NATHAN TARKOV: Yeah, OK.
Well, it should appear soon.
[LAUGHING]
There it is.
And that spares me having to
tell you everything about it.
But I'll give a little
bit of background.
Some of you are probably
familiar with it.
I think now eight years ago,
when the Leo Strauss Center was
created here, it initiated,
first of all, an effort
to remaster all the surviving
tapes of Strauss' courses
taught at Chicago and
Claremont and St. John's,
and with the help of a
grant from the preservation
division of the National
Endowment for the Humanities.
Then, the second
stage to commission
distinguished scholars
who are on the stage here,
and others of whom
are in the audience
to be the editors of
those transcripts based
on the remastered
audio files, when
they were available to
edit, annotate and introduce
those transcripts.
About 45 courses
for which we had
transcripts and/or audio
records, about half of those
are now--
all the audio
files that survived
have been available for several
years now on our website,
and about half of the
transcripts are now.
This conference is held to
mark the occasion of the print
and ebook publication by
the University of Chicago
Press of Strauss's course
on Nietzsche's Thus Spoke
Zarathustra edited by
Richard Velkley of Tulane
And the two other courses
that Strauss taught,
Nietzsche, one in Chicago, one
in St. John's, the transcripts
had been available for a
while now on the website.
As you may have
noticed, the press
is selling copies of
the printed version.
And the press has also
accepted for publication
the first half of a course
Strauss called Introduction
to Political Philosophy,
the first half being devoted
to positivism and historicism,
edited by Catherine
Zuckert of Notre Dame.
And we hope soon
that a transcript
of Hegel, edited by Paul Franco
will be accepted by the press
too.
Eventually, we will print
all the transcripts.
We have-- and here I'm never
sure how to word this-- two
versions of our website.
In one version, you
can read them in PDFs.
In the other, it's
possible for you
to search all the
transcripts simultaneously,
and not only for a single word,
but for words in proximity.
So that's my advertisement
for the Strauss Center.
"Leo Strauss on Nietzsche."
We have four
speakers, and you all
have a program that tells
you who they are are.
Richard Velkley, as I mentioned.
Paul Franco, I mentioned
in a different context.
Mark Blitz from
Claremont, who edited
the course on Beyond
Good and Evil,
and Robert Pippin from our
Committee on Social Thought
has written on Strauss,
on Nietzsche, as well as
many other subjects.
I'll say very little
to substantively--
I will mention that in a
letter of June 23, 1935
to his friend Karl Lowith,
Strauss wrote in German,
"And Nietzsche so
dominated and bewitched him
between his 22nd
and his 30th years,
that he literally
believed everything
he understood of
Nietzsche, and makes
clear that there was a
lot he didn't understand."
So given this
remarkable admission
of influence during
his 20s, it is striking
that Strauss wrote and published
so little about Nietzsche--
a couple pages in Natural
Right and History,
a page or so in What is
Political Philosophy?,
et cetera.
And only late in his
life, the final course
that he lived to teach
at St. John's, he
devoted to Beyond Good and
Evil, and wrote his Note
on the Plan of
Beyond Good and Evil,
one of his last publications.
So we have, in part,
attempted to make up
for that by finding what's
now-- whatever-- a 1,000
pages of Strauss on Nietzsche.
Transcripts are not, of course,
equivalent to things he wrote,
and they are, as some you
know, either because you
were in his courses,
or because you've
listened to our audio files,
or read our transcripts,
they are taught in
his normal way, which
is to have a student reader read
a chunk of the text, Strauss
to comment on it, then you
take questions and objections,
respond to them,
and have a student
read another chunk of the text.
So they're not
lectures in which he
provides a full
interpretation of the text.
I have to decided
entirely unfairly
to proceed in this
morning panel, which
is devoted to Strauss's
interpretation of Nietzsche--
and I've asked our
four speakers to say
what they find most
interesting or distinctive
about his interpretation
of Nietzsche.
I've decided to
proceed alphabetically,
starting with Mark Blitz
and ending Richard Velkley.
In the afternoon session,
we will turn more
to Strauss's evaluation
of Nietzsche-- stance
towards Nietzsche.
What does he agree with?
What does he disagree with?
And we will then proceed
with reverse alphabet,
starting with Richard Velkley
and ending with Mark Blitz.
So, Mark over here.
MARK BLITZ: Well,
thank you, Nathan.
And thanks all of
you for coming.
There are several of
you in the audience
who know as much or more
about Nietzsche than I do.
For all I know, all of you do.
It wouldn't be the first
time that the apparently low
are superior to the
apparently high.
[LAUGHING]
We were asked to say
something about, what
is a distinctive Straussist
interpretation of Nietzsche,
so I'll begin by saying
a few of those things.
And I'll make several
point, concentrating,
at least in this session,
also on Beyond Good
and Evil, on which he published
an article, as we know,
and on which he gave a full
course and roughly half
of another.
The first point is
his very emphasis
on Beyond Good and Evil, to
together with Zarathustra.
You know, Heidegger,
for example,
doesn't emphasize Beyond, but
does write about Zarathustra.
A second distinctive element in
Strauss, maybe not surprising,
of course, was his
emphasis on trying
to discover the structure
and the order of Zarathustra,
and of Beyond as
well, his attempt
to find some order in the
paragraphs within chapters,
and then within the epigrams
themselves, and then,
of course, to find some order
and structure in the book
as a whole.
I say a third
distinctive element when
you compare what Strauss
does to lots of other people
is his emphasis on a
historicism relativism question.
That is, Strauss's
concern is with the issue
of how Nietzsche might be immune
from his criticism of others.
Why is the will to power,
for example, merely
one more interpretation,
and therefore, dispensable,
ultimately?
Why isn't it subject to the
same brute, imponderable
at its base, in the same
way that every other view
or perspective is
according to Nietzsche.
And Strauss develops
possible ways
of dealing with, or
talking about, or thinking
about this issue in the
Zarathustra discussions
and Beyond
discussions, some ways
to deal with this question.
One possibility is
that will to power
is necessary and sufficient
for understanding
any interpretation.
He says something to this effect
in the essay on Beyond Good
and Evil.
Another is that will
to power and Nietzsche
generally is somehow a more
comprehensive understanding
than anything else.
A third is that will to power
is a self-conscious creation--
he discusses this in some ways--
unlike what is previous to it.
It's not, in other
words, a doctrine which
is unwitty about its own roots.
Nonetheless, of course, it
too is grounded in the self,
not in the ego, as he says.
Certainly, not the rational ego.
And Strauss develops at
some length the meaning
and the importance of
the self in nature.
Will to power may indeed
be only an interpretation,
but it's grounded on the
final insight, at least,
that is perspectival.
And that's an
approach that Strauss
takes to try to deal with this
issue of whether Nietzsche can
account for himself in a way
which distinguishes himself
successfully from his
criticism of others.
Still another is that
will to power and nothing
else is the ground of the
response to the current state
of nihilism.
Still another is that will
power can encompass or at least
account for nature,
which might seem to be
or a fact, or a set of facts
outside of will to power,
but that it can account for
it by consciously creating
or recreating it, and by
being ground of the inanimate
as well as of the animate.
So Strauss doesn't merely
point out this problem
that Nietzsche's
views seemed subject
to the same difficulties that he
says everyone else's views are
subject to.
He looks for
possible resolutions,
and he looks for
them at some length,
part of what's distinctive
in his understanding.
Strauss obviously
suggests, notes,
notices the importance
of eternal recurrence,
but he doesn't discuss it
so much as a ground for will
to power.
He considers or
seems to consider
eternal return as
philosophically or morally
necessary for Nietzsche,
and therefore sees
Nietzsche's attempts at
material or cosmological proofs
of it as secondary.
One might, but Strauss doesn't,
I think, say in so many words--
claim that the willing
of eternal recurrence,
if successful, puts Nietzsche
at a comprehensive end point,
another way you would deal
with the question of what
might appear to be
self-contradictory nature
of his own teaching.
Another distinctive element is
that Strauss, as I indicated,
emphasizes the importance
of the question of nature
in Nietzsche.
To what extent does Nietzsche
rely on some understanding
of nature, say, in
his view of hierarchy,
or even in his view of strong
as opposed to weak wills,
or in his view of men and women.
Strauss also, as
others do, however,
emphasizes the
question of truth.
How is it that the deadly truth,
that previous so-called truths
or merely creations, how can
that become life-affirming
at the same time that it's a
genuine truth of Nietzsche.
Another distinctive element
in Strauss, I think,
is the fact that he emphasizes
the importance of religion
in Nietzsche as, of
course, others do,
but not merely as something
that Nietzsche analyzes,
but as perhaps
equal to philosophy
and the religious
philosophical split,
as in some sense,
perhaps replacing
the political
philosophical split.
And in fact, one more
distinctive element
in his view of Nietzsche
is precisely his
discussing him in political,
philosophical terms.
So in addition to the question
of historicism and nature,
one also notices this in
Strauss's emphasis on, perhaps,
opposition between
discovery and creation,
his emphasis on the
meaningful, and of course,
what he has to say that connects
Nietzsche and his rhetoric
to Fascism.
And further, in
his understanding
of equality in Nietzsche,
and of the high
versus the lone
human possibilities.
These kinds of political
philosophic questions
come to the fore in
Strauss's interpretation
more than they do in lots
of previous interpretations.
Although Strauss is influenced
by Heidegger's view--
I think he makes that
reasonably clear in some
of these transcripts--
he does not follow
his basic argument--
Heidegger's basic
argument-- about
will to power as Nietzsche's
view of being or beingness
and eternal return as
his view of becoming.
He doesn't see,
though he mentions
the possibility, of that
Nietzsche's teaching of will
to power is a metaphysical
relapse, a relapse
into metaphysics,
nor does he treat
it as thought he acknowledges
the possibility that it is
a mere experiment, but
rather treats his doctrine,
especially will to power,
but the rest as well,
as a new mode of
metaphysical presentation,
as well as having a new
substance, a new mode
of presentation
as well as having
new substance, by
which I think he mostly
means to suggest the importance
of the self in Nietzsche,
as opposed to simply
the rational ego.
Two final points.
Strauss suggests much
more clearly than others
that the theme of
Beyond Good and Evil
is the philosopher of
the past and future.
In other words, he takes
the subtitle of Beyond Good
and Evil very seriously,
and he also more clear
than many others, of
course, and emphasises
more than many others, several
specific themes in Beyond Good
and Evil, though one of which
I'll point out and conclude
with is a distinction between
herd morality around slave
morality.
So there are many elements
in Strauss's understanding
that are, in fact,
quite distinctive, even
though Strauss doesn't
always call attention to what
is so distinctive about them.
PAUL FRANCO: Hello.
First, I just want to
say it's great to be back
at the University of Chicago.
I was a student here many
years ago in the 1980s,
under the good mentorship
of Nathan Tarkov.
And I've been lost in
Maine for many years now.
It's good to be back and
a great and very serious
university like this.
Again, I too want
to speak about what
is distinctive about
Strauss' interpretation.
And I'm going to talk more about
the actual Zarathustra lectures
that Richard Velkley
has just edited.
Strauss' interpretation
of Nietzsche
revolves around the
persistent themes
of his political philosophy
in The Critique of Historicism
and the attempt to reopen the
question in Natural Right.
In Strauss' account
of historicism,
Nietzsche occupies the
unique and interesting
between the theoretical
historicism of the 19th century
and the radical historicism
or existentialism of the 20th.
Strauss specifies this position
at the outset his lectures.
Nietzsche began, he says, from
the 19th century historicist
premise that all thought
and right are essentially
and radically historical.
Nietzsche, however,
found this view
to be problematic because of
its detrimental effects on life.
And of course, Strauss recurs
to the uses and disadvantages
for history just to
draw out that problem
that Nietzsche sees with
19th-century historicism.
All of this led Nietzsche,
according to Strauss,
to quote, "try to return
from history to nature."
And again quote, "to embark
on an enterprise aiming
at the restoration of nature as
an ethically guided concept."
While this effort
to return to nature
was criticized by
existentialist, as a relapse
into metaphysics
for Strauss, it is
what makes Nietzsche such a
fruitful thinker to study.
In the enterprise of returning
to or restoring nature,
Strauss sees Nietzsche's thought
for the eternal return playing
a central role.
Therefore, he
spends a great deal
of time in his lectures
trying to decipher and uncover
motivation behind
his thought there.
He rightly sees it as
a world matter than as
a common cosmological doctrine.
More specifically
and distinctively,
he interprets the eternal
return as a response
to the modern conquest of
nature, for which nature
is understood to
infinitely moldable,
and for which there are
no assignable limits.
The end result of
this scientific nature
is the destruction of
inequality, leading
to Nietzsche's last man.
By the way, in respect
to this modern project
of conquering nature,
the now largely
forgotten political
scientist Harold Lasswell,
comes in for some fairly
harsh and actually hilarious--
for instance, apparently
for Glasswell,
in his kind of technocratic
vision of things,
psychoanalysis was the
queen of the technocracy.
And in that regard, Strauss
adduces an advertising
from the days in
which he's speaking.
And it had a picture of Cesare
Borgia for a pharmaceutical ad.
And the idea was that
if Cesare had not
had taken some of these pills,
he would have been better off.
And Strauss comments that
if he had taken those pills,
he would not have accomplished
many of things Machiavelli
wanted to accomplish.
At any rate, in the light
of this scientific project
at conquest of nature, Nietzsche
believes that, or at least
Strauss ascribes to
Nietzsche, that the notion
of human greatness
ultimately would be
impossible it's dispensation.
A Human greatness,
for Nietzsche,
ultimately rests on the
maintenance of difference
between the sexes, for
example, on inequality,
on natural hierarchy,
and on suffering.
And for this reason,
Nietzsche needs nature.
This is a phrase
that Strauss repeats
throughout these lectures.
Nietzsche, in some ways,
is anaemical to nature,
which emphasizes an overcoming
of nature in Nietzsche.
In the last analysis,
he needs it.
But because Nietzsche's
doctrine of the will to power
is incompatible with traditional
understandings of nature,
nature, for Nietzsche,
must be willed.
And this is kind of a
paradox that he, again,
plays with throughout the
lectures, that he needs nature,
but nature is not something
that can be simply there.
It must be postulated or willed.
This is the main significance
of the eternal return,
according to Strauss.
And he's particularly critical
of Heidegger's interpretation
of the eternal return because
it overlooks this crucial motive
behind the doctrine.
For this reason,
this leads Heidegger
to reject eternity altogether.
And for this reason,
Strauss regards
Nietzsche as superior
to Heidegger,
in the same way that he regards
Nietzsche as superior to Marx.
Unlike both of these
thinkers, Strauss
says Nietzsche is aware that
nothing which is not eternal
would satisfying a thinking man.
In connection with Strauss'
interpretation for motive
behind Nietzsche's thoughts
of the eternal return,
I can't resist
mentioning a funny moment
at the end of the lectures,
when a student asks Strauss,
why is the doctrine
of eternal return so
necessary to Nietzsche?
Having spend about half
the course on precisely
this question, one
can only imagine
the sinking feeling Strauss
must have felt at this question.
Those of who you who teach may
have experienced this sinking
feeling at one point or
another in your careers.
It is a testament to Strauss'
patience as a teacher
that after stating, we have
already discussed this,
he went onto explain
the motivation behind
and significance of the
doctrine of the eternal return
one more time.
So what are we to make of
Strauss' interpretation
of the eternal return?
I have to confess, I'm not
sure his interpretation
makes this strange doctrine
anymore intelligible
or convincing than the myriad
of other interpretations
that have been offered of it.
Indeed, Strauss' interpretation
often makes the eternal return
look like a fantastical
contrivance designed
to accomplish a moral
political purpose
rather than as a
logical outgrowth
of Nietzsche's concept
of the will to power
and its affirmation of
creativity and eternal
becoming.
What is admirable about
Strauss's interpretation
is that he tries to make
this strange intelligible
and motivated.
I'm just not sure he
succeeds, but this
is something we could perhaps
pursue in our discussion.
NATHAN TARKOV: Robert.
ROBERT PIPPIN: Thank you.
And my thanks also
to the organizers.
Basically, with 10 minutes,
mostly what I want to suggest
is that Strauss's
interpretation of Nietzsche
is extremely hard to understand.
It's very elusive, achromatic,
and mysterious in a way
that I would appreciate your
help in trying to understand.
The most important role
played by Nietzsche
in Strauss' thought is
undoubtedly the identification
of Nietzsche as playing the
major role in what Strauss
considered the crisis of our
time, the crisis of modern will
to right.
But that, in itself, is a topic
for our afternoon session,
and it's appropriate
that we begin first
with the question of Strauss'
interpretation of Nietzsche,
of what Nietzsche,
according to Strauss,
meant to say in his
work, and what he meant
to accomplish by publishing it.
I've only time here to raise
very broadly two large issues
in Strauss's reading.
They are esotericism
and religiosity.
Mostly I want simply to
raise a number of questions,
since I find, as I said,
Strauss's interpretation
both extremely
intriguing and baffling.
Since Strauss tells us that, for
him, Beyond Good and Evil had
always been Nietzsche's
quote unquote, "most
beautiful book--" you
know, we could stop here
for half an hour.
Why does Strauss say
most beautiful book?
Why doesn't he say most
insightful, most clear,
most helpful?
And this is encased in an
"Introduction to the Beyond
Good and Evil" essay, in
which he criticizes Nietzsche
for calling attention to
himself rather than the truth,
and then he begins
by saying something
about himself, that
he holds Beyond Good
and Evil the most beautiful.
None of this is accidental.
And since he published
a dense article
on Beyond Good and
Evil, I want to consider
a couple of interpretative
claims he makes there.
This is not easy
to do economically,
because a prominent
feature of that article
is his elusiveness,
its deliberate lack
of resolution of
the issues raised.
For example, he suggests that
in a Preface to Beyond Good
and Evil, Nietzsche was wrong
to accuse Plato of dogmatism,
which for Nietzsche is the
invention of the pure mind
and the good in itself, making
unusual use of the question
of whether the
gods philosophize.
Strauss suggests that
Plato, if we can understand
a tangled path to any confident
view of Plato, a path wandering
through [INAUDIBLE],,
Socrates, and Dionysus,
we will see that
Plato did believe
that the gods philosophized,
and that means they endlessly
philosophized, and that
philosophy is accordingly
esoteric or operatic,
that Plato believed
in quote unquote "the
weakness of the Logos."
But he also reminds us that
Nieztche's apparent views about
Plato cannot themselves
be taken at face value,
since that is like to
claim of dogmatism,
cannot be taken at face value.
Since Nietzsche tells us,
and Strauss emphasized
this, that Beyond Good
and Evil is written
in a distinctive form,
one of quote, unquote,
"graceful subtlety" as regards
form, as regards intention,
and as regards the
art of silence.
So Strauss concludes,
quote, "in other words,
in Beyond Good and Evil,
in the only book published
by Nietzsche in the contemporary
preface to which he presents
himself as the
antagonist of Plato,
he Platonizes as regards
form more than anywhere else.
This subtle destabilization
of the contrast
between Plato and Nietzsche is
a feature of much of Strauss
wrote about Nietzsche.
Since Strauss had just
mentioned the art of silence,
and since, as I say, he will
quote the seventh letter
on the weakness of the
logos, Strauss seems to me
to be referring to one of the
most controversial aspects
of Strauss' own interpretation
of philosophers,
their esotericism.
But this is fully justified
in the case of Nietzsche,
and we have to keep
it in mind whenever
trying to understand Strauss's
own reading of Nietzsche.
In the preface,
Nietzsche had said
that, quote, "all
great things, in order
to inscribe eternal demands
in the heart of humanity,
must first wander the Earth
under monstrous and terrifying
masks," and that
dogmatic philosophy was
such a mask, or a grimace
of face [INAUDIBLE]..
And in Aphorism 40, he
famously writes the quip,
"Everything deep loves masks.
The deepest things, even
hate images and likenesses."
And in 289, he goes so far as
to say that every philosophy
conceals a philosophy too.
Every opinion is
also a hiding place.
Every word is also a mask.
And using an image of central
importance to Strauss, he says,
there is a cave
beneath every cave.
But what I find a bit
frustrating about Strauss's
reading is that having
introduced the topic of how
carefully did you write and how
esoterically, he doesn't really
pursue the issue in Nietzsche.
This is all the more
interesting because it
is deeply connected to the other
aspect of Strauss's reading
that is most prominent to
the essay and very difficult
to understand, Nietzsche's
so-called religiosity.
These intersect in this way.
Nietzsche tells us that
the deepest things,
love masks for a
strikingly unusual reason.
That is, they don't
write concealed in order
to protect philosophy
or in order
to offer a salutary
myth for the many.
The reason is paradigmatic
for all the stylistic elements
in the book, but it's very
mysterious in Nietzsche.
He writes wouldn't
just the opposite,
the opposite of writing in
mirror images and likenesses,
be the proper disguise
for the shame of a god?
As noted, he appears to
mean the opposite of images
and likenesses, or vehicles for
still recognizing the original,
or what is proper for a God
is to completely disguise
to where a mask that precludes
completely the original.
But the reference to shame as
the reason for writing masked,
and the shame of a god at
that, is quite unexpected.
And as far as I know, it's
not discussed anywhere
in the literature on Nietzsche.
Moreover, the penultimate
paragraph of the book
reminds us there was a God
without shame, Dionysus.
But when in such
shamelessness, he
proposed helping humans
be quote, "stronger, more
evil, more profound,
more beautiful,"
or exactly what many
believe Nietzsche wants
to help us become,
Nietzsche, in effect,
responds in our voice by
reminding Dionysus and us
that such a god lacks
more than shame,
and he could learn
a thing or two
from human beings, who
are, after all, more
human than the god.
None of this is clear.
It appears that
Nietzsche is suggesting
at the close of the book at the
connection between the shame
of a god and writing always
masked should not be abandoned.
There remain good reasons for
philosophers to be ashamed,
especially about
their own past and so
for writing esoterically.
It would take
hours even to begin
to untangle this complex of
images in Nietzsche, I mean,
not only to indicate
that Strauss quite
rightly introduces us to the
problem of Nietzsche's writing
as a problem.
And that problem is esotericism.
And the reasons for
that esotericism
are left relatively unexplored
by Strauss, perhaps quite
understandably, because
they're so obscure to Nietzsche
they would require
significantly more than one
brief article and interview.
And as noted, the
aura of religiosity
that surrounds Nietzsche's
remarks about esotericism,
the shame of a god,
the problem Dionysus,
is connected to the single
most remarkable aspect
of Strauss' interpretation.
It's also summarized in a 1956
lecture he gave he at Chicago,
called simply Existentialism.
Nietzsche's philosophy
of the future
is inherent in the Bible.
He is an heir to that
deepening of the soul which
has been affected by the
biblical belief in a god that
is whole.
The philosopher of the
future as distinguished
from the classical
philosophers will
be concerned with the whole.
His philosophy would be
intrinsically religious.
This claim, which I believe to
be the most important element
of Strauss' interpretation
of Nietzsche,
is also at the heart of
the Beyond Good and Evil,
although again, it's very
hard to identify anything
as determinant as a claim in the
tangled rhetoric of that essay.
Much of what Strauss says
remains quite serious.
For example,
Nietzsche's doctrine
of the will to power,
the whole doctrine
to of Beyond Good and
Evil is, in a manner,
a vindication of God,
Strauss says about Nietzsche.
Or he says that for
Nietzsche, quote,
"a certain kind non-atheism"--
just think for a moment of
the complexity of that word--
"a certain kind of
non-atheism belongs
to the philosopher
of the future, who
will again worship
the god Dionysus,
or again will be, as
an Epicurean might say,
a dionysokolax."
This is extremely intriguing,
but incredibly baffling,
since Strauss well knows that
in this passage, paragraph
seven of Beyond Good
and Evil, Nietzsche
is making a joke about the
philosophers of the past,
not at all characterizing the
philosophers of the future.
The full passage from Nietzsche
is, "how malicious philosophers
can be.
I do not know anything
more venomous than the joke
Epicurus allowed himself against
Plato and the Platonists.
He called them [NON-ENGLISH].
Literally the foreground meaning
of that term is sycophants
of Dionysus, and therefore,
accessories of the tyrant
and brown-nosers, is how
the translator translates
[NON-ENGLISH].
But it also wants to say they,
philosophers, are all actors.
There's nothing
genuine about them.
Remember that Strauss had
said that the philosophers
of the future will
be dionysokolax,
as if it's a term of
praise, where it's actually
an accusation of
them as flatterers
and sycophants of Dionysus.
I'm sorry this is
all so confusing,
but I don't believe this
essay has been attended
to as carefully as it ought
to be, given the deliberate
elusiveness that Strauss
is introducing for a reason
it would be useful to
understand in the essay.
Finally, to add to the most
baffling aspect of Strauss
on Nietzsche's
account of religion,
or what he calls the nerve
Nietzsche's theology--
who knew Nietzsche
had a theology--
Strauss claims in a
very suspicious avowal
of modesty about this nerve
of which I have not spoken--
actually he just did, calling it
the nerve, and will not speak--
but he will, in the passages
I've already quoted.
Since I have no access to
it, no access to Nietzsche's
religiosity, but he
has enough access
to know to recommend
a 1935 article
by the great German
philologist Karl Reinhardt
about Nietzsche's last poems,
"The Dionysus Dithyrambs."
Well, I'm sorry, but
there's no more room
to pursue any of
these questions.
I do want to express,
though, some great solidarity
with Strauss, and his insistence
that Nietzsche should not
be understood as proposing
traditional philosophical
themes, and that the form
of Nietzsche's writing
must be taken seriously in both
its figurative, its literary,
and its esoteric character.
This then puts the question of
truth in a different register,
let's say, shifting
our attention
from the truth at
various propositions
to the problem of living in the
truth, or living truthfully.
And when we see
that, we can begin
to see why Strauss might
have claimed that Nietzsche's
philosopher of the
future quote, "will
be intrinsically
religious," unquote.
Thanks.
NATHAN TARKOV: Richard?
RICHARD VELKLEY: Well, I was
very pleased and honored to be
asked to undertake the task of
editing the transcript on Thus
Spoke Zarathustra, which I
hope I accomplished well.
And I did, though, have a great
deal of assistance from Nathan,
[? Fiona Keane, ?] my graduate
assistant, Alex Priou,
and the fine people at
University of Chicago Press.
So because I am
actually at this point,
most acquainted with the writing
of Strauss and Nietzsche,
most of my comments are
based upon that transcript,
although I do have a few
references to other Strauss
writings on Nietzsche.
Now to approach what is
distinctive about Strauss
reading of Nietzsche,
I, for convenience,
focused on just three topics--
history, natural right,
and political philosophy.
And some of the points I want
to make, I've absolutely made,
but they will appear here,
perhaps in a somewhat different
light.
Now Nietzsche's significance to
Strauss with respect to history
is twofold.
There is Nietzsche's place
in the history of philosophy,
and then there is Nietzsche's
own thinking on history,
and the two are
closely intertwined.
Nietzsche's own thought,
as Mr. Strauss points out,
emerges out of the
historical consciousness,
even of the late 18th century
for the historical school,
which regards all
human thought as rooted
in its historical context.
But then, this
does not accurately
characterize Nietzsche's
place in history,
and Strauss, from
early in his career,
saw Nietzsche as
a radical critic
of the philosophical tradition
who brings modernity to an end,
and from 1930--
I have the statement--
through Nietzsche, tradition
has been shaken to its roots.
It has completely lost
its self-evident truth.
And Strauss goes on to say
that this is a liberating
event, where it makes possible
the recovery of lost questions,
in particular,
how shall we live?
And in Strauss's
later formulations,
Nietzsche inaugurates
the third wave
of modernity, a
wave that consists
of the fundamental crisis
in Western civilization
and Western philosophy.
That crisis, as
Strauss describes
it, crisis of the West,
consists in the West
having lost its sense of
the universal purpose, which
it has expressed in
terms of natural rights.
So the crisis of our
time can be characterized
as a crisis of national
right, a crisis that
emerges full-blown in
Nietzsche's though.
Again, Strauss speaks
of a positive aspect
of this in his later writing.
He says the crisis
of our time may
have the accidental advantage
of enabling us to understand
untraditional or a
fresh manner what
was hitherto understood only
in a traditional derivative.
Now, Nietzsche's
thought on history
is crucial to this
position he has in history.
Nietzsche's thought
carries forward
the historic consciousness
of earlier modernity that
radicalizes it by A, denying
the progressive rational
characterization of history,
which is most notable perhaps
in Hegel, and B, by exposing the
danger of historical thought.
Nietzsche particularly
writes about
the historical scholarship
of the 19th century
for a vibrant and
confident culture.
Now through this transformation
of historical consciousness,
Strauss says, "Nietzsche
begins a self-overcoming
of historicism."
That is, Nietzsche turns toward
a form of historical thought
and experience that is
rooted in life or nature,
but not nature understood
in a classical way.
So perhaps, I turn to the
second point, natural right.
And in the Zarathustra
lectures, Strauss
makes a striking claim, which
Paul Franco has already cited,
that Nietzsche tried to
return from history to nature,
and was in his way attempting to
restore classic natural right,
but on the basis of
the rejection of nature
as a standard.
This is an extremely
paradoxical formulation.
But, I see it as the core of
Strauss' reading of Nietzsche.
In other words,
hereby Strauss is
expressing a fundamental
problem of Nietzsche,
which both relates him
to classical thought
and distances him from it.
Now, what is the nature to
which Nietzsche seeks to return?
And I don't think it is
adequate just to characterize it
as inequality and moral concern
with restoring inequality,
because Nietzsche has
a, in fact, most of all,
a specific inequality in mind.
It is the nature
of the philosopher
and the rank of the philosopher.
And I quote from
Beyond Good and Evil,
number 207, "The philosopher as
distinguished from the scholar
and scientist is a
complimentary human, in whom
not only the human, but the
rest of existence is justified."
Now Strauss sees in this
view of the natural rank
of the philosopher a position
quite akin to that of Plato,
and claims that
Nietzsche is closer
to Plato, and Socrates and
Plato than he seems to realize.
However, in
attempting to restore
this notion of the philosopher
and the special rank
of a philosopher.
Nietzsche does not use
natural standards that
are found in Greek philosophy.
I mean, put this
most basically, he
does not appeal to some notion
of a universal notable order
of nature or the cosmos
that exists independently
of human interpretation
and creation.
Rather from Nietzsche, nature
so far as we have access to it,
is its fundamental
character creative will,
or will to power,
which is characterized
by radical particularities
of perspective.
So the problem Nietzsche
has is to reconcile
the radical particularity
of the creative will
with the contemplative
perspective overcoming
the spirit of
revenge against time,
which Nietzsche
regards as essential
to genuine philosophy.
And to make this
reconciliation, he
proposes the eternal
recurrence of the same.
That's, I think, the heart
of Strauss's interpretation
of Zarathustra.
The eternal recurrence is
the most important aspect
of Zarathustra.
Now, briefly on political
philosophy, the third item.
Nietzsche can be
said has a project--
and I'm following Leo
Strauss' reading--
to make that future possible
for philosophy as the highest
human level, and thereby
to overcome the danger
that nihilism will destroy
the possibility of philosophy.
And again, Strauss regards
that concern with philosophy
as bringing Nietzsche
close to classical thought.
Now if we stand back, this
is a remarkable situation,
if we look at this,
for it's clear
that Strauss is seeing
Nietzsche as a great ally
in attempting to restore
a certain understanding
of philosophy.
And at the same
time, as Nietzsche
is a great critic of
modern rationalism,
in this progressive form
of mastery of nature.
And I think it would
be fair to say,
when one considers that
situation that Nietzsche
is closer to Strauss than any
other modern figure in Strauss'
estimation.
Now, all the same for
Strauss, Nietzsche's account
of the creative will
or the will to power
is a certain stumbling block.
Perhaps we can talk more
about this this afternoon,
but he attempts
to understand how
it is that Strauss rejects
the classical understanding
of nature as universal and
transcending the human.
And Strauss says this
about, that he does not
reject this on the basis of
modern progressive premises.
So on what ground
does he reject it?
And this leads me to
another statement,
comparable in
importance, I think,
to the one [INAUDIBLE] quoted.
This is a statement in the
first lecture of the Zarathustra
transcript.
"By understanding Nietzsche,
we shall understand the deepest
objections or obstacles
to natural right
that exist in the modern mind."
Now, I take this to mean that
Nietzsche does have a deeper
criticism of nature
right than one
can find in any of
the other figures
in the modern tradition.
And thus, that Nietzsche
for him an interlocutor
of first importance,
for he needs
to understand the reason for
that rejection, the argument
for it.
In fact, I would say this
makes Nietzsche, for him,
an interlocutor
comparable in importance
to the classical
philosophers themselves.
Finally, quickly,
in my understanding,
Strauss regard that
deepest objection
to a classical
understanding of Nietzsche
as having to do in
Nietzsche with the status
of individuality, and that
Nietzsche's view of that status
links him to the great
poets, and perhaps especially
Aristophanes.
And in a few later
writings of Strauss,
Nietzsche is directly linked,
by renewing the problem
of Socrates, to Aristophanes.
And in other words, Nietzsche's
novel way of philosophizing,
which fuses philosophy with
poetry and religiosity--
a non-atheist religiosity
or whatever we can call it--
I then would say it is then
connected to this deepest
objection to classical
natural right, which relates
to the status of individuality.
NATHAN TARKOV: Thank you.
I will, in a minute, invite
our speakers, if they wish,
to respond either critically
or by way of elaboration
to anything one of the
others of them said,
but I'll take
advantage of this pause
to admit my failure to carry
out one of the assignments
that Gayle McKeen gave me, which
was to tell you that there are
restrooms on the second floor.
I think the men's room is
on that end, and the women's
room on that end.
And there also are
restrooms in the basement,
should that be necessary.
Which reminds me to
express my gratitude
to Gayle, who has
done everything
to make this conference work.
And while I'm
expressing gratitude,
one thing reminds me of another.
I can't help but mention
that in our audience today
is Warren Winiarski, who studied
with Strauss in the 1950s,
but went on to do
something quite remarkable,
to put California wine on the
world map, first at Stag's Leap
and now at Arcadia,
and who has been
the most generous supporter
of the university's Strauss
Center, without
whom we could not
have done what we have done.
And not present,
Richard Schiffrin,
who, as noted in the
program provided the support
for this conference
in particular.
Would any of you like to respond
one way or another to things
your colleagues have said?
ROBERT PIPPIN: Just one
things cursory that we haven't
mentioned that would be
good to get on the table
is that Strauss pays notably
little attention to problem
that occupied an enormous number
of pages in Nietzsche's text,
and that is Nietzsche's
attack or attempt
to undermine Christian morality.
It's as if Strauss silently
agrees with Nietzsche,
that the prospect for a kind
of justification or ground
of traditional Christian
morality-- that is to say,
morality that opposes
selflessness and altruism
to egoism and adherence
to duty for the right,
simply for the
sake of the right.
As I said, it's as if there's
a kind of silent agreement
that that project is
hopeless, and Strauss
turns his normative, or moral
concerns in a more broad sense,
to the question of
the best human life,
or the world of philosophy,
or something like that.
And secondly, the
problem with Nietzsche,
just to mention how
complicated that is
and how Strauss appreciates
how complicated it is,
by talking about Nietzsche's
turn back to nature, Strauss
knows he doesn't mean,
as we've mentioned,
a return to a teleologically
ordered morally significant
cosmos.
But he also knows
that Nietzsche doesn't
mean to turn us to
the modern object
of the natural and
biological world sciences.
It's not nature
in that sense too.
So the question of what
he is suggesting Nietzsche
turns us to is open for a
good deal of discussion.
He appears to mean
something like nature
in the sense in which we
mean the overall of nature
of things, the general
opposition to normalness
or custom, the way things are.
I mean, in 188 of
Beyond Good and Evil,
he says with great
clarity that nothing great
is achieved except by virtue
of tyranny against nature.
Discipline and order,
pain, suffering, sacrifice,
containment and
reduction of the power
of nature in the simple sense
of our instinctual givens.
So it's an open
question on both scores.
What is Strauss's
attitude towards
the Nietzschean critique
of Christianity,
and its influence in modernity.
And what does he really mean by
saying Nietzsche is turning us
back towards nature, since
he knows it doesn't mean any
of the things we inherit
as the relevance of nature
for our ethical lives.
MARK BLITZ: One other thing that
could be said on this score,
Strauss also indicates, makes
clear, that the distinction
between nature and
convention, where
Physis and Nomos is
overcome, or there's
an attempt to overcome it.
And that's one of
his interpretations
of what Nietzsche has in mind
with history and historicism.
But it is true.
Sometimes by nature, he
simply means the root
given, a set of given facts
that Nietzsche has to deal with.
And at other times,
he suggests that there
are things somehow
not made by us,
just in the simplest
sense of not
made by us, which are connected
to Nietzsche's project
for improving it,
those things being
found mostly in various
discussions of equality
and inequality, men
and women, and so on.
I think, first of
all, it largely
means Nietzsche's attitude
towards what's not made by us,
or simply given to the
degree to which it's
at all important as opposed to
a certain set of unimportant,
as Strauss says, facts.
But because you don't have
the split between nature
and convention in
the same way, it
becomes obviously
difficult to figure out
just what he has in mind.
PAUL FRANCO: So
I actually wanted
to continue with this
absolutely crucial of nature
in all of Strauss' writings,
but particularly, I
think, in these lectures.
He actually, in
lectures, Strauss,
he picks out a few
texts that he thinks
are absolutely crucial
for understanding
what Nietzsche means by nature.
188 is, of course, one of those.
And he makes much in that
particular aphorism the way
in which nature is put
in quotation marks.
For much of that
aphorism, for example,
when he speaks of morality
as a tyranny against nature,
and by the very end, he actually
takes away the quotation marks,
only kind of adding
mystery of what exactly
he means by nature.
The only thing I
was going to add.
It seems to me, at least from
the reading of the lectures,
that when Strauss
refers to nature,
he frequently seems to
me natural hierarchy.
That nature for him is--
that's the crucial
aspect of nature
that Nietzsche seeks to restore.
Actually, he prefers
several times to--
one of the sections from The
AntiChrist, the one where
Nietzsche talks about the laws
of Manu and the various orders
in kind of the
Hindu laws of Nanu.
And again, natural hierarchy
seems to be at least one
of the prominent meanings
of nature for Strauss,
at least as far as the
lectures are concerned.
RICHARD VELKLEY: So I
find all three things just
said quite [INAUDIBLE].
And my understanding
of Strauss's approach
to nature, Nietzsche,
there is, related
to the issue of hierarchy, a
certain answer to the question
of how Nietzsche
can have something
like a distinction between
nature and convention,
although he's
understanding nature
in terms of creativity
or interpretation,
which would seem to
obliterate that distinction.
And this is impossible, because
Nietzsche's understanding
of creativity or
interpretation as having
a hierarchical character,
and he is, in other words,
not simply a relativist,
and he believes
one can determine that there
are higher and lower notes
of interpretation or notes
of creativity which have much
to do with the--
I mean, it's a very
complicated issue,
but I believe it has much to
do with the comprehensiveness
of the vision of
the creator, and he
states famously
that philosophy is
the spiritual form
of the will to power,
and the will to the first cause.
So, hm, philosophy as
the comprehensive form
of attempting to
interpret the world
has a ranking as
higher form of will
than other modes such as
philological scholarship
or natural science as
pursued in the modern period.
And so I believe that
reflection can help us.
Because I think
we have to go back
to the simple notion of the
importance of philosophy
in this conception of nature.
MARK BLITZ: The typical
things with that, though,
is that ranking is not natural.
The ranking of high and low
is connected necessarily
to Nietzsche's teaching
of will to power, which
is itself an interpretation.
So it's not that
Nietzsche's guided
in this sense of more or
less powerful, or more
or less comprehensive
by something natural.
It is, again, a situation
or a position that imposes,
and that comes from his
overall understanding.
It's also the case that, to the
degree to which one talks is
more or less
comprehensive, one has in
mind always in Nietzsche
historical comprehensiveness,
the deepening of the
soul, for example,
and the deepening of
self as a consequence
of Socrates and
Christianity and so on.
And one wouldn't
call that natural.
It's not given naturally.
It's there historically.
So it's clearly the
case that Nietzsche
wants to find
distinctions among things,
or assert distinctions
among things,
and to assert distinctions which
are high and low distinctions,
but it's an assertion
to a very large degree.
And if the question is,
what isn't merely assertion,
but is something that needs
Nietzsche finds there already,
which he wants
also to recapture.
That's extremely
unclear, and that's
why the sense normally
of nature as opposed
to convention as something
guiding Nietzsche, I think,
is not correct.
It's not what Nietzsche
means to find.
And I don't think it's really
what Strauss believes either.
ROBERT PIPPIN: That
point's quite right.
I don't think Strauss believes
that's the crucial issue
in Nietzsche, because
the term is so elusive.
And I say, Nietzsche's
writing are all so
rhetorically complicated by
this issue of esotericism.
It depends on what you
quote, where and when.
But if you just
take the 188 thing,
nothing of any value
whatsoever, no matter
how you evaluate
whatever you evaluate,
is possible except by
tyranny against nature,
against a centuries-long
sovereign force
imposed on nature.
That, you could
say, against nature,
that's the nature of things.
That's not an interpretation.
That is what Nietzsche
wants to say is true.
But it does get to
the issue of, well,
if that's all on the table, what
should we say about the will
to power?
If it's not the nature of
things in the classical
or in the modern psychological
motivational sense,
what's he talking about?
And I think Strauss
is well aware
that Nietzsche doesn't mean
the capacity to subject
others' will to your will.
Nietzsche says that's a kind
of petty interpretation of it.
The great soul of man, for
the equivalent to Nietzsche
of the [NON-ENGLISH],, the great
soul of man doesn't care about
subjecting other
people to his will.
And it also doesn't mean
being able to impose
the results of your
creation on everyone,
because that kind of an
imposition on everyone
isn't really also of
interest for thee.
So the will to power sort
of has this elliptical role
as the kind of
absence of their--
I mean, if you look at what
Nietzsche thinks succeeded
in the expression of
the will to power,
the very first thing was
the power of Greek tragedy
to sustain and help
one endure a life.
That's a kind of model.
And very much at
the same time, he
thought there was a reanimation
of a kind of form of life
through music that was possible.
That's the expression
of the will to power.
It doesn't mean you get
everybody to believe it.
It means that there is,
within a form of life,
a kind of expressive moment
of its own self-understanding
that inspires and sustains,
encourages, sacrifices,
and so forth.
And I think Nietzsche wants
that to be deliberately elusive,
not to be a kind of a
standard we reach for
and apply to individual
cases, especially
since he came to be
greatly disappointed
with those two things.
And you can see the
rest of his life
as a way of kind of looking
for other modalities
of the expression
of the will to power
that could sustain some sort
of cultural force over time.
PAUL FRANCO: There's
one other aphorism
that one could bring in here.
It's the ninth one in
Beyond Good and Evil,
which begins, "According to
nature, you wanted to live,
oh, you Stoics."
And he says, how can
could you possibly
live according to the nature?
Nature is this totally
chaotic thing that, you know,
is not stoic at all.
Basically, your nature that you
want to live according to it
is basically a projection
of your stoic values.
But he then goes
on to add, along
the lines of what
Robert just said,
that isn't that what
is most natural,
in some says, to project onto
this blank kind of slate that
is nature, your own values.
Which leads me to
believe that-- again, I'm
not sure I understood
you, completely, Mark,
but I too don't
think that Nietzsche
regards the will to power
as a mere interpretation.
It strikes me that
Nietzsche regards it,
you know, as in some
ways an important truth
about the nature of things.
And it seems to me that
Strauss acknowledges that.
This is where we lose some
aspects of the lectures.
I mean, he says a lot
of things about the will
to power in its
internal consistencies
or inconsistencies, but
at the end of the day,
I think, he seems to claim,
that Nietzsche regarded
the will to power as not merely
an interpretation, but as,
in some ways, a
fundamental truth
about the nature of things.
MARK BLITZ: You know, I don't
know that that's quite correct.
I think Strauss worries
through this question very much
as the status of will to
power, of the truth of will
to power in some broader way.
The difficulty, however, is,
that if it has a deeper truth,
and what is the
object of that truth?
What is truth about
in that sense?
It's not about the natural.
It's always about somehow
the interpretable,
and what's interpreted.
So it becomes a problem which
Strauss never simply resolves.
And in a certain way,
it's a greater problem
for Strauss himself as he works
these things through, than it
seems to be for Nietzsche.
So I don't think it's
actually right to loosely use
the term nature or
essence, maybe even being.
It's simply not clear what it is
that the deeper truth, if there
is one, of will to power
truly is directed towards
and is about.
And Strauss worries that
through, at great length,
but without ever
attributing to Nietzsche
some doctrine of nature, or even
some clear doctrine of anyway
in which you would conceive
what the objects are
of understanding, because
ultimately understanding is not
about objects,
it's about forming
in a certain kind of way.
So I think it is more
deeper and more complicated
question than one
would see by merely
trying to reestablish
Nietzsche back
in the more typical categories.
As Strauss says all through
all of these lectures,
Nietzsche somehow
understands all philosophy
as the creation of a variety
of sets of categories.
And therefore, it
would presumably
be a mistake to simply
put Nietzsche himself back
with any one of those
things, difficult
as it nonetheless remains to
figure out just what Nietzsche,
in a simple sense, has in mind.
RICHARD VELKLEY: Well,
I agree with what
Mark is saying as
regards Strauss finding
that there is a problem in
Nietzsche's account of nature.
And he says on a
couple of occasions
in the essay on
Beyond Good and Evil
that Nietzsche needs nature,
but nature is a problem for him.
But at the same time, one has to
say Nietzsche does assert thing
about nature.
And one notable locus is
in Beyond Good and Evil,
where he talks about the need
to renaturalize the human.
Now, it is also
the case that if we
speak of nature in
Nietzsche, it isn't the same
as a traditional distinction
of nature versus convention.
We shouldn't deny that Nietzsche
has a say of human nature
simply because we can't find
him making that distinction.
It's rather the case that he's
attempting to understand nature
in terms of the creative
will, and to find
in this notion of
creative will the basis
for a certain hierarchical
conception of forms
of the will to
power, which allow
for philosophy as the most
comprehensive and spiritual
form of the will to power.
Comprehensiveness
still has some meaning,
even if the world we
encounter is fundamentally
approached and accessible only
through our interpretations.
That's a difficult question,
that somehow, comprehensiveness
doesn't mean something
in that respect.
And I should add that Strauss
tries to put into a formula
the novel view of nature
Strauss develops by talking
about creative contemplation.
And that's yoking together
the creativity of the will
with a stance that can be
related to, in some sense,
to a philosophic stance
that can't be characterized
as contemplation.
But it is not contemplation
of a world of objects,
a world and order that is
independent of the interpreter
or creator.
It is, though, nature itself
as interpreting and creating,
and nature as in its
creative interpreting,
at least in some higher
forms, aim to contemplate so.
And hm, I mean, the eternal
recurrence, I believe,
is the highest and
most perfect expression
of this self-contemplating
creative activity
for the one who wills.
Creating eternally
is also contemplating
a kind of eternity, an
eternity of creativity
as recurring eternally.
I'll leave it at that.
NATHAN TARKOV: I'll just
take the opportunity
to underline a couple
of things people said
that struck me as very
important and might be returned
to in the afternoon, perhaps.
One is, if I understood
correctly, Richard Velkley,
in his initial remarks
here, connected
the question of natural right
to that of the complementary man
in Beyond Good and Evil
207 in a way that hierarchy
or superiority or
complementarity
of the philosopher--
this is perhaps more
relevant to the afternoon--
isn't that really the
heart of what Strauss
meant by natural right anyway?
The other thing that
especially struck me was,
who am I attributing it to?
Mark spoke about the
deepening of the soul,
the historical deepening
of the soul caused
in part by Christianity.
It seems to me that this is
quite crucial for Strauss.
Strauss often uses the
formula as describing
Nietzsche's argument that there
can be no biblical morality
without the biblical god.
Strauss doesn't--
well, as Robert said,
he doesn't go into
detail, to say the least,
on the critique about biblical
morality that Nietzsche
provides.
And we're not sure where
Strauss stands on that.
But it does seem that
it's that deepening
of the soul from
Christianity that seems
to be more for the afternoon.
In a way his critique or
worry about Nietzsche,
that Nietzsche thereby
Christianizes the overman.
The overman will include the
results of the Christian soul,
and this may be connected
to Nietzsche's embrace
of suffering, and his rather
dark view of truth, perhaps.
Anyway, we would now like to
invite members of the audience
to ask brief questions.
Brief, I underlined question.
I put quotation marks around it.
It doesn't have
to be a question,
but it's something
that speakers might
respond to if you
wish you could specify
who you wish to respond.
We have a microphone.
Will the video capture
the questioners?
SPEAKER: Yes.
NATHAN TARKOV: Yes, yes.
So I note--
I think I am legally
bound to note that--
so it is our intention to
put the video on the website,
so if you ask a question,
you are implicitly
consenting to that.
I'll advise we would be
subject to legal troubles.
Professor Zimmerman?
AUDIENCE: When you turn to
Strauss's interpretation
of Nietzsche, whether
it's in his classes,
or in his few
mentions in his work,
aside from his one article,
where the article, now I
think-- and I don't think
this was true when I was boy.
But now, we can't help
but think of the question
of not just what is Strauss's
interpretation of Nietzsche,
but where does Strauss stand
with respect to Nietzsche?
And that means, in part, where
does he stand with respect
to Plato and Xenophon?
And when I think about
this, on the one hand,
there's the problem
of philosophy.
On the other hand, there's
a problem of politics.
Most people didn't mention
much about politics.
And I want to just
oversimplify greatly.
On the question
philosophy, the issue
seems to be the
status of reason,
or the status of what Strauss
sometimes calls rationalism.
And on the one hand, there seems
to be chasm between say, Plato,
Strauss, and Nietzsche on
the question of reason.
But it's not clear exactly
what Strauss' final position
on the question of the status
of reason in Nietzsche is,
if only because it's not clear
what his final position is
concerning the question
of the status of nature.
The same thing's true
with respect to politics.
On the one hand, you have
Strauss and Plato, who
are, say, not philanthropic.
On the other hand,
you have Nietzsche
who seems to be philanthropic.
But again, there is this
idea where Strauss repeatedly
emphasizes that Nietzsche
is above all concern
about philosophy, not politics.
On the other hand,
however, he's always
critical of him
for, you might say,
preparing the
ground for fascism.
So what is Strauss'
interpretation
of Nietzsche on the question
of the status of reason,
and the question of reason?
And what about politics also?
I mean, it just seems to me
that those simple questions
help get us organized.
NATHAN TARKOV: Does
anyone wish to--
I mean, surely, will be
addressed in the afternoon,
where we focus more
on the evaluation.
It is partly a matter of
understanding how rational
is Nietzsche, how rational
is Strauss's Nietzsche, how
philanthropic is
Strauss's Nietzsche.
AUDIENCE: How rational
was Strauss's Plato?
MARK BLITZ: You know, in his
discussions of Nietzsche,
Strauss emphasizes
often Nietzsche's
self-conscious distance
from the rational ego.
This is precisely connected
to his locating in Nietzsche
a grounding in the
self, where the self has
some serious aspects and the
body, the passions, and so on.
So the dominance of reason,
not just in the modern form,
but in the classic form,
is certainly something
that Strauss understands
Nietzsche to be disputing.
I think that--
AUDIENCE: Yeah, I think
that's a good question.
MARK BLITZ: So that's,
I think, clear.
And Strauss, in his
discussion, doesn't simply
denigrate or dispute
the importance
of some of the
elements of the self,
though perhaps again
some people will
discuss more this
afternoon, he sometimes
contrasts Platonic eros
with will to power.
Eros is somehow taking the
place of-- the will to power
is somehow taking
the place of eros.
So both of those
elements are central.
In terms of politics,
some of his criticism
of Nietzsche's
relation to fascism
have to do with
Nietzsche's rhetoric, all
of these extreme and
dangerous things he says.
As he says somewhere,
he's confident
that Nietzsche would be
the first one to leave town
when the Fascists took over.
Nonetheless, his rhetoric
has plenty to do with it.
And I think not just
his rhetoric, in fact.
Some of his understanding
of high and low as he
presents it, as he presents
it, even if it isn't presented
quite so extremely, but
nonetheless, as he presents it,
because he presents
even philosophy always
in conjunction with, or
often at least in conjunction
with, legislating and
commanding and forming a people.
I think it's a serious charge
and a serious relationship,
but I don't recall
Strauss actually saying
that that, in and of itself,
would bring Nietzsche's fault
qua fault into question.
ROBERT PIPPIN: The
famous passage,
of course, that you
know is that Nietzsche
is a little responsible
for fascism,
as Rousseau for Jacobinism.
But that means he's as much
responsible for fascism
as Rousseau for is
Jacobinsim, and that
means we have to decide
how much a little is.
It's an ambiguous phrase.
But with regard to
Dick's question,
I don't think that
Strauss himself thinks
of this question as getting
very far if we pose it
in terms of the
authority of reason
versus a kind of irrationalism.
Strauss, of course, believes
that the philosophical life
is the best form of life.
But he doesn't believe
that because he
thinks there is a
knock down argument
sustainable by pure
reason to establish that.
So we have to begin with that.
That's not why philosophy
is the best human life.
The question that if there
were such a strategy,
it's also the best human life.
Politically, it's the best, in
one way or another rule, rule
either culturally or
exclusively politically,
but that also is not a product
of ratiocination, moving
through various
alternatives with arguments
to defeat opponents
and so forth.
So that's one thing
that sort of changes
the nature of the question
and puts Strauss and Nietzsche
not all that close
together, but at least apart
from the people who
like Spinoza, or Hobbes,
or people who do think
that a reconfiguration
of the notion of reason can
provide us with an answer.
I mean, it's difficult because
there are different answers.
The question of what is the best
human life, the substantively
best, is different from the
question in the modern ages of,
what is a just life?
That is, what life is
responsive to the conflicting
interests of mere individuals?
And that's different from
Nietzsche's question, which
is a new question-- what
does it mean, full life?
A question that descends
a bit from Rousseau
for the first time.
So the questions being asked
are important to address
your point.
And what Strauss calls in the
essay on Beyond Good and Evil,
quoting the seventh letter,
the weakness of the logos
is what we have to live with.
There isn't a decisive
philosophical answer
to the question of
the best human life.
And we have to find
some way of living
with the operatic or
[INAUDIBLE] character
of how far philosophy
can take us.
RICHARD VELKLEY:
Well, this pretty much
dovetails what Robert just said.
Strauss, we recall,
speaks of finding
the traditional interpretation
and the traditional
questionable, and
that Nietzsche was
crucial in helping
him to see that.
So Strauss is really
investigating what reason is,
rather than assuming that he
has some available, traditional
view of reason that will simply
show Nietzsche to be wrong.
And I have a few quotations that
I'll offer this afternoon where
is indicating that the
openness with which
he's considering
Nietzsche's approach
to fundamental matters--
so one could say he
goes back to Plato
also, trying to understand
something like reason or nature
without the presupposed
view of traditional sort.
And yet for Plato,
nature is a problem,
as it is for Nietzsche.
On the political
matter [INAUDIBLE]..
NATHAN TARKOV: Sure.
RICHARD VELKLEY: I think
Strauss occasionally
sheds some light on how he views
that the political educations
of Nietzsche--
I mean, he does, of course,
say that Nietzsche extreme
or whatever helped prepare
the way for fascism.
But this sentence
from the essay,
"What is Political Philosophy?"
helps to show how he views
the particular problem
Nietzsche has with
respect to politics.
Nietzsche's call
to creativity was
addressed to individuals
who should readily
share their lives not to
society or the nation.
But even so, Nietzsche hoped
that the general creators
would find new nobility
able to rule the planet.
So the primary concern is
with the revolutionizing
of individual lives and leading
of individuals toward a deeper,
in a sense, more
philosophical existence.
But that is pandemic
in Nietzsche's thought,
with some project and its
political implications,
even if he doesn't elaborate
on it in political terms.
In other words, some meaning
to address the human condition
as a whole to attempt
to transform it so as
to make possible for the future
this appearance of the higher
form of life.
And Strauss, I think,
finds that a problem
inherent in this stance.
He makes an interesting comment
in a lecture he gave in 1940,
let's see, that's called "Living
Issues in Post-War Germany
Philosophy," and points out that
the question Nietzsche poses is
necessary from a theoretical
standpoint-- namely,
is there a kind of nature--
nature, again, is introduced--
that is superior to what we
have experienced historically,
what we have established
in modern world.
But the problem
with that question
is when it is understand
in some way practically.
And that was the problem,
he felt, with Germany
and with much of what happened
Germany, with the failure
to distinguish between
necessary theoretical questions
and the kind of thinking, the
kind of critical thinking one
needs for practical matters.
In other words,
he's not directly
ascribing to Nietzsche the
full-blown political project,
but saying that insufficient
consideration is given
to how this primarily
theoretical inquiry, which
is quite deep and
in a way necessary,
can have political implications
or some consequences that
are not being considered by
Nietzsche, and Nietzscheans.
By the way, a similar
criticism relates to Heidegger.
MARK BLITZ: But I think
on the political question,
even that Strauss seems a
little bit too apolitical,
or a little bit too distant.
Nietzsche has things to
say about current politics.
Nietzsche has things to say
about the future of Germany.
Nietzsche has things
to say about religion
and why religions have
dominated, created, and made,
and shaped
practically, so there's
a greater degree of concrete,
practical revolutionary
responsibility
that one, I think,
could reasonably ascribe
to Nietzsche of then merely
the kind of generality of
the theoretical understanding
has political consequence.
RICHARD VELKLEY: Well,
he's highly critical.
Yes, certainly, he's
highly critical.
But one doesn't find as
a clearly constructive
political philosophy.
ROBERT PIPPIN: One might note
that Nietzsche, in the 1870s,
there was a story that
the Louvre burned down.
This is the first
instance, really,
of public,
European-wide fake news.
It hadn't burned down,
and Nietzsche spent a week
weeping, thinking this
was the real beginning
of the rule of the mob, because
the Paris commune thought
it had burned it down.
And even after many
reports started coming back
in that the Louvre
was fine, Nietzsche
continued to be very, very
upset by the idea that
was intruded by him
for a while, because he
was so upset that this was
the beginning of the burning
down of all the things
that were valuable
that the mob could never
understand, and so forth.
So yeah, he was
certainly engaged.
It's a wonderful
story, by the way.
Nobody wanted to believe
that it wasn't true.
They thought all
the reports of it
not being true were
also fake news.
Where have I heard that before?
[LAUGHING]
AUDIENCE: Can I respond
just for a second?
NATHAN TARKOV: Briefly.
AUDIENCE: On the last
point, I think none of you
quite face up to this.
And that is let's assume that
Nietzsche's highest concern is
philosophy, the
philosophic life--
it's survival,
it's perpetuation.
From his point of view,
there's no question
that the philosophic life
has political preconditions,
and those preconditions are
an aristocratic, oligarchic
hierarchy to society.
So if he's right about that, and
we tend not to talk about that,
but if he's right
about that, then there
is no possible way of
simply severing his concern
with philosophy or his
elation with philosophy
to its highest concern from
the political question.
And for us, what does it mean to
advocate a hierarchical society
today for the sake
of philosophy?
I think that's real question
that Nietzsche faced,
and that we probably
are facing if he's
right about the
conditions of philosophy.
Of course, he might not be.
NATHAN TARKOV: I saw
a hand back there.
Do you want to come
forward to the mic?
AUDIENCE: A quick question.
This is for Professor Pippin.
What do you think, for
Strauss, the significance
is that Zarathustra,
in particular,
is a kind of inspired text.
He talks about page 18.
I couldn't quite
tell if he was joking
or not, but that
he writes so fast,
it was as if an evil
god, an spirit had come--
was the source of this.
So this is a different kind of
demon than like, Socrates had.
It's created.
It seems to be
part, even problem,
an alternative Christianity, the
kind of creative demonic force
behind this.
ROBERT PIPPIN: Well,
that's a very big question.
We're going to talk about
some of this this afternoon.
I have some things to
say about Zarathustra
and the Zarathustra lectures.
The brief point is
Strauss is fully aware
that the form of Thus
Spoke Zarathustra
is biblical only in the sense
that it's biblical irony.
And the real question
about what you mentioned,
about the sort of marginal and
setup issues for why Nietzsche
thought Persian profit
was necessary in order
to recover from the damage,
the distinction between what
Beyond Good and Evil did, has
to do with these two questions--
what the status of the
irony is in the presentation
of Zarathustra as
a prophet, what
Nietzsche's attitude
towards him was,
and what Strauss' attitude
towards Nietzsche's attitude
toward Zarathustra was.
And that's a difficult
question to answer,
but it's a very
important one, that
set of lectures in particular.
RICHARD VELKLEY: Robert,
yes, it is ironic,
though, that wouldn't you say
there is a genuine concern
with the sacred?
ROBERT PIPPIN: In
Zarathustra itself?
Yeah, oh, yeah, of course.
Yeah, yeah.
RICHARD VELKLEY: And
so, not Christian.
But in some ways, it's biblical.
ROBERT PIPPIN: Not
atheistic, see.
[LAUGHING]
NATHAN TARKOV: [INAUDIBLE].
AUDIENCE: Just want
to start by thanking
all the speakers for
stipulating comments
that at least I have a
page full of questions,
but I'm not going
to ask them all.
I just wanted to start,
actually, with something
that Robert had said
a little bit earlier.
He cited Nietzsche's
Birth of Tragedy and--
sorry, not that, but the Uses
and Disadvantages of history--
Uses and Disadvantages
of History for life.
And in your comment there, as
understand you were saying,
you seemed to be putting as
equivocal Nietzsche's appeal
to life in that crusade,
and that Nietzsche
in his early work seems to be
a kind of life philosopher,
as was common at that time.
And you seem to make that
equivalent to will to power.
And I wonder, did you
actually mean to say that?
And could you say more about it?
And what the panel in
general think about the idea
that this life philosophy, which
was common in the 19th century,
whether that sheds some
light on the will to power?
ROBERT PIPPIN: I don't
think I was the one who
mentioned Use and Abuse.
But it's a very interesting
question, so I'm talking.
I'll keep talking.
This has to do with what I
briefly said about the shift
in Nietzsche's-- what
the primary question is,
whether the primary question is
the best human life or the most
just or sustainable human life,
or the most meaningful live.
And in the last section,
the question of life
leads to a different set of
evaluative markers, especially
the question of health, which
is, of course, extremely
important for Nietzsche.
And part of his diagnostic
claim is that we're sick.
And then you have
to ask, well, what
does it mean if we don't have a
natural teleological conception
of life as having its own end.
You can sort of see
Nietzsche trying
to figure out, what would be--
and here, these terms
are so so vague.
Life-affirming is his central
category of evaluative success,
beyond the affirming moment.
And I don't know of
an economical way
to address both the question
of the relation between will
to power and life and the
question of how Nietzsche wants
to get an evaluative
category out
of the reconfiguration
of the problem of living
as a healthy life.
But it's a very
important question.
I don't know how to
really address it.
PAUL FRANCO: I was just going
to say, clearly later, Nietzsche
equates life and will to power.
Will to power is will of life.
I think it would be
reading back into the Uses
and Disadvantages, the
idea of the will to power.
Obviously, there's some
affinities or connections,
the idea that both life and
uses and will to power later on,
they're about
creativity, vitality,
which is maybe just another
word for life, actually.
But it seems to me that the will
to power, the later concept, it
was very much bound
up with this idea
as we see in Zarathustra
with overcoming, constant
overcoming, constant
transcending.
I don't really see
that as the theme
of uses and disadvantages.
Life seems to have
a more fixed meaning
in some ways in that
essay than I think
Nietzsche comes to later on.
MARK BLITZ: I don't
think the will to power
and life are equivalent
in Nietzsche.
They couldn't be.
He claims that will to power is
the principle of the inanimate,
as well as the living.
So you couldn't understand
it to be equivalent.
It also seems to
me, one would need
in these kinds of discussions
a more subtle understanding
let of what overcoming,
or even life means.
Because it's not
merely that there's
a constant creating if that
means a constant destroying.
There's a creating and an
overcoming, which is also
a fixing, or a fixing place.
That's part of what actually
the will to truth is,
which might then also
involve a further overcoming.
So another way to say this
is that life in one sense
would have to include fixing
or dying, or freezing in place,
or one might just better off
be saying that will to power
includes both of those things,
and transcending and overcoming
includes both of those
things, both vitality
and fixing in place, and so on.
Not so much in Use and
Abuse, but generally,
that you could
argue, that that's
part of the historical process.
And in these essays,
Strauss refers often
to Use and Abuse,
actually, when he's
trying to explain what
exactly Nietzsche's
connection to history is.
RICHARD VELKLEY:
Well, basically, I've
just [INAUDIBLE].
That's textual.
I think you find it
with Birth of Tragedy
and the Untimely Meditations,
certainly notions that point,
you could say-- and of course,
we see this retrospectively--
to the will to power
and the emphasis
on creativity in both works.
You know, the creativity in
the poet versus Socrates.
And also, that the
higher stance of the poet
involves a certain
affirmation of suffering,
which is central to the
idea of the Dionysian.
And in the Use and
Abuse of History,
apparently, the
highest form of history
calls for the
abilities of the poet.
And the poet is a
creator and interpreter.
So certain things
point to the ideas
that crystallized and brought
together in the will to power.
ROBERT PIPPIN: One brief
thing occurs to me by Strauss,
and that is, Nietzsche does not
say in Use and Abuse of History
that the historicist
thesis is wrong.
He says it's bad for us.
It's bad for life.
And that introduces the question
of illusions and fictions,
within which the cloud
of illusions and fictions
within which we have to live.
And that already
sounds to people
like a very jejune
sophomoric kind of claim,
that if believing
this is bad for us,
we just won't believe it.
Which is impossible.
Belief tracks truth.
You can't bully yourself
to believe something
just because it's good for you.
But I think the issue is
much more complicated,
and that Strauss
understands it has to do
with the real issue of life.
It has to do with the
question of what Strauss calls
the theoretical attitude,
the sideways-on attitude
today of modern natural science,
where philosophy considers
itself looking on at life versus
a point of view inside life.
From the standpoint of
theoretical philosophy,
that looks a concession to the
kind of every day illusions
and fictions of life.
But I think both Nietzsche
and Strauss realized
that that's a tendentious
and very misleading
characterization of what
life requires of us.
It doesn't require you to
believe things that are false.
That's just a first
step in understanding
what it might mean.
But I think there
is something there
that shows up
later in Nietzsche,
and is very-- we'll talk
about this this afternoon.
I think we're
probably gonna end up
talking about everything
this afternoon,
by the time we
finish this morning.
But it's a very important point.
PAUL FRANCO: I just have
one more thing to add.
It seems to me that this
question about these two
moments in Nietzsche's
oeuvre, the will to power
is obviously is connected
with the notion of becoming
and the affirmation of
becoming in Nietzsche's
later philosophy.
It seems to me, the perspective
of Uses and Disadvantages,
becoming is a
problem, in some ways,
the very problem that
is directed against us
is that the stream of
becoming, in some ways,
prevents people from actually
being capable of acting
in any sort of vigorous way.
So you know, it's an
interesting question,
because I think it actually
highlights in some ways
the fact that Nietzsche
does development,
and that all these
notions are not there,
you know, from the outside.
NATHAN TARKOV: And one thing to
what Robert and Paul just said,
near the very end of
Natural Right and History,
Mr. if I remember it
correctly, Strauss
credits Nietzsche
with an attempt
to recover the possibility
of practice that
had been threatened by theory.
I'm not sure I'd want to
equate practice with my fear,
but it's a very
striking formulation
and complicated
political thing that I'm
sure we'll be coming back to.
Did I see another hand?
AUDIENCE: Let me try to ask
a complicated question in two
parts, simply.
So the first one
would to do with--
well, both have to do
with Strauss's stance
towards Nietzsche.
I believe-- if I can trust
my short-term memory--
that Nathan, you began with
the very well-known '35 letter,
in which Strauss
says, until I was 30,
I agreed with
everything I understood
with Nietzsche, suggesting that
he no longer simply agreed.
And I believe in that
letter, he suggests
that what he disagrees
about has to do
with whether Nietzsche brought
that to antiquity or not.
Then Richard cited
a letter I don't
know from 1930, in which Strauss
said that Nietzsche reopened
all of the questions of the
tradition, which is a claim I
think Strauss later
makes in his exchanges
with Jacob Klein
about Heidegger.
And so I'm wondering
how you see--
is that related to
Strauss's change of mind?
So that would be the first
question about Strauss's stance
towards Nietzsche.
And then maybe to ask a question
in the form of an assertion,
picking up on Dick
Simmons's question.
Nietzsche says in
Beyond Good and Evil,
philosophers are legislators.
Strauss says a philosopher
can survive in any regime.
That would suggest a pretty
different understanding
of philosophy, as
well as politics.
NATHAN TARKOV: Anybody
wish to respond?
Or we can just nod if you wish.
[LAUGHING]
MARK BLITZ: The first point,
others can discuss this.
The second question,
I think is correct.
And that is a way of
thinking about the connection
between the political
and the philosophical,
and the political,
philosophical,
and religious, which I think
is significant here too,
which differentiates
Nietzsche from many others,
and certainly
differentiates Nietzsche
in a direct or obvious
way from Plato.
Philosophy itself is
a kind of legislator,
yet also involves a kind of
more ordinary legislating,
because it involves an
imposition, a creating,
a making, and a forming,
not simply a discovery.
And therefore, Nietzsche's
relation to the political
is a little better
from, and in a way,
broader than and more immediate
than the more general points
that Dick was making,
which are true generally.
Whether or not philosophy
requires an aristocracy as
opposed to a democracy
of a certain sort
is another question,
and I don't know
that one would need to say that
it requires an aristocracy.
It requires standards and
views of high and low,
but it certainly can flourish
for a while in a democracy.
Nietzsche certainly did
not think that, however,
and there is a link, I think,
between his political project
and what philosophy
is for Nietzsche
as forming and creating
and shaping and willing,
and not a discovering primarily.
And I believe that's
Strauss's view, certainly
at least of the distinction
between creating and shaping
on the one hand, and
discovering on the other.
ROBERT PIPPIN: I'm
not comfortable
with the distinction between
the simply making versus simply
discovering.
I think both
Nietzsche and Strauss
that it's a little
more unstable.
It's perfectly
clear in Nietzsche,
it doesn't mean
what should happen
is that everybody
should make everything
we want to live like and do it.
It's nothing like that.
The second chapter
of The Gay Science
makes clear how much
of what he calls
an intellectual conscience is
worsening-- an enormous amount.
It's just on other people,
we don't worry about
whether their views are true,
which is absurd, ridiculous,
disgusting.
So it's an enormously
complicated issue.
I mean, Kant is the
one who, human beings
shall be subject to
no law they do not
legislate for themselves.
But he didn't mean make it up.
He meant whatever
they determined
should be the rule
their life must
be consistent with
the conditions of them
being able to determine it.
And for Kant, that was reason.
That's not the
case for Nietzsche,
and I'm not sure it's
the case for Strauss.
But I don't think, to go
back to Catherine's question,
that the characterization of
the philosopher as a legislator
need mean he's a
political ruler.
I mean, I'm not
really in the position
to defend the fact that
this distinction is not
that disjunctive in either
Nietzsche or Strauss
between making or
legislating and discovering
or contemplating.
But I am reminded
of that passage--
Nathan will know it,
probably-- where Strauss said,
actually, right now is one of
the best historical conditions
for philosophy ever because
no one cares what we say.
We can say whatever we want.
Nobody cares.
Democracy has sort of equalized
all potentially dangerous
political views because
everybody ignores them.
It is true that it
kind of-- and boy
is it true recently--
the kind of degradation
of political discourse
can endanger universities.
And if they endanger
universities,
they endanger philosophy.
So it's not quite that simple.
But I don't think
he believes there
are strict political conditions
for encouraging philosophy.
NATHAN TARKOV: Nietzsche?
Strauss?
Who?
ROBERT PIPPIN: Neither
Strauss nor Nietzsche.
NATHAN TARKOV: I would like to
invite our speakers to reflect
a little more on one matter
that I think only Robert
Pippin dealt with, which is--
if I said this was the
first panels on Strauss'
interpretation of
Nietzsche, generally, it's
been taken here this morning
to mean, what views did he
attribute to Nietzsche?
But Robert started interpreting
my word interpretation
to mean, how did he interpret
Nietzsche, which emphasizes
the esotericism and the
attempt to find order
among the aphorisms and
within the aphorism.
And Catherine reminded
again of the letter
I quoted to Lowith,
where Strauss
makes two distinctions,
one between his polemic
and his teaching.
The way to understand him is to
somehow strip away the polemic
to get to the teaching.
But then there's also--
he makes the distinction
between his intention
and this teaching, and
says that what we--
Lowith, Strauss-- have to do
is move beyond his teaching.
Why was his intention?
This perhaps takes
us to the afternoon,
because just as you were
learning the distinction
between form and
discover, learning
the distinction between
interpret and critique,
if you're going to understand
someone's teaching in light
of their intentions, even
if they didn't follow
their intention
through, you are both
interpreting and
critiquing something
that Strauss discusses more
thematically elsewhere.
So I don't know if
any of you wanted
to say more about how
Strauss interprets Nietzsche,
as distinguished from what
his interpretation is.
PAUL FRANCO: Actually, I went
back and read that letter
in preparation for this, and I
actually have the quote here--
NATHAN TARKOV: Oh.
then I missed that.
PAUL FRANCO: No, no, you've
actually accurately summarized
it.
But it's a fascinating
letter, not only for the fact
that it says that Strauss' says
there was a time in his life
he believed everything
he read of Nietzsche.
NATHAN TARKOV:
That he understood.
PAUL FRANCO: That he understood.
But he does have this
very interesting comment
about how to interpret a
philosopher like Nietzsche.
One of the things
that was interesting,
actually, I found, in the
lectures on this subject
is that Strauss never
refers to Lilith once.
In a set of lectures devoted,
you know, to a large extent
to interpreting
The Eternal Return,
he doesn't mention his old
friend's very prominent
interpretation of that doctrine.
And this letter, in some
ways, indicates why.
He criticizes-- this is
the letter from '35--
Lowith's book on
the eternal return
that had just come out in '35.
And he criticizes Lowith for
in some ways always focusing
on the contradictions or
difficulties in Nietzsche,
as if it's not
enough to simply say
that Lowith sees a contradiction
between the will to power
and the eternal
return in Nietzsche.
That's not enough,
Karl says of Strauss.
And this is a quote that
Nathan just referred to.
He says, in brief, I
think that you do not
take seriously enough those
intentions of Nietzsche which
point beyond
Nietzsche's teaching.
For it is not
sufficient to stop where
Nietzsche is no longer right.
Rather, one must
ask whether or not
Nietzsche himself became
untrue to his intention
to repeat antiquity, and did so
as a result of his confinement
within modern presuppositions
or in polemics against these.
And what I find interesting
about that quote
is that it's amazing to
me that this is 1935.
There is a way in which
the lectures in 19--
is it '59?
RICHARD VELKLEY:
Some of his were '59.
PAUL FRANCO: '59.
It seems to me that he
anticipates very clearly
the effort to kind of
uncover the intentions that
go beyond Nietzsche's
teaching in these lectures.
NATHAN TARKOV: This, in a
way, is an excellent segue
from the subject of this
morning's panel, Strauss's
quote, "interpretation" to
his quote, "evaluation."
But I think when he says
he could characterize it,
that's an effort to move
beyond his teaching in line
with his intent.
Mark.
MARK BLITZ: Nonetheless,
I think what
needs to be seen in a
fairly straightforward way
in which Strauss, not
dissimilar to much
of what he does elsewhere.
He begins at the beginning.
He goes through
it piece by piece.
He tries to explain
and understand it
in terms of Nietzsche's
understanding of himself
and what he's doing.
He tries to connect
things which look
hard to connect as best he can.
He also applies to his
discussions some of his--
Strauss's-- own characteristic
questions to which returns
in various summaries.
So much of it is very much
you would otherwise see.
When he attempts give
to give Nietzsche
the credit for
understanding himself
and tries work it
through piece by piece,
and it's not as mysterious in
form as maybe it would sound.
One comment about Kant.
Strauss begins by connecting,
you write, Nietzsche
back to Kant, but
then treats Nietzsche
as a very extreme version
of this nonetheless,
And specifically distinguishes
Kant's limits, what Kant thinks
he discovers, what Kant
thinks his creation applies to
from his understanding
of Nietzsche.
But simply back to the
main point, in many ways,
the progress of
the understanding
is very straightforward.
It's elliptical a bit,
of course in the essay,
because [INAUDIBLE].
But when you compare the essay
to the St. John's transcript,
it's quite connected to it.
RICHARD VELKLEY:
One more comment
on the relationship between
interpretation and criticism
in Strauss.
He makes a very interesting
statement about Heidegger
as a reader of Nietzsche.
In his late lecture,
I believe it's 1970,
on the problem of
Socrates, he states,
"the profoundest interpreter,
and at the same time,
the profoundest critic of
Nietzsche is Heidegger.
He his Nietzsche's
profoundest interpreter
because he is his
profoundest critic."
That suggest that
Strauss may himself
be undertaking critical
interpretation,
and that he sees that
as appropriate and even
necessary to to think.
NATHAN TARKOV: Yeah, I think
in his review of Collingwood
and his review of
Wilde, neither of which
he ever included in his
collections of essays,
he uses the formula,
interpretation
must precede critique.
So he's not opposed to critique.
And furthermore, as he
more frequently says,
you have to first
understand an author
as he's understood
himself before you
attempt to understand
him better than himself.
So he doesn't rule out
understanding him better
than himself or critiquing.
It's just that the other
that Mark described so well
a minute ago has to come first.
RICHARD VELKLEY: But
you can't simply, then,
separate interpretation with
critique if the greatest
interpreter is also a critic.
NATHAN TARKOV: Question of
whether this would apply to him
too as interpreter or critique.
ROBERT PIPPIN: Right.
I think it does apply,
and certainly it
does in the Beyond
Good and Evil essay.
I mean, I've only begun to
talk about the things that
are peculiar about it,
that the will to power
is a vindication of God,
that Nietzsche's essentially
a religious thinker.
But I don't understand
that, so I'm
gonna send you to
Karl Reinhardt.
But the entire essay
is infused with that.
And at the end, it ends
with a German passage
that Strauss clearly
suggests is Nietzsche.
He quotes it in German.
The essay ends with
a German quotation.
It's not Nietzsche.
It's Strauss.
So I think Strauss is insisting
on a little work in teasing out
what he's criticizing and
taking from Nietzsche as well.
RICHARD VELKLEY:
[INAUDIBLE] since he
appeals to the young
Strauss at the beginning.
NATHAN TARKOV: I am
under an obligation
to halt promptly at noon, and
to invite you to come back
at 2:00, where we will
transition from interpretation
to critique.
[APPLAUSE]
I know I was mislead
by it, but we are
resuming at 2:00, or at 2:03.
Those of you who weren't
here in the morning,
can someone recirculate
the sign up sheet?
The first session was
more or less devoted
to Strauss's interpretation of
Nietzsche, this one, to his--
someone mischievously called
it "evaluation" of Nietzsche.
Let's say his stance
toward Nietzsche--
what things he agrees with
Nietzsche about, what things he
disagrees about.
I'm sure I could have
made a list easily
of a dozen things that were
mentioned in the morning, which
we said, we'll come back
to that in afternoon.
But I didn't make such a list.
And we may come back to them.
I did promise that we would go
in reverse alphabetical order
this time, starting
with Richard Velkley.
RICHARD VELKLEY: Thank you.
You will hear my dreary voice
again for about 10 minutes.
I hope not much more than that.
And there are many topics on
Strauss's evaluation or stance
towards Nietzsche.
As I did in my first set
of comment simplify things
by just talking about
three primary issues,
the same primary themes--
there are many aspects
of each of these
maybe that I can't develop.
Maybe we'll have more
discussion on them.
First, in History and Natural
Right in Political Philosophy.
And I'll start
with the statement
that we were discussing in
the first session, Strauss'
statement that Nietzsche
tried to return
from history to
nature and thus began
to return to classical natural
right, but on the basis
the rejection of
nature as a standard.
Note Strauss refers here
to Nietzsche's attempt
to overcome the
historical consciousness.
That is to say
Strauss regards, I
think, Nietzsche as
beginning the self-overcoming
of historicism, which he,
in some sense, continues.
Perhaps I have more
to clarify on that.
In Strauss's view, Nietzsche's
intent was incomplete.
We have a reference--
I think it was made by Catherine
Zuckert in first half--
to a statement
that Strauss makes
to Karl Lowith in
a letter in 1935,
that Nietzsche fails
to overthrow the powers
he struggled
against, while Plato
enables one to pose Nietzsche's
questions, thus our questions,
in a simpler, clearer,
and more original way.
At this point, Strauss
had begun his return
to premodern rationalism,
the possibility
of which he had
previously, in the 1920s
and until around the time of
the Spinoza book, had doubted.
Now, there is another comment.
And this is in a 1940
lecture of the living
issues of post-war German
philosophy in Strauss,
namely that Nietzsche
did not undertake
the necessary historical account
of the genesis of historicism.
So that's referring
clearly to an enterprise
that Strauss already conceived.
One sees this worked out
in detail in scarce places,
but especially perhaps
in the book Natural Right
and History, lectures
that became the book.
And now, another point of
reference on this topic
is statements Strauss
made in the 1930s,
especially in correspondence to
[INAUDIBLE],, about attempting
to uncover or to
emerge from the cave
beneath the cave,
which means especially,
although I think not
only the dismantling
of the historical consciousness
of modern thought,
which conceals the
original cave of problems,
problems that are inherent in
political and moral life, which
we can discover and articulate
most fully in Greek philosophy.
Now in Strauss's view, Nietzsche
did not undertake this,
although his thought
was, in some sense,
moving towards
classical recovery.
Basically, as I
was saying before,
the classical understanding
of philosophy.
In the seminar on
Zarathustra, Strauss faults
Nietzsche for beginning,
as he puts it,
for beginning with the
will to power, rather
than with a Socratic examination
of pre-philosophic political or
moral realm with its inherent
questions and problems.
So that is an inherent
question in which
Strauss express his
criticism, even as he also
points to some common ground.
Now concerning natural
right, I want there also
to refer to a statement that
came up in the first session
from the Zarathustra seminar.
The statement, "by
understanding Nietzsche,
we shall understand the
deepest objections or obstacles
to natural right that
exist in the modern mind."
I mean, that statement,
taken by itself,
is not clearly a criticism.
It's a statement that we
learn the deepest criticisms.
It's quite possible
that he might
agree with the criticisms.
Nietzsche may be close
to Socrates and Plato
in his effort to recover the
original meaning of philosophy
is, in some sense we
can say, engagement,
knowledge of the whole, or
having a cosmic character
that's eternal--
Strauss uses in the for
1940 lecture in connection
with Nietzsche.
But in Strauss's view--
we gather this from
different places--
Nietzsche is not truly or
not completely Socratic.
It's is difficult to say,
well, just to what extent?
I think Strauss really does
want to point to infinity.
Now, taking that
statement I quoted,
Strauss claims to
learn from Nietzsche.
And perhaps he's
making a claim that--
well, perhaps it implies that
he learns from him in a way
that he does not learn from
other modern philosophers.
Well, I mean, simply
in terms of content,
he's claiming we learn
the deepest objections
to natural right.
So possibly, then, we
can say that Strauss
in his speleology, if we
like, his effort to emerge
from the cave beneath
the cave, Nietzsche
is crucial for that
endeavor on his part.
That means Strauss's endeavor.
The implication is
Strauss has to come
to terms with Nietzsche's
exposure of the deepest
ground of objection
to traditional
or classic natural right.
Now at the same
time, Strauss seems
to question elements of
Nietzsche's thinking,
and we've been
referred some of these.
I'll mention them
in just a moment--
just the high estimation
of individuality that's
in evident, that at least seems
to be a problem, problematic.
Strauss's view is
that the perspective
of the thinker as a
creator, or as interpreter,
is deeply fashioned
or deeply conditioned
by the individuality
of the thinker,
and that certainly means, at
least to a significant degree,
the bodily existence of
the individual thinker
as the self, where the ego
is less profound in the body.
Of course, we shouldn't
be understanding
the body of Nietzsche in
traditional scientific or
mechanistic terms, where there's
a depth to the body which
in some sense is spiritual.
But as I understand
Strauss in the transcript,
the effort to come to terms
with that individuality
or the individual perspectival
character of thought
leads to the paradoxes
of eternal recurrence.
I mean, stating this
very formulaically,
the eternal recurrences,
the eternalizing
of the individual perspective,
an eternalizing of it which
is at the same time
the contemplation
of the creative act,
of the creativity
of the individual interpreter.
And as we mentioned
earlier, Strauss
has coined a significant
term for this mode
of knowing or
understanding in Nietzsche,
which he calls
creative contemplation.
Actually, the transcript
suggests that he's
taking it from Boris Pasternak.
Yeah.
He quotes an interesting passage
from an autobiographical sketch
in Pasternak, in which
Pasternak is discussing
Tolstoy's artistic perception
of the matter in which Tolstoy
as a writer perceives things.
And Pasternak uses the
term creative contemplation
to describe that.
Hm.
Because of limits on time,
I'll go on to the third point.
Plato philosophy.
And this is a topic
that-- someone complained,
I think, in the first
session that we had not yet
said anything about the
Bible in Greek philosophy.
This is crucial for Nietzsche--
that is, to try to understand
and to bring about a fusion
or synthesis, which Strauss
regards as very deep, not
simply some error that Nietzsche
makes.
For Nietzsche
undertakes this fusion
with deep insights
about both traditions,
deep sympathy for
them, as Strauss
says, a term of that sort--
one of the most
sympathetic observers,
or something of that
sort, of these traditions.
But Strauss does say that this
undertaking is problematic.
And Robert Pippin read
an appropriate quotation
from the Existentialism
Essay of 1956.
Perhaps I should just
read a little bit of it.
"Nietzsche's philosophy
of the future
is the heir to the Bible.
He is an heir to that
deepening of the soul which
has been effected by the
biblical belief in a God
that is holy."
I should read the next sentence.
"The philosophy
of the future, as
distinguished from
classical philosophy,
will be concerned with the holy.
His philosophizing will be
intrinsically religious."
Now one might say--
this is my proposal.
I'm not finding this
directly in Strauss--
the deepest valorizing
of human individuality
is expressed in the
idea of the holy.
For the holy relates
to the unique,
that is, to the absolute worth
of, or a sense of reverence
for unique persons or peoples.
One should remember that
an important section
of a part in the Zarathustra
on "a thousand and one
goals," where he's describing
the various tables, as he calls
them, tables of value that
people above themselves which
express their highest
strivings and express
their conception of the holy.
But it's very
important that there
isn't such a universal table
of that sort in Nietzsche's
account.
The question is, what
about his own understanding
of his philosophic
project, one might say?
Is that in some sense universal?
Perhaps it is.
But on the other
hand, it seems as
though what he is
most calling for
is the appearance of
the true individual,
as he says in that same section.
And the age of
the individual now
must arise because the age
of peoples is withering away.
Now concerning whatever
religiosity is of Nietzsche,
a few remarks.
It's clear that nature
rejects the biblical God,
in a crucial sense, as a
god who outside the world.
And Nietzsche affirms a divinity
of some kind within the world.
Perhaps one can say
that it's within nature,
or is nature itself,
as he understands it.
The divinity of the
world is rejected
since such a divinity devalues,
as Nietzsche puts it, devalues
the world, devalues
the body, devalues
our temporal existence,
which is related
to the revenge against time,
the revenge against mortality,
and striving beyond time
and mortality, which is,
in some sense,
initiated by Socrates,
but carried forward
by Christianity
in a very strong way.
And that's central to his
criticism of Christianity.
But is Nietzsche's
own thinking--
call it religiosity--
can we call it pagan?
That sounds too sane.
And well, let us note, though,
that Nietzsche in Zarathustra
certainly has some very
unclassical sounding statements
of his deepest concerns, such
as, man is something that
must be overcome, and man is
a rope over an abyss, tied
between beast and overman.
So central to
Nietzsche's thought
is some notion that the
human, as we know it,
must be overcome.
I could say that there's
no parallel to that
in anything in Greek antiquity.
But there is parallel of sorts
in the biblical tradition,
or parallels, perhaps.
And the creator, philosopher of
the future, for which Nietzsche
calls introduces a new
divinity, or perhaps
is that creates perhaps
itself something divine
or having define features.
And you know, Robert is pointing
to that interesting quotation
in German at end of the essay
on Beyond Good and Evil.
The noble nature places
the divine nature.
Well, the new noble
nature is really
inherent in something
or drawing something
from what previously was God.
So this project of rejuvenating
and elevating humanity
involves a transcending
of Greek philosophy,
at least crucial aspects of
it, as well as a Christianity,
but toward what seems to
be a new fusion of sorts
of Greek and biblical
wisdom, or we
might call it the West and
the East, on the surface.
We understand those use
terms in a certain way.
By the way, Strauss
significantly
in a couple of places
makes parallel comments
about Heidegger's concerns, of
finding deepest common ground
of the East and
the West to address
the problem of the world
society, the emerging world
society.
And Strauss calls that response,
by the way, a deep one.
Which isn't to say that
he endorses it or follows
it himself.
In fact, he says, "no one--" oh,
I hope I get the words right.
"No one else has an
inkling of the problem
that is involved in
addressing the world society.
No one else, other
than Heidegger."
This is a profound response
to nihilism, the nihilism
of modern civilization.
But Strauss-- and
I'm coming to end.
Strauss holds back,
I mean, certainly
for me, a direct endorsement
of approval of this.
For as I understand
it, he holds back
because it would involve
a fusion of philosophy
with political life in a way
that is fundamentally at odds
with the character of
philosophy as inherently
critical, inherently
oppositional,
in a fundamental sense,
toward political life.
And Nietzsche himself,
Strauss points out,
reveals that tension.
So once again, we
have the complexity
of Nietzsche's position
and the complexity
of his view of philosophy
as both having something
very akin to classical
view of the philosopher,
and also something
new, something novel,
involving a fusion of
classical and biblical thought.
I just want refer to a couple
of quotes, and then I'll stop.
Further quotes that I
think are interesting.
These pertain to what I think
is the evidently non-dogmatic
character of Strauss,
or his openness
to reflecting on
positions, possibilities,
that one might think are
alien to his thought.
Don't most people think that
Strauss regards Nietzsche
simply as having gone
way off the right track,
and the thinkers that
deserve our true respect
are the Greek philosophers?
Especially the Greek, and some
of the others, later ones.
Now Strauss in the
Zarathustra transcript
that Nietzsche is raising a
possibility that has previously
not been seen, and
one that he believes
must be taken seriously.
I refer to a remark he
makes in his seminar
of 1967 on Beyond Good and Evil
and the Genealogy of Morals,
pertaining to the Aphorism
45 of Beyond Good and Evil,
which begins a section
called "The Natural History
of Morals."
And Nietzsche makes a statement
about the history of the soul,
and that the one who would
study the natural history--
excuse me.
It's the natural
history of religion.
Crucial.
It's the natural
history of religion.
We must investigate the entire
history the soul so far.
And Nietzsche goes on to say,
"and its further possibilities
are not known."
And Strauss seems to
endorse this, and to say,
"the possibilities for the human
soul are perhaps infinite."
Now it could be that
he's simply paraphrasing
Nietzsche's thought.
But I mean, it would
be consistent, though,
with the way in which
he, at various points,
says philosophers might
arise in the future who
have developed thoughts
with which we are not
at all acquainted now.
And then he says of
Dionysus's thought,
we should not reject his thought
simply because it's original.
And there's another expression
of this sort of modesty
on his part I think it's kind of
modesty, which is in connection
with Heidegger.
And this is the essay called
"The Problem of Socrates,"
in which he's discussing
Heidegger's reflection
on thinking, and that
Heidegger pays attention
to the German word for thinking.
And Strauss says,
"to this procedure,
Heidegger makes the objection
to his own procedure of thinking
about the German word.
That a German word
obviously belongs
to a particular
language, and thinking
is something not particular.
Hence, one cannot bring to light
what thinking is by reflecting
on one word of a
particular language."
Which means that historicism,
even in its Heideggerian form,
contains for a problem.
He says that Heidegger tries
to address this problem
by attempting to understand the
different ways of approaching
the world in the East or the
West, and seeking in some way
to bridge that difference.
And Strauss demands, "if this
is reasonable, our first task--"
if it is reasonable.
He doesn't say it is not.
"If this is reasonable,
our first task
would be a language
we have already
engaged, the task
of understanding
the great Western books.
By implication, Strauss
is open to the possibility
that we don't wholly grasp
the phenomenon of thinking
on the basis of the
limited acquaintance
we have with certain languages
or certain traditions.
And lastly, on this theme of
Strauss' openness and modesty,
I quote this line from
"The City of Man."
The sentence, "There is no
unqualified transcendent,
even by the wisest man as
such, of the spirit of opinion.
Because of the
elusiveness of the whole,
the beginning or the questions
retain a greater evidence
than the end or the answers,
return to the beginning
remains a constant necessity."
I'll just add, I don't
endorse the view, which
I think is held by prominent
interpreters of Strauss,
that he regards essentially
the same problem which could
be called reason and
revelation, or theological
political problem.
Essentially the same problem
is appearing again and again.
Socrates, [INAUDIBLE],,
Maimonides, Machiavelli,
Rousseau, Nietzsche.
And to many, essentially
we grasp the arguments
that can be brought forth
in this confrontation,
and we discover the
superiority of philosophy.
That approach to Strauss
seems to me to be too narrow
and to suggest that Strauss's
approach to the problems
would be different from
what he here says, namely
that the return
to the beginnings
remains a constant necessity.
No.
The beginnings, by
the way, in his case,
certainly, includes going
back to other philosophers,
such as going back to Nietzsche.
He doesn't seem to be
going to Nietzsche just
to discover the same reading
of reason versus revelation.
If you've already got
it right, why would you
have to go back to him?
In fact, one needs to go back
because there are unsolved
problems, or there
are possibilities
that the philosopher raises that
remain necessary to consider.
All right.
Enough about this.
NATHAN TARKOV: Thank you.
Robert Pippin?
ROBERT PIPPIN: Thank you.
I think that Nietzsche's
importance for Strauss
stems primarily from what
Strauss regarded as Nietzsche's
diagnostic accusal.
Said another way,
Nietzsche's value for Strauss
lay as much of
Nietzsche's being a profit
and in his being a philosopher.
I mean that Strauss thought
Nietzsche's diagnosis
and prophecy were true
at the deepest level.
Certainly, at far
deeper level than that
attained by any other
right modern thinker.
The key elements of
Nietzsche's diagnoses
are summed in the famous
phrases, "the death of God,"
"the age of the last
man," and "nihilism."
In his course on Thus
Spoke Zarathustra,
Strauss states the
interconnections
among these elements, in
a way, strangely enough,
that could have been written
by a 19th century [INAUDIBLE],,
or perhaps even by
Marx, or [INAUDIBLE],,
or by [INAUDIBLE] themselves.
Quote, "The whole human
race is a single association
of reduction and consumption."
I don't know that Strauss
ever talks this way.
It's certainly not a
Nietzschean way of talking.
It's not a Zarathustrian
way of talking.
"The whole human race
is a single association
of production--" he's
channeling Nietzsche
to his students-- "of
consumption in such a way
that production and
consumption includes
the production and consumption
of art, for instance.
In other words, the so-called
creativity of man goes on,
but this takes place now
in the rise of production
and consumption, and therefore,
art loses its original meaning.
The true consequence of
the death of God is this.
"man is radically
unprotected or exposed.
Suffering remained.
There is a change
through the progress
of technical civilization,
except to the extent
that men become
shallow by virtue
of the infinite
destruction that prevails.
Entertainment, exciting and
stimulating things everyday.
We Man is radically unprotected.
No God tells him any longer
what is good and bad.
Nothing tells him any
longer what is good and bad.
There is no knowledge
whatever of good or bad.
Nothing is true.
Everything is permitted.
The first consequence
of the death of God
is then the drift
towards the last man
and the second nihilism."
Unquote.
By saying that Strauss
accepted this diagnosis,
I mean that Strauss that first,
the early modern conception
of nature and its
doctrine of the passions,
of virtue as a matter
of the passions,
whether sympathy, or
pity, or fear of violent,
or the love of a commodious
life, or whatever,
could not, when viewed as
a collective form of shared
self-understanding, sustain
either stable or in any way
affirmable form of life.
It could not be stable, because
reliance on the passions
ensures unresolvable conflicts.
And as the life form of the
last man, it leads to practices
and conducts that are subhuman,
a kind of animal contentment.
This is, of course, already
controversial in both Strauss
and in Nietzsche.
It would appear that the
last man form of life
can be quite stable,
especially if it arranges
an efficient structure for the
maximum mutual satisfaction
of individual preferences.
At least, so it
seemed stable, until
the last American election.
And it could be
questioned, I think,
to assume that the character
of this form of life
necessarily breeds a kind of
self-contempt, enervation,
and lassitude.
The last men are,
after all, happy.
As Strauss points
out, they're creative.
They build wonderful machines.
They even have, despite all
the problems, wonderful art.
Second, Strauss takes
Nietzsche, especially
in his Use and Abuse History
and Untimely Meditations,
to have rejected also the second
wave of modernity in Rousseau,
and what Strauss took to be
his German disciples, Kant
and Hegel.
The ideal of freedom
as rational autonomy
is compatible with too many
incompatible realizations.
And the aspiration that
historical progress
could reconcile such
realizations over time
in a form of ethical
life necessarily
leads to relativism,
something already
quite obvious before
Hegel and in Heidegger.
And according to both
Strauss and Nietzsche,
to live or lead a life, there
must be some separate moment
of an affirmation of that life.
And Strauss argues
in many places
that such an affirmation
would be impossible
if one way of living is as
good or bad as any other.
Nietzsche's reasons for coming
to the same conclusion are
somewhat different
than Strauss's.
And don't depend on
Strauss's assumption
that we must find such a way
of living in itself affirmable
in order to affirm it.
For the outcome of all
of this is summed up
in a dramatic statement by
Nietzsche that Strauss clearly
agrees with.
That is, he agrees,
that this is what we now
think about ourselves.
Quote, "all earlier
men had the truth.
What is new in our present
attitude towards philosophy
is a conviction which no epoch
ever had, namely that we do not
possess the truth."
Unquote.
Strauss makes clear
that Nietzsche
means we do not possess
all truth we need,
not that a kind of erroneous
skepticism is our fate.
The truth, Strauss says,
channeling Nietzsche,
is elusive, only very partly
knowable, as he puts it.
He also says, to
return to a theme that
came up several times
this morning, that quote,
"the only parallel in earlier
philosophy to what Nietzsche
means by the elusiveness
of truth is Plato."
So the main issue in Strauss's
evaluation of Nietzsche
comes down to the sense
in which Nietzsche
can be said in his
right to have seen
a way out of
nihilistic implications
of the modern revolution,
putting aside for the time
being whether such implications
are so damaging and obvious as
to sweep aside all at once
the attempts by Hobbes, Locke,
Rousseau, Kant,
Fichte, Hegel, nil,
as all finally failed to
avoid such implications,
leaving standing
only Machiavelli's
ruthless honestly, and that of
his brother in arms, Nietzsche.
This question,
Nietzsche's attempt
to overcome nihilism, and for
Strauss, his failure to do so,
takes in many things.
There is first the
question of whether Strauss
is right in what he
says many times--
and here we come
again to a theme
we've discussed frequently.
At bottom, Nietzsche's
attempt relies on his attempt
to return to nature as a kind
of God, although, of course,
neither the ordered, morally
significant teleological cosmos
of the ancients and the
natural law tradition,
nor the mechanical, purposeless,
but predictable and masterable
nature of the Enlightenment.
In order for Nietzsche
to celebrate, as he does,
a response to the situation
of late modernity with, to use
Nietzsche's words, gratitude,
thankfulness, and affirmation
of the eternal
return of the same,
loyalty to the earth, no revenge
against existence or time
itself, a transvaluation
of all values,
and so forth, we
have to understand
the nature of nature--
in this case, the human body,
and even more paradoxically,
the [INAUDIBLE] something the
not-yet-finished character
of our nature, so
extremely malleable
as to amount to almost
nature as absence of nature.
Strauss is completely
aware of this situation,
and puts it this way in
his Zarathustra lectures.
Quote, again
channeling Nietzsche,
"Man has no determinate nature.
Man has no support
in his nature.
What he is or will
become depends entirely
on his choice, his will.
Given the situation
as it exists now,
he has a choice between the
last man and the Superman."
Unquote.
But choice here does not mean
what it means in voluntarism.
Because according to Strauss,
Nietzsche's Zarathustra--
and I think he's right
about this-- distinguishes
a conscious ego from an
unconscious natural self,
the latter being the
wellspring of human creativity
which we suffer and
endure rather perfect.
There's much more to
say about all this,
but I've only time
for two comments.
The first is that
all this returns us
to the question of religion.
This is so because for both
Strauss, and Nietzsche,
and Plato, for that
matter, living in the truth
or truthfully, in the
proper acknowledgement
of the human condition,
is not a result
of a sustained,
argumentative case concerning
how one ought to live.
That would already
reflect a commitment
to a life determined in this
way by such an argument,
by philosophy.
Virtue cannot be taught, is
another way to put the issue,
or philosophy cannot be the
best human life if that claim is
already dependent on philosophy
for the measure of what is
and what is not worthwhile.
To say that this opens the
door to a religious dimension
in Nietzsche is not
to say that it all
becomes a matter of faith
or of divine revelation,
and it returns us to the
daunting and unmanageable issue
of the role of Dionysus.
But we do encounter
again Strauss' reticence
about this issue.
For example, he is well aware
that Thus Spoke Zarathustra has
a biblical form that is ironic.
Incipit tragoedia,
Nietzsche had suggested
about Thus Spoke Zarathustra
in The Gay Science--
thus begins tragedy.
But he warns us
immediately, beware.
Something wicked and
mischievous is being announced.
Perhaps, he goes
on, incipit parodia.
Now begins a parody,
referring to Zarathustra.
And I don't mean this
question rhetorically.
I'm genuinely puzzled by it.
Why does Strauss
treat Zarathustra
as Nietzsche's spokesman?
And what is the
philosophical point
of adopting this ironic
biblical form only
to actually ironicize it.
And in criticizing Zarathustra
for his self-contradictory
position on truth,
why does Strauss
think he's
criticizing Nietzsche?
But the great value
of Strauss's approach
is that at least these
enigmatic references to religion
establish that Nietzsche is
badly misunderstood if he's
taken to be offering
traditional, philosophical
claims and epistemology,
metaphysics, and value
theory decorated, as it were,
with literary and religious
images.
His published work
addresses thus
in a world historically
unique way.
And Strauss is one of the few
people to appreciate that.
Contrast Strauss's other
teacher on modernity,
Heidegger, who was completely
tone deaf to all these issues
in Nietzsche.
And 90% of Heidegger's
commentary on Nietzsche
doesn't even refer to
the published works,
but to the non-published.
What that way is, that
historically unique way
in which Nietzsche's
writings address us,
is too complicated to discuss
in a format like this.
Secondly, Strauss's whole
assessment on Nietzsche
turns on an issue he raised in
The Natural Right of History,
as well as many other places.
The issue descends
from Strauss's claim
that despite many ambiguities
and several curious hesitations
in his statement
of the criticism,
in Nietzsche, when
all is said and done,
sides with the theoretical
or historicism modern school
of though, and so is subject
to the basic problem.
I would nominate the
following quotation
as Strauss's most important
philosophical claim of all,
with the fear-reaching
implications.
Quote, "Since the
theoretical analysis
has its basis
outside of life, it
will never be able
to understand life.
The theoretical
analysis of life is
non-committal and
fatal to commit.
But life needs commitment."
Unquote.
The hardest thing to understand
is Strauss's reference
to the doctrine of nature
that Nietzsche needs
or is trying to return us to.
Virtually everything
else substantive
occurs inside life for Strauss,
not as a theoretical attitude
outside.
I think Nietzsche
deeply agrees with this.
It goes back to the
question Catherine
asked about my philosophy
in the 19th century.
But what is interesting is that
the implications for Nietzsche
are different than those
Strauss draw, which as we all
know involve scholarly
analyses of text
in a project of recovery of the
human experience of the human.
These different implications
involve, for Nietzsche,
the rationale for the kind of
figurative and literary writing
he produced.
One indication of
what he's trying to do
is clear from this note
from the [INAUDIBLE] clause,
which I'll end with, in contrast
to the implications Strauss
draws.
"My general task"-- this
is Nietzsche-- "colon,
to show how life, philosophy,
and art can have a deeper
and definitive relationship with
each other without philosophy
becoming shallow and the life
of the philosopher becoming
dishonest."
NATHAN TARKOV: Thank you.
Paul?
PAUL FRANCO: Right.
So again, this
afternoon's session
is Strauss's stance
toward Nietzsche,
what he agrees with and
disagrees with Nietzsche
about And we discussed
this morning,
Strauss applies
Nietzsche's attempt
to turn from history to nature
and to restore natural right.
As he puts it in another
place, not in the lectures,
"Nietzsche is the philosopher
of relativism, the first thinker
who faced the problem of
relativism in its full extent
and pointed the way in which
relativism can be overcome."
That comes from the essay
entitled "Relativism."
Nevertheless, despite
that favorable comment,
Strauss believes
Nietzsche's enterprise
to overcome relativism
was best by,
as he puts it in these lectures,
"great and perhaps hopeless
difficulties springing
from the modern principles
to which adheres."
Nietzsche's doctrine of the
will the power, in many ways,
is the epitome of these
modern smaller principles,
and it's to that doctrine that
I want to direct my attention.
An indication of Strauss's
fundamental difference
with Nietzsche with
respect to the doctrine
of the will to power
comes toward the end
of the lectures on Zarathustra.
Strauss states,
"Now if you start
from the assumption from which
I believe one should not start,
but from which Nietzsche,
in fact, did start,
that the fundamental phenomenon
is the will to power--"
and he goes on from there.
But he states very clearly,
now at the end of the lectures,
that this assumption something
from which Nietzsche started,
namely the will to power, is
an assumption from which one
should not start.
Strauss does not really explain
the ground of his difference
with Nietzsche in this regard.
But some indication of
the alternative he favors
can gleaned from the contrast he
draws between the will to power
and the Platonic notion of eros.
He comes back to this
contrast repeatedly
throughout the lectures.
The crux of the contrast
according to Strauss,
is that whereas the Platonic
eros is a striving toward given
ends, unchanging ends,
transcendent ends,
the will to power is constant
creation and overcoming
of ends.
According to Nietzsche's
doctrine of the will to power,
Strauss argues there
cannot be an [INAUDIBLE],,
as in Plato and Aristotle.
There cannot be a form, which in
its operation is the perfection
of the being.
For Nietzsche, nature
means overcoming.
There cannot be a peak.
There is a constant
transcending of a given stage.
In this respect, Strauss
says Nietzsche's doctrine
of the will to power
is primarily an attempt
to understand history,
or as he puts it
in another place, a
formula for nature which
accounts for evolution.
Strauss also describes the
will to power as quote,
"the self-consciousness
of creativity."
This formulation
suggests another way
of characterizing the
fundamental disagreement
between Strauss and
Nietzsche, having
to do with their very different
evaluations of human creativity
and the uniqueness
of the human self.
Strauss first discusses
this crucial aspect
of Nietzsche's moral
outlook in connection
with the speech on the
despisers of the body.
There he brings out
Nietzsche's distinction
between the conscious
ego, as you've
heard before, and
unconscious self, the latter
being the quote, "seat of the
uniqueness of individuals,
and therefore, what
can be his best.
The self and the
elusiveness of the self
is the source of human
creativity, and it Nietzsche's
valorization of the latter
that sharply distinguishes him
from classical thought,
according to Strauss.
Whereas for classical thought,
the highest possibility of man
is not creative, Strauss claims.
For Nietzsche, the highest and
deepest in man is creativity.
In this respect,
Nietzsche remains
quintessentially
modern, and for Strauss,
fundamentally questionable.
One need only recall--
and I think this passage is
behind some of Richard Velkley
has mentioned in his
comments-- one may only recall,
the final lines of
Natural Right and History
to appreciate how central
to modernity Strauss regards
the idea of the uniqueness
and creativity of the self.
There he writes,
"the quarrel between
the ancients' and the
moderns' concern eventually,
and perhaps even
from the beginning,
the status of individuality.
There, too, Strauss doesn't
mount an elaborate defense
of the ancient position,
unless the whole book
could be taken as such.
But one is never in doubt
as to his preference.
There is one other
site of disagreement
between Strauss and Nietzsche
that I would like to point out.
It concerns
Nietzsche's politics.
And in response to Dick
Simmons' question this morning,
as well as many others.
I was kind of biting my tongue,
to enter that phrase, simply
because I didn't want
to completely shoot
my wad in the first session.
But let me say a little
bit about this question
on politics, and
what Strauss says
about politics in these
lectures on Zarathustra.
In his lectures.
Strauss repeats
many of the claims
that he makes about
Nietzsche's published writings
on the subject of
Nietzsche's politics.
He states that Nietzsche
is not a fascist,
but he still bears some
relation to Fascism.
He rejects Kaufmann's apolitical
political interpretation
of Nietzsche, commenting
that national socialism is
a perversion of
Nietzsche's philosophy.
But nevertheless, Nietzsche made
possible that very perversion
of his doctrine.
These are statements by that
find an echo in many things
that Strauss says in
his published essays.
But in one, Strauss suggests
a slightly different response
to the question of how political
Nietzsche's philosophy really
is.
In connection with
Nietzsche's call
for a new nobility in a
speech on old and new tablets,
Strauss warns about taking
this call too politically.
He quotes an interesting passage
from Nietzsche's notebooks,
where Nietzsche says
that-- and this a quote--
"It is to altogether
not the goal
to regard the supermen as
the masters of the last men.
Rather the two kinds, the
supermen and the last men,
should co-exist side by side,
separated as much as possible,
the ones like the Epicurean
gods not caring for the others."
Strauss, after
quoting that passage,
comments "this clearly means
no political relation."
I find this passage
interesting because it
seems to be at odds
with what I would
call the standard Straussian
interpretation of Nietzsche's
politics.
I'm thinking of Werner
Dannhauser and Bruce Detwiler
here, what I would call
the aristocratic radical
interpretation that takes
Nietzsche to be literally
advocating an aristocratic
system, in which
the gifted few rule over,
manipulate, oppress,
and slay, and sometimes, even
exterminate the mediocre many.
Of course, Strauss
does not completely
exonerate Nietzsche here.
He goes on to say that in its
very non-political character,
Nietzsche's teaching is
politically irresponsible.
This is a quote.
"If this new nobility does
not have a political meaning
proper," he writes, "and
if Nietzsche attacks
any possibility of political
organization in our age,
does he not take on infinite
political responsibility
which might lead to the
collapse of any civilization,
as for example,
Germany in the '30s?"
One might quibble with
the claim in this quote,
that Nietzsche attacks
any possibility
of political
organization in our age,
but we can save that for
our discussion to come.
NATHAN TARKOV: Mark?
MARK BLITZ: Thanks.
Well, although
I'll repeat several
of the points already made,
some involve [INAUDIBLE]
being altogether silent.
As for agreement between
Strauss and Nietzsche,
it's clear enough
that Strauss agrees
with Nietzsche about the
current status of the West
is problematic,
whether or not he
agrees with the full analysis
of nihilistic decline.
He points several times to the
acuity of Nietzsche's analysis
of Europe, and of his
predictions or presentiments
of the future.
And he agrees with much of
Nietzsche's specific analysis
in Beyond Good and Evil of our
virtues, and especially of we
scholars, the decline
of scholarship
or science in the broad sense.
And it's not altogether given
that someone such as Strauss
would agree with someone
such as Nietzsche,
because many people don't
actually think that we
are on a path of this sort.
One central issue
of disagreement
is something we've discussed.
Is philosophy
essentially the creator
of a discovery of meaning, of
direction, of what is good,
of what is in itself.
The least that one can say is
that Strauss is not satisfied
that it's not a
kind of discovery.
He certainly doesn't
take the truth
of the standpoint of
historicism and creating
for granted, to say the least.
Strauss, therefore, also
contrasts the classical split
between Physis and Nomos with
a unitary view of historicism
that seeks to replace
that differentiation.
And he implicitly
criticizes, as we've said,
the historicist view by
examining how much Nietzsche
must still be wrong on a view
of nature somehow understood.
A second important disagreement
is the possibility that Eros
and not will to power is
the decisive characteristic,
at least in conjunction
with reason's attempt
to discover what is.
In Nietzsche's dispute
with Plato that frames
Beyond Good and Evil,
Strauss obviously
does not dismiss Plato and
points to this particular fact.
Connected to this is
Strauss's examination
of Nietzsche's view of
the importance of the self
and its link to the passions,
and the self's ground
in something individual
and unknowable.
The distinctive
or individual self
is distinguished implicitly
from the generality
of the human soul, or
what is essential in it.
Strauss also contrasts
the historical ground,
or the becoming, of the
strong, or comprehensive,
or complementary
self in Nietzsche,
with the naturally present
or completed distinctions
of high and low in Plato.
Again, of course,
it would be too
much to say in these
transcripts that Strauss simply
takes the side of Plato
against Nietzsche.
But as I said before, he at
least gives it equal status.
There's another area where
Strauss both agrees with,
but perhaps
ultimately presumably
disagrees with Nietzsche.
This comes from his analysis of
Nietzsche's mention of quote,
"the world that concerns us"
in section 34 of Beyond Good
and Evil.
Strauss analyzes this
world of human concern
and trying to explain
what this means
in terms of Locke's distinction
between primary and secondary
qualities, matters of own
extension and solidity,
say, as opposed to seeing
blue and hearing harmonies.
The world of concern
is, as it were,
the world of tertiary qualities,
the beautiful, the good,
the sacred, and so on.
Strauss sees Nietzsche,
among other things,
as attempting to reassert
the importance of this world,
and even to read back from to
those material qualities that
seem less questionable.
The issue, then again,
is whether the world
is of beautiful and good things
is ultimately nearly or largely
produced or created or not--
whether it is discovered
or even permanent.
In the published
essay on Nietzsche--
this isn't discussed--
but it is in transcripts.
In the book that the
essay appears in,
Studies in Platonic
Political Philosophy,
it's a major feature
of Strauss's discussion
of Heidegger, and
presumably it's
a link between Heidegger
and Nietzsche as he sees it.
I think that this question of
the world that concerns us,
and especially the place
of the sacred within it,
is also connected
to this question
of non-atheistic atheism,
or atheistic non-atheism,
perhaps as an experience
of the holy, which may also
be connected to the experience
of absent gods, as relevant
clearly in Heidegger,
but in Nietzsche
too in his understanding of
what the future requires.
A second related area of both
agreement and disagreement
is the importance of
problems and questions.
Some or much of
Strauss' discussion
is conducted in terms
of the questions
that Nietzsche finds or imposes.
And this is connected to
and implicitly contrasted
with the importance of
problems or perplexities
as keeping philosophy in Plato,
and connected as well to being,
being to a degree
elusive for Plato,
as it is for Nietzsche, without,
for Plato, this elusiveness,
making being simply elusive,
or mysterious, or relevant,
or without this making questions
at one's own idiosyncrasies,
as they are Nietzsche.
And I'll conclude
simply by saying
that one of the ways
in which Strauss tries
to argue or suggest
that there are
serious alternatives to
Nietzsche and to Heidegger
is by looking for the
continued existence
of the elusive and
the open, which
important to them in earlier
thinkers, Plato most obviously.
Thank you.
NATHAN TARKOV: Again,
I invite, if any of you
wish to respond to
any of the issues
that Mark or any of the others
raised when they were talking.
MARK BLITZ: Well, I'll raise
the question of politics,
and I'm sure Richard will
too, Paul, since you raised
it, and sort touch on this.
How much do you actually--
do you believe it too?
Or do you believe that
Strauss fully believes,
or that Nietzsche fully believes
in this kind of separation
between the political
and his own activity,
or the superman's
activity and so on.
We do have this chain.
Nietzsche's not,
Zarathustra is not,
the superman is not new
nobility, and so on.
PAUL FRANCO: I do think there's
a certain shiftiness in some
of the things that
Strauss says, and even
within the seminar
on Zarathustra,
meaning he sometimes seems to
suggest that there's something
in Nietzsche that
actually is akin to,
or has an affinity with fascism.
But one passage I quoted,though,
I think there is this other
side to Strauss.
And I think this is one of
the most striking formulations
of it.
It's an amazing in Nietzsche,
where he, in effect, does
say that this idea of the
supermen as masters who
rule over and impose their
values on everyone else
seems to be not what
Nietzsche had in mind at all.
I think that Strauss was
actually right to realize that.
I mean, it's not
clear what the values
of the supermen, or the
masters, in this case,
what they would have to do with
the values of the mediocre men.
So I think this idea that
there's an aristocracy that
may, in fact, as he
suggests in various parts
some of his middle
period writings,
also in Beyond Good and Evil,
that there's a way in which you
have an aristocracy
that leaves many
of the democratic structures
already in existence pretty
much intact and left to their
own devices is suggestive here.
MARK BLITZ: And
I'm thinking also
of the passage in
Beyond Good and Evil,
chapter 1, where the
aristocracy grows
on the basis of their own body,
and the others, who are simply
essentially there to
serve them or the material
for it, which Nietzsche
doesn't clearly state.
I mean, one would need
to say that his notion
of previous aristocracies
is separate from his notion
of a new nobility.
NATHAN TARKOV: Robert?
ROBERT PIPPIN: I think
maybe too abstract
an issue for the particular
discussion of politics,
but my own disagreement with
many commentators on Strauss,
and almost all
commentators on Nietzsche,
is that I don't think
Strauss is proposing
that what we need
in late modernity
is another theoretical
position about Nietzsche that
would serve us to
justify an egalitarian
notion of natural right.
I think that gets
Strauss, not to mention
Nietzsche, all wrong.
I take the passage I quoted
from Natural Right and History
extremely seriously
as a kind of benchmark
for any interpretation
of Strauss.
It helps explain why he
writes the way he does,
why he doesn't write
systematic treatises,
why he doesn't propose what
the theory of nature is.
I don't pretend that
it is a very easy thing
to make sense of the notion of
the elucidation of human life
having to come from
within life, rather
than as a theoretical
position about life.
But for myself, I don't think
there's any question that that
is Nietzsche's position,
that Strauss understood
it and approved of it.
Now that opens the door
to hundreds and hundreds
of other questions.
But as a methodological
principle of reading,
I think that
quotation is decisive.
And just secondly,
on will to power,
it's is such a complicated
interpretive issue
in both Nietzsche
and Strauss, what
they mean by referring to it.
I mean, the vulgar
interpretations of it,
that it means the
acquisition of potential
to control the
actions of others,
or to control the
machinations of nature,
is clearly not what
Nietzsche means.
And he also doesn't
mean something like--
this is only in the
[INAUDIBLE],, really,
that you get something that even
indicates a theory of all, not
just organic nature,
as driven by a kind
of [INAUDIBLE] for pushing
itself against other beings,
such that it manifests
its drive in a way that
is stronger than theirs.
One of the curious things
about the importance of Eros
to Strauss is that he
does not quote or comment
on the first sentence
of Beyond Good and Evil,
which is, "Suppose
truth is a woman."
Would it not then follow that
all philosophers, especially
insofar as they had been
dogmatic philosophers,
are [INAUDIBLE] and
improper-- clumsy lovers?
That is the first
sentence of the book.
And I believe it
introduces the conception
of philosophical
Eros in a some way
that is somewhat
submerged in the book,
but reappears periodically.
I mean, the most famous,
"everything we love
is beyond good and evil,"
it kind of tells you
what the book is
supposed to be about.
What's beyond good and evil?
Love.
But again, I don't
know how to manage
that in a framework
like our workshop.
I mean, that's several courses,
or something like that.
But for me, the first
point is the most crucial.
I think it's a mistake
to interpret Strauss
as proposing a theoretical
position about nature, which
we can recovered, and
then rely on to justify,
in order to avoid
that it's egalitarian.
He may believe in an
egalitarian world order,
but I don't think it's because
he thinks through Nietzsche,
we discover the real
nature of nature.
MARK BLITZ: If I
could say one thing
about seeing from the inside.
I mean, that's clearly
behind his pointing out
of the importance of
the world of concern
in Nietzsche in
Heidegger, his emphasis
on the relation of philosophy
and opinion and so on.
But there's also
a limit to that,
and I think it sums his
writing on Heidegger.
Strauss criticizes
Heidegger for this because
of the impossibility
of simply staying
inside moment to
moment, or simply trying
to understand the fullest
version of staying
on the inside, which would
be momentary experience
to momentary experience,
and the impossibility
of really having a set of--
let's call them categories,
or form, with terms
to understand them.
So part of the
question is, where
is the limit there as well?
ROBERT PIPPIN: I agree
with you very much,
that he thinks Heidegger
gets some of this very wrong
by not appreciating
what in the everyday,
in the everyday living, the
human as human, manifests
itself as distinctions
we need to make,
lest we fall into incoherence.
I think his disagreement
with Heidegger
is not so much about
inside and outside,
but what Heidegger thinks
he finds on the inside.
Angst.
MARK BLITZ: That too.
I'd say both, but yeah.
NATHAN TARKOV: On
the politics, it's
obviously difficult
or impossible
to say what Strauss's stance is
towards Nietzsche on politics
without some assumption
of what we understand.
Strauss's stance
on politics to be.
Sometimes it seems as if
he's criticizing Nietzsche
for thinking philosophers
should rule or legislate,
or found a religion,
because philosophers can't
do that-- shouldn't do that?
I'm not sure which.
At other times, it's almost the
opposite, criticizing Nietzsche
for political
irresponsibility, which
seems to imply a philosopher
should be politically
responsible, which
means not undermining
decent possibilities
and regimes.
He even says
Nietzsche undermines--
this is the end
of the discussion
in one book of philosophy--
he undermines conservatism,
liberalism,
nationalism, democracy,
and doesn't offer
an alternative.
But the complaint is
not that he offers
a pro-fascist alternative,
but that he doesn't offer any.
I mean, I suppose theoretically,
that mean could either
that philosophers should
offer an alternative if they
undermine all those things.
Or does it mean they shouldn't
undermine all those things?
Where does Strauss stand?
Without knowing that, it's hard
to see what he's criticizing
Nietzsche for politically.
ROBERT PIPPIN: Yeah,
not to mention,
how would Strauss
answer that question
if you threw it to him?
Beyond the protection of
the safety of philosophy
to survive in the
modern conditions,
take that list of things
he thinks are relevant.
Is there a Straussian
position on each of them?
On nationalism?
On conservatism, liberalism,
on representative government?
There isn't a text by Strauss.
I mean, it seems like his
politics is prudential.
You know, find
intelligent people
and give them some control
over things, and be careful,
and have lots thoughts.
You know, you don't
have to have a doctrine
of the state, of obligation,
of the source of authority.
It's a funny kind of question
for Strauss to ask Nietzsche.
It's almost like we're down.
NATHAN TARKOV:
Yeah, it just seems
to be a kind of common sense.
Oh, conservatism, liberalism,
democracy, they're pretty good.
A lot better than fascism
or communism, period.
[LAUGHING]
Sure.
RICHARD VELKLEY:
Well, I think there
might be a middle ground
between the two positions
that are suggested by
Strauss's problems.
Namely, Nietzsche
does suggest something
like a universal
project or goal to be
achieved by higher humans.
It's certainly not a
crude form of mastery,
or crude form of
legislation that--
but very central was the idea
of the overcoming of nihilism
and the overcoming
of this danger,
namely, the reign
of the last men.
And that has a certain universal
dimension that is- I mean,
Nietzsche is suggesting
that philosophically, one
has to provide something.
It may be a kind
of religiosity that
restores the human being in
the sense of higher goals
and a sense of
self-overcoming and nobility,
and a sense of hierarchy.
Perhaps what Strauss sees
as problematic in that
is that by concentrating
wholly upon that idea of what
must be done, they're focusing
upon certain conceptions
that we can't actually
realize practically,
and which it's very
difficult to conceive
a practical realization,
and at the same time,
we develop a contempt
for those things
that can be practically met.
So it's not as
though we are drawn
towards some new fascist state
or project [? enslaving, ?]
but that you're drawn away
from the real political
possibilities because there
is this other thing, which
is, of course, all important,
that they'd essentially
be addressing the
souls of human beings
as much as possible in a way
that's very difficult to spell
out concretely as a project.
I mean, Nietzsche, in a
beautiful way, of course,
does what can be done, namely
inspire one, seduce us,
as you might say, to think
about such a transformation.
And the chief effect
we get from his writing
is to feel that we are
transformed individually.
I think that this is, in
fact, an excellent thing.
But at the same time, Nietzsche
is suggesting there must be--
well, recall his
remarkable statements.
Man is something that
must be overcome.
The statements that
remind one of, let's
say, Marxist statements in the
idea of radical transformation,
that it [INAUDIBLE].
PAUL FRANCO: There's
another place
in this course on
Zarathustra that
has an interesting angle
on the political question.
At one point, Strauss
actually compares
Nietzsche and Tocqueville.
And he's commenting about,
again, Nietzsche's call
for a new nobility.
And he says Tocqueville, in some
ways, this was not his project.
He seemed to settle,
in some says,
for the decency of
democracy and nobility
was maybe something
that, you know,
was part of the bygone past.
And Strauss goes onto
say so this project
of the new nobility,
so different from what
we find in Tocqueville,
for Nietzsche,
was not primarily a
political project,
but he says a moral and
even a religious one.
Which again, kind
of to me suggests
that at least Strauss saw--
he does tend to see
Nietzsche's politics,
as it were, as largely a
kind of cultural politics
that, in fact, might allow
for democratic institutions
to serve the vast
majority of people,
but within a democratic
order, an aristocracy
could overcome itself and
develop its individuality
and creativity to
the utmost extent.
I would actually
cite, with regard
from Beyond Good and Evil--
Mark cited the aphorism
from part nine.
In part eight, which is devoted
to people and fatherlands,
there's a very
interesting aphorism
in which Nietzsche
talks about Europe
is becoming more and
more democratic, more
and more mediocre, more
and more democratic.
And actually kind
of welcome that.
He accepts it as, in some ways,
inevitable, like Tocqueville.
But he sees a different
outcome from this,
that out this kind of of
democratization of Europe,
you will get, as
he puts it, slaves
in a more subtle
sense, by which I
think Nietzsche means slaves--
his definition of
a slave is someone
who doesn't have 2/3 of
their day to themselves.
Slaves in that subtle
in that subtle sense
will characterize
Europe, and then there
will be, as he puts it toward
of the aphorism, tyrants
in the most spiritual sense.
Which to me suggests
less, perhaps,
an explicitly political project
and a moral, hopeful project,
as opposed to--
MARK BLITZ: I just want to
say two things on your side
before we go too far
in these direction.
First, to remind us more of
the predictions Nietzsche
makes the great wars.
Those are wars.
Those are wars.
They're not merely, I don't
believe, spiritual wars.
And second, to look a little
bit about the actual reception
of Nietzsche in Germany.
Richard mentioned a somewhat
benign reception for us.
But that certainly is not that
the reception of Nietzsche
in Germany and in
Germany afterwards
all along, and
the alliance there
between even those who took
Nietzsche in a certain sense
in this more spiritual way.
And then the political side
or the fascistic side of it
is a real alliance.
So I don't think one
can ignore his reception
and what Strauss
wants to indicate
is his responsibility
for his reception.
Nor do I think it's all
a complete and utter
misunderstanding by those
who received him and just
a great mistake.
ROBERT PIPPIN:
Just on this part,
we should mention the historical
facts are fairly complicated.
This is all narrated by
Steven Aschheim's book,
a wonderful book on
reception of Nietzsche
in Germany, the
main point of which
is, from the time of
Nietzsche's emergence as a world
phenomenon in the 1890s until
the beginning of the Second
World War, Nietzsche
primarily received or adopted
in many, many
radical left circles,
all the way from vegetarians
to emerging feminists--
PAUL FRANCO: Nudists.
ROBERT PIPPIN: Nudists.
And Aschheim shows in great
detail it was the First World
War that shifted the attention
towards a nationalist
interpretation of Nietzsche,
and every German soldier
in the trench warfare
of the First World War
was given a little copy of Thus
Spoke Zarathustra to carry.
What the German
high command thought
they would make of
soldiers in the dark
with shells flying
around, reading
any one section of Zarathustra
would hard to imagine.
But the reception was
quite complicated,
and it was impacted by
a historical event too.
MARK BLITZ: That
book in one instance
is a good example
of this, actually.
That's what those commanders
did think, that this would
have this forceful effect.
Or maybe they weren't
giving them enough to eat.
[LAUGHING]
They weren't vegetarians.
ROBERT PIPPIN: They
wanted them to be brave.
MARK BLITZ: Yeah, of course.
They wanted them to be brave.
RICHARD VELKLEY: Robert,
I'm sure you would also
bring to bear on this the
phenomenon of the [INAUDIBLE]
circle and the movement
called the [INAUDIBLE]
which, drawing very
much upon Nietzsche,
is chiefly about nobility
and the spiritual rebirth.
But it gets couched in
quite nationalistic terms.
And which on the face of
it, is not necessarily
something alarming, but
it easily lends itself to.
As you know, members in that
circle had sympathies with--
ROBERT PIPPIN:
Well, Strauss's part
was about nobility and rebirth.
RICHARD VELKLEY: Who?
ROBERT PIPPIN: Strauss's.
RICHARD VELKLEY:
Well, yes, of course.
So you're saying he
shouldn't say that at all?
ROBERT PIPPIN: Well, no.
I'm saying a lot of
things can be dangerous.
RICHARD VELKLEY:
Yeah, all right.
But we have to look
at particular cases.
I wouldn't conflate Strauss's
approach with [INAUDIBLE]..
NATHAN TARKOV: I'm happy to open
the floor at this point greet
comments, objections, questions.
They ideally should be
about Strauss on Nietzsche.
But if they're really Strauss
or really about Nietzsche,
that's OK too.
Yes?
Hold on.
Can we have the mic again?
[SIDE CONVERSATION]
AUDIENCE: Thank you very much.
I suppose I just wanted
to ask, Nietzsche
seems like, remarkably
important for the way
Strauss approaches everything.
But like, he doesn't
really give full book
the way someone
like Machiavelli,
or someone like Kant, or
even like City and Man,
which deals with Aristotle,
and Plato, and Thucydides.
So why is it if Nietzsche
is so profoundly central,
Strauss doesn't treat
him as central as some
of the other figures that
seem in some way secondary
to Nietzsche?
NATHAN TARKOV: I am completely
irrelevantly reminded
of sitting over
there, and watching
a production of [INAUDIBLE]
that you directed.
[LAUGHING]
PAUL FRANCO: I would respond.
I mean, I actually--
I mean, there is
that late essay.
But it seems to me that
Strauss, throughout his career,
refers to Nietzsche
as the beginning
of the third wave of modernity.
So it seems to me
in the narrative
of modernity, Strauss
always ascribed
a pretty position to Nietzsche.
I do think the question
you ask is, why did he not
write the book on Nietzsche
that this is substituting for?
And I don't know the
reason, except that--
I think what this
book reflects, and I
think as Robert Pippin brought
out with respect to even
that one essay, it's a very
vexed, complicated position
he has with respect
to Nietzsche that I
wonder to what extent
the very entanglement--
he's partly being
distant from Nietzsche,
but in some ways being
deeply involved, and engaged,
and entangled with
Nietzsche, made it
a formidable and daunting
task to write the book.
RICHARD VELKLEY: And that
reflects the way Nietzsche
himself writes.
So it's not just that
Strauss is personally
finding himself sort of
engaged in a very complicated
interpretive task, but
Nietzsche's own manner
of writing makes it very
difficult to produce something
like a commentary.
I mean, Nietzsche would, in
fact, scorn him, wouldn't he,
of becoming long-winded and
transforming his is aphorisms,
his pithy insights, into
extended commentary.
AUDIENCE: So just
to be clear, then,
are you suggesting that one
of the reasons Strauss doesn't
have a monograph
book response is
because he's making a kind of
Nietzschean aphoristic response
to Nietzsche?
RICHARD VELKLEY: Well, I would
say that late essay does have
something of that character.
Wouldn't you?
AUDIENCE: Yes.
NATHAN TARKOV: We don't
know what Strauss might
have done had he lived longer.
It is striking.
I mean, he devoted the
last year of his life
to teaching Beyond Good and
Evil and wrote that essay.
There's also, has this
been commented on?
I don't remember that.
That the essays that
are included in a book
called Studies In Platonic
Political Philosophy
would mean somehow that
the essay on Nietzsche
is a study in Platonic
political philosophy.
AUDIENCE: And that's
the central essay.
NATHAN TARKOV: I was once
at a conference in Europe
where a Strauss
scholars had said
that if Strauss had accepted
the offer of chair in the '50s,
his big book would
have been on Nietzsche.
MARK BLITZ: I think some of this
is after the fact explanation.
You know, he didn't
write the book,
so one is trying to
explain backwards.
It's a little hard
perspectively to say
if one's sitting here
when Strauss was alive,
what he was thinking about.
That's difficult.
I think it's general
characteristic,
though, many of the later books,
let's say the post-World War
II books, are on thinkers
whose importance, especially
for political philosophies,
is undervalued.
So though everyone kind
of thinks Machiavelli was
important-- certainly not the
way Strauss elevated him--
Xenophon, also,
Aristophanes also.
That wouldn't be a
question about Nietzsche.
So it seems to me that a lot of
his effort in these monographs
is directed toward the
elevation, in a certain sense,
of a particular kind
of figure thinker,
and Nietzsche would not
belong to that group.
But again, that's an
after fact explanation.
PAUL FRANCO: I was
just going to say,
another book that
was not written,
but about a thinker that seems
to occupy Strauss greatly,
is Rousseau.
NATHAN TARKOV: Way back there?
Wave your hands.
[LAUGHING]
AUDIENCE: So thank
you all, all of you,
for a wonderful,
stimulating day.
I'd like to take us
back to the question
of whether the philosophers
could be regarded
as philanthropic or not
philanthropic, political,
or non-political.
I apologize if this takes
us from evaluation back
to interpretation, but we
should interpret correctly
before we evaluate.
So we're assuming, I
think, all the time here,
that Strauss opposes
Plato and Nietzsche.
Nietzsche's seeing philosophy
as philanthropic and political,
Plato not, and
that Strauss takes
Plato's side against Nietzsche.
But I'm wondering if
we can be so sure, so
confident in reading
Strauss that way?
After all, one could
argue that Plato
was a legislator, that
he meant to be one,
and succeeded at being one.
And the interesting
thing, of course,
is that Nietzsche
says exactly this.
So I think one way
of maybe examining
the question of how Strauss
sees the philosopher
and how Strauss
even sees Plato's
conception of
philosophy would be
to look at what
Strauss does or doesn't
say about Nietzsche's
interpretation of Plato
in this regard.
I don't know if it was
Plato, but the subsequent two
millennia of Western thought
and the track that it took,
and that he did so deliberately.
AUDIENCE: And whether there
was something wrong with--
RICHARD VELKLEY: Something
wrong with what Plato did?
AUDIENCE: --what
Plato did [INAUDIBLE]..
NATHAN TARKOV: There
is the segments
where Strauss suggests that--
is it in the introduction
to Persecution and the Art
of Writing or in the--
Plato was too successful in
his effort to make philosophy
at home in the world.
Thoughts?
AUDIENCE: Not only too
successful in that sense,
but also--
I don't know whether
you have this in mind--
but perhaps not giving
all the vast gulf
supposedly between Plato and
Machiavelli, but the ancients
did take steps towards
bringing about a relationship
between philosophy and
politics, a step towards making
use of philosophy to have
an impact on politics,
if only to make
politics somewhat more
hospitable to philosophy.
AUDIENCE: And
maybe to do so, not
through what we would recognize
as overtly political actions,
but by doing something like,
say, teaching a new, more
benign theology that would
have a sort of gentling effect.
And then you could say
maybe Strauss's argument
is with those modern
efforts to rationalize
society and sort of popularize
or publicize philosophy.
In other words, one could
see Plato or the ancients
as regarding philosophy as
potentially a political-- even
a grosse politik,
a great phenomenon,
but not as narrow and
political, and certainly not as
sort of overtly rationalistic.
PAUL FRANCO: Right.
Yeah.
In this view, where we see Plato
being somewhat more political
than we might have
originally thought,
I take that that's, in some
ways, it's from that position
that Strauss is partly
criticizing Nietzsche.
He's not sufficiently political.
He is so non-political,
that he kind of advocates,
you know responsibility, and
even in that Platonic sense
that you're referring too.
And in some ways,
it could lead to--
you know, [INAUDIBLE]
was mentioned before.
I wonder to what
extent he has in
mind [INAUDIBLE] when he talks
about this Nietzschean kind
of complete removal
from politics,
that it leaves a kind of
vacuum into which things
that should be disapproved
of can take over.
AUDIENCE: Just one last thought.
Maybe don't know
if, Mr. Pippin, you
were overseeing Beyond
Good and Evil transcript?
Is that?
Well, in any case,
do we now have
a recollection of
Strauss's presentation,
or interpretation, or commentary
on those passages in Beyond
Good and Evil where Nietzsche
declares the philosopher
as the genuine legislator?
ROBERT PIPPIN: Well, I
mean, in the last essay,
he picks and chooses.
It's just an essay,
so he has a lot things
he has to pick and choose.
And that essay isn't really
as concerned with politics.
That's why Nietzsche complains
about his concern with religion
and the character of
Nietzsche's own religiosity.
As you say, it would be nice
if we had much more written,
carefully worked out detail,
interpretative detail
from Strauss about Nietzsche.
But this essay is
so unusual, even
by these sort of stylistic
standards of the late Strauss,
that I don't think you can
draw all that many conclusion
about politics.
But if it's true that the
great danger of philosophy
creates for itself is its
subversive relationship
to the public
morality of the day,
it's tendency to
corrupt it, provoking
a kind of response of anxiety
and hatred against it.
There's just no
question that Nietzsche
has a lot to answer for.
One aspect of the
political danger--
I mean, I think Nietzsche
is trying, especially
with religion, to offer
a critique of religion.
And sometimes,
it's so outrageous
and is coupled with such
gratitude for religion,
that he's signaling
the last thing he wants
is for people to
stop being religious,
or for Christianity to die out.
I mean, it's just as
paradoxical to say that,
but I think there's
plenty of evidence
that the last thing
he wants is to create
non-religious citizens
of the late modern world.
That would be really dangerous.
But I think Strauss
would have a point
in saying Nietzsche didn't
manage that all that well.
These books were
published in a way.
I mean, anybody who's ever
taught Nietzsche to sophomores
realizes that it's almost
impossible to slow them down.
I know what it sounds like
he's saying, but wait a minute.
Look at this passage.
It's extremely
difficult to do so.
So if the public picture of
philosophy that comes out
of Nietzsche is certainly--
it's deeply unfair to
Nietzsche that he's kind
of corrosive village atheist.
But he has something
to answer for for that.
MARK BLITZ: Let me say a couple
of things about this point.
First, it's not
possible not to have
a relationship, a political
relationship philosophically.
How you deal with that
is a political question
philosophically.
But it's a fact of the
world that the philosopher
lives within some kind
of political community,
is sometimes interested
in students and followers,
is among other things
studying the human beings,
and is thought of in
this way or that way
by political authorities.
So it's not a question you
can choose not to face.
You must face the question.
The issue is how you
face it in the way
is most useful for philosophy,
but also conceivably
for the citizens around you,
and the Platonic attempt,
or even more fundamentally
and visibly the Aristotelian
attempt, and the
politics and the ethics
are perfectly reasonable
and sensible ways to do it.
An attempt to think through
how philosophy could,
in the certain sense, have no
connection to anything harmful,
brings you back to a certain
view of the pre-Socratics
and some of the standpoints
that Heidegger at times
took and failed at.
In terms of Nietzsche,
there are times
when one reads Nietzsche
and one believes
that Nietzsche himself
believes that he's
so unpalatable that there's
nothing to worry about in terms
of harm that he will cause.
And he's incorrect about that.
NATHAN TARKOV: Mike?
AUDIENCE: I hope
I'll be forgiven
for stepping a little bit
out of my assigned role
here by first trying to suggest
that an answer to the question
that Matthew has put forward
about why Strauss didn't write
a book on Nietzsche.
And I think a way
to approach it is
to think about it in terms of
Strauss' corpus, the trajectory
of his own corpus.
So starting with Natural
Right and History,
Natural Right and
History is book that's
got a lot of things in it.
But I think the most
effective description
of it is to say it's
Strauss's attempt
to give the non-historicist
an account of the emergence
of historicism, and the
trajectory of historicism
itself.
He then turns his
attention, actually
for most of the rest of
the time, to Machiavelli.
And the next period culminates
in his Machiavelli book,
which is, I think, his attempt
to come to terms with modernity
per se.
This is his real
statement about modernity.
And it's the move by modernity
to take the step Machiavelli
took that ultimately
leads to historicism,
which is the project he
has just been working at.
After Machiavelli, he turn
turns almost exclusively
to the ancients.
There's hardly anything
that isn't about ancients
in one form or another.
Some of you may have
heard this story,
but back when me and
you were students,
Strauss told the
story of why he came
to the University of Chicago.
NATHAN TARKOV: [INAUDIBLE]
AUDIENCE: He came because he
had a book he wanted to write
on the problem of Socrates.
And he had chapters
on Aristophanes,
et cetera, et cetera,
Xenophon, Plato.
And he came here to Chicago
because they had a press.
And he thought they would
publish his book, because he
thought they would automatically
publish the book of a faculty
member here.
And so I think in
his latter period,
he was actually writing
book by book now this book
he came here to write.
That's at least a speculation
about why no Nietzsche book.
He didn't have time,
given his overall project.
I actually have another
one, a quick question,
which is about Spinoza.
Robert mentioned that Spinoza's
conatus before this relates
to, obviously-- not
obviously, but it perhaps
relates to Nietzsche's
book about it.
So I was wondering any
of you had thoughts
about how Strauss thought
about the relationship
between Spinoza and Nietzsche.
Obviously, he had
written on Spinoza.
That was a figure he had
in his mind somewhere.
So if there's
anything on that, I
would be interested to hear it.
ROBERT PIPPIN: The first
thing that comes to mind--
I mean, Spinoza would
call it necessitarianism,
or the impossibility
of there being
a space for rational reflection
leading toward decision
that one would defend.
But perhaps the right covered
term for the association
is fate, that Nietzsche
was in some sense
or another a fatalist in
the way that Spinoza was.
I mean, we could use all
kinds of different Nietzschean
phrases as a tag phrase for
his most important thought
But amor fati would jump near
the top, given the way it's
used and how important it is.
And Strauss is right that in the
discussion of the natural self
in the Zarathustra lectures,
his idea of there being
a choice between the
last man and superman,
he makes it very
clear that we're
talking about kind of
a boiling cauldron,
you know, and what we
could call kind of passions
emerge as a creative force
on their own and directed.
And he thinks of this
as tied in some way
to the vitality of life itself.
That there's a sense of being
carried along by we suffer
and looking mostly for
freedom as enlightenment
about what we suffer that
sees a deep link with Spinoza.
The other-- I don't know
if Strauss ever commented
on this passage, but Nietzsche
himself identified his closest
association with Spinoza
in the genealogy,
where he's talking about
regret for what I've done.
And he quotes
Spinoza saying, when
I've done something I'm
ashamed of having done,
it's not that I know I
could have acted otherwise,
and I wish I had.
It's that I know, I
learn, that I'm not
the person I thought I was.
That's not a
presage to changing.
That is a deeply
disturbing notion
that's connected to this
idea of, that's who I am.
The difference is
that Spinoza had
this theoretical perspective in
which the individual experience
almost vanishes.
It's an amazing
system in that sense.
So it's not
Nietzschean in spirit.
But with this notion of not
finding a way to deny fatalism,
but learning the absence of
what the Christian tradition has
taught us is the first
prerequisite for a worthy life,
which is that we run it.
We volitionally
determine our own fat.
The question for both
Nietzsche and Spinoza--
I think Strauss was
sensitive to this-- is,
how do we live giving that up?
What would be a form
of life in which
we don't have any confidence
anymore that that's true.
There are elements of that
kind, Spinozistic element
in Nietzsche all over the place.
And he certainly adored Spinoza.
RICHARD VELKLEY: There's a
passage in his [INAUDIBLE]
around the time he formulates
the eternal return,
and he says, I've now
attained an insight
like that of Spinoza.
I've become a
philosopher of that sort.
The whole idea of
eternity at that point
is very much like a
invocation of Spinoza.
PAUL FRANCO: I mean, roughly
at the time Nietzsche's
writing the fourth
book of Gay Science
and [INAUDIBLE] the opening
aphorism on [INAUDIBLE],,
he's writing to his
friend Peter Gast.
I've discovered a
predecessor, namely Spinoza.
And it's interesting.
In some ways, I think
clearly, the kind of thought--
how Spinoza and
Nietzsche understood fate
is quite different.
I think for Spinoza, it's
kind of intelligible order,
whereas for Nietzsche, it's not.
And there's a way in which
Nietzsche appreciated this
as well, because there's a
passage in the [INAUDIBLE]
where Nietzsche
says simply, Deus
sive chaos in contradistinction
to deus sive natura.
ROBERT PIPPIN: Maybe
the right phrase is
they're both deeply
non-Christian philosopher.
PAUL FRANCO: Yes.
NATHAN TARKOV: It is
interesting that Strauss also
just sort leaves Spinoza
behind after the early '40s.
And I think maybe partly--
perhaps this is too crude-- that
Spinoza doesn't fit very well
into his ancient modern saga.
Here's somebody
who's clearly modern,
and yet whose philosophy
culminates in braids
into the philosophic life
exactly what Strauss says
distinguishes the
ancients from the moderns,
is openly defending the
liberty of philosophizing.
He doesn't fit well.
RICHARD VELKLEY: Well, he
does bring that out in a way
he prefaced the
[INAUDIBLE] translations.
He has quite a bit
to say about Spinoza.
But as you're saying,
he [INAUDIBLE]
account of the journey.
He says he is the
great thinker who
synthesizes modern philosophy
with the contemplative account
of philosophy.
[INAUDIBLE]
NATHAN TARKOV: And in a sense,
Nietzsche doesn't fit very well
either insofar as he came
to Beyond Good and Evil
as about philosophy.
Yes, Professor Wellborn.
AUDIENCE: I'm at a disadvantage
in asking this question,
because I haven't
had an opportunity
to read the lectures about
the seminar on Zarathustra.
But I ask it nonetheless.
First of all, a footnote
on the [NON-ENGLISH]..
Before the [NON-ENGLISH] gets
pushed too far in the direction
of the kind of national
socialist fervor,
I would recall that
[? Staufenberg ?] came from
the [NON-ENGLISH] a broad
spectrum of political positions
that emerged out
of that context.
On Nietzsche and [INAUDIBLE],,
there is a brilliant essay
by [INAUDIBLE],, who came out
of the [NON-ENGLISH] himself,
comparing Zarathustra with
the self-mythologization
of [NON-ENGLISH] that I would
in this context as well.
My question is this.
There is an argument to be made
that Nietzsche's philosophy,
as it is represented
in Zarathustra,
can be understood as a
therapeutic enterprise.
I would call attention,
for example, to the chapter
from [INAUDIBLE],, which
is in a certain sense
a chapter of working through a
problematics of how to get out
of a captivation where the
idea of an [INAUDIBLE],,
of how to, as he puts
it, detach or unleash
the will from its
foolishness in wanting
to command the [INAUDIBLE].
A kind of deep,
deep, as it were,
neurotic investment
that has led to a number
of disastrous results.
Or from [INAUDIBLE]
on self-overcoming,
a similar argument
has been made.
By the way, in that context
the concept of [INAUDIBLE] here
is an utterly negative
context, and that's
something to be overcome, at
least the particular formation
of the [INAUDIBLE].
So it seems that there
is a therapeutic project
in Nietzsche that
one could compare
and has often been compared
with Freud in this regard.
Which philosophically
speaking, one
could also compare him
with Wittgenstein's
therapeutic orientation
of philosophy.
My question, first of all,
is whether Strauss picked up
on this therapeutic
motif in Nietzsche,
and whether there was anything
he could make out of it.
Related to that is
the question that
came up in particularly
Professor Velkley's
intervention, before
regarding historicism,
there seems to be a theme
that's running through.
The motto for Nietzsche
that Bernard Williams puts
at the head of the
Truth and Truthfulness
calls not for a
historicism, but it
calls for an historical
philosophizing.
One might say
Nietzsche's project
is a becoming philosophical
of historical thinking
and of becoming historical
of philosophical thinking,
but not only a
rejection of philosophy
on the part of a kind of, let
us say, black positivistic sort
historicism.
The name for that mode
philosophical investigation,
which is historical,
is genealogical.
And that theme, the
theme of genealogy,
is a theme that
has been picked up
in a number of
recent contributions
on Nietzsche's scholarship.
I mentioned [INAUDIBLE]
in this regard, Foucault
in this regard, and most
recently, of course, Williams
in Truth and Truthfulness.
It seems to me-- and Nathan and
I had a conversation on this
once--
that the fragment on
revelation that Heinrich Meyer
published as an appendix
to one of his books--
I think it was otherwise not
published-- that Strauss tried
the kind of steps
that one goes through
in developing revelation.
There is a remarkable
similarity to Nietzsche's
little eight-step piece
in Gotzen-Dammerung
on how truth became a fable.
It's exactly the same
kind of structure and set
of numerical propositions
that generates
from one stage of thought
to another stage of thought
to another stage of thought.
And it struck me that there's
a physiognomic similarity
between those two, and it would
seem that, at that moment,
Strauss might have thought,
well, a genealogical method
is what one needs to talk
about the [INAUDIBLE]..
You can't talk about
it, as it were, head-on.
So there would be
a way in which that
might be a locus in
which Nietzsche's
philosophical historical,
or historical philosophical
inquiry becomes energizing
for Strauss in his thinking.
So my question is, then,
about these two motifs,
the motif of therapy
on the one hand
as a philosophical
project, and the motif
of genealogy on the other
as a philosophical project.
One might also speculate
that therapy and genealogy
are in some sense two
versions of the same project.
ROBERT PIPPIN: Did someone
earlier refer to Strauss
as performing, I guess in
Natural Right and History,
a non-historicist account of the
genesis of historicism, which
is to say also a therapeutic
genealogy that's meant in a way
to cure us of that of
which it gives a genesis.
Perhaps the editors
can say more about what
could be found in his
commentary, have these issues?
RICHARD VELKLEY: I don't
have an adequate response
to this very interesting point.
One of the most important
sections of the third part
of Zarathustra is the
convalescent, is [NON-ENGLISH],,
I suppose.
And Strauss has quite
a bit to say about it.
And unfortunately, I
don't remember what it is.
I have to recover
from my forgetfulness.
ROBERT PIPPIN: One comment
is that, as you know,
the usual way to connect
these two directions,
or to think of them as two
sides of the same thing.
We now inherit some
Foucault. And the idea
is, having been shown the other
contingency of the development
in one direction rather
than another, something
like the whole of that
development almost breaks.
I don't that is, in a
way, a subtle enough way.
I'm not saying you
did, but that's
one way in which people answer
your question, by saying
there is a kind of
enlightenment involved
in the revelation as
a matter of some kind
of historical
philosophical truth
about the demonstration
of contingency.
Whereas if you take seriously
as I do the therapeutic aspect,
you mentioned, involves
Nietzsche addressing us
from his work in a
radically different way,
not in a way that has
as its goal illuminating
the other contingency of the
Christian moral tradition, such
that whens we realize
that-- well, [INAUDIBLE],,
that won't do it.
That won't be an effective
way of therapeutically
accomplishing our release
from a revenge against time,
to use one of his
many characterizations
of the ultimate
sort of [INAUDIBLE]..
So if we mark that in that
way, then the question
of how the way Nietzsche writes
is supposed to be therapeutic,
and how the way he invokes
history is supposed to,
in a way, transform us.
You know, he says about
the reason, the thing
that philosophers and
everybody, within a sense,
admires most about
religion is the saint.
And what they admire
about the saint
is the possibility of
sudden transformation.
That there could be
a moment in our life
that changes forever
in one moment.
And so he shrouds
the possibility
of there being a transformation
in this kind of mystery,
and I think he's
thinking about ways
in which the form of his
book, the way he writes,
could accomplish this.
But we don't have an enough
explicit discussion about that
in the Nietzsche literature.
I mean, just simple things like,
yes, there is [NON-ENGLISH]..
But there is in Beyond Good
and Evil an important chapter
called [NON-ENGLISH],, and
they're quite different.
The [NON-ENGLISH] is
the treatment of morale,
is the treatment of phenomena
that don't have histories.
Natural history
is what he means--
Pliny, Buffon, things like that.
So it's as if he's looking for
various ways in which he could
address the hold that a certain
claim, Christian secular
moralism, has on us, in
an experimental way that
doesn't have an overall
answer to your question.
But the one thing
I would say is,
I don't think it's
Foucault. I don't
think it's the revelation
of contingency alone.
And certainly not
Strauss, I don't think.
But that is the point of
doing an anonymous historicist
genealogy, is to show us it
could have been otherwise,
so why not have it otherwise?
That's not why he mentions it.
MARK BLITZ: I mean,
Strauss hasn't really
emphasized the
therapeutic directly,
but he spends a lot of time
talking about Nietzsche's view
that he has uncovered
a deadly truth.
And the deadly doesn't
liberate by being noticed.
It can liberate only if
Nietzsche somehow overcomes it
and reforms and reformulates it.
But as such, that truth is
deadly and not health-giving.
To the degree which,
at least the transcript
I looked at and edited,
genealogy as such
doesn't really play
among he talks about.
Those strike me as perhaps
the most directly relevant.
ROBERT PIPPIN: Yeah, I
love these passages too,
where Nietzsche is addressing
what he wants to transform.
That one that's in my mind,
I just wrote it out quickly,
a minute ago, is from Beyond
Good and Evil as well.
Jesus said to the Jews,
"The law is for servants.
Love God as I do, as His son.
Why would we care about
morals, we sons of God?"
What does that do?
It is potentially a
transformative moment,
but it doesn't have
a program behind it,
a way of getting you to
see Jesus differently.
Suddenly you have a Gestalt
switch, or something like that.
Love God as I do,
as the Son of God.
What need have we for
morals, we sons of God?
Marvelous passage, but that's
all you get in Nietzsche,
are things like that.
NATHAN TARKOV: Professor Zimmon?
AUDIENCE: There's an
awful lot to talk about.
Let me try to be a little
provocative by saying
that I think it's hard
not to read the transcript
book on Zarathustra without
being somewhat disappointed,
even feeling perhaps that
one has been mislead.
And what I mean by
that is this, Strauss--
certainly by the
time he gave course--
I mean, Strauss
seemed to be persuaded
that Nietzsche and Heidegger
had on the one hand
made the possible a reopening of
the most fundamental questions.
On the other hand,
however, he seemed again
to suggest that while
they reopened them,
there was something
wrong with both of them.
And in order to
overcome what was
wrong with both them--
and I don't mean
to say he simply
equated them-- we
need to go back to the ancients,
and means the Socratics.
So in the transcript, you have
this constant refrain of--
Nietzsche's problem
is he needs nature.
On the other hand, he really
isn't entitled to nature,
or however you want to put it.
And the impressions you get
of the some of the values--
I'm oversimplifying,
grossly, and maybe
being unfair to Strauss.
Well, what we need,
the ancients had.
And we really do is
recover what they had.
And what does that mean?
Well, what does nature
mean, say for Plato?
And very often, Strauss
talks as if we were
the answer to that question.
You know, there is on the
one hand, there's Eros.
On the other hand,
there are these forms.
Blah, blah, blah.
But we know that that's
not Strauss's view.
Right?
Or certainly not the whole
of his view, maybe even not--
Strauss, after all, is famous
for rediscovering Plato
without ideas
following [INAUDIBLE]..
So there is
something misleading,
insofar as Strauss
seems to suggest, well,
there is this choice between
Nietzsche and nature,
or Nietzsche and Plato.
And yet, either Strauss appeals
to a conventional understanding
of Platonism or a conventional
understanding of nature.
And he's careful not
to do the latter,
as I think somebody pointed
out, which he himself
doesn't believe.
And therefore, it's not
exactly clear-- well,
it's not clear at all to me--
where Strauss finally stands
with respect to Nietzsche
and his relationship
to Nietzsche.
And I don't think it's possible
to answer that question
without having a much better
understanding than Strauss
provided in his own
works about, let's say,
the ancients'
understanding of nature.
One point in to response to
this whole questions of-- yes,
of course, there are many
ways in which Nietzsche
was received, and
that was inevitable.
But I think there's a very good
chance, as I understand it,
if you read Strauss's essay
on German nihilism, which
is a very important statement.
And if you take seriously what
Professor Pippin had said,
that Strauss thought that
Nietzsche's diagnosis was
basically correct,
well, then, I think
Strauss was probably very
sympathetic with the view
of reaction to Nietzsche, or
the understanding of Nietzsche
that he presents in the lecture
on German nihilism, which
was 1940.
The outlook of the
German nihilist
students, and the
problem was not
that they're outlook was wrong.
I mean, it was incomplete.
The problem was
that their teachers
were themselves nihilists and
had nothing to offer them.
But what does Strauss
appeal to in that essay?
He appeals to--
surely, he doesn't
appeal to sort of liberal
democracy as simply understood.
He appeals to Winston
Churchill, the British empire--
this is 1940, you remember.
Maybe two years later, he
would have appealed to Franklin
Roosevelt and America.
But Strauss once, in his
correspondence with Lowith--
Lowith is horrified by
Strauss's radicalism,
meaning Nietzsche's radicalism.
He sees Strauss as reopening
Nietzsche's radicalism.
And Lowith said, nope, nope.
That's not for me.
For me, we need to
return to Burckhardt.
And Strauss says, uh-uh,
Burckhardt won't do.
And I think you could
say, even in 1940,
what, for all political
purposes, Churchill was great.
From the philosophical
point of view, uh-uh,
Churchill won't do either.
So I think this issue of
what follows politically,
if anything, if it is true
that Nietzsche's diagnosis is
correct, and correct
meaning, after all,
this diagnosis is the diagnosis
of the next 200 years, he says,
what follows, if
anything, politically?
And I don't think
it's enough to say,
well, Nietzsche
was irresponsible.
I think the question is, well,
what is responsible in 1933?
And now, which might
be a replay of 1933.
ROBERT PIPPIN: Well,
you know, any response
is going to be pretty
lame at this late hour.
I mean, you know,
fight the Cold War.
Support Israel.
Strauss had political position.
I'm not sure we should
think of them as descending
from his philosophy.
AUDIENCE: Oh, I
think you're right.
You're--
ROBERT PIPPIN: But I
also think that what
we were talking about before is
probably as far as we'll get.
Prudence.
You know?
Take the best option
available to you.
I mean, your
question, though, as
to what he offers us
raises, for me, a question
I'd like to ask Richard
or anybody else--
Nathan-- who had to do
with the manuscripts.
There's plenty of reason to
believe that Strauss took--
I don't think he was being
ironic-- very seriously
that he was hired as
political science professor,
and that that was strictly the
kind of things he should teach.
And when I looked over
the Zarathustra lectures,
I think I've read all--
you know, back in the '70s, you
could get all of these lectures
if you paid $7 and you were
on the secret list that
approved you for
getting them, and you
had to swear you'd never show
them to anybody, and so forth.
MARK BLITZ: I think
I was charged $9.
[LAUGHING]
ROBERT PIPPIN: I'm
older than you are.
And they're all--
I mean, you mentioned
that they're dissatisfied.
I started to have the
impression with the Zarathustra
lecture, when you think
about things like calling him
the spokesman and ignoring
so much of the drama
of Zarathustra and
happens after-- you know,
the relationship between the
overman and the eternal return,
and changing and enduring.
You know, is it possible
to say that Strauss
took his obligations
as a teacher different,
as imposing on different
requirements than--
I've always wondered about the
publication of the lectures
for just this reason.
It would help enormously if we
had some statement about him.
Of course, it would
in some way undermine
the power of what he's teaching
to say, I'm not telling you
the whole story here, because
you're not going to understand
it, but I want to give you
a kind of rough outline
of the Zarathustra book,
is ultimately inadequate.
Or did he regard
himself as obligated
to try to teach his own
interpretation from beginning
to end of every book he taught?
Or is there a way of
answering that question?
NATHAN TARKOV: I think just
by reading the transcript,
it's clear that not the latter.
He teaches books where
he has not worked
out a full interpretation.
He's teaching it out of
pedagogical responsibility,
and also presumably
to help himself later
toward getting to--
ROBERT PIPPIN: I mean,
teaching things he knows
are inadequate when he
knows what is adequate,
because he doesn't think
it's suitable for teaching.
Not because it's
politically dangerous,
it's because he thinks it's
the limitations of the students
at that stage of their
career, so that we don't
have a reading in the text--
the direction you're going
in is like, well, this
is as much as he could
adequately say then,
as he presented it.
But there's also the possibility
that he knew it was inadequate.
MARK BLITZ: There
are certainly times
when it's hard not to say
that his formulations are
more general or gross, you
might say, given the purpose.
A good example would be
on this issue of discovery
versus production, and as
we discussed Friday as well.
So I mean, it's
clear that there are
times where the
formulation is meant
to be adequate for that
stage in the conversation
in the classroom.
That's, I think,
the center of it.
ROBERT PIPPIN: But Dick has
asked a very good question.
That was a digression.
I didn't mean to cut
off any further ability
to answer to that question.
MARK BLITZ: You know, one
thing, Dick, you could look at--
I mean, in these transcripts,
this has been mentioned before.
He distinguishes Nietzsche
from Tocqueville,
Nietzsche's deeper
and so on and so on.
But it's not so clear that
from the political point
of view, the analysis it's not
already there in Tocqueville.
And therefore, one could
look at what Tocqueville
might think of as
reasonable, but never simply
adequate responses.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, except that
by the end of his life,
Tocqueville had given up.
He thought that his
early project had failed,
and I think that
Strauss would agree.
MARK BLITZ: The end of your life
is not always your best moment.
[LAUGHING]
NATHAN TARKOV: I see a hand.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] his famous
line from Karamazov Brothers,
Dostoevksy.
If God doesn't exist,
everything permitted.
My question is, is it
he had cited Nietzsche,
or Nietzsche cited him, or is
two independent statements?
My second short question
is, while we understand
that Donald Trump never
read Nietzsche and never
maybe thought of
Nietzsche, do you
think he is real superman, who
does not believe in morals,
think that he is over
anything and really
a superman that
nothing could touch?
ROBERT PIPPIN: He certainly
doesn't believe in truth.
NATHAN TARKOV: What
did you say, Robert?
ROBERT PIPPIN: Trump.
He certainly doesn't
believe in truth.
NATHAN TARKOV: Oh, Trump.
[LAUGHING]
I didn't know who you
were talking about.
Some obscure German
philosopher, Trump.
[LAUGHING]
PAUL FRANCO: I do believe
that the Dostoevsky
formulation proceeds the
Nietzschean formulation.
NATHAN TARKOV: Nietzsche
referred to Dostoevsky
to write that quotation.
AUDIENCE: Dostoevsky's
Karamazov Brothers,
I don't remember exactly the
year of when it was published,
but it's very close, actually
[INAUDIBLE] before Nietzsche.
I don't know.
But it's so clear that actually
Nietzsche read the Dostoevsky.
NATHAN TARKOV: Very late.
Yes.
And I think Nietzsche
came to Dostoevsky just
a year or two before
he went insane.
Yeah.
RICHARD VELKLEY: Said he
was great psychologist.
Nietzsche is.
Although [INAUDIBLE].
NATHAN TARKOV: I see a hand
all the way in the back.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
Thank you so much.
My name's Isaac.
In Strauss's course
on Plato's Republic,
he probably makes one of
the most extended comments
about Platonic metaphysics
that you could ever
get out of Strauss.
And in a way, could
Plato's metaphysics
could be kind of
considered maybe
his most corrupting teaching,
because it's so delightful.
It's the thing
that's most pleasant.
And he's delivering this to
his students in the classroom,
and--
I mean, in his essay
in [INAUDIBLE],,
he does not make as nearly as
an extended point about this.
And so, I was wondering
if you guys thought
that in the political purpose
of that he talks about serving
in his classes was in any
way undermined or complicated
by sort of metaphysical
speculations
that underwent that he
conducted in those settings?
NATHAN TARKOV:
Professor Velkley says
he's not sure what you mean.
AUDIENCE: My question is that--
there seems to be a question
as to whether or not
Strauss is getting a sort
of political education
to students in the classroom.
And there seems to be a
question as whether or not
he's giving a political
education about the history
of political philosophy to
us in his published writings.
Do you think that
Strauss in any way
undermined his own project
by discussing metaphysics
in an extended way?
RICHARD VELKLEY:
Are you referring
to a particular discussion?
Did you say Plato's Republic?
AUDIENCE: Yeah, the 1957 course.
RICHARD VELKLEY: Where he's
discussing the divided line.
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
RICHARD VELKLEY:
The ideas of good.
I'm find it very hard to answer.
No, it isn't that
evident to me that that
would undermine what he did.
But it all the depends on
the nature of the discussion.
I can't recall--
MARK BLITZ: There's a section
we were discussing about someone
else among ourselves
earlier in "What
is Political Philosophy,"
where Strauss talks
about the limits of knowledge
because of homogeneity
and a noetic heterogeneity.
I don't think that that
discussion-- it's brief,
but it's not tiny--
undermines.
If any thing, the
other way around.
I think it helps secure elements
of his particular approach,
because he means to leave open
still, not infinitely open,
but open still several
of the kind of issues
that you might categorize
under the term metaphysics.
And that's in his
published work.
PAUL FRANCO: You know,
I'm still thinking
about this question of what
Strauss as teacher is doing.
NATHAN TARKOV: What?
PAUL FRANCO: What Strauss
as teacher is doing
and his mode of communication.
And I don't think you
were suggesting this,
but I don't, from what I've read
here and in some of the other--
I don't get the
sense that this is
a kind of esoteric
communication, where
he's trying to not disclose
dark truths to his students.
I don't get that impression.
I sometimes feel that he does
what all good teachers do,
which is sometimes when
you're with students,
you use the simple
formulation because that's--
so when he, for example, with
the Platonic Eros versus will
to power, kind of
use an understanding
of Platonic Eros
that is relatively,
you know, to bring out the
contrast, relatively bold.
Complications can come later,
and depending on where thing
go, he might bring them out.
But I don't get a sense
of a deep strategy here.
ROBERT PIPPIN: No, I didn't mean
to suggest that, as you said.
But there's a tradition in,
say, the general philosophical
tradition, of
publishing your lecture.
But that's because before
you gave your lectures,
they were prepared with enormous
amount of care for publication.
I mean, Heidegger's
collected works
would fill half this room,
because he did everything
to prepare the publisher.
And that's certainly
not the case with these.
And that means, for
scholars, that the ability
to cite when you're talking
what he says in published
is complicated.
And I'm not sure how
complicated, because we don't
have much evidence to go on.
I agree, he's not trying
to hide something.
But you're right,
that he's introducing
a complicated figure.
You often cut a few corners,
make things really cartoonish.
You know, sometimes you
even draw a cartoon.
PAUL FRANCO: Guilty.
ROBERT PIPPIN: Yeah, we all are.
We all are.
And I don't really any
of my lectures published,
because I didn't prepare
them for publication.
And I'm wondering, his seem
a little more carefully
thought out.
But he might be
not saying things
he would say about Nietzsche,
given that he's just trying
to introduce students to him.
PAUL FRANCO: In fact,
this is a question I have.
Richard, you might
be able to answer.
I mean, where these--
I actually am not clear how
much he went into the class
with as far as these--
it was not much.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
PAUL FRANCO: Is that right?
Pretty impressive.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] Strauss
may have [INAUDIBLE],, which
is in his Hegel course,
philosophy of history,
He said Hegel knew the
difference between what
you should say in
a lecture and what
you should write in a book.
And he was very conscious of it.
I think it's hard not to see
that he did that in lectures.
NATHAN TARKOV: But also
in the Hegel transcripts,
Strauss defends
the fact that he's
teaching lectures rather
than simple texts.
PAUL FRANCO: Absolutely.
NATHAN TARKOV: And says,
in some ways, lectures
can be livelier and more
accessible than a written
text, which I think
[INAUDIBLE] ended up
quoting in the introduction
to your transcript.
PAUL FRANCO: Exactly.
NATHAN TARKOV: And in
the introduction to all
the transcripts, the final
sentence, which I signed,
is "However enlightening
the transcripts are,
they cannot be regarded as
the equivalent of works that
Strauss himself wrote
for publication.
In that respect,
they're different say,
from some of the individual
lectures he gave,
that he did some that
he did write out word
for word on his
papers that he gave,
especially in the New York era.
Things like "what can we
learn from political theory?"
He wrote them out word
for word, and did not
choose to publish them,
so they're sort of
an intermediate between the
these things that he didn't
write, and you can even tell,
especially say, in the lecture
course that Catherine had
edited, that at some places,
he seems to have a pretty
elaborate text that he's
reading from,
unlike the seminars,
where he is responding to
what the student reader just
read out loud.
I share, as that
sentence that I insisted
upon including
indicates, I don't
think these should be regarded
as carefully given texts
like the ones he published.
And if it were the case
that he, like Robert,
wouldn't want them ,
published, I don't care,
because it's interesting
to us to read them.
But isn't the case, because
Strauss signed the contract
with Phantom books--
I have a copy of it--
to publish three of them.
So he was willing
to publish them.
Maybe it was just for the money.
I don't know.
But he was willing
to publish them,
and therefore, I
would not consider
it to be a matter of going
contrary to his wishes.
AUDIENCE: Which were the three?
NATHAN TARKOV: The
Republic, The Symposium,
and a third that I'm forgetting.
AUDIENCE: But it's important
to remember the distinction
that Mr. Pippin remarked on.
That is, Strauss,
at one point, he
says Heidegger's
Nietzsche is the best
introduction to Nietzsche.
But he disagree, in
important ways, probably.
But he once also
said, at least to me,
that he thought a
case could be made
that Nietzsche lectures were the
best introduction to Heidegger
for an American student.
MARK BLITZ: He says that
in a transcript also.
AUDIENCE: Excuse me?
MARK BLITZ: He says that
in a transcript also.
AUDIENCE: Does he?
MARK BLITZ: Not
relevant, probably.
AUDIENCE: And yet,
Heidegger's lectures
were written almost
as if they were books.
So yes, they're more accessible
than Heidegger's, workbooks,
of which there aren't
that many actually,
but there still a big gap
between Hegel's lectures
or Heidegger's lectures
on the one hand
and Strauss's
courses on the other.
There are some exceptions,
The Symposium course
that I'm editing--
I apologize-- where the
second half of the course, he
is essentially reading
from the text that
became the first
chapter of [INAUDIBLE]..
But that, as far as
[? Heidegger, ?] very, very
un-Nietzsche.
And even there, he
reads from the text,
and he pauses to
elaborate or discuss,
he doesn't necessarily go
deeper than he did in the text.
MARK BLITZ: There are times in
his transcripts, where maybe
those of you've have taken the
courses has seen that he did it
the same way, where he
does begin with what
seems like set piece summary.
And those appear to have
been either written out
or fully thought out.
There are a lot of elements
of that and instances of that
in these things, as opposed
to where he's merely
responding to a reader.
NATHAN TARKOV: Well, I would
like to once again thank
Richard Schiffrin, who made
this possible, Gayle McKeen, who
makes it work, and above, our
four speakers for everything
said today.
[APPLAUSE]
There is a reception outside.
There is wine being served.
