The Auron MacIntyre Show - August 21, 2024


Did Machiavelli Break Philosophy？ ｜ Guest： Athenian Stranger ｜ 8⧸21⧸24

Topics
Blaze TV roast of DNC job stacking Strauss numerology
Hosted by
Auron MacIntyre
Guests
Athenian Stranger
Mentioned
Leo Strauss Strauss's Machiavelli Heidegger Plato Robert Weisfield Vogelin Hobbes Kant Andrew Gustafsson Sarah Gonzalez Ernst Kassirer Xenophon Cyrus Francis Bacon Russell Kirk Dave Landau Chris Ruffo Ralph Halza Glenn Beck Alex Stein Stu Breguier and 11 more
Demanding a Competent Tyranny ｜ 8⧸19⧸24 No Common Tradition, No Common Sense ｜ 8⧸22⧸24

Episode Stats


Length

56 minutes

Words per minute

166.66

Word count

9,419

Sentence count

496

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In honor of the Democratic National Convention, we have a guest on the show to talk about political philosophy, Leo Strauss, and his new book, Thoughts on Machiavelli. We also hear from Glenn Beck's roast of the DNC.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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00:00:30.440 Hey everybody, how's it going?
00:00:32.380 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.
00:00:34.060 I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.
00:00:38.840 Before I get started, just wanted to remind you guys that obviously the DNC has been going on.
00:00:44.720 If you've been watching the clips, the terrible interviews, the horrible speeches that have been coming out of this event, 0.95
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00:00:59.600 It begins at 9 p.m. sharp.
00:01:02.180 You're going to have the Blaze News tonight, and they'll be going commercial-free with the roast session of the Democratic National Convention that'll follow.
00:01:10.660 You'll have Glenn Beck, and he'll be joined by people like Dave Landau, Alex Stein, Sarah Gonzalez, Stu Berger, and Bridget Fettensy.
00:01:22.580 So make sure you go ahead and check in with those guys.
00:01:26.180 Enjoy the roast, all of the ridiculousness that is to follow after the DNC tonight.
00:01:32.900 You can check that out over on Blaze TV.
00:01:35.420 Joining me today is Athenian Stranger.
00:01:39.060 You know, I had to do this talk about Machiavelli recently, and I went back and, of course, I read a lot of Machiavelli.
00:01:46.200 But the other thing I wanted to do was look into others, the scholarship around it.
00:01:50.800 And, of course, one of the most famous people to ever comment on Machiavelli is Leo Strauss.
00:01:56.280 And that's a book that I've been turning over in my head.
00:01:59.500 His book, Thoughts on Machiavelli, is one that I've been thinking about since I read it.
00:02:04.000 So I wanted to bring someone on who is knowledgeable, familiar with Strauss and this book in particular,
00:02:08.840 because Strauss is really somebody who I'm still putting my toe in the water with philosophically.
00:02:14.600 So, Athenian Stranger, thanks for coming on today, man.
00:02:17.740 Man, thanks so much for having me.
00:02:19.180 I really, really appreciate this.
00:02:21.120 Absolutely.
00:02:21.520 So for people who are unfamiliar with your background, could you explain a little bit of kind of where you come from and what you do on the Internet?
00:02:29.120 Yeah.
00:02:29.580 So I originally found my way towards philosophy and political philosophy in a strange way.
00:02:35.760 I have a mathematics background initially, but I just became fascinated with philosophy of math.
00:02:42.140 And the next thing you know, I was in the philosophy department.
00:02:44.920 Next thing you know, I didn't want to stop studying it.
00:02:46.900 So I took it as far as I could go, took it as far as it goes through the PhD level.
00:02:52.460 And I was just fortunate enough.
00:02:54.660 I knew nothing about philosophy, but I just happened to be in some of the classrooms of some of the greatest professors on the thought of Strauss.
00:03:04.520 And it just worked out really well.
00:03:06.180 Oh, and what I do, at least on Twitter, I have my Athens Corner website where I just provide lectures and things like that on all kinds of things.
00:03:17.660 Everything from Nietzsche to technology and science.
00:03:23.380 I mean, I have a Fathers and Sons episode as well, series as well, to help fathers who are wanting to have a direct hand in educating their sons and the great books and things like that.
00:03:33.340 So that's that's really it. I'm sort of the I have I've had the fortune of having a very, very good great books education as far as it can go.
00:03:44.220 So. Yeah, you also do spaces on Twitter where you almost always promise they're going to be 45 minutes, but they end up being two hours, but of quality philosophical content every time.
00:03:54.320 So people should definitely check that out.
00:03:56.860 Yes, it's hilarious.
00:03:57.600 I have many, many recording and I always record my spaces.
00:04:01.080 So if people who are interested want to see what I what I have provided, at least on the Athens Corner website in much more focused form, by the way, polished form is the spaces that I do on philosophy and things like that, political philosophy in particular.
00:04:15.920 Fantastic. Well, we are going to get into Machiavelli.
00:04:18.740 We're going to get into Strauss.
00:04:20.080 We're going to get on get into what happened to political philosophy and whether it's something that needs to be repaired or restored.
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00:05:55.460 All right, so let's start at the beginning here.
00:06:00.140 Most people are probably at least passingly familiar with Machiavelli.
00:06:05.000 You usually have to learn about him.
00:06:07.340 There's a paragraph somewhere in a history book in high school that they may have even read The Prince in college because it's only 80 or 90 pages, something like that.
00:06:18.300 And so people are at least somewhat familiar with his role in political philosophy, but a lot of people don't know about Leo Strauss.
00:06:27.820 Could you explain a little bit about who Strauss was and kind of what he's doing?
00:06:33.080 Yeah, Strauss is just about the most controversial of thinkers.
00:06:39.400 I submit for everyone's consideration he will be remembered as a philosopher.
00:06:44.360 And that's not a word to be used casually.
00:06:49.040 It's very rare that there's ever a living philosopher in any of our lifetime, right?
00:06:54.460 That's how rare it is.
00:06:56.280 But he was a German immigrant from, well, from Germany during the Second World War.
00:07:04.140 And he, in many respects, he was a student of Heidegger, but I mean, he did his PhD and everything under Ernst Kassirer, a neo-Kantian, which is interesting itself because Strauss is always writing about political philosophy as opposed to what we would otherwise think of as purely philosophy.
00:07:27.200 Things like metaphysics, epistemology, and things like that.
00:07:31.800 And Strauss is known almost always mistakenly as the person who made popular looking for what we would refer to as kind of secret or hidden teachings within the great thinkers of the Western philosophical tradition.
00:07:52.460 Now, there's an enormous more to it than that.
00:07:57.200 It turns out that Strauss didn't begin this at all.
00:08:01.020 In fact, in many respects, he got it from Nietzsche.
00:08:04.240 And then from there, he got it.
00:08:07.460 Nietzsche sees it in many other thinkers, particularly Francis Bacon.
00:08:11.520 But this is a tradition of writing that has a very, very long history, but it's mostly been forgotten, particularly because we in the modern world, we're used to thinking that thinkers themselves will always write straightforwardly, that they're going to tell us precisely.
00:08:31.740 You know, they have the thesis that they state very clear for us.
00:08:35.540 And what Strauss points out, one of his more famous popular books, Persecution and the Art of Writing, is that the threat of persecution is very real.
00:08:48.320 And so our greatest thinkers, many of them, not all of them, but many of them had to write in a way that was intended for a multilayered audience, which is to say that the author was subtle enough to leave these kind of little clues along the way that there's a deeper teaching afoot.
00:09:12.820 And he can't say it out loud because, on the one hand, he himself doesn't want to face persecution, but also, and this is far, I would say, even more important, because they know that the damage that certain truths can have to political community itself.
00:09:30.860 Obviously, you see how foreign that is to us today, simply by thinking of someone like Nietzsche, who shouts, you know, God is dead from the rooftops, and sort of what everybody else does.
00:09:43.660 But I think when people consider at least the contemporary political climate of prosecution that all of us face for just saying what we think on social media or something like that, I think it becomes much more at least plausible that Strauss' elaboration of this kind of thinking is, in fact, something real.
00:10:07.520 But he focuses primarily on a criticism, it seems to be at least a criticism of what's known as historicism, particularly Heidegger's.
00:10:21.020 Now, again, there's much more to it than that, because he might, in fact, be far more in agreement than disagreement.
00:10:26.780 But from this sort of collision between Strauss and Heidegger, and then because of Heidegger's indebtedness to Nietzsche, the criticism, allegedly, that Strauss has with Nietzsche, he finds himself going back, following in the same tradition of Nietzsche and Heidegger, where they have these so-called destructions of the Western philosophical tradition, these return movements.
00:10:53.440 And Strauss, in fact, does something similar, but he goes further, one could say even more radical than Heidegger and Nietzsche, and returns all the way back to Homer, whereas Nietzsche goes back to the pre-Socratics, and in some respects Homer, and Heidegger, of course, only goes back to the pre-Socratics.
00:11:12.360 But it's all of this as a kind of return movement to the originals, right, the source of our tradition itself.
00:11:22.220 And Strauss, unlike Nietzsche and Heidegger, brings the Bible into it.
00:11:25.700 He speaks of this confrontation or this tension, really, between, on the one hand, Greece, Athens, represented in the tradition of philosophy from Greece, and the biblical tradition of Jerusalem.
00:11:40.460 And so he makes that question of the tension between Athens and Jerusalem really the centerstone of all of his thought.
00:11:50.060 And so he refers to this as the theological-political problem, and that should be understood as a constellation of very many problems, or very many questions.
00:12:00.060 So, for instance, poetry versus philosophy, divine revelation versus unassisted human reason, all of these things sort of come together in that.
00:12:09.360 And what Strauss argues is that we better understand ourselves and our genuine tradition when we recognize the great tensions that have really sustained our tradition by not really negating either of them,
00:12:24.080 but seeing how they can work in tandem, as opposed to the various syntheses that we have throughout the tradition.
00:12:31.040 One could think, for instance, the most famous of them, Hegel, but then also something along the lines of Plotinus or any number of these things.
00:12:40.720 Strauss takes a particular issue with the scholastics, Christian scholastics, who sought philosophy, the handmaiden of theology, et cetera.
00:12:49.120 So, that sort of thing.
00:12:51.740 So, for a lot of people, and it's interesting given that kind of pretext to kind of how Strauss is approaching these thinkers, a lot of people look at Machiavelli and they think,
00:13:04.720 okay, this is a guy who obviously had a significant impact.
00:13:07.700 He marks a turning point of some kind in the history of thought or philosophy, but he's often relegated to, well, maybe he's just kind of this really practical political theorist, right?
00:13:21.000 He's not writing particularly long works.
00:13:23.800 We don't have a large amount of philosophical content from him.
00:13:28.820 The applications are almost directly political in most situations.
00:13:32.760 A lot of people don't think of Machiavelli as somebody who's exploring the larger metaphysical issues, and in a lot of ways, he is a guy who is supposed to be just saying the straight truth, right?
00:13:47.080 This is a reason why his books are released after his death, because he recognizes how controversial they'll be, how they're going to clash with the restrictions of the times.
00:13:59.640 In many ways, that's the purpose of the books is to kind of break up, break open the kind of stranglehold that certain beliefs had had on thought and philosophy and politics at that time.
00:14:12.400 And so he's not maybe someone who initially strike a lot of people as a target for someone like Strauss, who is looking for that depth, that complexity, that hidden meaning.
00:14:23.280 Why did Strauss choose Machiavelli as a target of someone to kind of elevate, at least through the level of analysis that he was going to apply?
00:14:32.860 Right. So initially, what Strauss is fundamentally concerned with as he's looking over the, we could say, the history of political philosophy in the West, is what changes from so-called pre-modernity to modernity?
00:14:49.200 And what we understand as modernity, we need to be clear, that's classical liberalism as we understand it today.
00:14:56.380 So, for instance, we could say, beginning with Hobbes and Locke, these things.
00:15:01.620 And what Strauss is trying to understand is where, where was the change?
00:15:06.360 Because it certainly seems different looking at pre-modernity versus modernity.
00:15:11.780 Everything in particular with regard to modern science, et cetera.
00:15:16.960 And initially, he thinks it's Hobbes.
00:15:20.060 But he has a change of mind later on.
00:15:23.160 And he says, no, I think it's Machiavelli.
00:15:25.240 And what he's going to find in Machiavelli is not merely someone who's just a political theorist or a political thinker.
00:15:37.420 He's going to claim that Machiavelli, in fact, is fully a philosopher, which is to say he has a teaching on the very natures of things.
00:15:47.900 And that's where most people are going to say, what the heck are you talking about?
00:15:54.900 Because they're going to see in Machiavelli someone who is just a, what we would think of as a realpolitik, right?
00:16:02.820 Realism, clear-eyed realism.
00:16:05.480 And Strauss is going to take a great issue with that because he's going to say, well, wait a minute.
00:16:11.820 This thing you're referring to as realism is nothing new with Machiavelli because simply look to Thucydides.
00:16:19.300 Also, and what Machiavelli himself does is he says, look to Xenophon, in particular, the education of Cyrus.
00:16:26.580 For Machiavelli, Cyrus is the, Xenophon Cyrus is the armed prophet, new founder of new modes and institutions.
00:16:38.660 So then the question is, well, what is special about Machiavelli then if there's kind of this blurring there?
00:16:45.900 And what Strauss is ultimately going to come to is he's going to say that, he's going to argue that Machiavelli has a teaching of wisdom.
00:16:53.760 But what's, so that's going to make him a philosopher, but what separates him and what causes us to have a new understanding in modernity is that Machiavelli's teaching on wisdom radically separates this other virtue that we would think of as moderation.
00:17:09.720 And so now you have just the truth with no adornment if needed, right?
00:17:17.080 You just speak the real truths.
00:17:19.060 So not even Xenophon in his small dialogue, The Hero, which is Strauss's book of On Tyranny, not even Xenophon argues that one should do away with the distinction between a tyrant and a king or a prince.
00:17:34.200 Machiavelli simply makes no distinction.
00:17:37.120 And that's where we have sort of off and running with modernity.
00:17:41.640 Hobbes famously said that, he said, who is this, who is this man who's speaking the truths and things like that?
00:17:49.800 I mean, the influence of Machiavelli was just enormous.
00:17:52.560 I mean, he's in Shakespeare, the so-called Machiavellianism that we think, that's no different than what's always been alive and well in political philosophy.
00:18:02.960 It's just that now it's not even hidden.
00:18:05.700 They just flatly say, you know, it's neutral or something like that.
00:18:11.120 It's like, well, this is simply the way things work, right?
00:18:13.360 This is realism.
00:18:14.460 This is realpolitik.
00:18:16.020 But when you just concede that, you're conceding that there may not be a very inherent need for something like prudence or moderation.
00:18:25.100 Noble lies, as Plato would implement or something like that.
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00:18:59.660 Yeah, there is this, you know, because Strauss, while pointing to many of the qualities of Machiavelli's writing and his thought, does come out explicitly and say, you know, basically the clever thing would be to describe this guy as a scientist.
00:19:16.200 You know, the new modern way of looking at this is to describe him as someone who's just laying out the facts and the mechanisms of these things.
00:19:23.460 But he said the most classical and boring approach would be to simply say this is a teacher of evil.
00:19:29.480 But that doesn't necessarily mean that that's not the truth.
00:19:32.720 And his contention throughout, it seems, you know, is really that Machiavelli's attempt to present these things as just basic and factual, something that is shorn of any of the fluff, the noble eye, any of these things.
00:19:49.520 Just to reveal the natural mechanics of power ultimately is itself applying a value set or a lack thereof.
00:19:59.020 There's kind of a negative space thing where the fact that you're removing these pretenses to a higher order or certain metaphysical principles itself underlies a worldview in which you've already made determinations on what value those things should hold inside your society.
00:20:18.160 Yeah, that really gets to, again, sort of the novelty that Strauss is going to argue in a really amazing way, as he says in the opening of the text, that academics would be scandalized or they're shocked that students would say that Machiavelli is evil.
00:20:41.120 That's the great sort of scandal of academia is that the academics themselves would not, they no longer believe in this difference between good and evil.
00:20:53.080 It's just value neutral, right?
00:20:55.060 And what Strauss is arguing is that that's, in fact, the obliteration of the distinction between tyranny and any other form of political governance.
00:21:11.120 So the academics and their shock that we would call Machiavelli evil is sort of further influence or further proof that Strauss is really onto something with recognizing the novelty in Machiavelli because that obliteration of, I guess we could say, good and evil, the academics being beyond good and evil, is owed to us from Machiavelli.
00:21:36.280 In fact, Nietzsche himself, we should never forget, says over and over again, you need to be reading Machiavelli.
00:21:43.780 In fact, in particular, the prints, but Machiavelli greatly, greatly influenced by, I'm sorry, Nietzsche greatly influenced by Machiavelli, something that's not really attended to.
00:21:55.680 Because again, we have these sort of dry conceptualizations of what belongs in philosophy versus what belongs in political philosophy.
00:22:05.340 And exactly as you said, what Strauss is pointing out is that the problem for at least political philosophy is that people no longer even study political philosophy.
00:22:13.960 They study political science, which is to say the quantification of political phenomena.
00:22:20.200 It's very rare that majors in politics have to take any so-called theory courses.
00:22:25.820 They might take one semester of reading Machiavelli along with Plato.
00:22:30.260 So they smush everything into one semester and then everything else is nothing more than courses on whatever is latest and greatest in politics, along with an enormous amount of quantitative courses and things like polling and such.
00:22:44.860 Yeah, I was that rare political science major that actually enjoyed the theory.
00:22:48.500 So I ended up taking the theory whenever I could while everybody else bailed out to do the other courses.
00:22:55.140 But you're right that that's definitely the approach people are taking.
00:22:58.180 I want to dive deeper into this.
00:22:59.860 I've got a lot of questions about how this interacts with a modernity, current notions of kind of the noble lie, why Machiavelli still applies and kind of how Strauss would understand that application.
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00:24:36.460 So I think it's kind of interesting that, you know, you're talking about the way in which the value free evaluation for Machiavelli, the implication that this could be the case, what was a big change was a big rupture, obviously, in the approach that one would take.
00:24:58.360 You he's not the first person to say so many of these things, as you point out and as Strauss pointed out, but he's often the first one to say it in his own name and to not just use this as a common, you know, somebody who's using a character or these thing kind of things, but is willing to say these things directly about how you should understand and how you should act.
00:25:21.060 Even if those things are considered deeply immoral at the same time, you know, there's there's the kind of the current incarnation of this where perhaps we see this is the beginning of classical liberalism.
00:25:32.060 As you were talking about a more mechanistic explanation for the universe and then for human behavior and then for human political organization and and everything else involved in a lot of ways.
00:25:45.100 The current Machiavellian tradition, the update on that, a lot of the people who get kind of looped into this Pareto and mosque and these kind of guys are often being used to disassemble a lot of the classical liberal kind of noble lies, right?
00:26:02.860 A lot of the things that have been become sacred inside of that tradition.
00:26:07.980 So there's some kind of, I guess, maybe the irony is the wrong word, but the fact that this deconstruction of the constraints that had been on philosophy and had been on thought so that you can have a more mechanistic and practical application, a value free application of power, these kind of things in kind of the original Machiavellian framing.
00:26:32.860 Is then being used that gives birth to the classical liberalism that same attempt is now being brought against classical classical liberalism itself and I don't know if it ultimately just kind of shows that there will always be this noble lie.
00:26:47.840 There will always be this creation of kind of kind of a moral order to explain why power is being applied the way that it is and that is always vulnerable to this or that that that space is just going to be filled.
00:27:02.300 I don't know.
00:27:02.780 I kind of rambled on there for a bit, but do you have any thoughts on that one?
00:27:06.380 You're saying that you're rambling on to someone who holds spaces that will end up lasting four hours where I'm the only one talking.
00:27:14.280 Yeah, look, this this is what I would say about that.
00:27:16.680 Um, so Machiavelli famously gives us this is in chapter 15 of the Prince of this teaching on effectual truth.
00:27:25.300 Uh, he says, I'm no longer going to concern myself with these, uh, theoretical idealism sort of projects.
00:27:34.160 He has in mind in particular, Augustine city of God, because, uh, Machiavelli is always going to be criticizing Christianity, but, uh, also, and especially, uh, Plato, uh, and Aristotle with their best cities in speech.
00:27:46.860 But this is, this is what people need to understand about effectual truth, the consequences of it.
00:27:51.600 In other words, what Machiavelli is saying is I'm not concerned with the truth.
00:27:55.360 I'm just concerned with the truth only insofar as it gets the job done now, uh, two things to keep in mind about that first, that's going to be in many respects, the origin of modern science.
00:28:09.080 Uh, the fact that we model things based upon mathematics, uh, without really much concern of, is that really, uh, you know, what's going on in the phenomenon?
00:28:18.940 Well, it doesn't matter.
00:28:20.060 We can model it.
00:28:20.860 That's, that's all.
00:28:22.020 Uh, so there's that.
00:28:23.420 Uh, and then more, probably more importantly, philosophically speaking, uh, you can only disregard the truth for so long, uh, and associatedly, uh, bask in the glories of, uh, the emphasis on effectual truth, whether or not it's true or not, without eventually coming to the conclusion.
00:28:47.240 Well, I mean, is there really even any saying any such thing as truth?
00:28:50.660 Uh, so we have a kind of seedling there, uh, of this kind of relativism or nihilism that's going afoot that can only last for so long.
00:29:00.800 Uh, and that's exactly what happens, uh, with classical liberalism, which again, Strauss argues, at least begins with Machiavelli.
00:29:07.800 Uh, once you get to the time of, uh, just right around, uh, Kant and a little bit afterwards, uh, that's where we're going to see the first occurrence of the word nihilism, uh, which is to say there's a crisis, uh, wherein people no longer really think that reason itself, uh, can give us the answers to whatever this thing called the good life is.
00:29:28.880 And it might in fact be the case that the good life, uh, is nothing more than these sort of ideal things that, uh, Machiavelli himself is criticizing, uh, is saying, don't be concerned with that, uh, in chapter 15 of the prince, right?
00:29:41.780 Just be concerned with what gets the job done.
00:29:44.180 Uh, in other words, the rise of an emphasis on all practicality, uh, with little regard for theory.
00:29:52.140 Uh, and that's reflected by the way, in the, in the courses of politics departments, as, as you were saying.
00:29:57.940 Uh, so, so that's really what happens is that the, the preconditions for classical liberalism, which we should always understand as nothing more than radical toleration.
00:30:08.180 That's what it is.
00:30:08.940 Uh, at the end of the day, that's what the premises of liberalism are.
00:30:13.240 Uh, they end up undercutting themselves because they begin to reveal themselves as the premises.
00:30:20.140 Many people signed onto this without knowing that's what the premises are.
00:30:23.400 Uh, so, so this deep critique, uh, this criticism of Christianity itself at the very heart, uh, of classical liberalism, which is to say modernity, which is to say radical toleration begins to shine through.
00:30:38.460 Uh, and then what do you do once you've torn down all, uh, and placed your bets on this new thing under the sun, simply because it gives you the luxuries of technology, which again, uh, issue forth from the, the emphasis, the consequences of Machiavelli's effectual truth.
00:30:55.780 Um, what, what, what do you have left, uh, if you no longer believe in the tradition, uh, that you've replaced it with, of which, you no longer believe in that either.
00:31:04.520 Uh, well, that's where we have ourselves, the sort of the postmodern world we live in.
00:31:10.020 So, yeah, you know, I, um, the, the kind of comparison I try to use to help people.
00:31:17.820 Cause the, the problem is that this stuff works, right?
00:31:20.160 They, they, they, the classical liberalism, Machiavellian understandings of politics.
00:31:25.700 The reason that we use them is that they do work at least for a time.
00:31:29.660 And so you can't look at these and say, oh, well, I just dismiss them because they, they don't function or no, actually not only do they work, they work better in, in, when they're in competition with some of these other traditions.
00:31:42.680 The problem is that ultimately what you're doing is you basically have a Jenga tower and you're like, well, I can knock out a brick here and I can build it higher and I can scale things up and I can make this more complicated.
00:31:55.760 And this works, you know, it works really well.
00:31:57.880 Well, the first couple of times you take a brick out of the bottom of the tower, it has, it feels like it has basically no cost to what you're doing.
00:32:05.300 The stability is still there.
00:32:06.820 It's fine.
00:32:07.580 And you're like, oh, look, my tower is getting taller and taller.
00:32:10.100 It's getting more complex.
00:32:11.200 There's more going on with it.
00:32:12.680 But eventually you start realizing that the cost of building this tower higher and of scaling things up, of increasing the level of complexity you're building on this base that you've been hollowing out is that the stability is waning.
00:32:25.560 And, and the only thing you know how to do is continue to build the tower higher.
00:32:29.880 And so the more you apply these Machiavellian politics, it's not that they stop working.
00:32:35.220 The more that you apply to classic liberalism, it's not that necessarily stops working in and of itself, but that it's hollowing out the base.
00:32:42.000 That you didn't really think a whole lot about when you started constructing this thing.
00:32:45.920 And suddenly your need to constantly use this creates a situation where your next move might be the one that actually just topples the entire thing over.
00:32:55.380 Yeah, I mean, that's exactly right.
00:32:57.380 And let me sort of emphasize something, because a lot of people will mistakenly infer that what I'm saying or what I'm suggesting here is that, you know, modernity bad.
00:33:08.440 That's, that's not what's being said at all.
00:33:10.140 Uh, no one can deny, uh, the comfortability of the technology that we have in the world we live in.
00:33:15.780 Uh, but the question ultimately concerns is, um, look, uh, there are many sacred truths that most people no longer believe in.
00:33:24.960 Um, um, the thrust of the kind of, uh, nihilism that's afoot with us now, uh, again, sort of attendance upon this effectual truth instead of the truth, uh, is either on the one hand, you, you move in the direction of a radical decisionism.
00:33:44.160 Um, where you have the various thinkers, uh, such as Heidegger and, and Schmitt, I suppose, to some extent, uh, of simply, uh, resolve, right?
00:33:52.800 This, uh, the, the rise of the will, right?
00:33:55.260 This is Nietzsche's will to power, uh, the rise of doing something just because it's a sort of a release of the power or the strength might makes right to do it.
00:34:03.520 Uh, or, and this is where Strauss enters into things and particularly with his reading of Machiavelli says, well, look, uh, yes, there's no going back.
00:34:11.680 Uh, even Nietzsche says that, uh, Heidegger believes that Strauss certainly believes that there's no going back.
00:34:16.580 The question though, is, uh, do we still have some things to learn from these thinkers, uh, and we're not exactly beyond them yet.
00:34:26.300 And that's the key, right?
00:34:28.000 Because it's none of the Machiavelli himself who teaches us this, uh, who is Machiavelli relying upon, uh, for the source of his new wisdom?
00:34:36.300 Um, well, the ancients, uh, Livy in particular, uh, he's pointing back to Xenophon as well.
00:34:42.640 Uh, so all of these things are simply to suggest, and this is what Strauss always argues is he says, he actually hilariously says, we need to wipe the dust off of our old books, uh, and go back and start reading them more seriously.
00:34:58.740 As if they still have something to teach us that we don't know, because the greatest, uh, bias or premise, uh, mistakenly for us today is the belief in progress.
00:35:11.780 We simply believe that we are progressing, right?
00:35:14.200 This is why in politics, you'll always hear people say, uh, you're on the wrong side of history.
00:35:17.920 We're on the right side of history.
00:35:19.520 Look, no one denies technology.
00:35:22.060 No one denies the comforts of modernity and post-modernity.
00:35:25.520 Uh, the fact though, is that have we emphasized the practice that's required to have that luxury in our lives to such a great extent that we no longer value serious theoretical considerations or thought in order to better guide that practice.
00:35:43.380 Uh, that's the key, right?
00:35:44.980 It is, so we have these technocrats, et cetera, uh, who are these blind giants.
00:35:49.160 They have no knowledge of, uh, the humanities or what have you.
00:35:52.700 Uh, they're just making things up as they go along.
00:35:54.840 And the question as well, have people already, are you really, that was already invented, uh, in the teachings of, for instance, prudence and things like that, uh, of the classics.
00:36:05.600 Uh, and so that, that's ultimately what's, uh, what's at stake and what, what's going on here with, with this, the so-called return movements, or certainly at least the return movement for Strauss.
00:36:13.860 So, it's interesting, uh, obviously, uh, Strauss sets up this, uh, kind of contrast between the ancients and the moderns.
00:36:22.860 Um, I'm not, uh, this is really only, I have got one and a half, half Strauss, uh, of Strauss's books under my belt.
00:36:29.040 So, I'm, I'm far from any kind of authority on this, but as I understand it, this is a theme running through his work.
00:36:35.380 Uh, but, you know, Machiavelli specifically goes, as, as he points, you know, as Strauss points out, and as you're pointing out here, specifically goes to the ancients as a way to kind of, um, uh, undermine the authority of current Christianity.
00:36:50.760 You know, he, he talks about in Art of War, how, uh, the, the, uh, ancient troops were better, their modes and orders were better because they were worried about being enslaved or murdered if they lost a war.
00:37:03.260 As opposed to where Christians believe, uh, you know, that they basically don't do that means that they don't have to fight, you know, for, for their lives.
00:37:10.520 He, he refers to Livy, uh, as his own kind of Bible to, to, to kind of validate the things that, and the criticisms that he's bringing against kind of the current order.
00:37:19.780 That would seem like an appeal to the ancients in this case.
00:37:24.020 Uh, so, so why would Strauss see, uh, Machiavelli as a figure who's kind of rupturing, uh, the, this, uh, continuity of philosophy, creating this distinction between ancient and the moderns, if he is himself kind of calling back to the ancients in a way to, uh, criticize what was, I guess, more modern in his time.
00:37:42.840 Yeah, that, that, that gets us sort of into the, the, the depths, uh, or we could say at the frontier of serious scholarship on Strauss is that, uh, many people say that because Strauss himself seems to suggest that there is this true divide between the ancients and the moderns, uh, it's not at all clear that that's what's going on in Strauss.
00:38:04.700 And in fact, Strauss says in, on tyranny, in the exchange and the restatement with Kochev, uh, that he says, uh, perhaps the moderns were too successful.
00:38:15.560 And what he means by that is, uh, they were too successful at using the same kind of esoteric writing that the ancients used.
00:38:23.300 And it was the later moderns who failed to pick up on that.
00:38:27.360 Uh, Strauss is famously going to argue that Rousseau was the last of the great ones.
00:38:32.100 And then it's all lost, uh, on thinkers such as Kant, et cetera, uh, until Nietzsche comes to the fore very briefly.
00:38:39.180 And then Heidegger is, it's lost in many respects on Heidegger.
00:38:43.080 Um, but that's going to be the key is again, uh, just to emphasize what Strauss finds in Machiavelli is that there is the separation of wisdom as such.
00:38:58.220 In other words, philosophy, uh, from any kind of teaching of moderation or prudence, uh, that's going to be what's new under the sun.
00:39:09.040 Uh, and so to the extent that Machiavelli is a modern, it's going to be that, uh, but to the extent that he's still an ancient, uh, it's going to be the fact that he is deeply concerned with the human things.
00:39:22.940 Uh, Strauss is going to say that Machiavelli is in fact very close to Plato, uh, and the turn towards the human things.
00:39:29.860 In other words, elevating the primacy of the human things.
00:39:33.180 Now, uh, I should add though, that this is, this is sort of one could say possibly the, the very deep, uh, aspects of Strauss on Machiavelli is that Strauss links Machiavelli.
00:39:51.040 He, he, he specifically says when, uh, in the text on tyranny and the restatement of on tyranny, uh, which I, if I encourage readers to, to read on tyranny, because he has a lot to say about Machiavelli and on tyranny and particularly restatement.
00:40:04.100 He's speaking of, uh, uh, Vogelin and the extent in the exchange with Vogelin.
00:40:08.140 And he says, uh, the problem is that, uh, it's not sufficiently attended to that Machiavelli was influenced by the biblical tradition.
00:40:19.740 This is to say that it's his deep criticism of, and the transformation in his, so his criticism and transformation, uh, of the Christian tradition.
00:40:29.120 Now, what this means for Strauss ultimately, uh, concerns what Strauss refers to as the cave beneath the cave.
00:40:36.720 Uh, he says, our problem in modernity is that we're no longer simply in Plato's cave, the natural condition of ignorance.
00:40:44.000 We're in a deeper cave.
00:40:45.280 So we have to climb out of this deeper cave, uh, which is to say of ideology, uh, just to get to the natural level of ignorance.
00:40:53.620 And okay, well, where does that initially begin?
00:40:56.460 How does, where does the cave beneath the cave really begin?
00:40:59.120 Uh, and Strauss never really openly says it, but to the extent that he does, he links it with Machiavelli there.
00:41:05.200 Machiavelli's influenced by the biblical tradition.
00:41:07.900 What Strauss is claiming is that it's Christianity itself that's really going to constitute, uh, the more powerful lining of this cave beneath the cave.
00:41:17.400 Uh, now that's some dangerous thought right there.
00:41:22.560 Uh, I mean, it just goes without saying, uh, but that's ultimately what's going to be going on with this critique of Christianity.
00:41:28.900 Uh, in Machiavelli and how Strauss uses it.
00:41:32.840 Now that's why I always emphasize to people, uh, there's Machiavelli and then there's Strauss's Machiavelli.
00:41:40.100 We always have to make sure that we're clear on that.
00:41:42.160 So, yeah, that was going to be my next question because Strauss speaks specifically, you know, he emphasizes in the book because, because the book is, uh, the way it's constructed, we didn't quite get into this, but we might as well.
00:41:54.220 Now, the way it's constructed is kind of interesting.
00:41:56.760 It's only got four chapters despite being 300 pages plus, uh, another 50 or so pages of notes.
00:42:04.700 And the, the footnotes are extensive.
00:42:07.420 Uh, and it's one of those things where if you blink, you might miss a critical, uh, footnote that unlocks a whole thing.
00:42:13.820 Uh, it's a, you know, there, there are footnotes that go on for an essay in, in some cases, uh, in this.
00:42:20.020 And so, uh, that, that is an interesting way to lay this out itself.
00:42:24.080 It's also broken into, to four, the four chapters, which are, uh, kind of the, the two, uh, approaches that, uh, that Machiavelli has, uh, the prints, the discourses, and then Strauss's own, own thoughts on how, uh, on what kind of Machiavelli is trying to do.
00:42:43.820 And the thing that stress points out over and over again is that Machiavelli is using the immunity of the commentator, right?
00:42:51.560 He's invoking this immunity of the commentator is like, well, I'm just looking at this.
00:42:56.020 I'm just commenting on this thing that this other guy said, maybe these are my opinions.
00:43:00.340 Maybe they're not that they, you know, but, but I'm not, you know, I'm not throwing all this out there as my own, in my own words.
00:43:07.860 And of course, you know, the, the wink there is that that is also what Strauss is doing through here by.
00:43:13.820 Saying, well, I'm, I'm just commenting on Machiavelli and what he might say about, say something like Christianity.
00:43:19.560 Uh, you, you're never sure.
00:43:21.140 Is it, is that what Machiavelli was saying?
00:43:23.500 Or is that what Strauss is saying?
00:43:25.160 Unless you're very familiar, uh, in an intimate way with kind of everything that, uh, that Machiavelli said, uh, throughout all of his writings.
00:43:33.980 Uh, you've got your finger on the pulse of the most difficult thing about Strauss.
00:43:38.520 Strauss is not at all easy to read.
00:43:40.760 Uh, he's very difficult because you can't simply quote Strauss and say, this is Strauss speaking.
00:43:47.220 Well, hold on.
00:43:48.840 Uh, is it Strauss speaking in the narrator's voice for somebody else?
00:43:53.560 Uh, along with exactly like you said, the sort of hint, hint, uh, wink, wink, uh, kind of movement there.
00:44:00.780 Uh, but the text itself is understood.
00:44:04.100 And I think rightly so to be Strauss is just, just about Strauss's most difficult text.
00:44:08.320 Uh, now that cuts two ways on the one hand, it's, it's great reading.
00:44:13.200 Uh, he does a wonderful job of, uh, just going over, uh, the teaching, various teachings of Machiavelli as he interprets it, which is perfectly clear on the surface.
00:44:22.720 Uh, but then it's also got this second layer, which is, I mean, it's not even subtle.
00:44:28.700 Uh, you don't even get a few pages into the text and you realize he's going very heavy on what we would otherwise refer to as numerology.
00:44:35.080 He's counting sections of the texts.
00:44:37.680 He's counting paragraphs.
00:44:39.960 Uh, and in fact, uh, he even has, uh, it's in this book where he has what's referred to as the golden sentence, uh, of Strauss, which is to say, uh, the surface of things.
00:44:50.400 Uh, when he's talking about the surface level of writing, in other words, what's literally clear on the page, uh, he says the surface of things is, uh, that's where you find the depth of things and only there.
00:45:04.960 Uh, well, that's interesting.
00:45:07.080 What exactly do you mean there, Strauss?
00:45:09.000 And then he elaborates that throughout by saying that, uh, there, how should we read Machiavelli?
00:45:14.120 He's very clear.
00:45:14.800 How do we read Machiavelli?
00:45:16.400 Uh, sort of like the hint, hint, wink.
00:45:18.620 Uh, how do you read me, uh, reader, uh, someone who's been schooled in this apparent kind of numerology or something like that.
00:45:25.340 And the end notes are just unbelievable.
00:45:28.060 Uh, it seems to be the case that there's serious numerology going on in the end notes.
00:45:32.880 He cites things with what I refer to as machine gun fire very often without any explanation.
00:45:38.540 Uh, and then you go to wherever those might be in the primary text that he's citing.
00:45:42.480 And they might not in fact justify what he's saying.
00:45:45.540 Uh, so you realize very quickly because of just how many of them there are, uh, it's a deluge.
00:45:51.640 You realize that studying at any kind of a deep level, what Strauss could be up to, uh, is something of a life's work, uh, in itself.
00:46:00.780 Yeah.
00:46:01.260 And I'll be honest, uh, this is not my favorite thing about him.
00:46:03.820 Uh, this is, uh, I'm right there with you.
00:46:07.940 I don't like it.
00:46:08.720 I don't like it.
00:46:09.700 Yeah.
00:46:10.160 I, I, this is not win me over.
00:46:11.820 Uh, I, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm still looking into, due to the number of people who I respect, who, who respect Strauss's work.
00:46:20.320 Uh, I'm trying to gather as much as I need to.
00:46:22.780 Uh, but honestly, this does not, this does not drive me towards wanting to, to really go deep.
00:46:28.760 And, and not because the, the book itself, you know, I, I found the book helpful in, in a number of ways.
00:46:34.940 I found, uh, the, the surface level reading, you know, the first pass that I did on this is something that I don't regret.
00:46:41.320 And it's something that I think is useful and helps to illuminate, as you said, even if you're just doing that surface level reading, uh, still, still helps you to better understand, you know, it just, if, if nothing else is a kind of a, a strong commentary to help you better, uh, uh, elucidate the different, uh, things that, that Machiavelli is discussing.
00:47:01.040 Uh, but I, I don't want to play like cryptographic games with my philosophy, philosophy is already challenging enough to do it.
00:47:08.880 Like maybe I, you know, maybe that just reveals that I'm not complicated enough that I don't, I don't have what it takes to grind through Strauss, but it's like, man, I, I have other philosophers I got to read.
00:47:20.140 If you're going to make me dedicate my entire life just to reading, uh, you know, the few books that you have correctly, uh, then I don't know, man, it makes me want to move on to something else.
00:47:29.420 Yeah, let me, let me say, because I, I completely agree with you on that.
00:47:33.980 The way that I describe it is, uh, trying to read Strauss, uh, almost immediately causes, uh, reader fatigue, uh, because, um, and, and, and I, I honestly don't believe that Strauss should be taught, uh, at certainly not at the undergraduate level.
00:47:51.100 And I really don't believe Strauss should be taught at the graduate level either.
00:47:54.500 I think that, uh, Strauss should be one of those things that if students want to pursue it, it's kind of an independent course with a particular professor.
00:48:02.180 And the reason is I have seen so many people simply go insane.
00:48:07.240 Uh, I mean, they don't think they have, but I mean, they're literally, they're counting words, they're counting paragraphs.
00:48:11.840 They're looking for the so-called magic numbers, things like 13, uh, seven, uh, these kinds of things.
00:48:18.220 Uh, and they're always looking for the middle.
00:48:20.620 What's the middle of them, right?
00:48:21.520 What's the middle, uh, and it just causes people to, people become intoxicated with trying to solve puzzles, uh, which is understandable.
00:48:30.460 That's perfectly understandable.
00:48:32.380 Uh, but at what cost, right?
00:48:34.900 I mean, are you, there's a difference between interpretation and over-interpretation.
00:48:39.460 Strauss himself is very specific about the kind of rules that he follows for this.
00:48:45.160 Uh, but no one really attends to those because they want to look for even deeper things.
00:48:50.940 Uh, and then it just becomes a kind of, like you were saying, it's almost like a mathematical puzzle, uh, where you just walk away thinking, oh my God, man, I'm, uh, other books I can read better time spent elsewhere or something like that.
00:49:04.880 Well, uh, we, we, we have already, uh, closed in an almost an hour at this point and we have not even touched the surface.
00:49:13.640 Um, but, uh, I guess before we move on to any questions from the audience, my last, uh, thing would, what, what would be maybe one or two concrete insights that you think, uh, that maybe we, we haven't yet touched on that Strauss brings forward, uh, for someone who otherwise has maybe only, you know, read the prints.
00:49:36.740 And maybe given a cursory glance at, uh, at kind of a discourses, uh, what, what are some of the things that, uh, Strauss really pulls out of the text for you?
00:49:47.640 Yeah, I would say probably the most important thing, at least that occurs to me right now, uh, that readers would get on any kind of a reading, not even a deep reading.
00:49:57.120 Because it's right there at the surface, uh, would be something like the following, uh, there's the, the issue of Averroes in the text.
00:50:05.860 Uh, now I, I won't go into great detail about that, but that's, that's going to be something important because it concerns this issue of biblical criticism.
00:50:14.500 And attendant on that is his discussion of the role of conscience, uh, not conscious, but conscience, uh, and Christianity in the text, because what he's doing by invoking the issue of conscience in the context of Christianity is he's, he's bringing to the surface, uh, the possibilities for a new, uh,
00:50:44.940 politics, I guess we could say of Christianity itself, uh, in order to ameliorate or reconcile itself to a world in which, uh, being good is so difficult because so many people are bad, as Machiavelli says.
00:51:00.740 Uh, so there's that.
00:51:02.300 And, and then, uh, of course, uh, the way he ends the text is really quite amazing that people should really read those last, uh, 10 or 15 pages of the text.
00:51:10.680 Uh, what he argues ultimately is that one has to understand that this thing we call the enlightenment, it presents itself as a great expansion of our horizon, very liberating.
00:51:21.940 Uh, and what Strauss says is it could very well be in fact the case.
00:51:25.780 In other words, Strauss is saying it is the case, uh, that is a great darkening, uh, a contraction, a great contraction of our horizon.
00:51:32.780 Uh, and how do we find our way back to a more expanded horizon?
00:51:35.640 Uh, well, return to the great books, right?
00:51:39.460 Uh, so that's, uh, that's just the first things that come to me right there on that.
00:51:43.560 No, absolutely.
00:51:45.080 All right, guys.
00:51:45.800 Well, like I said, um, I don't know if this was a, uh, I don't know if this is a selling the book necessarily.
00:51:52.100 Um, but I do think it's an interesting, uh, read.
00:51:55.780 I do think that it creates, uh, a framework for understanding, uh, Machiavelli that is very helpful, um, in certain areas.
00:52:06.200 And, you know, you don't have to, like we said, you don't have to dedicate yourself to, you know, the entire life's work of, of trying to, uh, excavate everything that Strauss meant.
00:52:15.540 If you just want to give it, uh, the past, that'll help you to kind of have a better grasp on, on Machiavelli in general.
00:52:22.620 Uh, though the depth is certainly there, uh, if you would like to do that.
00:52:26.860 Uh, so stranger, before we head to the questions of the people, where can people find your spaces, your writings, everything else?
00:52:33.300 Yeah. So, uh, uh, my, my recordings that I do, the sort of the lectures, I guess you could say there at my, my website, uh, Athenscorner.com, uh, I put a number of, uh, things out for free.
00:52:48.280 I put as much out for free as possible, uh, so long as I can still just cover the costs, uh, on Spotify, uh, and, uh, and Apple podcasts and stuff with, uh, uh, Athenscorner, uh, and then, uh, just find me, uh, Athenian stranger.
00:53:03.300 Uh, uh, Athens underscore stranger on Twitter. Uh, you'll find all my recorded spaces, uh, which by the way, is just so people know, uh, is never heavily Straussian or anything like that.
00:53:15.160 You're, you're saying what you mean, even if the guy you're talking about isn't.
00:53:18.220 Yes. And, and, and also I'm always perfectly clear, uh, whenever I bring up Strauss that I'm bringing him up.
00:53:24.180 Uh, no, I don't ever try to simply presume him or smuggle him into any interpretations or something. That's never, ever what I do. So, yeah, it really is a strange thing. You know, I, uh, having written my own book, uh, which I am not going to claim is anywhere near as complex as, as a Strauss's book.
00:53:41.980 Uh, but, but I recognize that currents are always going to exist, um, you know, for at different levels, you know, that, that, that's always going to be true.
00:53:52.100 Uh, that's what makes, uh, especially the, the really, the truly great works, what they are is that the first reading is never enough, that there's always another layer to peel back.
00:54:02.520 There's a reason that people can study Plato for literally, you know, thousands of years or whatever. And it just doesn't, there's always some, some other little bit that you can kind of go back to and understand.
00:54:14.040 So there, it's not that these books don't have that depth, uh, because they do. I don't think that's imagined on Strauss's part. It's just like, if you're going to be laying things out, at least do your best to lay about as, as in a way that is as easily communicatable as possible.
00:54:30.180 And then if someone can't grasp it on their first pass through, well, that's on them. They have to read a couple more times, but at least you did your best when you're actually, actually actively obfuscating, uh, the truth in there, just, just to kind of run people in circles.
00:54:44.560 At that point, it makes me feel like, okay, well, we're just doing this so we can say, you know, it's like the pretentious prog rock band. You know what I mean? Like, uh, maybe I didn't need 24 minutes of that guitar solo. I could have gotten it in like eight. Uh, that, that probably would have been exactly, exactly. Yeah, exactly.
00:55:00.180 All right. Well, let's go over to the questions of the people here. Uh, looks like we just got Robert right now. Uh, Robert Weisfield says, uh, Strauss, smart, but annoying. Where are my dissident, right? Jay's at? Uh, yes, always, always an adventure. Thank you very much, Robert.
00:55:14.560 All right. Well, we're going to go ahead and wrap this up everybody, but thank you so much for coming by. Make sure you check out Athenian Stranger. Uh, like I said, we only got to the, the very tip of, of this topic, but, uh, there's plenty of great content for you to check out, uh, with him.
00:55:30.980 And of course, if it's your first time on this channel, make sure you subscribe to the channel, turn on the notifications, the bell, everything. So you can catch these streams when they go right live. If you would like to get my book, uh, the total state, you can do that on Amazon, Barnes and Nobles, uh, books, a million, all your favorite bookstores. And of course, if you'd like to get these broadcasts as podcasts, make sure that you should subscribe to the Orr McIntyre show on your favorite podcast platform. Thank you everybody for watching. And I'll talk to you next time.
00:56:00.980 Thank you.