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The "code" thing is a new one on me, and sounds like bullshit.
Funny, I was thinking of starting athread like this after listening to a radio debate about Strauss last night. He's been interpreted every which way, I'll tell you that—one guest made him sound like a Machiavellian Antichrist, another made him sound like an old-fashioned Federalist. Because so many Washington neocons have taken to calling themselves Straussians, his work has become politicized—i.e., people who seek to discredit the Bushies are going to be hard on Strauss, while those who support Bush will claim a Straussian lineage for his policies to give them a veneer of respectibility. It'll be hard to find a blanaced source that doesn't have a a political agenda.
That said, there's a decent introduction to Strauss (who died in 1973) and the Washington neocons here.
For a little heavier reading, here's a brief summary of his philosophies: briefly, he sets out to rescue the reputation of the pre-modern philosophers and ends up going much further than that...
...the Straussians believe that premodern philosophy is better than modern philosophy. This turns the whole "progressive" view of history topsy-turvy, and provides a very distinctive point of view, and line of criticism, about modernity. The Straussians are pre-modern and anti-modern, not in the name of religion (like the various forms of religious fundamentalism all over the world) or of tradition (like conservatives since Edmund Burke), but in the name of reason, of philosophy: an understanding of reason and philosophy different from the Enlightenment's.
The "encoding" rumor that you've heard may be a distortion of the notion of esoteric philosophy, to which Strauss subscribed. That is, the premodern philosophers generally talked one sort of philosophy for a general audience, and another kind for their inner circle; and in their public writings they could only allude to their true philosophical views...
The lesson of the trial and execution of Socrates is that Socrates was guilty as charged: philosophy is a threat to society. By questioning the gods and the ethos of the city, philosophy undermines the citizens' loyalty, and thus the basis of normal social life. Yet philosophy is also the highest, the worthiest, of all human endeavors. The resolution of this conflict is that the philosophers should, and in fact did, keep their teachings secret, passing them on by the esoteric art of writing "between the lines." Strauss believed that he alone had recovered the true, hidden message contained in the "Great Tradition" of philosophy from Plato to Hobbes and Locke: the message that there are no gods, that morality is ungrounded prejudice, and that society is not grounded in nature....
The problem with [modernism] (in the Straussian view) is that it exposed philosophy once more, and ultimately prostituted philosophy itself into the service of common men. The esoteric tradition was forgotten, and with it philosophy as such. At the same time, philosophy inadvertently exposed men to certain hard truths, truths too hard for them to bear: that there are no gods to reward good or punish evil; that no one's patria is really any better than anyone else's; that one's ancestral ways are merely conventional. This leads to nihilism, epitomized by the listless, meaningless life of bourgeois man, or to dangerous experiments with new gods -- gods like the race and the Fuehrer.
Now, this unique interpretation of Western history depends on the existence of a "hidden agenda" in the history of philosophy. If there was, in fact, such an esoteric tradition, it has escaped the attention of most scholars. Of course, that might only prove how well-hidden it is ... which goes to show how seductive esotericism can be, once you start flirting with it. But in the end, what really matters is the philosophical questions Strauss raised, whether or not he was correct in ascribing them to the historic philosophers.
Much, much more in link. |
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