Hey folks, welcome back to the New Thinkery. If you listened all the way to the end of the last episode, you'll know that we had a conversation in twain, right? And here's what's that? Is that what that means?
Is that right? Okay, sure. Anyways, here's part two of our conversation Greg. I'm looking forward to it.
And now more Tim Burns. As Strauss, he puts it, he suggests this about Heidegger only once, clearly. And that's in his, in a talk on Heidegger called the problem with Socrates that appeared in interpretation, issue 22.3. He asks, is Heidegger insufficiently aware of the Odysseus in Socrates?
Perhaps. Now, I can go into that a little more if you'd like. Yeah, but I'll just say, amplify a little bit. One of the things I was struck by your book sort of draws out well is that, I mean, Strauss is maybe to put another two, five, one on it, but Heidegger doesn't read the ancients closely enough.
This guy had a lot to do either. And you get the impression that Hobbes doesn't read him well enough. I mean, I wonder about Machiavelli looking in the background, but is it a problem of modern thought generally that it's rejection of the ancients? Does it misread the ancients?
Is it's rejection based on a sound understanding of the ancients in first place? Yeah, that's a very important point. That might take you far away from where you were just going, but I think it would. Sorry.
I still think it's a great question to ask. And in some ways, it means that, um, Mr. S has to make claims about Hobbes that he misunderstood the ancients, that he misunderstood the whole intention of political philosophy. As Strauss puts it in, after written history, Hobbes belonged to the idealist school concerning political philosophy.
Because he thought that the whole purpose of it was to bring about the best, doesn't say the best regime, the best social order. And that that means he mistook what is best a tertiary goal of classical political philosophy for its primary goal. But as for Machiavelli, that's a different story. But certainly he does indicate there was that misunderstanding by Hobbes.
And the misunderstanding does seem to have continued right up through Dijneger. Let me say a little bit about this particular article, the review of Havelock. This structure, Strauss argues this. Everybody grants the priests of critics were atheistic materialistic epimatheum, not promatheum.
You see this in the 10th book of the laws, what Dijneger has to say to Megalist and Clemius. That also that the priests of critics recognized progress in the arts and inventions had pulled humanity out of an originally poor and British beginning, which we talked about before. And that the priests of critics held all morality to be merely human origin. Strauss says, those are not sufficient for liberalism.
Well so, what is a sufficient condition? Or what's present in ancient priests of critics thought that's absent from liberalism? What's present that caused them not to move to liberals? And Strauss says it's three things, theaeria, or understanding as it's a distinctively human life that's superior to life of action and production.
And just to anticipate, Havelock obscures that. For Havelock, the theoretical life is not one that is distinct from the life of action. Second, what distinguishes the priests of critics from contemporary liberals is the clear side and it's about the fact that the universe is coming to being and will perish. And therefore, no attempt to overcome its inevitable decline or to conquer nature and a corresponding recognition of the relative insignificance of human action and production.
This is something that Strauss thinks the moderns occluded, that they blinded themselves to. And that most Strauss to raise in turn the question of whether in this essay, whether human being was for the ancients, the priests of critics and the ancients in general, whether human being was not accidental to but necessary to an ordered whole or cosmos. Which is to say that they understood the human mind and its noetic and sense perceptions to play a decisive role in the formation or being of that ordered whole. And the Strauss in the case of natural and history, the finitude of human beings.
And hence this question of the being of the cosmos without human beings. That is a most important question also in the thinking of Heidegger who claims that there can be beings without being. That is without Daza. This is how the first chapter concludes of natural and history.
Third, empirical or practical pragmatic liberalism, Strauss argues, is unable to assert that the principle of causality. That principle is this, nothing comes into being out of nothing and through nothing. X-neolot-neil-fit. That principle is evidently and necessarily true.
The positivists are pragmatic liberals. They're unable to assert that it's evidently and necessarily true. Greek investigators of nature did regard that principle as evidently true. Because they understood the relation of sense perception and logos differently than the liberals.
Liberals like Havelock followed Descartes. They followed Descartes in rejecting sense perception as providing a natural knowledge of the world as it is. The ancients did not reject pre-socratic knowledge available through sense perception. A knowledge that's available as knowledge relies on that principle.
Where the purified sense perception is indeed trustworthy is of course, that's something also investigated by the ancients. But the important point is pre-socratic investigators of nature in accepting this principle, X-neolot-neil-fit. They stand against Heidegger. According to whom all things come into being out of nothing and by nothing.
Haidegger traces the ancients alleged failure to question the fundamental tenet of all philosophy. X-neolot-neil-fit. He traces that to an insufficient awareness of mortality. An insufficient awareness of the recognition of the central role of thinking being man in the being of the cosmos.
Strauss, in many places, shows that's not at all the case for Platonic political philosophy. One of the central themes of which is death or erotic rebellion against mortality. In Heidegger claims that all things come into being out of nothing and by nothing. That claim, according to Strauss, is traceable ultimately to Heidegger's historicists.
Of our being in the grip of forces more powerful than we. Which Haidegger rather unthinkingly inherited. And about which Strauss spends a good deal of time discosing the origins and the trajectory in modern thought. Now in this essay Strauss addresses the alleged historicism that Havelock finds in the pre-socratic who rejected Hesiod's alleged tale of historical decline.
He'll talk about a progress instead. And in the course of doing so Strauss introduces Hesiod's Isatericists. In this case Hesiod's Isatericists, the intimations of the power of the Nightingale, the poet that is, or the knower, over and against the king. And so he introduces Isatericists by way of Hesiod.
Then he addresses Aristotle's argument in the second book of the politics. The argument concerning Hippodemus of the leadus. In order to bring out the irresolvable problem that the ancients has spied in the difference between scientific progress and when he had social progress on the other. Understanding of which is behind the isatericism of the ancients.
Daddy's isatericism was overlooked not only by Havelock but also by Heidegger who argued that ancient thought, indeed all thought prior to Nietzsche, took place in a sheltered or guarded horizon. In the case of the ancients it was belief in gods. And Strauss argues to the contrary, ancient thinkers including the pre-socratic, guarded themselves against the forces of their contemporaries and their beliefs. But they were not believers.
And then I go on to explicate a limited agreement between Strauss and Heidegger over and against Havelock on the matter of modern rootedness or their disagreement about the role of philosophy in the task of contributing toward the recovery or return of an alleged source of human greatness that is, Bowden's standing kite rootedness in the soil versus Heimat Losekite, homelessness. Which according to Heidegger is the will of nihilism. Strauss insists on account, this is what he insists on the Heidegger piece, on account of the very awareness of our imperfect beginnings. An awareness you see in the pre-socratics and in the socratics.
He says on account of that, the very first duty of civilized man is to respect the past. And that's a duty that leads one to elevate the founding fathers and the aged and hence logically it leads to the belief in perfect beginnings of the age of chronos. This is what someone who's aware of the imperfect beginnings and of what that means for human life will proclaim. More generally, what Heidegger's analysis of classical thought, well of course it's infinitely more impressive than that of Havelock.
Strauss Kletzett was limited, no less than Havelock's, by Heidegger's failure to see the accommodations, the classical philosophers and poets, socratic and instocratic, pre-socratic. The accommodations they were making on the surface of their works to the reigning religious orthodoxies of their time. Or as comes out a bit later in the section of Strauss's review dealing with the Prometheus Smith in Escalas. Whereas Heidegger holds the Germans and through them all human beings.
This is in the retro-attress. He must now engage in thinking and science in the light of Nietzsche's finding. Nietzsche, that passionate seeker of God, is finding God is dead. That they must now face up to the forsakenness of modern man in the midst of what is.
For Strauss, what's entailed in that facing up is already achieved in meditation on divine human things made by Escalas. And his Escalas, a poet with an awareness of his civic responsibility, was someone who faced up to that but didn't broadcast it. He did not broadcast that forsakenness. And more broadly, there's a significant neglect on the part of Heidegger, no less than Havelock, of the literary character, of the ancient texts that they claim to be examined and carefully.
There's a fascinating remark by, I think it's right on this point that Ben or Denny makes an encounter some reflections about how Strauss saw that. You would think a refutation of Heidegger should proceed through a critique of his understanding of design or something like that, one of his central philosophical concepts. But he actually says that Strauss saw you could actually do it through the interpretive line. If you attacked the hermeneutics, and I think he points to this phrase that Heidegger often uses when he says, thought greekly, or thought in the Greek manner.
It presupposes when he's getting to the concepts, it presupposes a kind of interpretive approach. And that somehow- It's an interpretive approach that assumes the stories. Yeah, exactly. That it's not really raising the literary question in the proper manner, right, which of course the ancients and the medievals were so focused on.
One thing I'll also add just to sort of, because that was a very detailed exposition- I'll just say that. One helpful way to think about what Strauss is doing with the history of philosophy, and specifically with classical thought, is to show that the Machiavellian critique or the modern critique of ancient idealism as imaginary, as made up, right, and is therefore somehow opposed to real life as it's lived. Which you can find in chapter 15 of the Prince, and it goes all the way up to the end of Nietzsche's thought in 12 of the idols, he has a chapter called Scarequotes Reason and Philosophy, which he shows that the so-called reason of the ancients, and of really all philosophers, is just a kind of world creation, right? And therefore, this modern focus on making the world as sort of meaning as created is somehow the primary sort of philosophic phenomenon, or the sort of entry point of philosophy.
Strauss is trying to show that the ancients were aware of this. They even used it, and yet still saw that this was not a wholesale rejection of nature, but that there were some natural standards beyond this, that, and this is where esotericism I think comes in beautifully, right, because esotericism shows that apparently it looks like you can reduce Plato to a Greek manor or something, or you can reduce him to his time. It's actually just the sort of the surface, right, what they're presenting, and that there's a kind of irony and a depth, and their understanding of nature is in a way far more sensitive to the issues raised by the moderns than the moderns were aware. Now which moderns were aware more aware than others is a question, but I think it's important to underline that this sort of esotericist of thesis really drives a stake.
It's the heart of a lot of modern critiques of the ancients. Well, I guess especially the- Devogorized versus especially. No, but also the late moderns. What you just said about Machiavelli in Chapter 15 of the Prince, I'm not sure that Machiavelli was unaware of what was intended by Plato by an imaginary republic that is of a utopia, and that he was saying, yes, I understand that, I want to move us in a different direction.
Whether subsequent thinkers understood Machiavelli or understood Plato as well as Machiavelli did, I don't know, but stress. And thoughts on Machiavelli goes pretty far in claiming that Machiavelli understood the theoretical life in Plato and Xenophon in an Aristotle, but that he thought it could take care of itself, that for the situation that was now faced, there was a need for a transformation, that a transformation of political life that the ancients had not foreseen. And that Machiavelli was himself as much a participant in the theoretical life as anyone else, as any of the ancients and as any of the medievals, but that he thought the situation was such that one had to move in a different direction. But that really would take us into another podcast.
I thought it's on Machiavelli. Well then, since we should get back to the task at hand, we've already mentioned a couple of times the Church Hillian alternative, you mentioned in the chapter on German IELISM, it's on the cover of your book for goodness sake, right? So this points to me, the centrality of Church Hill. You have to go to that?
That's Church Hill? No, I celebrate it. That's Church Hill? Yeah, that's the coffin of Church Hill.
Oh, I thought that was Princess Nives, whether. Oh, God, very real. Okay. Do you want me to say a little bit about that cover?
Yeah, tell me a cover and then talk about the seriousness of the possibility of Church Hill with the modernity or liberal democracy or something. Yeah. Yeah, please talk about the cover of the cover. Well, the cover of sure.
So it's a single shot from the video of Church Hill's funeral. And if you look at it, you'll notice up in the left hand corner, the king and the queen, or rather the queen and her husband. This is the first funeral in British history in which the queen was there for a commoner. And it never been the case that the queen would come to the funeral of a commoner.
And so that's what I was trying to capture, first of all, in this snapshot that she's there for the commoner. And the commoner upstages her. There's the, on the top of the casket, a regular order at the garter. But it's also that Churchill is too important commoner, though he be, for the queen not to be there.
Second, you'll notice the way in which the Paul bears heads are against the casket. There's a physical reason for that. The casket is lead-lined and Churchill's a heavy man. And they're trying to keep their balance.
But there's also another reason. That's what I was trying to bring out with, or what I was trying to bring out and capturing this or isolating this photograph is that there's a certain expression of love, for Churchill, that's conveyed to you. And third, that he's being honored by not just royalty, but all of Brit for what he did, what he stood for. And that's something that Strauss points to very emphatically in the German nihilism piece, that what he stands for, what he argues for is a humane, generous, imperialism.
And this is the part that affects the German nihilists. He stands for sacrifice or call for sacrifice. Now, is Churchill pre-liberal democracy or is he something that is still available in liberal democracy? I think a good question.
Does he come from outside of it? His education was in British schools before they became democratized. So when Strauss says blood, sweat, and tears in the German nihilism piece, or claims that had these young Germans who were moved by the possibility of sacrifice, had they seen what was available still in liberal democracy with Churchill, that it would have transformed them. Is that true?
Is Churchill really somebody who emerges out of liberal democracy or does he represent a throwback? Well, just for one thing. The British reform acts had been passed, we have to remember this, 1832, 1867, 1884, with progressively more enfranchisement. So we are talking about liberal democracy.
And Churchill himself was a member of the liberal party from 1904 to 1924. He was not a Tory. He was a member of the liberal party. As I said, he stood for humane, generous empire, and above all, call for sacrifice.
As Strauss, though, did not find that liberal democracy in America in 1965 was as he found it, capable of producing a Churchill. Liberal democracy might be capable, but it was not at that time. That's why Strauss spoke of the need for a sub-political aristocracy within democracy. This is of the need for it.
It wasn't there. He was calling for it. It was a sub-political aristocracy that could set the tone for public life. If we recall what Tocqueville says about aristocracy over to Guist democracy, especially regard to the life of the mine, I think we can see what Strauss means.
The effect of a society putting the life of the mind above all else yields a Pascal, yields in Archimedes, but it has an effect on everyone, Tocqueville says. And that's what Strauss means by the tone, setting the tone for everyone. You see this even in Downton Abbey or upstairs downstairs, that a tone is set. Strauss incurs the formation of an aristocracy within democracy, also in his eulogy of Kurt Riesler, which is the eulogy of a man whom he indicates was not a philosopher but a gentleman, a gentleman rather than a shallow cosmopolitan.
One can see what Strauss has in mind by the product of liberal education, by seeing what he says about Riesler, who Strauss says was formed above all by Guerta, by a poet. So two questions, one, so in 1965, obviously, this isn't relevant, but why not Lincoln is more a product of a liberal democratic society as a model of greatness we aspire to? Is the problem and you look to this in the book, is what's more impressive about Churchill, as impressive as he was, as outstanding as he was, there was still a devotion to the life of the mind. He didn't only act in politics, he also wrote Marlboro, for example.
Is that part of what makes Churchill so impressive? That's what Strauss says, certainly. Yeah. Yes, that equally impressive.
And it's a little shocking, actually. Equally impressive to his opposition to the Nazis was his life of Marlboro. That is, that there was something else in addition to action that's required, or there's something that is good in itself, and that's the life of the mind. You find that in Churchill.
Okay, so with respect to this life of the mind and sacrifice and action, one of my favorite lines is in My Early Life, and it's in the chapter called Education of Bangalore, and he says, but now I pity undergraduates, it's reflecting on education. When I see what frivolous lives that many of them lead, in the midst of precious fleeting opportunity, after all, a man's capital L life must be nailed to a cross either of capital T thought or capital A action. So he seems to recognize that these are the two serious alternatives and that a sacrifice to choose one or the other. It's interesting.
Maybe that can be something we can transition to liberal education. Yeah. No, isn't it an impressive statement? Churchill saw those as an alternative, that he saw if he goes to the life of action, he's going to abandon the life of fear.
Yes. And you mentioned specifically Plato and Aristotle in the preceding paragraph. Yeah. So he wasn't unaware of the alternatives, but you could say Socrates, I guess it's a he's not sufficiently pulled by, clarity that would allow him to move to the life of the mind.
But in any case, that's part of the impressiveness of Churchill that he recognizes the alternative. And that's an alternative, by the way, that Heidegger does not see, does not see that the life of the mind is not subordinate to the life of action. Hence you have 1933, you have the rational address, you have to claim that philosophers, like him, should be leading the political action of Germany, or even very late after the alleged term Heidegger claiming everybody can participate in this new thinking. But Churchill, this practicing statesman, was much more aware of the difference between those two ways of life than was Heidegger.
A few people have practiced both lives on such a level. Right. I mean, it's a political issue. No, I guess it's a political issue.
It's a political issue. Maybe cissorale, Marcus Aurelius. Yeah. Marcus Aurelius, who, yeah, Xenophon, Machiavelli cites Marcus as the philosopher.
You only mentioned of Chef 19. Yeah. But the fact that we have to go back 2000 years, I think, right? Right.
Specialness. No, you make a persuasive case for that. I mean, you can see this sort of unwitting modernity of Heidegger and things like this kind of Zorga or care, right? Where he's trying existentialism, he's not just about your existence as an individual, but it does seek, at least in the Heideggerian form, a kind of harmony between the sort of life of the mind and the communal existence.
This comes out painfully in the rhetorical address, but even in being in time, you see this attempt to really ground our communal life and our world of concern with others and even with things in an interpretation of being. I mean, what a... Eventually, I guess. Yeah.
I mean, primordly, it is an individual choice, an individual decision. But then when gathers that seriously after confrontation with death, the situation in which one finds oneself thrown and one does not accept it blindly as what thus man dishes out, that yes, that includes all of the care of other human beings, that would be quite different from the life of the mind. That would be present an alternative to it. That would be the life of action and or production that's quite different from the theory of...
I mean, there are even accounts of being in time of sort of liberating other people's eyes towards being an intervening in their life. So there's a kind of emancipatory or you might even want to say, also, it's I think, element to Heidegger's thought, if you want to be maybe a bit more sort of offensive with his thought, if there is something like that, that's strangely modern slash Christian. Right. Yes.
Should we get the question? I just wanted to follow up on Churchill before we move on. Like, is... I just wanted to dwell on it just because I'm not satisfied.
I suppose is it is that tight still possible? Can it actually provide the kind of corrective that Strauss thinks it can provide? Like, I'll make the criticism a little more boldly. This wouldn't have satisfied these German youths.
Okay, Churchill is some weird exception, but by and large still modernity is nothing but Tik-Tok and vapid teenagers are some of the pleasure-seeking consumerists. Is Churchill sufficient? church else efficient, they don't have himself or are there still in 2023, is there a church else possibility out there? Yeah, it's trust doesn't suggest that Churchill in and of himself would be sufficient.
But it would have caused these young, intelligent German youth who saw nothing of greatness in liberal democracy or Marxist, Marxist regimes, would have caused them to turn their heads and say, what? He's talking about blood, sweat and tears. He's talking about England's finest hour. We didn't expect that.
We didn't think that there was still room for that in liberal democracy. We thought that it was wiping those things out. That's still there. And they might have then begun to question Strauss says their historical thinking.
That is that they would have reverted to their common sense thinking. They would have abandoned what they had been told by their teachers that either it will result rationally in the universal homogeneous state or that state must be opposed with resoluteness, with something irrational, with an opposition to what reason points to that the possibility could have opened up of a common sense rationality. The church it was part of and it remained part of liberal democracy, despite all of this pull away from common sense and toward a kind of narrow liberalism of the sort that Patrick Demean has been denouncing. That within liberalism, one has actually a certain human alternative that corresponds with their deepest longings.
So Churchill is just the beginning, but it's visible in Churchill because he's the leader of the opposition to national socialism and is calling for it so explicitly. There's no mealy mouth statements here. There's nothing about, well, there's problems on both sides. I mean, it's very, very clear.
And it's a statement that appeals to the common sense understanding of the English, of the British. And it didn't just appeal to it. It wasn't a failure. Churchill succeeded.
He was succeeding in mobilizing the British on the basis of this. So it was something that might have awakened them to the thought there's still greatness there. There's still a possibility of that very thing that moves me. It's still a sacrifice, a call of sacrifice to the nation.
And that I think he's saying it was unexpected. I think he's also saying it was exhilarating for him to hear it. I go ahead. It wasn't wiped out.
I have a small, small thought. So I mean, I realized that this one of the things you're talking about is in 1965, German islands before this 1941. But 1963, Kennedy says, let's go to the moon. What was it?
63. I'm just wondering is it, is there any prospect for the young and liberal democracy to look at technological excellence as another path? Or is it because that there's no sacrificial component to achieving greatness in technology that that won't appeal to their souls? You're moving away from Strauss now.
Sorry, sorry. I can get my own opinion on that. I don't know what Strauss would think of it. My own opinion is, yeah, as Almuth says, space is empty.
We want to go there. And I know that people as different as Henry Kissinger and Ross Stauffit argue in favor of the space program and technological innovation is great. I don't think that's far as... Yeah.
Good. So I had this debate with a student of mine where I said, you know, look, you go to the bottom of the ocean, maybe see a deranged fish with a light bulb off its head. That's kind of fun. You know, maybe, I don't know if it's worth imploding over, but you go to space, what is there?
And the student said, well, you know, there are some amino acids. The consolation gets to see some amino acids. But I have to say, I'm consoled by the idea of Churchill's greatness that you can be great in liberal democracy and still turn the ball of champagne today. That's my kind of job.
But to get to the question of education. Right. I thought a good way to conclude is to sort of ask about, right, this is a possibility within liberal democracy. You brought up the needs.
So let's think about, you know, Churchill's flourishing, you know, 180 years ago, roughly, right? That's what he's having, his sort of moment. What about today? I mean, you talk at one point about the task of philosophers as converting gentlemanly education so that it's also conducive to philosophic education.
And I imagine you have like the Nick and the Kean ethics in mind there that there's this sort of education in the moral virtues that could somehow also be conducive if probably articulated toward the philosophic virtues, right, or philosophic excellence. But it seems today that that's increasingly off the table, right? It's difficult to come by. It's maybe easier to come by philosophic education, but maybe it's too easily one of a kind of liberal cynicism.
But it's definitely very difficult to come by a gentlemanly education. So just what we're getting from these questions about democracy, technology and education. What about today? It feels increasingly like we have to start from scratch, right?
We have to kind of pull each of us has to pull himself up from by his boots, drops and try to figure a way out to get an education. Is it a liberal education need to be revived? Do we really need philosophers? Do we need law givers or statesman like Churchill or somebody who is a statesman who can sort of reform our education?
What would a path forward look like in light of the lessons that we can glean from Strauss from these pieces that you've analyzed? Yeah, that's a great question, Alex. I suppose I should first ask and reply to the final part of your question, which was, do we need philosophers or statesman, law givers? I would ask, do we need them for what?
Do we need them for the perfection of humanity in rare individuals or for a healthy political regime? And Strauss following Plato points to the great difference between those two things. What I tried to argue is that according to Strauss, liberal education, the education of free men and Xenophon in the memorabilia in his mention of liberal education makes clear that's who it's for, free men, not slaves. But education precedes philosophy.
It's there before philosophy and was, as it were, not hijacked by but infiltrated by philosophy with Socrates for purposes of his own purposes that had little to do with liberal education's original intention. Liberal education was originally poetic and religious stress or case. It was an education for free men in entailed understanding of epic poetry, history, and lessons from practicing statesmen. And it was guided by the need to have virtuous and competent rulers and by the time awareness that there's something good in itself, even beyond political life.
So stepping into this education, Socrates introduced into it dialectic with a twofold intention. It was in the first place to secure a pre philosophic defense of the philosophic life, the life of science, which had come to be seen, defensive come to be seen as necessary for reasons that are spelled out and played as Fido. In the second place, the stepping in to liberal education was needed for a political defense of philosophy, which is quite a different thing from a pre philosophic defense of the philosophic life. Now, what would such a liberal education look like?
Well, we've got the best example of it in the platonic dialogues, in which very few interlocutors end up becoming philosophers. It's not to be expected that that has changed. And as stress argues, the same questions and even the same answers about human life as one finds in the dialogues. One finds also in the great poets, just without those poets being directing their poetry to the philosophic life.
Today, good teachers can explore those questions with the kind of care exercised by Plato or his Socrates, and that exploration will enrich those students, with most though not becoming philosophic, but rather cultivating the reasons so that they will become more thoughtful, more prudent, and more moved by the noble and the just, by the call of conscience, we could say. But stress indicates that something has indeed changed that makes even this end of liberal education more difficult for us today, for us who claim to be educating our students. We are the heirs of the attempt, as stress puts it, to found a rational society. We are the heirs that is of the enlightenment's disenchantment of the world and the soul-shrinking that has proved to accompany it.
That means that those entering our classrooms need to be awakened to the longings that modernity has put to sleep in many of them, through its distractions, through its entertainments, its pursuit of preacher comfort's wealth. And this worldly happiness, its deep cynicism about claims of virtue and the noble, its positive as social science jargon, and its corresponding failure to concentrate, as Travis says, on those very few essential things upon which man's wholeness entirely depends. So part of our task, as educators, is to awaken in our students those longings that have been put to sleep by their iPhones. That was excellent.
I thought that was just an extended justification of attempts not using a phone. That's very good. I was going to ask Tim, actually, I thought it was such a beautiful way of putting what little education should be doing, awakening the longings that modernity has put to sleep in our students, I think that's right. So this might be a good, I mean, this was excellent.
We appreciate the book, The Book of the Guenten, it's Leo Strauss on democracy, technology, and liberal education. But I thought at this point, maybe you could tell us about your own education. Who was it that roused you from your modern slumber and creature comforts and turned you on to the life of the mind? Were you always interested in these things?
Was there a particular moment, a particular teacher? How did you find liberal education, and then the next step beyond liberal education, the philosophical? Yeah, it was my mother when I was five years old. No, I went to Boston College.
But why is that? It's funny you say that because my son Daniel did not realize until he was an adult that I hated Dr. Seuss. I think it was when I praised the movie Adam's Family Values, in which Morticia has shown expressing her contempt for doctors that he realized I hated.
Anyway, no, it was not until I went to Boston College as an undergraduate and I was an executive become a lawyer, so I majored in political science. But Boston College had many very thoughtful political scientists. As you know, it was a department founded by David Lowenthal, included teachers like Robert Faulkner, Christopher Brill, and I lived with the Augustinians of the assumption. And Ernest Fortin, who was a student of Strauss, lived in that house.
So there were 21 of us. And it was a couple of miles from campus. I was the gardener and the breakfast cook and handyman. That's how I paid for my Roman board, in addition to driving a Zamboni at Boston College for my work study, which was another tale.
But there were a number of graduate students in political philosophy at that house. And I mean, it's an amazing thing, just amazingly good fortune to have meals every night with Ernest Fortin. And to be introduced to the life of the mind. I think that the real turn to the decision to study political philosophy was in my junior years taking course on Thucydides with Christopher Brill.
And I guess he was the one who really made me alive to these questions who brought me out of that that's longer and who caused me to think maybe I should investigate these things more. So going to graduate school, I didn't have clearly in mind that I would become a professor of political philosophy, but I knew that I wanted to investigate these questions more. Did that? Sorry.
I had the good fortune of studying with Thomas Pangal in the fourth one. Right. Was that part of the reason that you've done your work on Thucydides, the work that you have done? Yeah, I think so.
Yeah. You have a couple of very interesting articles on I think a couple of comparing Thucydides and Aristophanes, which is a very how the historical, you have one on Cleon, I know, I think maybe another as well, right? And I really recommend it's sort of you would think that people would do more of this, but they don't, you know, so yeah. Excellent.
Yeah. Man, that was great. So you just enlisted the influential teachers. Very nice.
All right. Should you do a lightning round Alex or anything? Go ahead. I'm sorry.
Another influential teacher was David Lowenthal. And you had on last year for his last interview. BJ Dobson just texted us and said, please get Tim Burns to do with Lowenthal. Yeah, I had my first class on Shakespeare with Lowenthal.
I had a class called Political Classics, with Lowenthal my first year at BC. And we did 1984. We did sections of the politics. We did some of the Federalist papers, but really it was his class on Shakespeare that I think was his best class.
I also took a graduate class with him on Montesquieu, but the Shakespeare was, it was a lot of fun because he was clearly attuned to Shakespeare's not just his brilliance, but his subtlety. And he was someone who brought Shakespeare alive in a way that, you know, there were English majors in the class and they had never experienced this. They'd never seen that. Oh, now I see.
Now I see why Shakespeare is a great writer. So, yeah. I'll recommend you your Shakespeare book. That's another work that, you know, when I took my current job, I had never taught Shakespeare.
I think I taught him once before, but I never taught him. And, you know, in anything like a throw going away. And I did the Tempest and you have a very helpful chapter on the Tempest, I believe in your book. Am I right?
Remember that. You did a great attempt. You don't remember? Right.
I thought it was the attempt. You don't remember if I did it. It was either because I did the template. There's also a thing that I thought was really helpful for me too, that one time you wrote it was very helpful.
I know there's a chapter on Macbeth, right? But the Tempest one, anyways, I recommend it's not a chronological treatment, much like this book, but it sort of treats a series of plays that are interrelated conceptually. And I like that approach where you're thinking with an author, not in a, you know, it's important to trace somebody's development. I'm trying to discount that, but you're sort of tracing an author's thinking across works in a way that brings the, I guess you take your orientation by the ideas in relation to the works rather than just sort of by somebody's sort of path of like, you know, historical path, which, yeah, important, but not fundamental, I think in the end.
Tim, can I ask you a series of short questions? Sure. What's your favorite philosopher? I go.
Favorite work of liberal philosophy? The Republic. Fair enough. Favorite work of literature?
Say the Republic. Shakespeare's doing a season. Julius Caesar, very good. Now this will be obvious.
And favorite, a non-philosopher author. What does that mean? Yeah, okay. Fair enough.
That's not a very, you're going to say Shakespeare, but no Shakespeare is philosophic. It's still something. It's just conventional. Just conventional.
I don't know. Just conventional. I guess, yeah, I would say it's a tough one. Yeah.
Stendol. Stendol, right. What's your favorite work by Stendol? Charterhouse of Parliament.
Charterhouse of Parliament. Yeah. Very good. What's your first car?
It was a Toyota Corolla. Hatch. Right now you drive a pickup truck, right? Yeah.
So you own a Tacoma. Right. It was your first job. It was on a farm.
I was eight years old. Eight to thirteen. I worked on a farm. And by thirteen I was pretty much running it.
But I was 14. I was able to get a... You could work on farms without permission from the state. But at fourteen I got a permit to work.
And so I worked at Howard Johnson's. I don't know if you know what those are. Older listeners will remember Howard Johnson's. I remember Howard Johnson's old feet.
Oh, Joe's. He tells with good photo restaurants. And so I was a fishwasher for two or three months and then graduated to short order cook. Worked there for four years while I was in high school.
Right. That's something you became a painter. Having commented, you started working on a farm too. Something like that.
Yeah. Not old at all. This was great. Greg still lifts 300 pound logs and throws that.
I'm told across football fields. Yeah, that's right. I'm like a farm like in that. It's very farm like.
Yeah. Yeah. It seems fair. I'm going to fight this mortality.
Your book mentioned that I'm going to die and I just it just drove me to go work out more. Yeah. Well, for you, it's you're hoping to live forever. That's right.
So far so good. So far so good. Yeah. All right.
Well, it's been fun. I learned a lot. I do encourage folks to get out and go out and read the book Leo Strauss on democracy technology and liberal education. You work on anything else.
It's coming out sooner. I mean, we're kind of a service book. Right. Right.
So I'm on book eight of the Sarah Padilla in my second draft of the manuscript and I'm hoping to finish that the spring and hoping therefore that it'll be published in. 2025. Very nice. Okay.
I know you're you're working on the server. I am also working on Saturday. Exchange some thoughts about that and I profited from your work on that. And I've from you and from all our conversations over the many years at NPSA and other such conferences.
So it was a pleasure. Anything else? And I've profited from your work on the campus if it should exist. Well, you're welcome back anytime, Tim.
So come on back. Thanks. Thanks, Greg. Thanks, Alex.
It's been a real pleasure.