David Saussy

what it feels like to read Plato…

@NoCaparison I believe it is from Olympia: die Ergebnisse der von dem Deutschen Reich veranstalteten Ausgrabung (digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/curtius…). Tafelband 3: Die Bildwerke von Olympia in Stein und Thon (Berlin, 1894).

@lermiteVIIII Do you know where those sketches of the twelve labors are from?

Still plugging away, Theaetetus and Sophist until new moon in April, and then ascending to the Statesman: 5. Theaetetus = Augean Stables Cleansing false opinions about knowledge; intellectual purification? 6. Sophist = Stymphalian Birds Driving away sophistic confusion with dialectical tools, the method of division? 7. Statesman = Cretan Bull Mastering the powerful forces of governance?

It’s amazing to see ppl still getting into insane arguments on social media platforms about politics. By 2009 or so, I thought it was pretty clear that 1. You can’t persuade ppl to change their minds on social media 2. Given #1, always ask yourself what you’re aiming for in a comment you’re about to post - if you don’t know, then don’t post. These two rules have served me well. Disengage. A third point has become clear to me, too: everyone assumes that obviously your aim has to do everything you can to increase the number of followers. But why? So I reject that. As a consequence, it’s pretty chill over here - I’m learning, and enjoying myself. 📚📖🍻

καλός

@majavonwestphal @heymiller @HDaleCollegian @Hillsdale LLM is a rapidly changing tech. I find it useful to always preface my thinking with “as of right now”. Claude for Chrome can do research work on a gated site with permissions granted.

@heymiller @HDaleCollegian @Hillsdale My issue with no 3: LLM can only access open-access publications. The majority of important publications in my field is NOT open-access. Students using LLM for their literature research mostly find rather obscure papers from ResearchNet, not our field's renowned authors.

The student-run @HDaleCollegian of @Hillsdale has adopted an AI policy: 1. Do not let artificial intelligence write for you. This includes composition and revision. The Collegian teaches students to write and edit their own work. It also promises its readers that our articles are written by people. 2. You may use AI tools that highlight errors, including misspellings, improper punctuation, or subject-verb disagreement. You may use AI as a dictionary and a thesaurus. 3. You may use AI for research, such as the discovery or review of sources and documents. AI operates well as a high-powered search engine. Do not cite an AI-generated answer as a source. Sometimes AI is wrong. Check the source it cites.

@JohnSexton8676 Maybe this is part of the same strength, but there was a First Things article from some years back I found personally useful, on how Strauss might be a help for believers : firstthings.com/leo-strauss-fo….

@lermiteVIIII Right, “let’s take old texts seriously, not assume we already know better,” is the great strength of the school, whatever its weaknesses.

I’ve read most of Strauss’s books, and many of his students, or his students’ students (my favorite being Christopher Bruell and David Bolotin) the effect they have on me has always been to stimulate an appetite for practically limitless rereading - Plato or whatever else - and not to substitute secondary sources for the original. + Learn the original languages. My feeling is, I just can’t wait to get back to the book and think it through again from the beginning. That’s what I get from this school.

Imagine this. You got a shiny new job at a civic center. You left the woke department whose discipline you were trained in for it. Good paycheck, no more insanity. But your new colleagues aren’t from your discipline. They’re specialists in the history of political philosophy, in American political thought. They’re…Straussians. What do you do? You’ve heard of these odd creatures. The rumors, the jokes. You’ve read a couple snippets online, maybe an article or even a book. Burnyeat, Norton? But now you have to work with them, talk with them, engage with them intellectually. You ask questions to be polite. They have answers, plausible responses. They correct misconceptions and caricatures. Things you’ve never heard. It even starts to sound sort of sensible. And somehow they have, as a school, not only resisted the insanity of the contemporary academy, the insanity you’ve just fled—they’ve actually been ahead of the curve in diagnosing it. Odd creatures! So, what do you do? Do you think, maybe, just maybe, your training misled you? About the soundness of its methods? About this school of thought? About alternatives and challenges? Do you reflect on why your discipline was so susceptible to ideological pressure? Do you consider, maybe, that reflecting on the regime and its pressures, on persecution and esoteric writing, may be healthy for a scholar, perhaps even part of his task? Do you even consider joining their ranks? Or do you continue with the caricatures? With half-baked attempts at engagement and criticism? I’ve seen a lot of the latter. Some by friends or acquaintances. And all to a letter evince a failure to appreciate the basics of the school, to say nothing of the man himself. We’ve heard it all before. We know esotericism has its pitfalls. But that doesn’t invalidate the thesis. It means that it should be applied judiciously. Perhaps you could even be of some help. Talk to your new, strange colleagues. Learn from them. Become one of them. It’s not that bad, I swear. Submit.

Study of an owl’s wing. From life, Pencil on Strathmore paper. I spent long hours in this study. Practically every slow study for me has a story about what I didn’t see, what was right in front of me the whole time - hidden in plain sight. For this one, there are the little white diamond shapes - on tiny feathers. I didn’t see these shapes until I was well advanced into the drawing - then suddenly there they were, where they had been, the whole time. It strikes me that I’ve often had this experience reading - especially rereading great books (and especially reading Plato). Makes me wonder what else I’m missing - what is hidden in plain sight.

Well said

A further note about great books in science and math. The question we've seen raised: 'Why study the old texts when we understand, say, electricity so much better than Faraday and Maxwell? The best we can do by reading authors like this is to understand something historical.' My answer: it is NOT the case that we simply understand electricity better than, say, Faraday and Maxwell did. What we can gain by plumbing these books is not *merely historical knowledge*, but it concerns the very way we think about and understand the phenomenon itself, here and now, and maybe even the scientific enterprise as a whole. I can't address the problem thoroughly here. But I offer the following for you consideration. Let's take electricity. We are surrounded by electrical devices - a familiar fact of our common life. Whether you are a scientist or not, it is normal to speak about the "flow" of electricity. (If one makes the argument that this metaphor is something the unlearned only uses, a common set of problems in Calculus and Physics instruction, for example, make use of the example of wire and the flow of electricity, as if it is a foregone conclusion that some sort of electrical substance is "flowing", even though we may know better.) But does electricity actually"flow"? Now what if we turn to 'nature', to what we consider naturally occurring electrical phenomena - how are static, lightning, and say the shock of an electric eel, all examples of electrical phenomena? What makes them electricity? Do they "flow"? Or is "flow" an inadequate conception for the phenomenon? What *is* electricity? I've found it confirmed in my own experience that turning to Faraday and Maxwell in the original - helps one to face the phenomena and these questions more directly than without. It doesn't help to hear explanations - you need to work it out yourself, to undergo it. Layers of unexamined preconceptions are exposed. One can begin to think about electricity from the place where this inquiry begins: the phenomena. Do we understand electricity better than Faraday and Maxwell? The best we can say is that we understand its behavior better - but still, to this very day, we do not know what electricity is. There are two quotes I want to share in support of this, both appear dated but to my knowledge they are not. Consider first, Harold Wilson, Encyclopedia Brittanica, 1947: "The study of electricity to-day comprehends a vast range of phenomena, in all of which we are brought back ultimately to the fundamental conceptions of electric charge and of electric and magnetic fields. These conceptions are at present ultimates, not explained in terms of others. In the past, there have been various attempts to explain them in terms of electric fluids and aethers having the properties of material bodies known to us by the study of mechanics. To-day, however, we find the study phenomenon of electricity cannot be so explained, and the tendency is to explain all other phenomena in terms of electricity, taken as a fundamental thing. The question 'What is electricity?' is therefore essentially unanswerable, if by it is sought an explanation of the nature of electricity in terms of material bodies." 2. Feynman, as if to corroborate this contention, in 1983: "I can't explain that attraction in terms of anything else that's familiar to you. For example, if we said the magnets attract like if rubber bands, I would be cheating you. Because they're not connected by rubber bands... And secondly, if you were curious enough, you'd ask me why rubber bands tend to pull back together again, and I would end up explaining that in terms of electrical forces, which are the very things that I'm trying to use the rubber bands to explain." Now from here you could follow one well-trodden path, say, with Dirac: "When you ask what are electrons and protons I ought to answer that this question is not a profitable one to ask and does not really have a meaning. The important thing about electrons and protons is not what they are but how they behave, how they move" Don't ask the question, in other words, it's not profitable. If you've ever read Kant and Wittgenstein, you know how these well-trodden this royal road is. But suppose we do take this road. What are we left with? Then we are left with a Science that claims to understand Nature, 'now more than ever' - but this success has been purchased at the price of throwing out a whole field of natural questions about the world, the most basic of which is "what is electricity?" Another pathway branches off in a different direction: instead of rejecting the most persistent questions about nature, we might to learn to face the problems, and to understand it in a radical way, by learning again how to think about phenomena from the beginning. Note that this pathway does NOT reject, say 20th and 21st century science. But it includes, say, thinking again from the beginning Euclid and Aristotle's Physics, as well as all the others - inquiry into nature. The pursuit is not about how people thought about nature more than two thousand years ago, but about the truth about the way things *are*. I am minded to think this path leads in the direction of scientific wisdom. I hope this note has helped shed a little more light on the rationale for a 'great books' study of math and science.

Haydn invented the string quartet, on the model of political liberty. In a recent concert by the Vitamin String Quartet (the recording studio project that translates pop songs into the string quartet), the VSQ jokes with its audience about how Haydn invented the string quartet for hoity toity types and aristocrats - and the audience loves it, as they launch into their third Billie Eilish song (after playing Golden).

I've gone through this program myself - and I've read the works with folks outside St. John's - and I can attest to what @zenahitz is saying. Speaking only for myself, I think the best reason for reading these books in particular - why I'd want to go back and read them as many times as I can in my life - is because they are truly beautiful works of artfulness. They are energizing! I've studied several of them again since graduating, like Euclid, Apollonius, Ptolemy, Copernicus and Kepler, and some Newton + Descartes. There are many more besides (e.g. I've been meaning to go over Maxwell and Faraday - amazing). If the sheer sense of adventure - of walking in their footsteps - doesn't capture the imagination (it does for me), there are some serious reasons for studying the primary sources. The main one (that I find persuasive) is the strange difficulty that we face in modern mathematical physics still after a century - a kind of stalemate - that it cannot be comprehended without mathematical notation. (In other words, it can't give an account of itself.) I don't think we can assume that this is merely problem for philosophers in a philosophy department, or historians in a history department. Ordinary intuitions do not map onto the world of physics. This was not always the case. So what happened? To go back into the sources is to uncover original problems that led to this situation - and it gives the modern student a unique perspective on the current issues of the day, to be able to think the problems down to the studs and back up again. Another perhaps more hidden part of the problem is the radical redefinition or transformation of the concept of number that takes place in the invention of formalized algebraic notation - and even the counting numbers we teach kids in schools. The big mistake that we moderns seem to make - again and again - is to anachronistically interpret the ancients in terms of our own way of thinking. In this case, the modern concept of number. So for example, we take the algebraized Pythagorean theorem to be no different than, or even better than, Prop 47 of Euclid's Elements, or the Appollonian ellipse for the formula in the Cartesian coordinate system. In order to really understand algebra, and the modern revolution that it led to, it becomes a matter of rigorous working principle to suspend our anachronistic assumption (that Euclid "evolved" into or anticipated Algebra, is a primitive algebra (thinking of the theory of ratios). We are freed then to study both the algebraic conception in itself, and confront Euclid in itself. There's nothing stopping us from doing this - in terms of the intelligibility of these mathematical and scientific works. My final thought: I think it is a well-known fact in the history of science that during times of intellectual crisis - thinking people in general and scientists in particular go back into the bedrock principles to search for new life, for a way out of contemporary of impasses. I have always taken the St. John's math and science approach to be providing exactly this sort of endeavor - deeply consonant with the spirit of the scientific quest for truth... @ANNVYSHINSKY

Kristol’s point is that intellectuals are secretly jealous of the business class. “What gives them the right to wield so much power - their money? But we’re the smart ones - WE should have the power!” I think Schumpeter is the primary source of this idea.

Entirely missing the point. The issue is not “thinking about what we’re doing” but a certain Hamletism of the spirit, a habit self-examination that is a self-undoing, and involves a backwards-looking position, weighing any and all current challenges in terms of past personal wounds, on the theory that we have no significant rational control over our decisions now or ever. Ancient introspection is of an entirely different order. Any number of modern examples can be adduced - like the Founders - that also fall in line with the ancients, for whatever differences they had. The “theory” of a psychological unconscious was a relatively late development (on my reading, seeds were sown in Locke, Hume and Kant way before Nietzsche and Freud) whose first impact on the public was felt only after WW1. I’m not surprised to hear that a guy who builds things is not interested in examining his childhood and how his parents influenced him to make certain decisions. It is far more astonishing to me how thoughtless our adversary intellectuals continue to be.

@Paultalk44 @AtelierMissor_ Oh, gray shirts? But with Brown Shirt vibe.

@Paultalk44 @AtelierMissor_ It’s all about the uniform - suspenders, the boots and brown shirts.

We are entering the Age of Prometheus.