, but the second one begins at the very bottom of the page. He says, the fact which makes this literature, sort of literature that hides its meaning possible can be expressed in the axiom that thoughtless men are careless readers and only thoughtful men are careful readers.

Now, I read you some criticisms where I purposely read those criticisms to show you that Strauss does make this distinction. There's thoughtful and thoughtless. Thoughtful or careful with thoughtless or chaos, but he doesn't say this axiom is a fact. He says the facts can be expressed as an axiom, right?

In reality, as he goes on to show, there's actually degrees, but he's trying to just give you a simple distinction. Now, Adrian Blau in his article on this makes a big deal about this. He says, this is a false dichotomy, but the dichotomy is an axiom that expresses a fact, a fact which he hasn't really articulated yet. So you can see that the critics of Strauss aren't actually reading him carefully, right?

They're not actually trying to paying attention in a specific way in which he words things. But we do have this sort of experience that certain people read things too quickly, and therefore you write academic articles attacking it, and certain people read things carefully and slowly, and therefore I have a sense that what he's trying to do is lead you into a there's a second axiom. If you I'm just lamenting all the speed reading courses that I took back in high school, just really, really had to learn all the way, and we go and tell us a second axiom while I'm here. That's great.

Isn't it? I mean, sometimes a stall bellow, I think once described reading a stressing article as being an aunt and trying to cross the Himalayas, it's like, you get a 30 page article and then it's supposed to take you years of your life to look up everything and do all the details. Right. And when you start reading carefully, it is a very, very slow process.

It's very, very difficult. And this is stressing love one book courses where you teach a 50 page text level. I mean, like it really does take me just to putting brass tacks on this, right? This means like reading every footnote, checking every reference, right?

Like if an author cites a passage in another author looking at the immediate context, not just the passage itself, right? Seeing if it's been modified in any way, like are there any significant modifications? So again, it's slow and it's painful, but it can be extraordinarily rewarding when you find some of these things towards me. So the second axiom also, I think, relates to some of these criticisms.

He says, another axiom is the bottom of page 25 onto 26. And it's the end of the first section of the second chapter. He says, another axiom, but one which is meaningful, only so long as persecution remains within the bounds of legal procedure, which is to say, when you actually are threatened by legal persecution, is that a careful writer of normal intelligence is more intelligent than the most intelligent sensor as such. I think because the sensor has certain priors, right, in certain commitments.

What does he go on to say? For the burden of proof rests with the sensor. It is he or the public prosecutor who must prove that the author holds or has uttered heterodox views. In order to do so, he must show that certain literary deficiencies of the work are not due to chance, but that the author used a given ambiguous expression deliberately, or that he constructed a certain sentence badly in purpose.

That is to say, the sensor must prove not only that the author is intelligent and a good writer in general, for a man who intentionally blunders in writing must possess the art of writing, but above all, that he was on the usual level of his abilities when writing the incriminating words, right? So he didn't even make a mistake then. Now, when you see people attack this hypothesis about writing between the lines because of a fear of persecution or something like that, and they say, well, how can you ever prove that? The whole point is not to be able to prove it.

If you're actually if you could prove it, then you can do it, right? That's not art for writing them. That's right. Now, and so this puts us in a weird situation.

I want to emphasize this because I think it's important. This puts us in a position because one, you know, this has happened, but two, you can't really prove definitively that it's ever happened. And so this leads us in a situation where we have to explore a phenomena as though in the dark, right? Fundamentally in the dark and outside of the strictures of proof that we usually use when thinking academically or scholarly, right?

And that's I think one of the reasons that people find it so off-putting is that this really challenges some basic assumptions about what it means to do scholarship, what it means to read books, and what what actually thinking looks like. It's way more and more than you believe it is. Yeah. And you were Greg given an actual example or a small example of esoteric writing, because we've given an example, Greg, you gave an example with from my monadies rules.

Those are rules. But maybe something that struck you as a young reader, where a book came alive in a way that it added previously. Yeah, I'll give you a I'll give you a I'll draw some examples from my favorite esoteric writer. Well, one of my favorite esoteric writers is Zenofen, the student of Socrates.

So one of the things that he will do, there are a bunch of ways that one can write us with, but the example I gave earlier when you were just describing your day was one of omission. So one thing you can do is simply omit things. And then what's, this is why it's very hard to prove is I was just pointing out that it's hard to prove that something is there when it's not there, the pregnant omission, right? What's the old joke that Burns told us how many straws he has to take to change a light bulb?

None and the darkness is more, the light is more circumspect by absence or something like that. So emissions are hard to prove. I'll give you another simple one. It's lists.

List is another one. So for example, if I were to say the following, you know, I host this great podcast. Imagine I'm being interviewed. It's not about the thing.

I host a new podcast with a couple of friends of mine, David Barr and Alex Prione, you know, and of course me. And David is, David's very smart. He's well educated. He's kind.

He's a good family and he treats his wife well, right? I mean, really cares for his wife and his kids, by the way. He has a great sense of business. Like he's the marketing brains for what we're doing.

He has a, he's funny, by the way, he's clever. He's an excellent writer. He's not the worldly, right? And then, and David, I just think we've been friends for a very long time.

And Alex is very smart. I think any, any reasonable reader would read, read what you would say clearly, clearly Greg is in his late stage of Alzheimer's. Yeah, I'm forgotten to praise him. More, they might infer that maybe you're not all those other positive adjectives that I strive to David.

Now, that's, that's a joke. But here's a serious, but trivial example that shows that Zenithin does this. And then I'll give some other examples as well. So this isn't the Anabasis of Cyrus, which is one could translate the rise of Cyrus or if you're being clever, the rise of the Lord.

And this is in book one. So this is book that Zenithin wrote about a military exhibition he was a part of from Greece to the heart of Persia, unsuccessful battle, and then retreat back home. So this is a, as I mentioned, this is a trivial example. But while they're campaigning, they're traveling, you travel on foot back then to get from point A to point B and they're going through various cities.

So Zenithin will say, for example, that he passed a city that was inhabited, prosperous, and large. This is a book one chapter two, section six. Later on, he goes to another city named Peltay. And that city was inhabited.

Note he left out large and prosperous. And then this is that was still in chapter two. And then the third city still in chapter two, section 13, he marched to a city that was inhabited. So you infer that it was neither large nor prosperous.

And later, there'll be an example where you, you infer that the place has been completely abandoned. Now, these are, as I mentioned, I want to stress, I think these are not super significant examples, but it's showing you that one of the things Zenithin is trying to train you to do his reader is to make lists and sort of draw out implications from those kinds of lists. That's a kind of trivial example. But in his regime of the Spartans, Zenithin contrasts the Spartans with all the other Greeks.

And I think there, if you go through and actually literally make lists, you'll say, for example, Spartans do, here's how other Greeks did things. And the Spartans did things completely opposite to how all the other Greeks did it. And so then if you say, well, they, okay, if all the other Greeks kept their women to a modest amount of wine, and the Spartans did the exact opposite of that, what's the opposite of a modest amount of wine or modern wine, a lot of wine, something like this. And so then, and that's a sort of trivial example too, but then you start realizing that if you were to go through the regime of the Spartans and contrast the lists that Zenithin provides for Sparta and contrast them to the Greeks, I think you see a lot more clearly as Strauss has pointed out, that there's his constitution of the Lachimonians or Regima Spartans is actually quite critical of Sparta.

And I'll just point out as a brief aside, I think that was Strauss's first major foray into scholarship was his sort of article on Zenithin's regime of the Lachimonians, where he tried to show beyond a reasonable doubt that even this old guy who had a reputation for being a sort of silly old military dude wrote esoterically. And what everyone has taken to be a praise of Sparta is in fact a satirical hilariously satirical, by the way, commentary on the Spartan regime. So there's an example there. One more example from Zenithin, this is another little silly example, but when describing Cyrus, the emperor of Persia in the educational Cyrus, Zenithin says, Cyrus's mother is agreed by all to have been Mandane.

His father is said to have been Cambysius. Now that's another silly, true example, but he will use this phrase, it is said, to insert some doubt into what he's actually been said. And this is a very common thing that he does that other authors do as well. So people say, X, I'm reading with a bunch of faculty members right now, we're reading Aristotle's ethics, and they will frequently say, Aristotle says X.

And I was like, no, no, look, he says, people say X, it appears to be X, it seems so to most people, there's this Greek verb, okay, it's a pine, it's people think that this is the case. That's an easy one too. I mean, people will frequently skip over an author saying, well, if it seems to him to be the case, it must be the case, whereas the author, I think often will say, when he says it seems that you have to ask yourself, does it merely seem to be, is it in fact the case? So those were, I tried to give some kind of trivial examples, but I can, we can build to bigger ones, but go ahead.

So I think that's, and one of the difficulties, if you start paying attention every time Aristotle says it seems, there's nothing left. Yeah, and then you realize he's making lots of hypothetically. If then, a lot of ifs then, yeah, and then you realize you become really unmoored. And the difficulty is, is when you have centuries of scholarship that have been developing and you seem to make progress to unwind yourself so radically from a text is very, very difficult.

Okay, I had one example from Plato's, I just because I've been working on sure for years, for Plato's trilogy, the Atetus office statesmen, when they're describing the softest early in the in the office and they go through a number of different appearances that softest takes on all these different guys is, and the stranger, this is anonymous strangers says, okay, the softest claims to know things. What does he claim to know? And they talk about you know this, that the other and then at one point he says, he also claims to know the political things and the Atetus remarks briefly. Well, if you didn't claim to know this, nobody would study with them implying that what the softest most of all claims to know is political things.

That's left behind. And they get this very abstract account of how images relate to reality. This weird thing called a dialectical science. So you can figure out what images are here to reality accurately in which don't and then they kind of wrap this up and you kind of forget about that.

Then they move on in the next dialogue is a continuation called the statesmen. And as they're trying to define what a statesman is, all of a sudden out of nowhere, they run into the softest again. And it's a softest that looks like none of the other ones. It's a softest that is really turns out to be all the different defective statesmen who don't have a science of statecraft, all the different statesmen, all the regimes, all the laws turn out to be a kind of sophistry or deceptive images.

Now, you can just separate those two texts and treat them. But what you really are discovering is that there's a deep connection between them and an emission leads to a later discovery. Now, you can and people read these texts independent of one another and even read them as a whole and they don't notice things like that. Once you do notice that you realize there's a sort of subtle drama of the unfolding of this works that now if you take that seriously, it turns out that the account in this office is just inadequate because it hasn't taken into account the most fundamental image that claims to be true.

And that's the regime or the laws, right? And once you take once you realize that you realize you have to you have to reread this office in light of this and the statesman, which is an ugly forbidding dialogue, seems to be the more fundamental. Though it is far less read. Just a couple other small examples.

So another one is repetition. So if someone repeats a list of things, I kind of give that example a moment ago, but if there if a passage, not even a list of passages repeated almost verbatim, but not exactly verbatim, then a change there is something that people expect to be connected with yesterday. One more example, and then a day was trying to get on the other one that I sort of stressed as mentioned this in the chapter, we just looked at if someone says consistently, A, A, A, A, A, not A, A, A, A, A, A, I think an esoteric manner of reading would say the one the one contradiction is more significant than the 10 things that were consistent because it's like, for example, pay your taxes, pay your taxes, you should always pay your taxes. I don't care what this says, the IRS is just trying to pay your taxes, pay your taxes, you should hide your money that came in an ounce, pay your taxes, pay your taxes, pay your taxes, pay your taxes.

You know, like, it's obvious that why would you, why would you hide that? And you can point to it. No, no, I said sometimes you should pay your taxes. So anyway, you're trying to jump in there, my apologies.

You know, one thing that I think we should point out is in classes with say a Charles Butterworth or even, and again, go to the tape listening to how Strauss conducts his seminars over those many decades at the University of Chicago, which you should listen to, it's not like we're, our teacher sit us down and say, okay, guys, here are the 20 rules for uncovering a text or that we're branded with hot iron or just like weird shit is happening. The listeners on David hasn't been branded yet. So yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think that what happens is you get kids that first, this is what it was like a little bit when Alex and I were first kind of discovering Strauss, getting into it at St.

John's, you can get really enamored in flight, totally off the rails with esoteric with, you come enchanted with esoteric reading. And really, I think that the when you come under the auspices of a good teacher, you'll see that there are no real hermeneutics that you're given to on a one-pager, you're just sitting down and carefully reading a text. So I think that you could, if you took the most careful of readers here, she would come to the same conclusion of the text and I think somebody who's being pointed out all, you know, this is esoteric, this isn't one small point related that we've been, I've been hammering at the sort of salutary, this is common sense, it's decent, you know, this that any other and I guess I should point out that in your last room, it's kind of reminding you this that the epigraph at the beginning of chapter two to persecution, I'm writing, I find probably worth reading Strauss quotes somebody named W.E. H.

Lecky, I don't know that is, do you know that is? Yeah, it's a story and then it's I looked at the quiz from a section on persecution of his work and he's talking about religion intolerance and stuff, but he's pointing out how religion needs to be sort of watered down a bit with toleration so as to not become vicious. Here's the quote just for listeners at home. This is Strauss quoting Lecky, that advice has often proved an emancipator of the mind is one of the most humiliating, but at the same time, one of the most unquestionable facts in history.

So maybe there's something a little inbish to this, the whole enterprise. So we're running a little low on time, we got a ton of questions on this, I mean, I have a couple of minutes, so David, do you want to just give us a couple? I think, you know, I think we did a good job of laying out some of the core ideas. I mean, the one thing we should be clear is that this form of writing is necessary both from a political standpoint, but also from a pedagogical or educative.

Right, right, right, right. That which is the Stanislaus example that David gave earlier, right? One way, one might teach a young person that there's no saying that they're going to call out, everybody here, the guy, the guy, I think I gave this sample out of the kid that learned out in Switzerland, there's not a lot, right? Like, that's not what would be a more pedagogical esoteric way of teaching there's a Stanislaus would be like, oh, that's a toy from Stanislaus, but why does it say made in China on the bottom and then you try to work through that?

How did you get around the world? And so, you know, anyway, sorry, but yeah, no, I think pedagogical is a big part of it, not just persecution, but also pedagogy. Yeah, huge. So let's let's let's let's let's let's, sorry, I just said we should wrap up just a bloody line.

And the very last line of the essay showing the line up says, education, they felt is the only answer to the always pressing question to the political question products. So once of how to reconcile order, which is not oppression, with freedom is not which is not licensed is going to have to let people but what's what's really at stake here is a kind of question of the relationship between these two and trying to figure it out. That seems to be the core observation here. Yeah, maybe we should do a short 1520 minute follow up to round out the runners dozens we run so long time maybe I'll do two quick ones.

First is by our friend Mike, Mike Schmidt from Boston College, he asks, I'd like to hear what you guys think about my opinion that even though persecution, the art of writing is quote, the locus classicus of Strauss's theory on esoteric writing. And he points out those certain Tarkov's work words on the back of the cover. Thoughts on Machiavelli is Strauss's clearest textbook on how one should begin to approach esotericly written types. No, I don't think so at all.

I mean, how to how to begin to approach I mean, look, my I keep hearing that the thoughts on Machiavelli is is master class. No, I think it's his masterpiece. Yeah, I think I think Mike was asking while he said to begin, I think I mean, that's not I'm sorry to I think the best beginning text for Strauss on this piece I mentioned on Zenefins regime, like I'm on, he's called a sparrows artist, tastes of Zenefin. Okay, I think that's I'm not trying to dispute.

I think he's right that I think I think that's on Machiavelli's masterpiece. But I mean, good Lord, I mean, that is not a beginner's text. I mean, the footnotes and that are insane. I think that the place where Strauss is clearest in his explicating and esoteric reading with something is that Zenefin piece.

And it's telling the descent that to me that Strauss never ever republished it anywhere. It has not ever been published in more sense. Where can I find it? You can email me an s new PDF.

Roger that. I mean, I do agree though. I do agree that I think you see the principles or the method most active, maybe as a way to put it in thoughts on about you know, you see him really going I mean, also to my monadies introduction from the penis translation. That's so hard to do that.

Yeah. Okay. So Alexa O'Brien, our friend asked two quick questions. What would Strauss think about Straussianism and is Strauss responsible for the actions of his students?

He is responsible for the invasion of Iraq. That is what I've been told he is responsible for. And I will repeat that. I think I think look Strauss understood the politics.

He understood what happens when you found a school in the tendencies of it. He also understood I think the need to what happens when you don't found a school and what happens to your thought. I think he sees enormous potential in academia for embracing a version of this. And I think stressionism is a version of that.

Now, the worst of the Straussian readings of things that get sort of very sort of flight of fancy. Obviously, you can look at that and you can you can find your judgments about it. It would be unfair to judge Strauss for it simply as though this is something that he would endorse. And he was quite critical of this from his students, other students, and he would really push them on their thinking in many ways.

So I do think though, he says at one point, we didn't discuss it but in part two that look ordinary people read a book, they come away with one thing. Scholar reads a book, they're new on things, they're noticing subtleties. In a way, they're already on the track of this sort of esoteric reading. They're seeing a little bit that there's more going on.

They maybe don't have a sense of why it might be written in this way. Here are some ways that you could read it. So I think he does see scholarship as being able to preserve some of this. And Straussians can be very doctrinaire and there's a reason for that.

And he's fully conscious that can be the case and he cultivates that. But what ultimately comes from this is a political science that's way more sensitive to the political problems, even if it isn't up to his sort of high standards. And I think Strauss from what I gather from these chapters, I think Strauss would say that's on the whole better than not having that and leaving under sort of the sort of the doctrines of positivism, for example. I think another thing to point out, many of our listeners know this but what's remarkable about Strauss as a teacher are we've talked today primarily about Plato and the ancients and a few medievals, but his students had a wide variety of interests.

So Strauss is responsible for, I think, the revival of American political thought in a serious way. You had guys like Harry Jaffa, Martin Diamond, who's the guy that's very, very good who did the anti-federalists, Herb Storing. These are giants in their field. Herb Storing also wrote a great deal on the administrative state.

And so Strauss was the teacher there. He revives medieval political thought with Butterworth and Mottie, Jewish political thought. I mean, it's really remarkable his students' interests. And they all come from him.

And also his breath because his students are often just continuing his suggestions or yeah, that's what yeah. I mean, he writes on Plato, he writes on Aristotle, he writes on Thucydides, he writes on, you know, every medieval thinker under the sun, he writes on he was so on lock hobs. I mean, natural right in history covers everything on Heidegger. I mean, I can not be able to do it justice, but knows I mean, he just keeps going through all of them.

And he has even if you disagree with him, he's a remarkably original thinker on nearly every single massive thinker in the history of political thought, no slouch. He also invented blue jeans. I mean, the man just gets it's amazing what he's done. Okay, one last question.

I think this is an interesting one. If we push it to its conclusions, there is a Christopher David LaRoche asks, what are the limits of esotericism? So how do you know, this is good? Because how do you know that you're not flying off the rails in inventiveness?

That's what I don't know. That's what's hard. But you know, I heard from a professor once, he said, David, all you trying to explain esoteric reading to another Americanist in the department. And he said, you guys are always thinking in terms of data.