Hi, welcome back to the new Thinkery. If you hear my voice, you know, that means that David Barr has once again died. How you doing, Greg? Well, better now that I heard that news.
Yeah, it's fantastic news. Yeah. Let me say I'm very pleased about our guest today. I like to refer to him as Waco's Most Wanted.
In fact, there's a, there's a bit of an urban legend that the infamous Waco Fire was started by one of his cigar bots. Did you know that? I, that's what I heard. Yeah.
So I'd like to welcome to the show Professor Political Philosophy and Serial Cigar Arsonist, Timothy Burns. Welcome, Timothy. Good to see you. Thank you very much, Alex.
Thank you very much, Greg. It's great to be here. Finally, thank you. Thanks.
We've been wanting you to be on for some time and a lot of our listeners will know who you are. But Tim is a professor of Political Philosophy at Baylor University, which is why he's known as the Waco Outlaw, as Alex pointed out. And we're, tonight we're discussing his book, Leo Strauss on Democracy, Technology and Liberal Education with SUNY Press. And Tim has written widely on classical political thought, Shakespeare, liberal education.
He's the chief editor of Interpretation, the Journal of Political Philosophy. And Tim and I met in, I think it was 2014 in the wonderful city of Spokane, Washington, where we spent a wonderful summer together just reading medieval philosophy and enjoying some cigars and, and better, it will beverage it occasionally. So it was an NEH, wasn't it? Any H.
It was a national and downer of the humanities summer institutes led by parents in Greece in McFarland. And McFarland, yeah, who had just published the second edition of the source book. That's right. I think I would get to hang out with Yener and Terry Clavin and all the crew.
We had a great time. It was wonderful. Yeah, we did. But that's not what we're here to talk about tonight, Alex, what we're talking about tonight.
Yeah, we're going to talk for an hour about that one NEH thing you guys went to. We can talk for a long time actually. We're going to talk about his book, Leo Strauss on Democracy, Technology and Liberal Education. By way of introduction, I'll just say it's a really great book.
It's I think very unique in many ways in that he, Tim, you chart your way through Strauss's writings, not chronologically or focusing on a single work, but tracing a thread of thought through various works spanning from the 1930s all the way to the 1960s, right? So, but making compelling case for putting them together. Also, I think, and we'll get into this, I'm sure at some point, making the compelling case that if you're going to think about Strauss, you're going to have to think about technology. And I think this shows a new way in which Strauss or sort of adding to the list of ways in which Strauss is relevant to problems of today.
I know personally I teach in a program that services the engineering college and I've gotten tons from Strauss on technology. So I'm very pleased to see this book out. So, I thought that as a general introduction, we could discuss what led you to write this book and specifically on these particular pieces. I said this before, but you don't interpret a single worker, which is the history of his thinking before a lot of thought through a series of works written over decades.
And I thought that approach is interesting. I thought our listeners might be interested also on how you got there. Yeah, sure. Thanks, Alex.
I published on Strauss before, sometimes with overviews of his thought, but this book does represent a somewhat different approach. In retrospect, I can say it came about in two steps. First, I wrote an essay review of a book on Strauss by Grant Haver's, who made a number of claims about Strauss and liberal democracy and technology, claims that I thought were misinformed and we ended up having a published exchange about it. And in that way, themes of modern democracy and technology and Strauss's work came more clearly into focus for me.
And then I was asked by my colleague, Steve Block, and co-authors, Stephen Simms and Patrick Kane, to write a chapter on Strauss on democracy for their collection of essays, democracy, and the history of political thought. It's a collection of examines, democracy, and the thought of 25 political philosophers. And that essay sometimes happens, grew into a book project as I examined some lesser studied works by Strauss on democracy. And saw the relation that he presents between democracy, liberal education, and technology.
Just a follow up question. As I've been working through some pieces of Zenith and I've been gradually, and I sort of always suspected, but gradually confirming my suspicion that Zenith and wrote across works in ways that I think intentionally would inform how he was writing. So as you worked across Strauss's works, did you ever get the impression that there was a kind of intentionality that parts were intentionally left and different works to be worked through together? Well, if you mean that there's a coherence to Strauss's thought, and that he can't, in any one work, spell everything out.
Yes, I think so. But at the same time, of course, Strauss points away from himself to the texts, and is very careful about going through each text and not imposing anything on it, but seeing what it has to say. And the result of that has been, of course, he changes his mind on some things. But yes, I think that there's a number of important themes in what I think I discovered.
I mean, you have to say, you've discovered something in stresses, is a bit pretentious that it's going to take a few generations before Strauss is understood, and I've just begun to scratch the surface. But it does seem as if there is in Strauss's work a quiet confrontation with Heidegger throughout. And that was especially of interest to me. Yeah, I mean, you do a good job.
We'll get to this eventually now in one of your chapters, the longest chapters devoted to the overview of Havalach, which I think to Greg's point, you point out that in a letter to Ben or Dettie, Strauss says that the review spells out a few of the notes in that right history. Yeah, and natural right history is, you know, widely understood. Now at least as a response to Heidegger, and I think an interesting case for reading Havalach, as a result also engaged with that. So you kind of never know what you're trying to find when you're you're working through Strauss and how things interconnect, right?
So let's maybe we can jump to the next sort of topic, which are the hopes and expectations that the early moderns had for technology and democracy, what they could accomplish, specifically in their attempt to subvert monarchy with the old aristocracy and religion. I think in their first couple chapters, you really chart this Strauss's account of this path really nicely and then into the sort of German nihilism, nor your chapter on German nihilism. So I thought it would be helpful if you could trace that development a bit specifically as regards to hopes and how they were and were not more important. I think we're not that sure.
Strauss has the intimate connection between technology and democracy within the modern project. And in the book, I show him doing this, especially in the essay liberal education and responsibility, which he wrote in response to a group of adult education students in Chicago who had asked him to explain two sentences in the talking given on liberal education, but also in philosophy and law. Strauss sees technology as fundamental to modern thought. And Machiavelli is pointing the way toward it, especially in his influence on Francis Bacon.
And in the relatively late autobiographical preface to Spinozas Gritika for religion, for example, 1965, Strauss speaks of quote, the fundamental modern project, parenthesis, man's conquest of nature for the relief of man's of man's estate. And he says a little later on the same work, the modern project, as understood by Bacon, Descartes, and Hobbes, demands that man should become the master and owner of nature, or that philosophy or science should cease to be essentially theoretical. And for Strauss, the famous lowering of the goals of political life is an aspect of this technological project. As he says in modernity, the political problem becomes a technical problem.
As he says in the three waves of modernity. And this extends to the thought of Locke and his liberation of an economics of plenty and even to the political thought of Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel, in their successive attempts to correct or mitigate the stress puts at Machiavelli's attempt to make the right social order automatic, something that also he says a number of times in natural written history about Hobbes. And in highlighting this in as many comprehensive statements about modernity or the modern project that is the conquest of nature, Strauss stresses the modernist's break with the engines. Over and against Heidegger, Strauss denies the continuity of the thought of Plato and Aristotle with that of the moderns.
He argues in chapter five, natural writing history that for Hobbes, no less than for Descartes, the actualization of wisdom is attained through a free human construction in a universe that is unintelligible and that forces man to be sovereign. The purpose is a scientific, artful reordering by man of nature, a reordering that we've come to call technology. So it is with the new science of politics at the heart of which is natural rights. So Strauss puts it in a city and man, the rights of man are the moral equivalent of the ego cajatons.
The ego cajatons has emancipated itself entirely from the tutelage of nature and eventually refuses to obey any law, which is not originated in its entirety or to dedicate itself to any value of which it does not know that it is its own creation. Strauss argues that this technological spirit comes to affect both political philosophy and philosophy simply in modern philosophy, originally the same as modern science and later bowing to the authority of modern science, which was its most successful part becomes according to Strauss and a quote now, a kind of conscience or consciousness of modern science and is as such anthropocentric. That is it becomes philosophy of the human mind, explaining how the mind prescribes nature, its laws. This is how he puts it in his talk called progress or return.
The underlying idea is that all truths or all meaning, all order, all beauty originate in the thinking subject in human thought in man, some famous formulations. We know only what we made, Bob's understanding prescribes nature, its laws can't. I've discovered a spontaneity little known previously of the monads of the thoughts, lightness and the greatest goal of this project of what Strauss calls systematic enlightenment is the elimination of powers invisible. That is the goal is civilizational atheism, the disenchantment of the world, man as maker was to replace God.
Modern science grounds itself then from the start on the expectation of a progress in human consciousness through a technological commercial civilization, transforming the world such that it will move human beings away from religious belief and revelation. Strauss was quite starkly, very clearly in the essay to philosophy introduction to the philosophy and law, which came out in 1936. Enlightenment, he says, was to do away with the challenge of revelation by civilizing the world in man. It would disenchant or demystify the world to relieve human beings of religious imaginings, which delude them about an ever hostile nature and thereby cheat them of the possession and enjoyment of the real, this worldly goods, which humans can obtain on their own through science.
The advance of civilization, the progressive conquest of nature, the use of science and commerce to provide human beings with the goods they have always sought in more of a negative ways, all of these are promoted so that revelation will be as Strauss's not merely refuted but outlived. That is seen by enlightened, satisfied beings, human beings as the product of a backward age. Now you can say, well, okay, well, in political philosophy, that project, one could see including Hobbes and Descartes, but neither of them championed democracy. Both of them at most championed liberalism, but Strauss finds that the move to democracy in Machiavelli, in Spinoza, in Rousseau, was no less driven by the attempt to overcome the challenge to philosophy posed by divine revelation.
Unlike many thinkers from Hegel to Marx to Nietzsche and so many of his contemporaries, including Küge v. Kojev Strauss didn't subscribe to the secularization thesis. According to which, liberal democracy emerged out of a progressive historical development that began with the Christian doctrine of the incarnation and the equal dignity of all human beings. Strauss's account in the majority is quite different.
The rise of democracy is quite different. He noticed that the enlightened despotism of Hobbes was a regime foreshadowed by Machiavelli. A regime capable of replacing fear of God with the fear of the prince, but that both that enlightened despotism and modern democracy rests on Machiavelli's critique of moral virtue. He noticed that with Machiavelli's unleashing of acquisitiveness, strictly with the view to societal needs, Machiavelli pointed both democracy and despotism, both regimes, in his founding of the philosophic emancipation of human beings away from the kingdom of darkness.
In any event, it was two of Machiavelli's followers, Spinoza and Rousseau, whose work according to Strauss led to democratic theory proper, and in both of those thinkers, one does find the same end. The emancipation from the kingdom of darkness in the name of individual freedom. Strauss argued already in 1928 in Spinoza's critique of religion. So before his turn to classical political philosophy is something still viable.
He argued that Spinoza's appeal to the will to freedom of the people, not narrowly but broadly concede, was ultimately in the service of the goods of this world, goods of which the people may come to hold that theory, theocracy, cheats them. And that this is what moves Spinoza to argue for the equal dignity of all. That is Spinoza attempts to unleash inquisitiveness, and thereby enlist the people in the effort to overthrow theocracy. And Spinoza's enlisting of the people goes hand in hand with the new constructivist understanding of the contemplative or theoretical life.
In fact, as the title of the TTP indicates, the freedom of that life is what he seeks to secure. So you have asked, has this project succeeded according to Strauss? Well, only partially. That is, modern science certainly became and remains the authority in the modern world.
But as it was meant to transform human consciousness, it's only partly succeeded. It's caused the growth of intellectual property that is of the admission by human beings. Well, I just can't believe that anymore. I can't believe even God, of which disenchantment is another name.
But that disenchantment has by no means been unproblematic, as the case of Germany above oil has made clear. You know, as you say that, it's a reminder, I was just talking about this with my students in class about, I have this theory that Santa Claus is a ritual of disenchantment with children, sort of, you know, teach them this thing, this benevolent being, and then, and then you see this adult. And then tell them he doesn't exist. And then you see this, and you talk to adults and say, oh, yeah, it's like a leading in Santa Claus or something like that.
And then one thing I'll say, just as sort of a dendom, you have a very, I don't know if you want to spell this out a little bit right now, but you have a very good point, which helped correct my own way of approaching these problems where you sort of point out that when Strauss speaks of the destruction of humanity, he has in mind, of course, our physical destruction by by technology. He has a minor physical destruction, he mentions things like H bomb, but you point out that it means actually something much more right that it's, and I think that's a salient point because if you're attacking modernity, because it might destroy us physically, that's in a way a modern promise still, but to attack it because it rubs human beings, not just of their sort of wife, but also the good life in the highest sense and to see this as part and parcel of sort of the risk of technology. I thought that was a very helpful point that there's much more to stay, I don't know if you want to say anything about that. I think Greg has a question.
Yeah, no, thanks, Alex. It's something on which there's a great deal of overlap between Strauss and Heidegger and the dehumanization of human beings. I mean, they weren't the only two talking about that, of course, but it's striking how much overlap there is between them, and we could probably get into that more as we proceed. I have a follow-up question as well.
I mean, you rightly note that, and this is anyone who's studied Strauss probably understands like the ancient versus modern things, and that Strauss words and eyes of continuity that's seen by Heidegger and others, but one of the things your book did that I hadn't really thought about, maybe you want to spell this out a little bit, is nevertheless, Strauss points to some agreement between the ancients and modernists. I was wondering if that would be worth talking about from him, even with regard to technology, although ultimately, obviously, more profound disagreements, it seems, but maybe regarding human origins and role of technology, it seems like there were nevertheless some areas where there's overlap or agreement even. Yeah, well, certainly, and I think this comes out in Strauss's long article on Cricius, that the world was originally something like what Hobbes describes as the state of nature of human world was. The origins are barbaric.
The origins are weak. The civilization emerges through the arts, through technique, through human overcoming, something you see presented, I think, especially clearly in Plato's statesman. And yes, there's agreement on that. There is disagreement, and there's even, as you know, as the scholar is done, Greg, there are even pre-socratic who talk about the possibility of overcoming the weather, of overcoming death through science, right?
And one sees in the Sarah Patea, especially from, I would say, book four onward, an increasing reliance of Cyrus on technology, on engines, on even horses, or are presented as a kind of emblem of technology, or human beings on horses. They become centaurs, and they can travel much faster than nature allows human beings to travel. And so for Cyrus, that becomes a means, and it becomes a means that is an amoral means to victory. So those things are very much on the horizon, and there are a few other things we could name.
But what Strauss brings out is that the ancient's rejected technology, that they saw already that it would bring about a dehumanization of man. So I don't know if that's what you had in mind. It is exactly what even in the education of Cyrus, it seems like as you mentioned, there's increasing reliance on technology, I would say it's going to be increasing the humanization even of the subjects. Yes, and a decreasing attention to virtue, right?
That's very good. Well, folks, you see here just how Strauss can invigorate our sort of inslexible lives by bringing the ancient and modern into conversations. Should we move on to, you brought up the Germans at the end of your last, which have in mind your third chapter, which is on currently a very popular piece by Strauss German-Niles, which was never published. He gave a talk at the new school.
And do you remember the year, say 1930s, 1940s? 1941. I think it was January of February of 1941. So it was before the United States entered the war, it was given at a time when Hitler's troops had taken over Europe.
And so at a very dark moment. And in it, Strauss anticipates the destruction of the Third Reich. There's even before the United States enters the war. But yeah, the talk was given at the new school, and it was in response to a book by Herman Roushning that had come out on Hitler and German-Niles.
Roushning is an interesting character. Dan Mahoney tells me that I should read more of Roushning, but Roushning was, he wrote a book for a propaganda book for the British, subsequently. It was called Hitler Speaks. And Roushning had been not exactly a member of Hitler's inner circle, but close enough to at least claim that he knew things that Hitler was saying that not everybody knew.
And it turned out that, I don't know, maybe 10 years after it was published, some people started to look at it carefully. And they discovered that there were whole sections of it that were just lifted from Nietzsche. I thought your foot put on this and laughed out. It was plagiarized.
Roushning was really a fraud in some ways. And Roushning was going after him, not on those grounds, but on similar grounds concerning what German nihilism is. So yeah, that's the background for the piece. That makes me want to ask all sorts of questions of why Houshning would do such a thing.
It sounds like actually maybe even a more interesting book as a result that somebody's trying to develop this sort of connection. But yeah, so the connection between your first two chapters and your third chapter, your third chapter being on German nihilism, is that what Strosz describes in that piece is the reaction of the young Germans, and particularly the more intellectually or academically inclined Germans, their reaction to liberalism, and their embrace of national socialism. And it seems to be that this moment exposes a weakness in the modern project, however vaguely, right, that it prompts this nihilistic counter-reaction. But then you are at great pains, maybe that's not the right phrase, but you make a great deal about the fact that there is this other alternative reaction that is embodied in the figure of Churchill.
So I thought you'd just need to describe that counter-reaction and how Churchill fits into that. Okay, sure. Well, I mean, Strosz talks about two German reactions to the modern project in this piece, one of which he says, redound to the honor of German philosophers, the second of which most of the article or most of the talk is addressed to. And one thing I just want to note is that Strosz is not talking about young Germans who became national socialists.
He's talking about young Germans who he says, he quotes them saying, or as if they're saying, Hitler, less said about him the better. He's talking especially in this piece about those thinkers whom very young, intelligent, but not well-educated Germans were inclined to follow. So let me just say a little bit about those two reactions, the two reactions in Germany to modernity or enlightenment that he talks about in the German nihilism talk, as well as elsewhere. Only the second reaction produced nihilism.
Only the second reaction that has produced the desire to destroy modern civilization and start over from the very beginning, a pre-seocratic starting over, or even going back to the state of nature. This is the case with Schmitt, the first reaction, the one that he calls, of which he says, German philosophy stood up to its longstanding honor. That he explains in his explanation of how it is as toward the end of the piece, how it is that courage came to be the highest virtue for Germans. And this was a reaction, he says, in his explanation for that, to modernity, it came between 1760 and 1830.
That is, it's the reaction of German idealism to modernity. And the philosophers that Strass mentions by name here are Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling. Their arguments stood against the modern enlightenment doctrines, which had been spread to Germany by the French Revolution and Napoleon, which attempted to make those modern doctrines, attempted to make the common rules of everyday life effective, the effectual truth, effective by making them tied to individual rights, to self-interest, to industry, and to commerce. And Strass mentions in this connection Descartes and his Gené-Rocite, no justice, no duties.
And he mentions Locke. So the German idealists argued against that, in this first reaction. They argued against the degrading modern doctrines in favor of the recognition that belongs to common sense, that Moralex always entailed a call to sacrifice. And the only virtue that is manifestly self-sacrificial is courage on the battlefield.
The result of the German idealists stand, this first reaction to modernity in Germany, was, Strass says, a synthesis. It was one that failed, a synthesis that failed because of the inevitable rise of positivism. And Strass argues that positivism is not, as some of his students think, a uniquely German product. This is what Strass says in that piece, in German I was that talk.
However deep the difference between German philosophy and the philosophy of the Western countries may be, German philosophy ultimately concedes of itself as a synthesis of the pre-modern ideal and the modern period. That synthesis did not work. In the second half of the 19th century, it was overthrown by Western positivism, the natural child of the Enlightenment. Germany had been educated by her philosophers in contempt of Western philosophy.
Gémerry's Locke is the saying of showing. Germany now observed that the synthesis, affected by her philosophers, of the pre-modern ideal and the modern ideal did not work. She saw no way out except to purify German thought completely from the influence of the ideas of modern civilization, the modern ideal. National socialism is the most famous because the most vulgar example of such a return to a pre-modern ideal.
Okay, so the second German reaction was the reaction to the failure of this synthesis, which had resulted from the first reaction. The second is the reaction of Nietzsche and his students above all, which helped to give rise to national socialism. Strauss had spoken earlier in the talk of this second reaction that is of German youth who in the 1920s and 1930s were repulsed by liberal democracy and by Marxists. I mean just quote what he has to say about them, prospect of a pacified planet without rulers enrolled, of a planetary society devoted to production and consumption only, to the production and consumption of spiritual as well as material merchandise was positively horrified to quite a few very intelligent and very decent if very young Germans.
They did not object to that prospect because they were worrying about their own economic and social positions, certainly in that respect they had no longer anything to lose. Nor did they object to it for religious reasons, for as one of their spokesman, Ernst Youngger, said, they knew that they were the sons and grandsons and great-grandson of godless men. And here I'll just add parenthetically, Strauss had said at the German idealists that they were theists and pantheists, so we're in a new situation. What these youths hated, Strauss continues, was the very prospect of a world in which everyone would be happy and satisfied, in which everyone would have his little pleasure by day and his little pleasure by night, a world in which no great heart could be and no great soul could breathe, a world without real unmetaphoric sacrifice, i.e.
a world without blood, sweat, and tears. What to the Communists appeared to be the fulfillment of the dream of mankind appeared to these young Germans as the greatest debasement of humanity, as the coming of the end of humanity, as the arrival of the last man, or Strauss as the latest man. And it was these youths who turned to the teachings of Spingler, of Nodevander Brook, of Kaltschmidt, of Ernst Youngger, and above all, of Heidegger. A lot of these thinkers, maybe with the exception of Vander Brook, but a lot of these thinkers are experiencing a renaissance.
And you get the sense that there's a deep, I sometimes like to make this point, that the modern project, if you did it back to Machia Valley, is coming close to 500 years old, right? 1530 or so. You have the prince written and published posthumously, and then we're now in 2020 something. But if you identify the date in which- 2023, to be exact Alex.
Sorry, I'm a little tired. But if you if you if you sort of chart that path, you start to realize that sort of the early modern project of this sort of synthesis of liberalism and natural science in form of sort of corporatized technology, or something like that, or privatized technological sort of innovation, that really only came to hegemony over the West, at least with the fall of the Berlin Wall, right? And so we're talking the 1990s, right? So this is a very young project.
And it seems like just as after the fall of the monarchy or the empire in Germany, so to now with this sort of burgeoning sort of global liberal order, there is a kind of counter-reaction in the United States and an increasing appeal of these thinkers. Though we strangely, and this is maybe if you know German idealism and thereafter is to the honor of the Germans, maybe this is to our own dishonor. We're not producing thinkers of that high caliber. But I thought maybe you had some thoughts on the parallel between parallels or non-parallows as well between our situation and the German situation in the wake of World War I.
Yeah, I have some thoughts on that. Thanks, Alex. I guess first, Strauss indicates the superiority in a certain way of the first German reaction. That is, that it's a more honorable reaction.
But he also indicates that the synthesis that resulted did not work, he says, and it did not work because of modern social science positivism, that it overwhelmed the synthesis. And there are some students of Strauss who misled, I guess, by something Strauss suggests in the first part of natural right in history that, let me say, the adoption of the fact value distinction, the abandonment of the notion of natural rights is something, he raises the possibility that this represents a victory by Germany over the United States, not on the battlefield, but a victory in thought. And he says it wouldn't be the first time that this has happened. So he suggests the possibility, does this all just come out of Germany?
But here, and in other places, Strauss makes very clear, no, social science positivism and its fact value distinction or its inability to say the rational life is the right way of life. That's something that's inevitable. That's something it's baked in the cake of modern natural science. That's after which, of course, social science positivism models itself.
And it's baked into the cake of constructivist science. So just that is one point, that the synthesis was not going to work. The synthesis required, as he indicates, theism or deism on the part of the German idealists, at least on the surface of their teachings. And that that is what had become questionable, not just questionable, but unbelievable, for three generations of Germans, and that it would become questionable because of modern science and social science positivism for anyone living under modern liberal democracy or technology, and or technology.
So are we in that situation now? Yes, still, this is not gone away. This is something that in a certain way, you could say in Germany, it was more clearly faced. And it's not being faced today, especially well by anyone, that the natural worldview you could say, as Strauss calls it on the basis of in Hüsserlian idiom in natural writing history, the natural worldview, which is that the world is a morally ordered whole, ordered by gods or god, that modernity has displaced that view and has not replaced it, has not been able to replace it with something else, that the premise of modern science that human consciousness would simply progress to the point where it didn't need to have any kind of serious morality that would involve sacrifice.
That has not it hasn't played out in the way that the modern is expected. So if you're referring to the rise of BAP, and I suspect maybe you are, yeah, that would be one example, I guess, a particularly vulgar example, a kind of clownish example of the persistence of what was going on in Germany and is going on really all over the world, with this major disorientation of humanity that has been occasioned by the attempt to establish a rational state, a rational society. And that attempt fundamentally is misguided, is what Strauss is arguing. Tim, I have a question for you.
I read this in your book and you just reiterated that social science positivism was inevitable, or as Big Den has you just said, can you spell it out? Why? It's just because modern natural science was so successful that it would naturally sort of infect the other sciences, was it because of a sort of implicit denial of practical science or something like this? Because modern science does not claim to get at the truth about the world.
It attempts to replace that attempt with a reconstruction of the world. And that reconstruction depends upon human beings, it depends upon human will, you could say. And that means that from the start, it can't claim to be the right way of life. Science or reason can't claim that.
What it has to fall back on, what it's attempting to bring about is the dismissal of the previous challenge to that way of life by revelation. But it is giving up on the claim that there's access to the truth in this matter. There's rational access to the truth. This is, Strauss goes through this in great detail in his book that was supposed to be his first Hobbes book.
It's been published in English translation in the last 15 years, Hobbes is critique of religion. And there, Strauss makes very clear that the attempt is it's very much the Cartesian construction. It begins with an admission of the day of the Septuar. It begins with an admission that maybe the world is the work of a God who deceives us into thinking that it's governed by permanent, intelligible necessities.
But that's all a deception that God created it and can cause it to go out of existence in a flash. And that building, okay, so making that initial admission that maybe that's the case. Then you have the question, okay, so where do we go from here if we want to argue on behalf of human knowing? We argue on the basis of egotagitons.
We argue on the basis of what of this very narrow truth that we know that we think therefore we are. And that we can reconstruct the world according to laws so called principles causes that we prescribe to nature. That means that we have no access to the world in itself. We don't claim to have access to it.
We are making a much more limited claim. And Strauss's argument is for a long time for a long time for a while, and this includes the American founding by the way, this time. There were attempts to reconcile the findings of that modern natural constructive of science with the older view according to which the world is governed by God. And that's why he attributes to the German idealist, Dism and Theism.
And it's the same theism that one can see in the American founding and decoration of independence or in the works of Jefferson. You could say one of the most radical of the of the enlighteners of the American founding. Right. At a time when there was a hope that there could be a reconciliation of these things.
But what was hidden was that the new science was not able to say that the natural world as it's perceived by common sense is the same as the world that science is prescribing its laws to. In fact, Strauss is saying from the start, modern science was saying the world of common sense is not at all the world of these homogeneous bodies or homogeneous things that we can we can understand by torturing nature that they're not at all the same thing. And that in fact, are prescribing to nature its laws, that depends on the premise that the world is a chaos. And we are giving it order.
We can become sovereign because we're forced to be sovereign as Strauss puts it in the fifth chapter of natural writing history, talking about Hobbes. And so there was a for a while a very limited while a suppression of the the truth that emerged about natural science only at the end of only at the end of the 19th century. That is that natural science cannot tell us anything about the ought. It can't tell us anything about the way we ought to be that it all it can do is to describe the is and even that description is just a construction.
So that's I think what that's what I think Strauss has in my life. These remarks about social science, positivism, or just positivism in general. That's very helpful, Tim. Thank you.
You have an interesting connection between this and the secularization thesis where if you read Bacon, for example, or Descartes, this is very clear how they're promoting this sort of value neutral science and the values are kind of borrowed from Christianity, values of charity. But I think the secularization thesis often misses that this charity is done through human hands, not through divine divine works, right? This is human charity. And so it's really sort of a attempt to subvert, right?
Divide the Netherlands or the place of God in the human order. That was just aside. The big. Yeah, I guess I mean, one of the ways you could one of the things that I confirm what you're saying, Alex, is that you see already in Machiavelli, you see it very clearly in Bacon, an attempt to replace charity, caritas, with the notion of humanity.
And they're quite different things, but they share enough in common that the moderns could pretend that modern science was charitable and not just humane, that it was that is in accord with the divine commandment to love, to be charitable. Though that charity is done up to, you say, or the sort of benevolence is not achieved, not the prayer, right? Or even through sort of. Certainly not, but also what it has in mind is the elimination of human suffering.
And that's not what caritas has in mind. Charity is a Christian virtue. That means that it's something that will be practiced forever amongst the suffering. And then in fact, that virtue is superior to the elimination of suffering.
This is something that through Christopher Hitchens for a loop when he did his biography of Mother Teresa, he was astonished to find out that she wasn't really interested in eliminating human suffering. Well, hello, she's a Christian Catholic nun. She's much more interested in the salvation of their souls than she is in eliminating human suffering. The human suffering, you could say, is the occasion for it.
It's an opportunity to exercise the virtue of charity. But if it's eliminated, that means the elimination of that opportunity. And that elimination is what Bekonian science is about. It goes hand in hand with the destruction of tragedy.
Very good. Very good. Say more there, say more there, the destruction of tragedy. There's no possibility of human suffering that we can't eliminate.
And we can eliminate even the suffering of tragic figures who fight on behalf of the just and find themselves suffering terrible things that we admire. But we don't congratulate them for. And that's what that's what I had. So I mentioned the big guy, and then you you interjected with an important point on the journey.
But the big guy I had in my life was Heidegger, actually, not God. The big guy lurking in the back of the Havillock from you, or the big guy who was sort of operating in this German nihilism piece. Maybe it's Nietzsche, but it seems like the more current figure, obviously, is going to be Heidegger. And again, I'll just restate what I said earlier that Strauss is the idea that the Havillock review is an implicit critique of Heidegger.
Now you say this is something you're seeing all over. So maybe this is not going to get bigger than the Havillock review this question. But I thought you could I think it's an interesting observation. So a couple questions looking around here, all interconnected.
What is the implicit critique? Also, how did you arrive at this thesis? And since the Havillock review, as this letter to Ben or clearly indicates is spelling out a few of these footnotes in natural writing history, how is that critique of Heidegger and natural writing history different from, or perhaps deepened by the Havillock review? Okay, great.
Thanks. How do I arrive at it? Well, Strauss mentions Heidegger in the introduction of the review, not by name, but by speaking of existentialism as superior to positivism. Strauss sometimes will refer to, if this is what he does in natural writing history, he won't refer to he refers to existentialism.
But in the talk that he gave on existentialism at Hillell House in Chicago, he says existentialism is a movement, like how the movement is characterized by a flabby periphery with a solid core, that solid core is Heidegger. When Strauss refers to existentialism, he's always referring to Heidegger. There, in the review of Havillock, he speaks of existentialism as superior to positivism. And he calls positivism the final form of modern rationalism.
It's not going to go anywhere from here. And he says, if it understands itself, it will become existentialism. It will lead its thoughtful adherence to existentialism. And he elaborates on the three ways in which existentialism finds classical philosophy obsolete, based on modern premise.
So both positivism and existentialism find classical philosophy obsolete. And it seems to me that Strauss is here alerting his readers to the fact that his critique will go beyond Heidegger to include Heidegger. And second, there's the letter to Benadetti that you mentioned, explaining that he's going to use the review of Havillock to elaborate on some of the points he makes at Footnuts in Natural Retin History. And as you suggested, Alex, that work, Natural Retin History is directed against Heidegger.
And third is the fact that Havillock's work is really awful. It's of such poor quality that a review of it is otherwise not worthwhile. Strauss has moved to save it in a conclusion that it's exemplary of classical scholarship that's supposed to be a bulwark of civilization against barbarism, but it's becoming an instrument of rebarburization. So those are the three things that led me to examine the work as furthering the critique of Heidegger.
Can I just pause pause on that point? I think it's such a worthy point. I've learned a lot from Strauss and also from Benadetti's work on Herodotus on this, incidentally, but particularly from Strauss, we tend to think of like civilization as, you know, looking at paintings and, you know, I don't know, wearing powdered wigs or something like that, and barbarism is like eating other people, right, cannibalism and incessant all that. But there's this actual quite gray area and it's it's very strange when you look at, you know, 20th century history and you look at Germany in particular, you know, it's coming off the heels of this great philosophic movement and it commits this act.
How do you move so quickly from this flourishing to this? It shows that, you know, you're always just a couple steps away and that the sort of means of rebarversation often look extremely civilized. And one such means he points out is this sort of indefensible attempt to shoe horn classical thought into contemporary sort of liberal ideas without any sense of the radicality of the critique actually contained in the ancients and the intellectual demands that critique makes. And therefore the civilizational effect that taking that thing seriously has, I mean by that that, it forces you to be civilized, it forces you to think through problems and to be far more moderate, you could say in your practical efforts than this appropriation would have you be, right?
I'm not sure if that comes off clearly, but I find that that remark jarring at first or it should be jarring to good liberal peers, but somehow a good caution that, you know, the excesses of the third Reich are very different from our own excesses, but we have our own excesses and they are barbarizing in their own way. Yeah, that there are what C.S. Lewis calls barberism in a three-piece suit. And that's much better but than the Michael thing.
That's that's have lock. As for the review of have lock itself, it examines have locks claims not only about Plato, especially in the protagonists, Plato, whom have lock considers a religiously inclined anti-liberal. It also, but it also examines have locks claims about Greek poets and pre-socratic. Have lock tries to argue that the pre-socratic were liberals and even what we might call secularists and lighteners, technological, commercial, pragmatic, non-theological, indebted to a philosophy of history and egalitarian, it's all those things.
So have locks position doesn't seem at all to resemble Heidegger's position, which is of course that the path to technology starts with Plato. And for this reason, we have to return to the pre-socratic over turn technology and technological thinking. And the pre-socratic to recover the pre-socratic understanding of being. But have lock does parallel Heidegger in searching among the pre-socratic for something covered over by Plato and Aristotle.
In have locks case, he's searching for a pure liberalism in pre-platonic or pre-socratic thought, one that is free of any non-negotiable natural right over and against what he considers Plato's and Aristotle's metaphysical absolutism. And that indicates a certain common ground with Heidegger for all of their differences. Have lock and Heidegger, according to Strauss, I think what he indicates is that they share an inability to read texts carefully enough in light of the opposition that those texts express between philosophic thought and accepted opinion. Whoa, whoa, whoa.
All right, folks, this just seems like a good place to stop. This conversation has been going really great, but the conversation took over two hours. So we thought we just got to break it up. So we'll look forward to next week, folks.
I'm the new thinker for part two of this excellent conversation with Tim Burns on Leo Strauss, Democracy, Technology and Liberal Education. Anything to add, Alex? Yeah, I mean, Tim's like a philosophy machine. You can't get him to stop and that's right.
We'll get folks look forward to an episode too. I mean, I'm not sure exactly where we're cutting us because we're already this right after, but more Heidegger, more so that's the second part. We're going to talk about Churchill Heidegger. And we'll also get a genealogy of Tim Burns's own turn to philosophy and, you know, his first car, you're here, you're lightning, lightning, right, questions.
Yeah, exactly. Hope you liked this first episode. Don't forget to like, rate, subscribe, and don't forget to tune in next week for part two of our conversation with Tim Burns. Yeah, Sentex.