![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
High today, here: 19. Dewpoint then: 0. High dewpoint: 3.
High today in TO: 21. Dewpoint then: 2. High dewpoint: 3.
Low today on the balcony: 10.8. High: 20.8. Currently: 14.
Can it really be that I'm making the only May Day reference I've seen today? A few years ago, it was inescapable. Where'd all those pagans go?
Painfully slowly making my way through Bloom's Republic commentary, which is a shame, because it's fantastically intelligent. I see he's got my fittingness angle covered. Or at least that he's on to it. I have always been a Straussian, apparently.
Last night I read a section of Peter Levine's Nietzsche and the Modern Crisis of the Humanities, on Strauss, which Levine has on the web. It argues that Strauss is really a nihilist, and that he learned his exoteric/esoteric manner of writing from Nietzsche. His evidence that Nietzsche writes in that manner is really feeble, if not outright irrelevant (e.g., Nietzsche says that "morality must be shot at" to make it stronger--but if that indicates an exoteric/esoteric split (which is wildly implausible anyway), it's exactly the opposite of Strauss's supposed Nietzschean/nihilist one). Anyway, this section is, in essence, just some more commentary of the worst kind, though I learned some interesting things from it, the most interesting being that Strauss apparently said that the great exoteric/esoteric writers place their true thoughts in the exact centre of their books. Which you might just think is kind of wacky, but the thing is, my supervisor (who is by no detectable means any kind of Straussian, but then real Straussians wouldn't be, would they?) likes to say that the most important part of important books is almost always to be found within a page or two of dead centre. (I don't know how this dead centre method might be applied to books like Being and Time or Hegel's Phenomenology, which are, or are apparently, truncated toward the end for basically accidental reasons.)
The business about the relationship between Strauss's and Heidegger's readings of the ancients also comes up, partly via a discussion of Bloom, who's quoted saying that Strauss wants to understand the ancients as they understood themselves; Levine says that Strauss wants to "creatively mis-read" the ancients, like Heidegger--which I think is a terrible misunderstanding of how Heidegger reads philosophers: Heidegger, I think, reads Plato the way I was saying the other day that I read philosophers, which is to say, in a sense, phenomenologically, with a view to the phenomenon that Plato is trying to grasp ... such that, in a way, you might say that Heidegger tries to be truer to Plato's thought than Plato managed to be himself. That, I think, is the ideal that I strive for in reading and commentary (not that I imagine myself managing anything better than someone like Plato, but ya know). And I was thinking, as I was reading Levine's bit, that Strauss, as Levine constructs him, sounds like he might read and write in a similar way; I wonder whether what Levine reads as nihilism is really a probing engagement with every thought. As the commentaries generally note, the most striking thing about Strauss's work is that Strauss doesn't appear in it: it all (or the great bulk of it, and all of it that I've seen) has the appearance of exegesis. And then the commentators and critics try to sift through and figure out in whose mouths Strauss puts his true thoughts. I wonder whether, for Strauss, like Heidegger, in all thought there is truth--thought is truth taking place.
High today in TO: 21. Dewpoint then: 2. High dewpoint: 3.
Low today on the balcony: 10.8. High: 20.8. Currently: 14.
Can it really be that I'm making the only May Day reference I've seen today? A few years ago, it was inescapable. Where'd all those pagans go?
Painfully slowly making my way through Bloom's Republic commentary, which is a shame, because it's fantastically intelligent. I see he's got my fittingness angle covered. Or at least that he's on to it. I have always been a Straussian, apparently.
Last night I read a section of Peter Levine's Nietzsche and the Modern Crisis of the Humanities, on Strauss, which Levine has on the web. It argues that Strauss is really a nihilist, and that he learned his exoteric/esoteric manner of writing from Nietzsche. His evidence that Nietzsche writes in that manner is really feeble, if not outright irrelevant (e.g., Nietzsche says that "morality must be shot at" to make it stronger--but if that indicates an exoteric/esoteric split (which is wildly implausible anyway), it's exactly the opposite of Strauss's supposed Nietzschean/nihilist one). Anyway, this section is, in essence, just some more commentary of the worst kind, though I learned some interesting things from it, the most interesting being that Strauss apparently said that the great exoteric/esoteric writers place their true thoughts in the exact centre of their books. Which you might just think is kind of wacky, but the thing is, my supervisor (who is by no detectable means any kind of Straussian, but then real Straussians wouldn't be, would they?) likes to say that the most important part of important books is almost always to be found within a page or two of dead centre. (I don't know how this dead centre method might be applied to books like Being and Time or Hegel's Phenomenology, which are, or are apparently, truncated toward the end for basically accidental reasons.)
The business about the relationship between Strauss's and Heidegger's readings of the ancients also comes up, partly via a discussion of Bloom, who's quoted saying that Strauss wants to understand the ancients as they understood themselves; Levine says that Strauss wants to "creatively mis-read" the ancients, like Heidegger--which I think is a terrible misunderstanding of how Heidegger reads philosophers: Heidegger, I think, reads Plato the way I was saying the other day that I read philosophers, which is to say, in a sense, phenomenologically, with a view to the phenomenon that Plato is trying to grasp ... such that, in a way, you might say that Heidegger tries to be truer to Plato's thought than Plato managed to be himself. That, I think, is the ideal that I strive for in reading and commentary (not that I imagine myself managing anything better than someone like Plato, but ya know). And I was thinking, as I was reading Levine's bit, that Strauss, as Levine constructs him, sounds like he might read and write in a similar way; I wonder whether what Levine reads as nihilism is really a probing engagement with every thought. As the commentaries generally note, the most striking thing about Strauss's work is that Strauss doesn't appear in it: it all (or the great bulk of it, and all of it that I've seen) has the appearance of exegesis. And then the commentators and critics try to sift through and figure out in whose mouths Strauss puts his true thoughts. I wonder whether, for Strauss, like Heidegger, in all thought there is truth--thought is truth taking place.
