Leo Strauss Foundation

The video of the discussion of Robert Faulkner's fine collected essays @HannesKerber @mupress youtu.be/ivzeBNYxge4

@ls_foundation Hegel & Husserl knew Math. Kojeve didn't. Strauss didn't. As refugees, they had to make a bit of money any which way. But Plato wasn't a fucking refugee. He set up an Academy which privileged Math not talking bollocks.

Kojève: ...Je considère donc qu’il est de mon devoir de mentionner ici même le nom de ce philosophe de génie [Heidegger], qui a d’ailleurs philosophiquement mal tourné, peut-être précisément à cause d’un malencontreux désir de « dépasser » Hegel en « revenant à »… Platon d’abord (via Husserl), à Aristote ensuite, puis à… Hölderlin et finalement à Parménide, voire à Héraclite, ou à qui sais-je encore. Ayant mentionné l’influence de l’ex-Heidegger, je dois signaler également celle de mes amis Jacob Klein et Leo Strauss (respectivement russe et allemand d’origine et actuellement américains). Sans eux je n’aurais su ce qu’est le Platonisme. Or, sans le savoir, on ne sait pas ce qu’est la philosophie

Today in Cicero Seminar: 1959 - On the difference between justice and the other virtues: “In justice, according to Aristotle, we seek a mean in things, not in passions.”

@ls_foundation difficult to understand without context

Today in a Nietzsche Seminar: 1959 - On the inversion of edification: Nietzsche “pretends to be religious, in other words, just the opposite of the man of intellectual honesty, who pretends to suffer from God’s cruel and savage attack on him. The suffering consists in the fact that his is not simply edifying, and pleasing, and redeeming knowledge, but precisely the terror of religion, and he opens himself to the terror of religion.”

Today in the Marx Seminar: 1960 - On orthodox Stalinist orthodoxy: “To this I will give you a strictly orthodox Stalinist answer—that the constant issue of communism on the basis of Marx’s framework is literally what Stalin said. Then in that case, it’s up to Stalin to say why we have to study it at all any more, because one could say it’s all dated.” - On Marx’s late despair: “He didn’t know what a bureaucratic party was. The German Social Democratic party was growing but he didn’t know what a bureaucratic party was.”

On this day in 1959: Cicero Seminar - On pure curiosity and the philosophical life: “A passion for miscellaneous omniscience no doubt stamps a man as a mere dilettante; but it must be deemed the mark of a superior mind to be led on by the contemplation of high matters to a passionate love of knowledge.”

Today in 1959: Cicero Seminar - On the relation of Roman civil law to natural right: “It is conceivable, of course, that a certain Roman civil law formulates what in fact is natural law. That would need an argument. In the case of oaths, that might be of some importance.”

Today in 1964: Aristotle's Rhetoric - On shame as the missing exhortatory rhetoric: “How to instill people with shame, this he must know. And is this not perhaps the equivalent in Aristotle—it occurs to me just now—of the exhortatory rhetoric for which I was looking in vain? To fill the public, the deliberative body, or the jury with shame is of course an indirect way of appealing to their better instincts."

Today in 1967: Kant Seminar - On Kant via Montesquieu: “Kant makes here a distinction between despotism and a free society. The free society requires public spiritedness, or to use the more common expression, virtue. That was Montesquieu’s famous teaching. The principle of republics and especially of democracies is virtue. In a despotic state, there is no need or place for public spirit, for virtue.”

May 8, 1961: Letter to Seth Benardete, on the Lysistrata: - “The sexual starvation itself is based on the premise that the husbands are at home, for otherwise no opportunity for the women’s policy; on the other hand it presupposes that the husbands are in the field, for otherwise no motive for the women. The husbands are both at home and in the field, i.e. they are neither at home nor in the field. In a word, the poet hints at the war widows who would as a matter of course act as strike breakers (Ares and Aphrodite are in perfect harmony: the war feeds the war even regarding sex).”

Today in 1958: Kant Seminar On the universality requirement: “The moral law must be of such a kind as to apply equally to all rational beings, man or non-man, i.e., angels and God. That is a crucial point.” - On divine vs. human justice: “Some theologians were inclined to say that God’s justice cannot be measured by human notions—if you define justice in human terms, as Aristotle did in his Ethics, then this justice cannot be applied to God as Aristotle says, because God does not” stand in need of anything.

Nietzsche today in 1959 On the predicament faced by modern intellectuals: "either to be specialists or to be swindlers."

Today in 1959: Cicero Seminar On the practical understanding of the good: “For practical and ordinary understanding, we do not refer explicitly to nature. We use such terms as decent, or serious, or whatever it may be. But according to Cicero as well as according to Aristotle or Plato, if we would theoretically articulate it we would have to have recourse to the nature of man.”

Today in 1967: Political Philosophy of Kant On Kant’s freedom-formula in moral matters: “The limitation is freedom: to be as beastly as you please, provided you grant the same freedom to everybody else.”

@BartlTony40497 x.com/ls_foundation/…

@ls_foundation How did Strauss rate Kierkegaard?

On this day in 1957: Plato Republic Seminar On existentialism: “The only existentialist, if one uses this term, who is a first-rate thinker is Heidegger.” - On Heidegger’s project: “Heidegger was compelled, because he was a great thinker, to give an analysis of existence. This analysis of existence is, however, an analysis of the essence of existence.”

@howserob "Relativism" (1961)

@ls_foundation I think that this judgment of Strauss-in fairness, only a tentative statement in a class-may short-change Kierkegaard. In fact, elements of Heidegger's existentialism are drawn from Kierkegaard. Heidegger was not so entirely original. He took from Kierkegaard & Nietzsche et al.

On this day in 1469