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.
00:01:02.180You'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.
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00:01:22.580So make sure you go ahead and check in with those guys.
00:01:26.180Enjoy the roast, all of the ridiculousness that is to follow after the DNC tonight.
00:01:32.900You can check that out over on Blaze TV.
00:01:35.420Joining me today is Athenian Stranger.
00:01:39.060You know, I had to do this talk about Machiavelli recently, and I went back and, of course, I read a lot of Machiavelli.
00:01:46.200But the other thing I wanted to do was look into others, the scholarship around it.
00:01:50.800And, of course, one of the most famous people to ever comment on Machiavelli is Leo Strauss.
00:01:56.280And that's a book that I've been turning over in my head.
00:01:59.500His book, Thoughts on Machiavelli, is one that I've been thinking about since I read it.
00:02:04.000So I wanted to bring someone on who is knowledgeable, familiar with Strauss and this book in particular,
00:02:08.840because Strauss is really somebody who I'm still putting my toe in the water with philosophically.
00:02:14.600So, Athenian Stranger, thanks for coming on today, man.
00:02:21.520So 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?
00:02:54.660I 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.
00:03:06.180Oh, 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.
00:03:17.660Everything from Nietzsche to technology and science.
00:03:23.380I 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.
00:03:33.340So 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.
00:03:44.220So. 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.
00:03:54.320So people should definitely check that out.
00:03:57.600I have many, many recording and I always record my spaces.
00:04:01.080So 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.
00:04:15.920Fantastic. Well, we are going to get into Machiavelli.
00:04:20.080We'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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00:06:07.340There'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.
00:06:18.300And so people are at least somewhat familiar with his role in political philosophy, but a lot of people don't know about Leo Strauss.
00:06:27.820Could you explain a little bit about who Strauss was and kind of what he's doing?
00:06:33.080Yeah, Strauss is just about the most controversial of thinkers.
00:06:39.400I submit for everyone's consideration he will be remembered as a philosopher.
00:06:44.360And that's not a word to be used casually.
00:06:49.040It's very rare that there's ever a living philosopher in any of our lifetime, right?
00:06:56.280But he was a German immigrant from, well, from Germany during the Second World War.
00:07:04.140And 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.
00:07:27.200Things like metaphysics, epistemology, and things like that.
00:07:31.800And 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.
00:07:52.460Now, there's an enormous more to it than that.
00:07:57.200It turns out that Strauss didn't begin this at all.
00:08:01.020In fact, in many respects, he got it from Nietzsche.
00:08:07.460Nietzsche sees it in many other thinkers, particularly Francis Bacon.
00:08:11.520But 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.
00:08:31.740You know, they have the thesis that they state very clear for us.
00:08:35.540And 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.
00:08:48.320And 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.
00:09:12.820And 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.
00:09:30.860Obviously, 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.
00:09:43.660But 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.
00:10:07.520But he focuses primarily on a criticism, it seems to be at least a criticism of what's known as historicism, particularly Heidegger's.
00:10:21.020Now, again, there's much more to it than that, because he might, in fact, be far more in agreement than disagreement.
00:10:26.780But 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.
00:10:53.440And 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.
00:11:12.360But it's all of this as a kind of return movement to the originals, right, the source of our tradition itself.
00:11:22.220And Strauss, unlike Nietzsche and Heidegger, brings the Bible into it.
00:11:25.700He 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.
00:11:40.460And so he makes that question of the tension between Athens and Jerusalem really the centerstone of all of his thought.
00:11:50.060And 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.
00:12:00.060So, for instance, poetry versus philosophy, divine revelation versus unassisted human reason, all of these things sort of come together in that.
00:12:09.360And 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,
00:12:24.080but seeing how they can work in tandem, as opposed to the various syntheses that we have throughout the tradition.
00:12:31.040One 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.
00:12:40.720Strauss takes a particular issue with the scholastics, Christian scholastics, who sought philosophy, the handmaiden of theology, et cetera.
00:12:51.740So, 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,
00:13:04.720okay, this is a guy who obviously had a significant impact.
00:13:07.700He 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?
00:13:21.000He's not writing particularly long works.
00:13:23.800We don't have a large amount of philosophical content from him.
00:13:28.820The applications are almost directly political in most situations.
00:13:32.760A 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?
00:13:47.080This 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.
00:13:59.640In 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.
00:14:12.400And 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.
00:14:23.280Why 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?
00:14:32.860Right. 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?
00:14:49.200And what we understand as modernity, we need to be clear, that's classical liberalism as we understand it today.
00:14:56.380So, for instance, we could say, beginning with Hobbes and Locke, these things.
00:15:01.620And what Strauss is trying to understand is where, where was the change?
00:15:06.360Because it certainly seems different looking at pre-modernity versus modernity.
00:15:11.780Everything in particular with regard to modern science, et cetera.
00:16:05.480And Strauss is going to take a great issue with that because he's going to say, well, wait a minute.
00:16:11.820This thing you're referring to as realism is nothing new with Machiavelli because simply look to Thucydides.
00:16:19.300Also, and what Machiavelli himself does is he says, look to Xenophon, in particular, the education of Cyrus.
00:16:26.580For Machiavelli, Cyrus is the, Xenophon Cyrus is the armed prophet, new founder of new modes and institutions.
00:16:38.660So then the question is, well, what is special about Machiavelli then if there's kind of this blurring there?
00:16:45.900And 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.
00:16:53.760But 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.
00:17:09.720And so now you have just the truth with no adornment if needed, right?
00:17:19.060So 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.
00:17:34.200Machiavelli simply makes no distinction.
00:17:37.120And that's where we have sort of off and running with modernity.
00:17:41.640Hobbes famously said that, he said, who is this, who is this man who's speaking the truths and things like that?
00:17:49.800I mean, the influence of Machiavelli was just enormous.
00:17:52.560I 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.
00:18:02.960It's just that now it's not even hidden.
00:18:05.700They just flatly say, you know, it's neutral or something like that.
00:18:11.120It's like, well, this is simply the way things work, right?
00:18:16.020But when you just concede that, you're conceding that there may not be a very inherent need for something like prudence or moderation.
00:18:25.100Noble lies, as Plato would implement or something like that.
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00:18:59.660Yeah, 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.
00:19:16.200You 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.
00:19:23.460But he said the most classical and boring approach would be to simply say this is a teacher of evil.
00:19:29.480But that doesn't necessarily mean that that's not the truth.
00:19:32.720And 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.
00:19:49.520Just to reveal the natural mechanics of power ultimately is itself applying a value set or a lack thereof.
00:19:59.020There'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.
00:20:18.160Yeah, 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.
00:20:41.120That'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.
00:20:55.060And what Strauss is arguing is that that's, in fact, the obliteration of the distinction between tyranny and any other form of political governance.
00:21:11.120So 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.
00:21:36.280In fact, Nietzsche himself, we should never forget, says over and over again, you need to be reading Machiavelli.
00:21:43.780In 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.
00:21:55.680Because again, we have these sort of dry conceptualizations of what belongs in philosophy versus what belongs in political philosophy.
00:22:05.340And 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.
00:22:13.960They study political science, which is to say the quantification of political phenomena.
00:22:20.200It's very rare that majors in politics have to take any so-called theory courses.
00:22:25.820They might take one semester of reading Machiavelli along with Plato.
00:22:30.260So 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.
00:22:44.860Yeah, I was that rare political science major that actually enjoyed the theory.
00:22:48.500So I ended up taking the theory whenever I could while everybody else bailed out to do the other courses.
00:22:55.140But you're right that that's definitely the approach people are taking.
00:22:59.860I'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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00:24:36.460So 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.
00:24:58.360You 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.
00:25:21.060Even 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.
00:25:32.060As 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.
00:25:45.100The 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?
00:26:02.860A lot of the things that have been become sacred inside of that tradition.
00:26:07.980So 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.
00:26:32.860Is 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.
00:26:47.840There 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.
00:27:02.780I kind of rambled on there for a bit, but do you have any thoughts on that one?
00:27:06.380You'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.
00:27:14.280Yeah, look, this this is what I would say about that.
00:27:16.680Um, so Machiavelli famously gives us this is in chapter 15 of the Prince of this teaching on effectual truth.
00:27:25.300Uh, he says, I'm no longer going to concern myself with these, uh, theoretical idealism sort of projects.
00:27:34.160He 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.
00:27:46.860But this is, this is what people need to understand about effectual truth, the consequences of it.
00:27:51.600In other words, what Machiavelli is saying is I'm not concerned with the truth.
00:27:55.360I'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.
00:28:09.080Uh, 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?
00:28:23.420Uh, 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.
00:28:47.240Well, I mean, is there really even any saying any such thing as truth?
00:28:50.660Uh, 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.
00:29:00.800Uh, and that's exactly what happens, uh, with classical liberalism, which again, Strauss argues, at least begins with Machiavelli.
00:29:07.800Uh, 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.
00:29:28.880And 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?
00:29:41.780Just be concerned with what gets the job done.
00:29:44.180Uh, in other words, the rise of an emphasis on all practicality, uh, with little regard for theory.
00:29:52.140Uh, and that's reflected by the way, in the, in the courses of politics departments, as, as you were saying.
00:29:57.940Uh, 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.
00:30:08.940Uh, at the end of the day, that's what the premises of liberalism are.
00:30:13.240Uh, they end up undercutting themselves because they begin to reveal themselves as the premises.
00:30:20.140Many people signed onto this without knowing that's what the premises are.
00:30:23.400Uh, 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.
00:30:38.460Uh, 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.
00:30:55.780Um, 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.
00:31:04.520Uh, well, that's where we have ourselves, the sort of the postmodern world we live in.
00:31:10.020So, yeah, you know, I, um, the, the kind of comparison I try to use to help people.
00:31:17.820Cause the, the problem is that this stuff works, right?
00:31:20.160They, they, they, the classical liberalism, Machiavellian understandings of politics.
00:31:25.700The reason that we use them is that they do work at least for a time.
00:31:29.660And 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.
00:31:42.680The 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.
00:31:55.760And this works, you know, it works really well.
00:31:57.880Well, 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.
00:32:12.680But 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.
00:32:25.560And, and the only thing you know how to do is continue to build the tower higher.
00:32:29.880And so the more you apply these Machiavellian politics, it's not that they stop working.
00:32:35.220The 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.
00:32:42.000That you didn't really think a whole lot about when you started constructing this thing.
00:32:45.920And 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.
00:32:57.380And 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.
00:33:08.440That's, that's not what's being said at all.
00:33:10.140Uh, no one can deny, uh, the comfortability of the technology that we have in the world we live in.
00:33:15.780Uh, but the question ultimately concerns is, um, look, uh, there are many sacred truths that most people no longer believe in.
00:33:24.960Um, 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.
00:33:44.160Um, where you have the various thinkers, uh, such as Heidegger and, and Schmitt, I suppose, to some extent, uh, of simply, uh, resolve, right?
00:33:52.800This, uh, the, the rise of the will, right?
00:33:55.260This 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.
00:34:03.520Uh, 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.
00:34:11.680Uh, even Nietzsche says that, uh, Heidegger believes that Strauss certainly believes that there's no going back.
00:34:16.580The question though, is, uh, do we still have some things to learn from these thinkers, uh, and we're not exactly beyond them yet.
00:34:28.000Because 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?
00:34:36.300Um, well, the ancients, uh, Livy in particular, uh, he's pointing back to Xenophon as well.
00:34:42.640Uh, 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.
00:34:58.740As 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.
00:35:11.780We simply believe that we are progressing, right?
00:35:14.200This is why in politics, you'll always hear people say, uh, you're on the wrong side of history.
00:35:22.060No one denies the comforts of modernity and post-modernity.
00:35:25.520Uh, 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.
00:35:44.980It is, so we have these technocrats, et cetera, uh, who are these blind giants.
00:35:49.160They have no knowledge of, uh, the humanities or what have you.
00:35:52.700Uh, they're just making things up as they go along.
00:35:54.840And 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.
00:36:05.600Uh, 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.
00:36:13.860So, it's interesting, uh, obviously, uh, Strauss sets up this, uh, kind of contrast between the ancients and the moderns.
00:36:22.860Um, 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.
00:36:29.040So, 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.
00:36:35.380Uh, 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.
00:36:50.760You 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.
00:37:03.260As 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.
00:37:10.520He, 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.
00:37:19.780That would seem like an appeal to the ancients in this case.
00:37:24.020Uh, 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.
00:37:42.840Yeah, 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.
00:38:04.700And 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.
00:38:15.560And what he means by that is, uh, they were too successful at using the same kind of esoteric writing that the ancients used.
00:38:23.300And it was the later moderns who failed to pick up on that.
00:38:27.360Uh, Strauss is famously going to argue that Rousseau was the last of the great ones.
00:38:32.100And then it's all lost, uh, on thinkers such as Kant, et cetera, uh, until Nietzsche comes to the fore very briefly.
00:38:39.180And then Heidegger is, it's lost in many respects on Heidegger.
00:38:43.080Um, 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.
00:38:58.220In 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.
00:39:09.040Uh, 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.
00:39:22.940Uh, Strauss is going to say that Machiavelli is in fact very close to Plato, uh, and the turn towards the human things.
00:39:29.860In other words, elevating the primacy of the human things.
00:39:33.180Now, 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.
00:39:51.040He, 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.
00:40:04.100He's speaking of, uh, uh, Vogelin and the extent in the exchange with Vogelin.
00:40:08.140And he says, uh, the problem is that, uh, it's not sufficiently attended to that Machiavelli was influenced by the biblical tradition.
00:40:19.740This 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.
00:40:29.120Now, what this means for Strauss ultimately, uh, concerns what Strauss refers to as the cave beneath the cave.
00:40:36.720Uh, he says, our problem in modernity is that we're no longer simply in Plato's cave, the natural condition of ignorance.
00:40:45.280So 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.
00:40:53.620And okay, well, where does that initially begin?
00:40:56.460How does, where does the cave beneath the cave really begin?
00:40:59.120Uh, and Strauss never really openly says it, but to the extent that he does, he links it with Machiavelli there.
00:41:05.200Machiavelli's influenced by the biblical tradition.
00:41:07.900What 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.
00:41:17.400Uh, now that's some dangerous thought right there.
00:41:22.560Uh, I mean, it just goes without saying, uh, but that's ultimately what's going to be going on with this critique of Christianity.
00:41:28.900Uh, in Machiavelli and how Strauss uses it.
00:41:32.840Now that's why I always emphasize to people, uh, there's Machiavelli and then there's Strauss's Machiavelli.
00:41:40.100We always have to make sure that we're clear on that.
00:41:42.160So, 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.
00:41:54.220Now, the way it's constructed is kind of interesting.
00:41:56.760It's only got four chapters despite being 300 pages plus, uh, another 50 or so pages of notes.
00:42:07.420Uh, and it's one of those things where if you blink, you might miss a critical, uh, footnote that unlocks a whole thing.
00:42:13.820Uh, it's a, you know, there, there are footnotes that go on for an essay in, in some cases, uh, in this.
00:42:20.020And so, uh, that, that is an interesting way to lay this out itself.
00:42:24.080It'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.
00:42:43.820And the thing that stress points out over and over again is that Machiavelli is using the immunity of the commentator, right?
00:42:51.560He's invoking this immunity of the commentator is like, well, I'm just looking at this.
00:42:56.020I'm just commenting on this thing that this other guy said, maybe these are my opinions.
00:43:00.340Maybe 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.
00:43:07.860And of course, you know, the, the wink there is that that is also what Strauss is doing through here by.
00:43:13.820Saying, well, I'm, I'm just commenting on Machiavelli and what he might say about, say something like Christianity.
00:43:25.160Unless you're very familiar, uh, in an intimate way with kind of everything that, uh, that Machiavelli said, uh, throughout all of his writings.
00:43:33.980Uh, you've got your finger on the pulse of the most difficult thing about Strauss.
00:43:48.840Uh, is it Strauss speaking in the narrator's voice for somebody else?
00:43:53.560Uh, along with exactly like you said, the sort of hint, hint, uh, wink, wink, uh, kind of movement there.
00:44:00.780Uh, but the text itself is understood.
00:44:04.100And I think rightly so to be Strauss is just, just about Strauss's most difficult text.
00:44:08.320Uh, now that cuts two ways on the one hand, it's, it's great reading.
00:44:13.200Uh, 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.
00:44:22.720Uh, but then it's also got this second layer, which is, I mean, it's not even subtle.
00:44:28.700Uh, 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.
00:44:39.960Uh, 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.
00:44:50.400Uh, 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.
00:46:11.820Uh, 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.
00:46:20.320Uh, I'm trying to gather as much as I need to.
00:46:22.780Uh, but honestly, this does not, this does not drive me towards wanting to, to really go deep.
00:46:28.760And, and not because the, the book itself, you know, I, I found the book helpful in, in a number of ways.
00:46:34.940I found, uh, the, the surface level reading, you know, the first pass that I did on this is something that I don't regret.
00:46:41.320And 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.
00:47:01.040Uh, but I, I don't want to play like cryptographic games with my philosophy, philosophy is already challenging enough to do it.
00:47:08.880Like 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.
00:47:20.140If 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.
00:47:29.420Yeah, let me, let me say, because I, I completely agree with you on that.
00:47:33.980The 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.
00:47:51.100And I really don't believe Strauss should be taught at the graduate level either.
00:47:54.500I 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.
00:48:02.180And the reason is I have seen so many people simply go insane.
00:48:07.240Uh, I mean, they don't think they have, but I mean, they're literally, they're counting words, they're counting paragraphs.
00:48:11.840They're looking for the so-called magic numbers, things like 13, uh, seven, uh, these kinds of things.
00:48:18.220Uh, and they're always looking for the middle.
00:48:34.900I mean, are you, there's a difference between interpretation and over-interpretation.
00:48:39.460Strauss himself is very specific about the kind of rules that he follows for this.
00:48:45.160Uh, but no one really attends to those because they want to look for even deeper things.
00:48:50.940Uh, 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.
00:49:04.880Well, uh, we, we, we have already, uh, closed in an almost an hour at this point and we have not even touched the surface.
00:49:13.640Um, 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.
00:49:36.740And 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?
00:49:47.640Yeah, 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.
00:49:57.120Because 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.
00:50:05.860Uh, 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.
00:50:14.500And 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,
00:50:44.940politics, 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.
00:51:02.300And, 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.
00:51:10.680Uh, 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.
00:51:21.940Uh, and what Strauss says is it could very well be in fact the case.
00:51:25.780In other words, Strauss is saying it is the case, uh, that is a great darkening, uh, a contraction, a great contraction of our horizon.
00:51:32.780Uh, and how do we find our way back to a more expanded horizon?
00:51:35.640Uh, well, return to the great books, right?
00:51:39.460Uh, so that's, uh, that's just the first things that come to me right there on that.
00:51:45.800Well, 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.
00:51:52.100Um, but I do think it's an interesting, uh, read.
00:51:55.780I do think that it creates, uh, a framework for understanding, uh, Machiavelli that is very helpful, um, in certain areas.
00:52:06.200And, 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.
00:52:15.540If 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.
00:52:22.620Uh, though the depth is certainly there, uh, if you would like to do that.
00:52:26.860Uh, so stranger, before we head to the questions of the people, where can people find your spaces, your writings, everything else?
00:52:33.300Yeah. 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.
00:52:48.280I 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.
00:53:03.300Uh, 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.
00:53:15.160You're, you're saying what you mean, even if the guy you're talking about isn't.
00:53:18.220Yes. And, and, and also I'm always perfectly clear, uh, whenever I bring up Strauss that I'm bringing him up.
00:53:24.180Uh, 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.
00:53:41.980Uh, 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.
00:53:52.100Uh, 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.
00:54:02.520There'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.
00:54:14.040So 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.
00:54:30.180And 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.
00:54:44.560At 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.
00:55:00.180All 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.
00:55:14.560All 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.
00:55:30.980And 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.