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nicklloydnow · 6 months

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“In 1941, whether liberal societies could endure despite their weaknesses was a more than theoretical question. Strauss’s lecture addressed the long-standing question of how liberal societies might protect the virtues they need but often struggle to cultivate, and sometimes actively undermine. And his answer, offered in defense of what he called the “open society” (a term Karl Popper would put to different use four years later), was provocative. He argued that many virtues essential to liberalism are best understood in the moral traditions that are most opposed to liberalism. He also suggested that the vices most threatening to liberal societies are often nurtured by liberal ideals themselves. As was his style, Strauss suggested, rather than explicated, his thesis: An open society requires strengthening by moral and political imaginations that have been formed in closed societies.

Strauss’s lecture bore the solemn title “German Nihilism”—slightly misleading, since its focus was broader than Germany and deeper than nihilism. Strauss was horrified by National Socialism, and he closed his lecture by expressing his admiration for Churchill and his gratitude toward British combatants. But what most engaged his attention was not contemporary statesmen and soldiers, but a previous generation of teachers and students. Strauss worried that the mistakes made by progressive educators in the decades prior to the rise of National Socialism could be made again, endangering the stability of Western democracies.

Strauss opened with a claim that may be unsettling, even when considered in context. He expressed his regret that National Socialism had been identified with nihilism, a philosophical doctrine whose political goals were said to be purely destructive. His concern was not that Hitler’s regime had been denied a fair hearing among intellectuals. For Nazi ideology Strauss expressed only the severest contempt, and with the interesting exception of Ernst Jünger’s early work, he dignified no contemporary German writer with a citation. Nor did Strauss suggest that the regime’s goals were less barbaric in theory than they were proving to be in practice.

Strauss’s concern was that the brutality of the regime evoked strenuous moral responses that impaired philosophical thinking and historical judgment. The regime posed an obvious threat to its victims and to those resisting its advance on two continents by force of arms. But Strauss argued that it posed a less obvious and potentially more enduring threat to those opposing it by intellectual means. Authoritarianism clouded the thinking of some of its most trenchant opponents, making it difficult for them to understand critiques of modernity as anything other than the “ravings” of the vulgar, the provincial, and the stupid. Strauss lamented that a political movement whose lasting defeat required the deepest philosophical wisdom had, in too many cases, elicited something else. It had given defenders of democracy, among whom Strauss included himself, the opportunity to demonize liberalism’s critics as “gangsters,” “mentally diseased,” or “morbid.”

Strauss was not alone in wishing for a deeper understanding of the intellectual roots of European illiberalism. In the same semester, a young John Rawls published his first essay, a sympathetic reading of Oswald Spengler’s predictions of democratic decline. But Strauss’s worry was distinctive of him and his pedagogy, which would play an increasingly important role in American conservatism after his move to the University of Chicago in 1949. Strauss worried that Western thinkers were no longer capable of contemplating perspectives beyond liberalism, even against liberalism, from which to judge the present. Far from constituting a threat to clear thinking, such a perspective is essential to it—for only outside the open society can we identify its virtues and its vices, and gain the strength to endure its discontents. But if we are to reach this horizon, Strauss argued, a popular prejudice often directed against critics of liberalism must be rejected. For what is mislabeled “nihilism” is not a destructive doctrine at all. It is a protest on behalf of something of the highest human importance—something liberalism dismisses at its peril.

(…)

Strauss’s portrait of his classmates was unsparing, but not disdainful. Strauss described young men full of vehement certainty about what they rejected, but inarticulate and unreflective about what they affirmed. “The prospect of a pacified planet, without rulers and ruled,” he observed, “was positively horrifying to [them].” Strauss lamented that their passions found no outlet other than the crudest propaganda. Unable to understand or express themselves in any other way—Strauss noted that they had largely rejected Christian belief—they gave voice to savage forms of group identity. The mark of barbarism, Strauss explained, was the belief that truth and justice should be defined in terms of ethnic or racial membership.

But Strauss acknowledged that these students, shaped by defeat, conflict, and social disintegration, were inspired by an ideal—an ideal whose dangers they did not understand but whose allure they keenly felt. Here we approach the heart of Strauss’s lecture, which sought to place these interwar students and their ideal in a broader intellectual history. Strauss cautioned that he sought not to pardon what deserved condemnation, but to make intelligible what required understanding. He therefore challenged his class to see in the youthful German protest what many had failed to perceive two decades earlier: its moral basis. This protest against liberalism was not fundamentally inspired by a love of war or a love of nation, Strauss insisted. Nor could it be explained by material or class interests. It was inspired, as he put it in a bracing passage, by “a love of morality, a sense of responsibility for endangered morality.”

Strauss named this outlook the morality of the “closed society.” No sensitive reader of the lecture can avoid being struck by the intensity of the passages in which Strauss describes the gravity of the challenge this “endangered morality” poses to the “open society.” What is the closed society? Strauss didn’t identify it with any one people, tradition, or form of government. By the “closed society” he didn’t mean non-Western cultures, pre-Enlightenment thought, or even undemocratic polities. The closed society represented a perennial moral possibility, whose roots are found in every human soul and whose demands must be confronted by every human community. In its most common expression, the closed society levels a familiar accusation: that the open society is immoral, or at least amoral, because it jeopardizes the very possibility of living a virtuous life.

Strauss assumed his American students might have difficulty seeing the possible strengths, to say nothing of the seductive appeal, of a way of life associated with ignorance and bigotry. He therefore tried to show them how liberal and democratic ideals might appear from a perspective that denies their moral legitimacy—not out of resentment or bad faith, but out of loyalty to a higher order of values. The rights of man, the relief of the human estate, the happiness of the greatest possible number—for advocates of the open society, these are ideals that have inspired social progress. They are part of a shift in modern consciousness, through which we have recognized our power to change the present, rather than simply accept the authority of the past. But to defenders of the closed society, Strauss argued, the moral prestige of these slogans evinces a different kind of shift. It is a sign that humanity has been debased rather than ennobled.

To draw his listeners into anti-liberal ways of thinking, Strauss sketched the development of modern political thought from the perspective of the closed society. This interpretation casts the arc of modernity in a disturbing light, depicting as decline what Enlightenment thinkers hailed as advance. It sees modernity as the story of how and why Western societies chose to lower their moral ideals, exchanging the demanding codes of antiquity and biblical religion for the comfortable norms of commercial society, legal proceduralism, and bourgeois life. Heroic ideals, attainable only by the exceptional few, were defined down for the ordinary many; ideals that promoted spiritual or intellectual excellence were balanced by those promoting health and prosperity; ideals that imposed self-denial were replaced by those that indulged self-expression.

As Strauss’s reading of modernity suggests, the closed society is defined by what it affirms no less than by what it rejects. He emphasized that its conflict with the open society is ultimately over the most fundamental question: Which way of life is best for man? For defenders of the closed society, human life should be ordered to a political end whose achievement requires the highest and rarest human qualities. So demanding is its vision of moral excellence, so uncommon are the virtues it requires, and yet so necessary is it to the sustaining of human life, that its fulfillment involves the greatest personal risk. As Strauss described it:

Moral life . . . means serious life. Seriousness, and the ceremonial of seriousness . . . are the distinctive features of the closed society, of the society which by its very nature, is constantly confronted with, and basically oriented toward, the Ernstfall, the serious moment. . . . Only life in such a tense atmosphere, only a life which is based on constant awareness of the sacrifices to which it owes its existence, and of the necessity, the duty of sacrifice of life and all worldly goods, is truly human.

Duty, sacrifice, danger, struggle—here we enter the charged atmosphere of a moral world that Strauss feared his students, and not only his students, failed to understand. It saw the best human life as one that dares to risk all for the sake of heroic possibilities. It saw the desire to pledge oneself to a great cause and to prostrate oneself before great authorities as essential to human virtue. In later writings, Strauss would examine a tension between the life of philosophy and the life of faith, a tension that he believed was foundational to Western civilization. But the conflict between the open and closed societies is not a conflict between reason and revelation. It is a conflict over the necessity of life-and-death struggles for human excellence. If the open society is constituted by free argument and equal recognition, the closed society is formed by loyalty, courage, sacrifice, and honor. It celebrates the virtues that it believes make political order possible: the willingness to forgo material comforts, to close ranks against outsiders and oppose enemies, and, above all, to fight to the death with no thought for profit or pleasure. Though these virtues animate other spheres of life, they are, in their deepest origin and highest expression, martial virtues.

(…)

But in defending the martial virtues of courage, heroism, and loyalty, Strauss was not simply giving guarded expression to past political views. He was giving voice to a moral ideal that defenders of democracy were jeopardizing, at significant human cost. That ideal insisted that these are the virtues through which, and only through which, a man can prove himself to be a man in full. It contended that what makes us human is not the way we pursue and enjoy the goods of bodily life, however refined our habits might be. Rather, we prove our humanity only by exercising our radical ability to contradict those goods, only by risking our lives for a value greater than mere survival. To live as a human being is to fight to the death for something higher than life. Within this moral world—a world so fundamentally hostile to liberal modernity—man is not made for comfort and security. He is tempted by them. The man who wishes truly to live must flirt with death.

Strauss was aware of the destructive power of this impulse and its pursuit of meaning through confrontation with annihilation. But before it could be corrected, he believed, its moral critique of liberal modernity had to be confronted. Proponents of the closed society regard the open society as degrading not simply because it places bodily safety and well-being at its political center. They regard it as degrading because it diminishes the soul’s need for moral risk, demotes the virtues needed for pursuing and protecting the highest things, and devalues the men who strive to live by its severe code. For those, such as Ernst Jünger, who found the most sublime virtues in the trenches of a world war, the open society was hypocritical. It lived by achievements it did not properly honor, or merely pretended to honor, and in doing so lied about the basic facts of human experience. Its dream of a world of freedom and equality, a world in which everyone was happy and satisfied and at peace—such a world was no dream, but a posthuman nightmare, “in which no great heart could beat and no great soul could breathe.”

Strauss’s portrait of the closed society made no claim to originality. As he acknowledged, his account brought together critiques of liberal modernity made by Rousseau, Tocqueville, Nietzsche, and others, who had likewise questioned whether something vital to human life was lost when older moral codes were exchanged for greater freedom and equality. But if Strauss’s reading of history was not original, the lessons he drew from it for the American university were. As he brought his seminar to a close, he reflected again on the generation of students who had entered adulthood during the decades before the Second World War, and whose moral passions had been so poorly understood and so poorly formed. He said that what those students had needed most was “old-fashioned teachers.” It is a startling remark.

(…)

Strauss didn’t wish to turn his students into sophisticated enemies of liberalism. His goal was to turn them into virtuous defenders of democracy. But to become true patrons of the open society, they needed qualities of character that could be developed only through a proper appreciation of traditional society. The open society was right to order its common life through the exercise of reason and the arts of civility. But the closed society was also right about some important things. It acknowledged our need to be loyal to a particular people, to inherit a cultural tradition, to admire inequalities of achievement, to reverence the authority of the past, and to experience self-transcendence through self-sacrifice. It acknowledged as well the importance of a leadership class whose decisions expose them to special risk rather than shielding them from it. As Strauss observed, these are permanent truths, not atavisms, no matter how unpalatable they are to the progressive-minded. A society that cannot affirm them invites catastrophe, no less than does a society that cannot question them.

Strauss gave his lecture only months after the institution of a military draft in the United States. But his primary aim wasn’t to steel his students for the nation’s entry into war. As Western democracies sent young men into combat, they needed to think more soberly about the kind of society they wished to defend after the fighting ended. Strauss warned them against the illusion of building a culture around values of “openness” that scorned the human need for solidarity, sacrifice, and even suffering. As a philosopher, Strauss was a critic of modern thinkers whose ideas encouraged, as he later wrote, the “corrosion and destruction of the heritage of Western civilization.” Strauss was therefore both a defender of liberal democracy, as well as a critic of liberal theories of human nature that sought to domesticate the highest longings of the soul. He correctly saw that some of the most serious threats to liberal ways of life do not come from authoritarian regimes. They come from homegrown ideals of equality and freedom, which can exercise their own kind of tyranny over the social customs and habits that make open societies possible.

For Strauss, more was at stake than the West’s readiness to shed “blood, sweat, and tears” on the shores of Europe and the islands of the South Pacific. There was also the tradition of education on which the peoples of the West depend for their civilizational identity. Strauss saw liberal education not as a catechesis in liberal pieties, but as a courageous engagement with moral traditions that may be profoundly at odds with democratic life. In this way, a genuinely liberal education served as a “counterforce” to the leveling pressures of mass culture. It provided reminders, as he later put it, of human greatness, of human possibilities beyond a life of consumption and production.

Strauss wrote frequently about education, and the survival of great books education in our country owes a great deal to his work. But his boldest insight is found in this early lecture, delivered at a time when the future of Western civilization was in doubt. Strauss implied a moral connection between the martial virtues of the closed society and the liberal virtues of the open society—between the life of the warrior and the life of the philosopher. He suggested that only in the search for wisdom could a human being truly achieve the qualities sought by the warrior and the soldier. Strauss did not therefore condemn the man who fights valiantly to the death; he sought to perfect the martial ideal, transposing it to the mind’s struggle against its enemies, falsehood and flattery. To pursue the highest truths and the highest goods, he claimed, requires the rarest human excellences. It requires the courage to risk cherished beliefs and self-images in encounters with great authors of the past. Strauss ended his lecture with a remark that is as arresting today as it was eighty years ago. He observed that there is a place in Western culture where the old morality and its noble ideals are still defended rather than subverted. Within its ancient universities, the greatest human battle is carried on bloodlessly and perpetually—as rational debate over the nature of truth and goodness.

(…)

Strauss wished to recover classical philosophy and revive the careful study of the great books. He believed that this kind of education could open the aristocratic horizon that citizens of an open society most desperately need, if they wish to save liberalism from itself: not freedom from the past, but freedom from the present. Perhaps education cannot bear the moral weight that Strauss placed on it. And as religious men and women, we should entertain even more serious doubts whether the philosophical life can fulfill our deepest aspirations for wisdom and holiness. But as our politics burns through the ideological firewalls of the postwar era, we should heed Strauss’s prescient warning: An education that denies our need to risk our lives for something beyond life will fail students to the extent that it succeeds. It will leave them in a condition like that of Strauss’s doomed classmates: angry, lost, and prey to the savagery that will destroy our civilization.”

#strauss #leo strauss #liberalism #anti liberalism #open society #closed society #nihilism #germany #philosophy #political philosophy #education #ernst junger #ernst jünger #modernity #tradition #society #neocons #neoconservative

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dr-henry-walton-jones-jr · 1 year

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from "what is political philosophy?" by Leo Strauss

#leo strauss #machiavelli #classic academia #liberalarts #great books #chaotic academia

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itisanage · 1 year

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Breve ma intenso scambio di vedute con un mio carissimo amico. Stralci disordinati.

La guerra, in quanto scatenamento della potenza, non è l’effetto della mancanza di cultura o dell’azzeramento della cultura, bensì il contrario. È cultura al suo ultimo stadio. Suggerisco io: al suo stadio di perfezionamento platonico. Un libro, credo presente nella biblioteca neocon americana – ma potrebbero anche non averlo, tanto l’equivalenza tra potenza e cultura era già ben oliata in Leo Strauss – recita fin dal titolo Platone. La lotta dello spirito per la potenza (1933) [è del tedesco Kurt Hildebrandt della cerchia di Stefan George tradotto nel 1946 da Giorgio Colli].

La guerra nucleare con il dispiegamento della sua potenza assoluta è lo spirito. La versione neocon identifica, opportunisticamente, potenza con democrazia, Ma quest’ultima è una menzogna opportuna e perfettamente morale da propinare alle masse che mai, con nessun mezzo, dovranno essere messe a contatto con la verità… anche perché non c‘è verità alcuna se non il nulla coperto dal tutto della potenza.

La cultura non serve ad evitare la guerra, casomai serve ad attenuare i suoi effetti e a ricostruire dopo un ambiente vivibile. Nel caso di quella nucleare non si dà neppure questa funzione.

Durante la Grande guerra gli zaini dei soldati, morti a milioni, erano pieni di libri, in alcuni casi degli stessi libri, da una parte e dell’altra. Questi libri non hanno impedito lo scatenarsi della strage. Forse qualcuno, dopo, ha capito meglio l’altro. Ma non ne sono sicuro.

La cultura come non serve ad impedire la guerra così non la evita. Così come il ricordo e la memoria non impedisce l’orrore che tende a ripetersi grazie al fatto che, per molti esseri umani, è manifestazione sublime e affascinante dell’esercizio della potenza.

#Leo Strauss #Kurt Hildebrandt #Giorgio Colli

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grandhotelabyss · 2 years

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Come voyage with us on the latest episode of Grand Podcast Abyss at the link above or wherever you listen to podcasts. The official description:

Homer, The Odyssey. The sophistication of epic narrative. The Odyssey in education and academia. Homeric violence. Is the west founded on plunder and slaughter? Homeric sex and honor. Homeric psychedelia. The muse sings. A guest appearance from friend-of-the-pod Matt the Straussian. The difference between ancients and moderns: from the best regime to the realistic regime. A democratic Odyssey? Plato vs. Homer. What are the benefits of believing in the gods? Odysseus as philosopher king. Adorno meets Allan Bloom. Achilles/Sparta vs. Odysseus/Athens. Why does Odysseus reject Calypso and choose the human? Odysseus as man of pain and change. Homeric echoes in Dante, Melville, and Tennyson. Homeric gender. Is Homer a misogynist? Homeric race. Is Homer a racist? Homeric translation, male and female. The 20th-century loss of the hero in serious literature. Are Homer and the canon tainted? Representations of the poet’s freedom from ethical responsibility in The Odyssey. Art for art’s sake. Homeric magic. The glory of poetry, beyond left and right: that it means more than it says. The execution of the maids and the epic’s self-critique. Homeric cuisine. The metaphoric and the domestic. Homeric universality. Poets as vessels of the gods.

Note: my essay on The Odyssey.

Please like, comment, subscribe, and otherwise obey the ethics of guest/host relations that obtain in the online world.

#homer #epic poetry #greek literature #poetry #literature #literary criticism #leo strauss #podcasts

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postersbykeith · 4 months

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#quotes #Leo Strauss #no bloody or unbloody change #eradicate evil in man #malice #hatred #envy #coercive restraint

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dipnotski · 7 months

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Leo Strauss – Doğal Hak ve Tarih (2023)

Çağdaş siyaset felsefesinin köşe taşlarından biri olan Leo Strauss’un 1949’da, yani II. Dünya Savaşı’nın bitmesinden kısa bir süre sonra, Soğuk Savaş kutuplaşmasının şekillenmeye başladığı bir dönemde Chicago Üniversitesi’nde verdiği altı dersin genişletilmiş versiyonu olan ‘Doğal Hak ve Tarih’ hâlâ onun en etkili yapıtı olarak kabul ediliyor. Strauss bu klasik eserinde, doğal hak sorununu…

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#2023 #Ayrıntı Yayınları #Doğal Hak ve Tarih #Leo Strauss #Murat Erşen

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nunc2020 · 2 years

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Leo Strauss. Antiliberales Sickerwasser

In seiner 1935/36 entstandenen Schrift Hobbes‘ politische Wissenschaft in ihrer Genesis versucht Leo Strauss im Rückgriff auf die negative Anthropologie Hobbes’ nachzuweisen, dass die gesamte moderne politische Philosophie aus der radikalen Verdrängung der kriegerisch-aristokratischen Moral hervorgegangen und durch eine neue bürgerliche Moral ersetzt worden sei. Für Strauss ist – ausgehend von Hobbes – die liberale und sozialistische Moderne durch diese Abwertung des Thymos gekennzeichnet, eine Entwicklung, die er bestrebt ist, rückgängig zu machen.

Hobbes, so Strauss, hebe zwei „höchst gewisse Postulate der menschlichen Natur“ hervor: das Postulat der „natürlichen Begierde“ und das der „natürlichen Vernunft“. Die „natürliche Begierde“ werde mit dem „Streben nach Ehre und Ehrenstellungen, nach Vorrang vor den anderen Menschen und nach Anerkennung dieses Vorrangs durch die anderen Menschen“, bzw. mit der „Eitelkeit“ identifiziert. (13) Die „Eitelkeit“ – also Thymos – sei für Hobbes die Quelle aller „Verrücktheit“, aller Unruhen, und führe notwendig zum „Krieg eines jeden gegen jeden“.

Diese Leidenschaft sei nur durch die „natürliche Vernunft“, die auf dem Prinzip der Selbsterhaltung beruht, zu bekämpfen. Diese werde hauptsächlich von der „Furcht vor dem Tod“ gelenkt, welche als „Ursprung allen Rechts und aller Moral“ aufgefasst wird (S.36). Für Strauss organisiert sich Hobbes’ Denken um diesen moralischen Gegensatz von Eitelkeit und Furcht. Während Eitelkeit die Quelle von Krieg, Unrecht und Irrtum sei, könne die Furcht vor dem qualvollen Tod Frieden, Recht und Erkenntnis stiften (vgl. S. 19).

Daraus leitet sich die Maxime des Staates ab, die Eitelkeit durch eine Politik der Angst bekämpfen zu müssen. Stolz, Ehre, Ehrgeiz, Heroismus, Tapferkeit und Hochsinnigkeit würden auf das Eitelkeitsprinzip zurückgeführt und daher nicht mehr als Tugenden anerkannt, sondern als zu zähmende Leidenschaften. An deren Stelle trete „die viel farblosere ‚justa sui aestimatio‘“ [das gerechte Selbstwertgefühl], die sich von den Adelstugenden dadurch unterscheide, dass „sie nicht wesentlich Überlegenheitsbewusstsein ist“ (S.74).

Hobbes Welt sei also, so die Schlussfolgerung des jungen Philosophen, eine Welt der Bourgeoisie, der er die philosophische Rechtfertigung liefere (vgl. S. 138). Sie ziele auf sozialen Frieden und betrachte „privates Eigentum und privaten Gewinn“, „Handel und Industrie“, „Arbeit und Sparsamkeit“ als „unerlässliche Bedingung für alles friedliche Zusammenleben“ (S. 138f.) Materialistische, „sinnliche“ Güter würden privilegiert, selbst die Wissenschaft sei dazu da, den Wohlstand zu mehren. Da der Krieg für Hobbes aber „kein sicherer Weg zu Wohlstand“ sei, dürfe er „nur zur Verteidigung geführt werden“ (S. 139f.) So stellt sich die Staatsgewalt im Hobbes’schen Leviathan ausschließlich in den Dienst der Bürger und des Friedens, und der Thymos wird radikal abgewertet. Das von Carl Schmitt denunzierte liberale Zeitalter der „Entpolitisierung“, die einer symbolischen Kastrierung gleichkommt, beginnt.

Damit ist der Fluchtpunkt jener entscheidenden „Umwertung aller Werte“ gesetzt, die den Bruch zwischen antiker und moderner Philosophie markiert. (14) Hobbes führt in die politische Philosophie eine „Klugheitsmoral“ ein, die nicht durch die Einhaltung moralischer Prinzipien verwirklicht wird, sondern in den Vorteilen und Profiten, die aus deren Einhaltung resultieren. Die Norm, die Hobbes begründe, sei keine „Norm im strengen Sinne“, kein „Gesetz“, sondern „ein Recht, ein Anspruch“ des Individuums. (15) Dieses „Menschenrecht“, das auf dem Anspruch auf „Selbsterhaltung“ beruhe, sei unveräußerlich.

Die Konsequenzen dieser wichtigen philosophiehistorischen Wende hat Leo Strauss in seiner Rezension zu Carl Schmitts Der Begriff des Politischen hervorgehoben: Gegen die Hobbes-Lektüre des deutschen Juristen zeigt Strauss, dass der von Hobbes begründete Staat unfähig ist, von den „Angehörigen des eigenen Volkes Todesbereitschaft“ zu verlangen, denn die Berechtigung dieses Anspruchs würde von diesem auf das Mindeste eingeschränkt. Deshalb „kann der Staat vom Einzelnen nur bedingten Gehorsam verlangen, nämlich einen Gehorsam, der mit der Rettung oder Erhaltung des Lebens dieses Einzelnen nicht in Widerspruch steht; denn die Sicherung des Lebens ist der letzte Grund des [Hobbes‘schen, B.Qu.] Staates.“ (16) Da die Hobbes’sche Konstruktion aber den Tugendcharakter der aristokratisch-kriegerischen Werte leugnet, taugt sie für Strauss nicht einmal dazu, die Stabilität der politischen Ordnung zu sichern und ist somit als theoretische Grundlage ungeeignet für Schmitts autoritäres Projekt. Vielmehr zeige der Rekurs auf Hobbes, dass der deutsche Jurist in den „Fängen des Liberalismus“ verbleibe, einem „Liberalismus mit umgekehrtem Vorzeichen“ (S. 237).

Für Strauss führt das Projekt der liberalen und sozialistischen Moderne quasi unausweichlich zur Produktion des „letzten Menschen“ (Friedrich Nietzsche), also zu einer Welt ohne Politik und ohne Ernst, ohne Heroismus und ohne Männlichkeit. Dementsprechend möchte Strauss im Moment des Zusammenbruchs der Weimarer Republik die moderne Zivilisation nicht etwa verteidigen, sondern vielmehr einen philosophischen „Horizont jenseits des Liberalismus“ gewinnen, um die „Ordnung der menschlichen Dinge“ wiederherstellen zu können (S. 243). Die Rückkehr zur platonischen Philosophie geht für Strauss mit einer Aufwertung der aristokratisch-kriegerischen Moral einher, die seiner Auffassung nach schon von Nietzsche ins Werk gesetzt worden ist.

Obwohl Leo Strauss Schmitts Liberalismuskritik und die der „deutschen Nihilisten“ (neben Schmitt sind das Ernst Jünger, Martin Heidegger und andere) weitgehend teilt, distanziert er sich jedoch schon vor seiner Ankunft in den USA vom real-existierenden Faschismus. Für ihn ist der „deutsche Nihilismus“ zwar eine legitime Reaktion gegen die von der liberalen Moderne in Gang gebrachte Abwertung des Thymos, dieser bleibe aber in den Fängen seines Feindes verstrickt. Der Umschlag des Liberalismus in den Faschismus ist nach Strauss nämlich in diesem selbst angelegt. Die radikale Negation des Thymos führe notwendig zu seiner nihilistischen Rückkehr in Form des Faschismus. (17) Diese konservative, antiliberale Gegengeschichte der Verdrängung aristokratisch-kriegerischer Moral bildet das philosophische Grundnarrativ des Thymos, das später von den Straussians in immer neuen Formen adaptiert wird.

Gegen den Liberalismus und seine antiliberale Kehrseite schlägt Strauss schon ab den 1930er Jahren einen dritten Weg vor, indem er seine nietzscheanisch grundierte Liberalismus-Kritik in einen platonischen Horizont einschreibt, um eine ‚gute‘ autoritäre Ordnung denken zu können. In seinem idealen Staat soll das „Politische“ (der „männliche“ Pol) über das „Ökonomische“ (der „weibliche“ Pol) herrschen, während der „Weise“ seinerseits über beidem steht, um dafür zu sorgen, dass „jeder das Seine tut“. (18) Die Aufgabe des Weisen besteht darin, die Führer zu führen, bzw. die zukünftigen Staatsmänner so auszubilden, dass sie ihre „thymotischen“ Tugenden entwickeln, sie aber gleichzeitig unter der Kontrolle der „Vernunft“ halten.

Strauss nimmt zwar am Diskurs der deutschen Rechten teil und entwirft in den ersten Jahren des Nationalsozialismus seine eigene Version eines „edlen Faschismus“ (Karl Löwith), bleibt jedoch als deutscher Jude (und als Zionist) sowie als Anhänger des Rationalismus von dieser rechtsextremen Ausformung strukturell ausgeschlossen, was ihn davor bewahrt, sich völlig mit den „deutschen Nihilisten“ zu identifizieren.

#leo strauss #politische Theorie #Konservativismus

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immaculatasknight · 2 years

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The politics of raw aggression

#Leo Strauss #neoconservatism #European Union #hegemony #imperialism #sociopathy #subjugation #social darwinism #Dick Cheney

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i-love-a-lot-of-things-a-bunch · 3 months

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Silly! 🌠🗡🌬🎀🎣🐈‍⬛🦁🧊🔥🤘🏼💪🏽

#ft #fairy tail #lucy heartfilia #lucy heartifilla #natsu dragneel #panther lily fairy tail #elfman strauss #leo fairy tail #loke fairy tail #panther lily #erza scarlet #wendy fairy tail #wendy marvell #gray fullbuster #gray fairy tail #happy the exceed #fairy tail gajeel #gajeel redfox #romeo conbolt

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lisannastraussisanangel · 10 months

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Fairy Tail Headcanons pt 3:

Chelia was so tiny during the deliora attack that she doesn't actually remember anything about it. Sherry is very thankful for that

Loke and Natsu both knew the other wasn’t human because of the body switching episode. Neither said anything. Mostly out of confusion

Elfman is the best hypeman. That man loves supporting his friends

Mira and Erza still have a rivalry. It’s not out of hate anymore but can still get pretty intense. They don’t fight physically anymore but everything is a competition

It’s a running joke that Laxus collects demons like Pokémon. He’s got Freed, Mira, Natsu and Gray so far (some count Erza as well)

The entire guild is super protective of Lisanna. She stubs her toe and half the guild is trying to do first aid

Cana is a natural born leader. She tends to take charge during battles has led them to victory multiple times

#hits hard that Chelia is the only family sherry has #fairy tail #fairy tail headcanons #chelia blendy #sherry blendy #lamia scale #loke #ft loke #loke ft #leo the lion #natsu dragneel #elfman strauss #mirajane strauss #erza scarlet #laxus dreyar #freed justine #gray fullbuster #cana alberona #lisanna strauss

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fairytail-multishipper · 5 days

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a ft get to know you

what’s your favourite character:

favorite ship:

favorite arc:

favorite op/ed:

an unpopular opinion:

best ft duo:

Ohh! How fun!

Favorite character: Natsu and Lisanna, but I also love writing for Zeref and Loke.

Favorite ship: Nali 🫣

Favorite arc: Edolas or Phantom Lord

Favorite OP/ED: Mashayume Chasing or Strike Back because I’m a basic bitch. My all time favorite ed is Be As One.

An Unpopular Opinion: Zeref and Mavis’s relationship shouldn’t have been written as a romance. Age difference aside, the tragedy of their relationship shouldn’t have been romantic but platonic instead.

Best FT Duo: Gray and Natsu. Romantically/plantonically, I think their relationship is probably the strongest we see.

#xvi answers #anon #ask game #natsu dragneel #ft ask game #lisanna strauss #zeref dragneel #loke/leo the lion #nali #otp: lost and found #mavis vermillion #anti zervis #gray fullbuster

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nicklloydnow · 1 year

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“But intellectual life is flourishing in the cafés, institutes and academies, as refugees forge community in exile. And at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, one of France’s most prestigious research universities, Alexandre Kojève has taken over Alexandre Koyré’s seminar on The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) by G W F Hegel. Between 1933 and 1939, Raymond Aron, Georges Bataille, André Breton, Gaston Fessard, Jacques Lacan, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Éric Weil, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, Raymond Queneau, Emmanuel Levinas all come to hear his lectures. A collection of the most renowned thinkers of the day, who would come to lay the intellectual foundations for 20th-century philosophy, political thought, literature, criticism, psychology and history. It is said that Kojève’s lectures were so intricate, so deft, that Arendt accused him of plagiarising. Bataille fell asleep. Sartre couldn’t even remember being there.

(…)

The short answer is that Kojève made Hegel accessible by bringing to the surface one of the essential elements of his work: desire. Kojève did not deny he was providing a reading of Hegel that transformed the text. His interpretation has been described as ‘creative’, ‘outrageous’ and ‘violent’. The question Kojève placed at the centre of his lectures was: ‘What is the Hegelian person?’ And he answered this question through a discussion of human desire by centring a brief section in the Phenomenology titled ‘Independence and Dependence of Self-consciousness: Lordship and Bondage’, which is popularly rendered as ‘the master/slave dialectic’. And by centring this nine-page section of a 640-page work, Kojève offered readers a way to grasp an otherwise elusive text.

Poetic in its opacity, perplexing in its terminology, Hegel’s work offers an understanding of the evolution of human consciousness where the finite mind can become a vehicle for the Absolute. But what does that mean? Kojève took the lofty prose of Hegel down from the heavens and placed it in human hands, offering a translation: this is a book about human desire and self-consciousness. Or, as the philosopher Robert Pippin writes:

Kojève, who basically inflates this chapter to a free-standing, full-blown philosophical anthropology, made this point by claiming that for Hegel the distinctness of human desire is that it can take as its object something no other animal desire does: another’s desire.

What was Kojève’s reading of the master/slave dialectic?

In Kojève’s reading, human beings are defined by their desire for recognition, and it is a desire that can be satisfied only by another person who is one’s equal. On this reading, Kojève unfolds a multi-step process: two people meet, there is a death-match, a contest of the wills between them, and whoever is willing to risk their life triumphs over the other, they become the master, the other becomes a slave, but the master is unable to satisfy his desire, because they’re recognised only by a slave, someone who is not their equal. And through the slave’s work to satisfy the master’s needs, coupled with the recognition of the master, ultimately the slave gains power.

What is essential for Kojève is that one risk their life for something that is not essential. The one who shrinks before the other in fear of death becomes the slave. The one willing to die – to face the inevitability of their own non-existence – becomes the master. In other words, desire is an exertion of the will over an other’s desire. Or, as the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan would come to say: ‘Desire is the desire of the Other’s desire.’ It is not an attempt to possess the other person physically, but to force the other person in that moment of contest to make the other give, to bend their will, in order to achieve superiority. And in this moment, Kojève writes: ‘Man will risk his biological life to satisfy his nonbiological Desire.’ In order to gain recognition in this sense, one must be willing to risk everything – including their life. It is a struggle for mastery of the self.

Instead of Hegel’s roundabout of self-consciousness that exists in itself and for itself but always and only in relation to another, Kojève gives us: self-consciousness is the I that desires, and desire implies and presupposes a self-consciousness. Thinking about the relation between the finite mind and Absolute knowledge is opaque, but desire is human. People know what it feels like to desire, to want, to crave to be seen, to feel understood. Desire is the hunger one feels to fill the absence inside themselves. Or, as Kojève put it: ‘Desire is the presence of absence.’

(…)

Perhaps most importantly, what Kojève understood was the extent to which we humans desire to exercise some control over how other people see us differently from the ways in which we see ourselves. However tenuous or certain our sense of self-identity may seem, it is our very sense of self that we must risk when we appear in the world before others – our identity, desire, fear and shame. There is no guarantee that we will be seen in the way we want to be seen, and feeling misrecognised hurts when it happens, because it wounds our sense of self. But this risk is vital – it is part of what makes us human, it is part of our humanity. And whereas Kojève’s reading drives toward an ideal of social equality that affirms one’s preexisting sense of self when confronted by an other, for Hegel, one must take the other’s perception of the self – whatever it may be – back into their own self-consciousness. In other words, whereas for Hegel freedom rested upon the ability to preserve difference, for Kojève it rested upon the ability to preserve one’s own identity at the expense of difference.

In bringing the lofty language of Hegel down from the heavens, Kojève offered readers a secular understanding of human action, which requires each and every individual to reckon with the inevitability of their own death, their own undoing. And in doing so he shifted the focus toward the individual as the locus of social change, where history unfolds toward an aristocratic society of equals, where all difference is destroyed. Influenced by Karl Marx’s account of class struggle as the engine of history, and Martin Heidegger’s understanding of being-toward-death, Kojève’s reading of the master/slave dialectic presents another form of contest between oppressor and oppressed, where mastery over another in order to master oneself becomes the means to equality, and ultimately justice within society. Kojève adopted the master/slave dialectic in order to develop what Michael Roth called ‘a schema for organising change over time’, to think about the movement of history. And the master/slave dialectic unfolds at the level of the individual and the level of society, where the self gains recognition as a desiring subject through the endless battle for recognition that is appearing in the world with others, and the level of society where all past historical movements will be judged within a framework of right, which is the end of history.

This has been in part the legacy of Kojève. Influenced by Kojève’s reading of the master/slave dialectic, Sartre argued in Being and Nothingness (1943) that man’s freedom is found in negation. In The Second Sex (1949), Beauvoir turned to Kojève to think about women’s oppression in relation to man and the need for intersubjective recognition. Lacan’s ‘mirror-stage’ follows Kojève’s reading of Hegel to understand the role of desire as a lack in the formation of human subjectivity. Bataille turned to Kojève to argue that one could experience full self-sovereignty only in a moment of pure negation. For Foucault, it led to the belief that there is no desire free from power-relations – his central theme. And for Fukuyama, this historical contest of wills evolving along a linear temporal plane toward an equal and just society has become the much-mocked ‘end of history’ thesis – the idea that Western liberal democracy has evolved as the final form of human government in the postwar world. The postwar world Kojève himself helped to shape, before his untimely death in 1968. Ultimately, Fukuyama’s thesis captures the difference between Hegel and Kojève’s Hegel: for Kojève, the ideal of universal equality won through an endless battle for recognition was always an individualist notion that required domination when confronted by otherness. But for Hegel, human freedom could be won only through collectivity by embracing the opacity of otherness that we are constantly confronted with in ourselves, and in the world with others. It is an acceptance of that fact that self-mastery will always remain an illusion.”

#kojeve #kojève #alexandre kojève #philosophy #leo strauss #francis fukuyama #stalin #hegel #hegelian #sartre #bataille

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