Wow! Alas poor Leo Strauss, z'tl, who is not alive to defend himself and I have not the learning to do it adequately myself.
Unlike the learned on this site, I have the disadvatage of having attended the University of Chicago in the late 1960's, and while I was unable to take a course from Strauss, who left for Claremont during my first year, I did take one from his long time colleague and co-author, Joseph Cropsey. And all I can tell you is that Henry's posting is a caricature of what I remember having learned at that time. Although I am sure that Henry will improve in Brian Leiter's estimation.
If you wish to learn more about Leo Strauss from a truly learned source, I would suggest looking at Arnaldo Momigliano, Essays on Ancient and Modern Judaism, Ch. 17 "Hermeneutics and Classical Political Thought in Leo Strauss" (UChicago 1994).
Rightly or wrongly, I detect in Henry, DeLong and Leiter a jealousy that leads them to deride that which they cannot equal or surpass. Strauss belongs to your grandfathers' generation. Anthony Grafton wrote about them when he wrote this:
"Every one of them benefited from an education unimaginably more rigorous than ours, read the forgotten classics of literatures whose existence is hardly known to us, burned with rage at the pamphlets of forgotten radical sects—and then used the shining, drop-forged tools that they had mastered in Gymnasium and liceo and yeshiva to break every rule and to transgress every boundary. Their mental and moral qualities challenge comprehension now—as they often did in their own day. Gullivers in a variety of Lilliputs, the exiles discovered before they even left Europe that they had the right and the duty to embark on unconventional intellectual careers, in the teeth of family opposition, anti-Semitism, inflation, Fascism, Nazism. How did they know? How did they dare? And how will we convey whatever we can learn of their accomplishments intelligibly and attractively to readers to whom the traditions of Jewish and European learning are an unknown country?"
One minute Robert. There's some history to my post. Read here and here first--including the comments.
That said, the one part of your comment I take issue with is where you ascribe a motive (and the same motive at that) to Henry, Brad DeLong, and Brian Leiter. I have no idea why they think what they think of Strauss and I very much doubt that Brad DeLong, who has shown himself to be a fair thinker, has the same motivations as Brian Leiter.
I thought it was completly unhinged, and yes, I did read the last line.
As for Leiter, the one syllable summary would be "jerk." I thought his treatment of Josh Cherniss was shamefull. Months later he is still at it. Read this:
I can only assume that Leo Strauss killed Leiter's father and stole Leiter's patrimony, or maybe Leiter is off his meds.
I thought Henry's comment was completly in the weeds. It reminded me of a post I read on some undergrads blog where he was arguing that David Hume was really a PoMo.
I was trying to tie together these attacks on a man who I regard with great admiration. I choose the word jealousy not as a statment of overt motivation but more as a Freudian interpetation of the wellsprings of their animus towards Strauss. I think one defect of the current generation of scholars is revealed by this quote:
"I firmly believe that the "linguistic turn" and postmodern theory have left us technically more proficient as historians even if we utterly reject (as I largely do) the intellectual premises or outlook of most postmodernist thought. The range of evidentiary material that historians have learned to look for and think about has widened a thousandfold in the past two decades. The skill that we bring to reading any single document has been massively enriched by the guild's professional encounters with literary criticism and anthropology. We now have disciplined, substantial strategies for recognizing that a single sentence in a document can contain within it many meanings and even many authors."
If he is serious, and I could find no indication that he was not, he is showing an arrogance that could only come from ignorance of the classic works of scholarship and history. I quoted Anthony Grafton, who is an outstanding Rennisance Historian at Princeton, because he appreciates how vast the intellectual gap between Leo Strauss and his contemporaries and Henry and Tim and their contemporaries is. Its like the story of Modern Art. The first generation learned the rules and broke them, the second generation tried to imitate the first without ever having learned the rules, and now they sit around in salons and cop attitudes.
Robert: Ah, yes, the Greatest Generation. How could we forget? How little are we compared to our exalted ancestors.
Posted by Walt Pohl · October 4, 2003 03:21 AM
Walt: In the case of the Boomers, and I are one, that is the sad truth.
"But he himself went a day's journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a juniper tree: and he requested for himself that he might die; and said, It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life; for I am not better than my fathers." 1 Kg 19:4
Posted by Robert Schwartz · October 4, 2003 05:46 AM
My comment from the thread at CT:
Wow! Alas poor Leo Strauss, z'tl, who is not alive to defend himself and I have not the learning to do it adequately myself.
Unlike the learned on this site, I have the disadvatage of having attended the University of Chicago in the late 1960's, and while I was unable to take a course from Strauss, who left for Claremont during my first year, I did take one from his long time colleague and co-author, Joseph Cropsey. And all I can tell you is that Henry's posting is a caricature of what I remember having learned at that time. Although I am sure that Henry will improve in Brian Leiter's estimation.
If you wish to learn more about Leo Strauss from a truly learned source, I would suggest looking at Arnaldo Momigliano, Essays on Ancient and Modern Judaism, Ch. 17 "Hermeneutics and Classical Political Thought in Leo Strauss" (UChicago 1994).
Rightly or wrongly, I detect in Henry, DeLong and Leiter a jealousy that leads them to deride that which they cannot equal or surpass. Strauss belongs to your grandfathers' generation. Anthony Grafton wrote about them when he wrote this:
"Every one of them benefited from an education unimaginably more rigorous than ours, read the forgotten classics of literatures whose existence is hardly known to us, burned with rage at the pamphlets of forgotten radical sects—and then used the shining, drop-forged tools that they had mastered in Gymnasium and liceo and yeshiva to break every rule and to transgress every boundary. Their mental and moral qualities challenge comprehension now—as they often did in their own day. Gullivers in a variety of Lilliputs, the exiles discovered before they even left Europe that they had the right and the duty to embark on unconventional intellectual careers, in the teeth of family opposition, anti-Semitism, inflation, Fascism, Nazism. How did they know? How did they dare? And how will we convey whatever we can learn of their accomplishments intelligibly and attractively to readers to whom the traditions of Jewish and European learning are an unknown country?"
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030303&s=grafton030303
In my estimation you all have a long way to go before the rocks you like to throw reach the vicinity of their marks.
Posted by Robert Schwartz · October 3, 2003 11:06 PM
Posted by Robert Schwartz | Link to this comment | 10- 3-03 6:10 PM
One minute Robert. There's some history to my post. Read here and here first--including the comments.
That said, the one part of your comment I take issue with is where you ascribe a motive (and the same motive at that) to Henry, Brad DeLong, and Brian Leiter. I have no idea why they think what they think of Strauss and I very much doubt that Brad DeLong, who has shown himself to be a fair thinker, has the same motivations as Brian Leiter.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 10- 3-03 6:26 PM
I dragged DeLong into the controversy because I followed a link given by one of the commentors in the thread:
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001589.html
I thought it was completly unhinged, and yes, I did read the last line.
As for Leiter, the one syllable summary would be "jerk." I thought his treatment of Josh Cherniss was shamefull. Months later he is still at it. Read this:
http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000252.html
also Leiter commented on this post (at this hour those comments are down):
http://www.professorbainbridge.com/2003/09/conservatives_i.html#comments
I can only assume that Leo Strauss killed Leiter's father and stole Leiter's patrimony, or maybe Leiter is off his meds.
I thought Henry's comment was completly in the weeds. It reminded me of a post I read on some undergrads blog where he was arguing that David Hume was really a PoMo.
I was trying to tie together these attacks on a man who I regard with great admiration. I choose the word jealousy not as a statment of overt motivation but more as a Freudian interpetation of the wellsprings of their animus towards Strauss. I think one defect of the current generation of scholars is revealed by this quote:
"I firmly believe that the "linguistic turn" and postmodern theory have left us technically more proficient as historians even if we utterly reject (as I largely do) the intellectual premises or outlook of most postmodernist thought. The range of evidentiary material that historians have learned to look for and think about has widened a thousandfold in the past two decades. The skill that we bring to reading any single document has been massively enriched by the guild's professional encounters with literary criticism and anthropology. We now have disciplined, substantial strategies for recognizing that a single sentence in a document can contain within it many meanings and even many authors."
-- Tim Burke http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/tburke1/perma92903.html
If he is serious, and I could find no indication that he was not, he is showing an arrogance that could only come from ignorance of the classic works of scholarship and history. I quoted Anthony Grafton, who is an outstanding Rennisance Historian at Princeton, because he appreciates how vast the intellectual gap between Leo Strauss and his contemporaries and Henry and Tim and their contemporaries is. Its like the story of Modern Art. The first generation learned the rules and broke them, the second generation tried to imitate the first without ever having learned the rules, and now they sit around in salons and cop attitudes.
From the CT thread:
http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000623.html
Robert: Ah, yes, the Greatest Generation. How could we forget? How little are we compared to our exalted ancestors.
Posted by Walt Pohl · October 4, 2003 03:21 AM
Walt: In the case of the Boomers, and I are one, that is the sad truth.
"But he himself went a day's journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a juniper tree: and he requested for himself that he might die; and said, It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life; for I am not better than my fathers." 1 Kg 19:4
Posted by Robert Schwartz · October 4, 2003 05:46 AM
Posted by Robert Schwartz | Link to this comment | 10- 4-03 12:19 AM