Leo Strauss

Leo Strauss

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can’t believe finally stopped Straussian reading
ya know, as if Plato and Aristotle were irrefutable, hiding harsh truths from the masses for young philosopher pups to find
Few knew the secret truth

>tfw reading all of Strauss' early work to prepare for a close reading course of one of his books in a few days

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I have notes on Leo I’ll share if you’re worthy

Levi Stauss

Imagine having an evil guy like Kojève as you friend. The two were enemies in terms of deeply held beliefs, and yet remained lifelong friends. It's beautiful.

kys

please

To listen to them read a text was to go into a garden, into a wilderness, into an ocean and breathe
They were scandalous, daring; they took your breath away with their honesty
They were precise, disciplined, ascetic, reverent, heretical, blasphemous and fearless
Unfinished quote or pun, and in it cleverest, wittiest heresy
Discreet allusion or simple statement, and one would find oneself at the edge of the abyss
For Strauss, nothing is more important than the book you are reading
That book, the text, is the final authority
Students are taught to set aside what they know of the book or its author, what other people have said or written about it
Secondary sources are dispensable
Instead, one is to approach the book without preconceptions, not knowing what one will find in it
Students are taught to read the text on their own
Students (and the professor) are made more honest by the insistence that all claims must be supported by the text
Element of equality and common purpose enters early: all read the same text, all are held to the same standard of judgment
Strauss believed one should always teach as if there were one student in the class who was more intelligent than the teacher, and another more virtuous
The academy is a curious place
Time moves more slowly and more swiftly there
Time moves more slowly because more time is visible
Professors know long dead figures more intimately than they know neighbors or even their own family
Professors and their students read ruins, hieroglyphics, layered rocks, dark matter and old books
They read the alien and the enemy
Christian saints illuminate the gospel by the light of the pagan Aristotle
Time is larger for them, and so it sometimes seems to move more slowly
But those who sit in the company of the dead, who read forgotten books, seen worlds come and go in their mind’s eye, may see things before they happen
They see patterns, so they can predict, sometimes, where change will come – before it has begun, before those who think they make the changes have conceived them
Time may move more slowly for them, but they can move more swiftly through time: into the past and into the future
They are said to live in an ivory tower removed from the world, and in some respects they do
They often look at one part of the world devotedly, hungrily, and ignore the rest, giving their entire mind to the workings of a single enzyme, or the thinking of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Because their sense of time is long, they are often indifferent to the things around them
Yet they often know the world very well, far better than those who think professors are confined to an ivory tower
They see others: those whose lives they know through their scholarship
They often speak other languages
They read and write, study, eat, and make friends, in several places

They have a home and life, and another in the place where they work; they have often come from still another place
Sure that they had access to Nature or the Truth
Radical equality: no one could argue from authority, and a lifetime of learning was subordinated to the text
No one could refer to the latest article, or the “literature,” or an array of secondary sources for support
These, like all other arguments, had to be made through the text before us all
In a classroom where conventional distinctions are stripped away, other distinctions come to the fore
Ambitious students were unleashed
They learned the pleasures of a common endeavor and the pleasures of contest
They learned to like the taste of their professor’s blood
They learned quickly enough to be something more than students
They learned that when they succeeded most fully they would not be praised
They would be fought as rivals; they would be resented
Perhaps they would surpass their professors
Their professors longed for this, thinking, like Nietzsche, that “all those who go on their own way, carry my image too into the breaking day”
Life of the mind
Neurosis was a small price to pay for brilliance
Each Chicago student had one or two obsessions
Chicago students were connoisseurs – of food, wine, music, baseball and classes
Students talked incessantly about their classes – about who was on the way to something and who was a fraud