Archives for November 2024

Laurence Lampert: Strauss, Plato, Nietzsche: Philosophy and Its Poetry. Lectures 3 and 4: “Socrates Philosophic Poetry” and “Socrates Becomes Socrates.” Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2024.

 

In his first two lectures, Lampert, following Leo Strauss, distinguishes between philosophy and philosophic poetry. In times of religious crisis, when the gods of the polis are no longer credible, especially among the youth, the future rulers of the polis, the activity of philosophy itself might come under threat. Under this circumstance, a philosopher might make a ‘politic’ intervention, proposing a new or at least reformed or reinterpreted myth, one that will convince the young and incline them to friendship toward philosophy and philosophers. In his second pair of lectures, Lampert considers Plato’s strategy in more detail, to some extent still through a ‘Straussian’ lens but very much with his own eyes.

How did “Socrates become Socrates,” a philosopher but also a political philosopher? This occurred in two steps: Socrates first became a philosopher, one who understands “the fundamental truths of being and knowing, nature tout court and human nature, and only then a political philosopher, “a teacher of a theological-political view” that will prove edifying in his time and place. Lampert takes these matters in reverse order, devoting his first of the two lectures to “how Socrates became the political philosopher he became.”

Of the 35 Platonic dialogues, 26 are performed, amounting to scholars now call ‘closet dramas,’ plays intended to be read, not performed. Nine dialogues are narrated or reported, six by Socrates, three by others. Lampert selects three of the Socrates-reported dialogues: the Protagoras, the Charmides, and the Republic. These dialogues reveal not only what Socrates was thinking at the time he wrote the dialogue but what Athens, his polis, was doing in Socrates’ time, and what Athenians were thinking and feeling. That is, they show the philosopher thinking about what philosophic poetry he might make that would prudently address the political circumstances of Athens, very much in view of how those circumstances might injure those few Athenians who love wisdom so much that they devote their lives to that love.

The arguments and actions Socrates reports in the Republic (in the Greek, Politeia or Regime) occur in early June of 429 BCE, the third year of what would become a twenty-year war between Athens and Sparta, the second summer of the devastating plague described so graphically by Thucydides. One of the participants in the dialogue refers to the feast of Bendideia; this feast honored Bendis, a foreign goddess whose consort was a healer-god. In the experience of all those alive at the time, this was the first time a foreign god was honored by Athens. What is worse, under the pressures of war and disease, but not only of war and disease, some Athenians suffer from “a spiritual crisis” that Thucydides also described. Plato sets the Charmides only a month earlier, upon Socrates’ return from a foreign polis, having spoken not to a healer-god but to a doctor who taught him “new things.” Finally, the Protagoras‘ dramatic date is before the war, about 434 BCE, when “the great city of Athens [was] at the very height of its power and glory.” Lampert accordingly begins with an interpretation of the Protagoras.

In his dialogue with the 65-year old Protagoras, then called Greece’s wisest man, “the founder of the Greek enlightenment,” Socrates, nearly thirty years his junior. “steps forward to restrain and redirect” the great man. In Socrates’ estimation, Protagoras is “too outspoken,” “not cautious enough.” Being so, he “puts the whole enlightenment at risk with his inadequate exotericism,” his “failure to hide adequately his own skeptical views,” which “has led the younger generation to mistrust their gods.” In leading the young to mistrust their gods, Protagoras “seem[s] to them to destroy the reasons for living a moral life, a life of justice.” What is more, Socrates hopes to “attract and win as his own student the young Alcibiades,” one of the witnesses to the dialogue, who is “the most promising young Athenian of all those who aspire to political glory and greatness.” [1] If he abandons morality, and especially if he abandons justice, very bad consequences could ensue for Athens and possibly for philosophers in Athens. Recognizing that Alcibiades will never become a philosopher, Socrates intends to win his political friendship, thereby “maintain[ing] in Athens a public spirit friendly to philosophy.” 

Five years later, Socrates returns to Athens after serving in the Athenian army during the early years of the war. In the Charmides, Plato refers to Homer’s Odyssey, the story of another return, “the return of the wise king Odysseus” to his home in Ithaka. During his odyssey, Odysseus has learned many things, including things about nature (specifically, the nature of the moly root) and the many regimes that rule the poleis. Following the interpretation offered by Seth Benardete in The Bow and the Lyre, Lampert writes that Homer’s odyssey is “his gradual learning of the wisdom that is philosophy and the wisdom that is political philosophy”—theoretical and practical wisdom. The two are distinct but related. The moly root is given to Odysseus by the god Hermes in order to protect him from the magic of the witch, Circe, who has imprisoned Odysseus’ friends in her palace. One might say that men are readily ‘bewitched’ by the unnatural, by the spells cast by rhetoricians, priests, and sophists, but knowledge of nature can save them, if they or a friend of theirs has such knowledge and uses it for that purpose. After this adventure, Socrates returns to his home, prudently disguised as a beggar. After observing the circumstances prevailing in his household, in which his enemies, the suitors, have been held at bay by his wife’s own prudent policy, “Homer has Odysseus reveal himself in a series of recognition scenes, thereby winning the allies he needs to kill his enemies and restore his rightful household regime.” In founding or refounding his regime, Odysseus needs to consider not only how to regain his rule but to consider how to perpetuate the regime, how to establish an orderly succession in the future, a succession that will provide “wise rule without wise rulers,” wise men like Odysseus being exceedingly rare. To do so, he must “establish a new teaching about the gods,” a “religious founding” which will back up his political founding by reinforcing his succession plan. 

In Athens, Socrates is “the new returning Odysseus.” By this parallel, Plato invites his reader “to think of Socrates as returning with a founding deed that is a theological-political program.” In the dialogue, the handsome young wrestler Charmides needs Socrates as a physician—a physician of the soul, not the body. As it happens, Socrates himself had consulted a physician “of Zalmoxis,” who was “a god who teaches that to cure the body the soul must also be treated and that the soul can be treated only with incantations which are ‘beautiful speeches'”; more, the doctors of Zalmoxis also “teach that the soul is immortal” and that there is only one God. The doctrines of monotheism and the immortal soul have made the people who believe these teachings, the Getae, “the most courageous and most just of people, the only people to effectively resist the Persian invaders”—exactly the virtues Athenians will need if they are to trust one another, unite, and win the war against Sparta. What Hermes is to Odysseus, the doctor of Zalmoxis has been to Socrates; what the doctor has been to Zalmoxis, Socrates intends to be to young Charmides and to other Athenian youths with whom he will dialogue. The topic of the Charmides is moderation. Before the war, Socrates had taught Critias, who is actually his main interlocutor in the Charmides. During the course of his conversation with him now, Socrates sees that he had earlier taught Critias “a view that would eventually turn him into a notorious Athenian criminal, a most immoderate sophist and tyrant in the Athenian civil war.” Socrates inadvertently had corrupted Critias; now and in the future, he must alter his exoteric teaching. Corrupting the youth will be one of the charges laid against Socrates, years later, at his trial before the Athenian jury. Socrates was indeed guilty as charged, if unintentionally. Well before the trial, he acts to correct his own actions.

In the Republic, a few days later, readers hear that, according to the myth Socrates proposes, in the afterlife the soul of Odysseus chooses “the life of Socrates” for his next life. That is, he chooses “the business of philosophy and everything it entails to protect itself and advance itself.” “Plato in the Republic makes the returned Socrates of the Charmides the thinker who recognized in himself the soul of Odysseus,” the soul that “carries on and advances the tradition of Greek wisdom that began before wise Odysseus, before Homer, and was passed on after improvements by Homer, and is passed on to Socrates, that ‘son’ of Homer who improves,” or, rather, adapts and adjusts, “Homeric wisdom and passes it on to his ‘sons’ after him.” Plato suggests that “a wise man knows who he is and he knows where he is and he learns what he must do because of who he is and where he is.” Whereas the Athenians are introducing a foreign god whose consort is a healing-god, Socrates, “on that very night,” introduces his own teachings, his own “incantations” or philosophic or natural religion, which he says he learned from another foreign god. The young gentlemen in this dialogue, Adeimantus and Glaucon, “have been exposed to the Greek enlightenment and learned the teaching of teachers like Protagoras, teachings that seem to them to destroy the reasons for living a moral life, a life of justice.” They are experiencing “the crisis of the death of the gods,” a crisis “similar to what Nietzsche would call nihilism.” His rival in this dialogue is another sophist, Thrasymachus, who is even less moderate in his teaching than Protagoras was, openly asserting that justice is only the advantage of the stronger—the “real and radical position of enlightenment teachers.” The sophists have shaken the young gentlemen’s belief in the gods; what will happen if they spoil their sense of justice, upon which the survival of any polis depends? 

Socrates adopts three strategies for dealing with the Athenian crisis of the death of the death of the gods. First, he attempts to make the sophist Thrasymachus his friend, despite Thrasymachus’ attempt to compete with Socrates for the allegiance of the young gentlemen. Socrates had “learned a new strategy,” replacing the one that “did not succeed with Protagoras” or with Alcibiades. He offers teachings on the soul, on ‘epistemology,’ and on the gods—all “anti-Homeric teachings foreign to the Greek tradition, teachings meant to persuade and cure young men like Adeimantus and Glaucon.” Socrates teaches them that the soul has three “parts”: logos or reason; thumos or spiritedness; and the appetites. If reason exercises its rightful rule over spiritedness, and spiritedness exercises its rightful rule over the appetites, the young gentlemen will learn civic or political courage, not the raging, Achilles-like warlike courage that has entangled Athens in a war they will not win. He also teaches them that the soul is immortal, with Hades a place of reward and punishment for acts committed in this life. “The returned Socrates’ teaching on the soul’s afterlife is most clearly a teaching that he learned while he was away, from the doctor of Zalmoxis—or, Plato suggests, perhaps from Herodotus, the Greek historian who reports the teachings of Zalmoxis and their salutary or beneficial effects, and who says that the people of Zalmoxis are most courageous and most just.”

Socrates’ new teaching on knowing reality or ‘being,’ his ‘epistemology,’ consists of his doctrine of the ideas. Strauss forthrightly contends that “no one has ever succeeded in giving a satisfactory or clear account of this doctrine of ideas,” showing that “the doctrine is an exoteric teaching that can easily persuade non-philosophers who have been raised to believe in glorious gods like Nike and Dike, the gods of victory and justice.” But Socrates aims not at a rigorous philosophic proof; he rather intends to persuade young Athenian skeptics that while the goddess, Justice, does not literally exist, the idea of justice “has a permanent independent reality that can be known by humans.” Such a notion assuages their disappointment in no longer being able to believe in the existence of eternal gods, gives them instead an account of a principle of justice that is at least rationally conceivable if not rationally demonstrable as an idea, as an eternal thing, an idea easily acceptable to souls inculcated by religious doctrines about eternal gods. That is, “Socrates’ teaching on the eternal, transcendent ideas is a teaching consciously tied to its time, the time of the death of the Homeric gods.” It is poetic, a making, not a proof, but it is philosophic poetry.

Strauss placed his account of Socrates’ new teaching on the gods in the center of the chapter on the Republic in The City and Man. The philosophic lawgiver of the City in Speech “lays down two new laws for the gods”: they only cause good, never evil; they never change shape or lie. In each instance, the gods are quite unlike Homer’s Olympians. “A crucial part of making the gods more moral than Homer had made them is what Socrates adds in Book 10: he makes the gods ultimately responsible for punishing or rewarding the soul after death in Hades.” After all, the soul is immortal and receives reward or punishment for its actions in this life, and if the standard of good and bad (for political men, and young political aspirants, especially justice and injustice) is impersonal, an idea or set of ideas, then who will enforce the ideas, who will make them rule the immortal souls? 

Socrates adds another novelty about the gods. If the idea of the good is the sovereign idea, the idea that sets the standard for all others, including justice, then “Socrates moves toward the monotheism of Zalmoxis.” This is one reason why Nietzsche regarded Plato’s account of Socrates as a teaching that “opened the way for the successful introduction of Christianity,” a religion about which Nietzsche expresses some well-known reservations, indeed animadversions. While “the Athenian introduction of Bendis failed to do anything to change the ultimate fate of Athens, Socrates’ introduction of his new teachings succeeded in changing the fate of philosophy in Athens and, ultimately, in changing the fate of Western civilization,” making him into “what Nietzsche said he was, ‘the vortex and turning point of so-called world history.'” And just as Homer’s Odysseus needed to kill the 108 suitors of Penelope in order to re-found his regime in Ithaka, just as Socrates “kills” Homer by “taking Homer’s place as the ultimate authority,” so too will Nietzsche, in this way following the lead of Machiavelli, ‘kill’ Plato in order to found a new spiritual regime adapted, as Nietzsche supposed, to the new circumstance in which both the transcendent God and the transcendent ideas are ‘dead,’ no longer believed, in need of substitution. Although Socrates ‘kills’ Homer exoterically, he “honors Homer as his own teacher” esoterically. Nietzsche ‘kills’ Plato, but only “the exoteric Plato whose teaching ultimately led to a cultural disaster,” Christianity. The esoteric Nietzsche “honors Plato as Plato honored Homer,” as what Nietzsche calls “the most beautiful growth of antiquity.” “Times change, gods die, and politic wisdom must change with the times by teaching new gods.” 

Before turning to a fuller discussion of Nietzsche, Lampert devotes his fourth lecture to how Socrates became Socrates—a philosopher. That Socrates changed, that he changed his exoteric teaching, he has shown. How he changed may be seen not so much in the Protagoras, the Charmides, and the Republic as in a second trio of dialogues, dialogues reported by witnesses, not by Socrates himself. These are the Phaedo, reported by Phaedo, the Parmenides, reported by Cephalus, and the Symposium, reported by Apollodorus. These are the only ‘reported’ dialogues in which Socrates appears that Socrates himself does not report. [2] Lampert remarks that these dialogues form not only a sequence in time but a logical sequence, Plato’s way of depicting “Socrates’ progress in thought” toward “the deepest insight that a philosopher can attain.” His “calculated presentation of the exoteric Socrates is intended to lead his most interested reader to the esoteric Socrates” even as he makes it possible “to date these steps in the life of Socrates against the background of the life of Athens.” One might say that he thus beckons his young Chinese listeners to think for themselves, just as Socrates thought for himself.

The Phaedo is named after its narrator, who is telling the story of Socrates’ last day to Pythagoras in the polis of Philia—a conveniently named site for such a story, if ever there was one. On that day, Socrates had been talking to two young Pythagoreans who had begun to doubt the Pythagorean doctrine of the immortality of the soul. One of them, Kebes, has raised an objection to that doctrine which requires Socrates to reconsider “the cause at work in the whole of nature, the whole of becoming.” This will be “the last argument of his life,” but before he makes it, he recurs “to his first philosophic experiences in order to tell the story of his becoming a philosopher from its very beginning.” As a young man, he began with wonder, animated by the intellectual eros that desires knowledge of nature. Early and then-contemporary Greek philosophers had explained natural causes naturalistically, that is, without recourse to explanations depending upon claims about the gods. He found none of these explanations satisfactory, he recalls, until he heard the theory that Mind causes natural changes, that “everything in nature is what it is because it was for the best that it be that way, as judged by mind.” Strauss calls this Socrates’ “teleotheology.” But in examining the works of Anaxagoras, the philosopher who proposed the theory, Socrates found that the doctrine of Mind was an “exoteric and salutary teaching” that “cover[ed]” Anaxagoras’ “esoteric naturalism.” So, Socrates remained dissatisfied, thinking that natural/material causes “cannot explain human things.” As proof of this, he argues that the cause of his sitting in prison, awaiting death, cannot be fully explained by the actions of his body; the “human opinion” that commanded his death sentence as more important. But if natural causes do not suffice to account for causation, and Anaxagoras himself didn’t believe that Mind accounts for it, what then? This led to the philosophic adventurer’s “second sailing” under the banner of thinking that if the things to be explained don’t explain themselves, if that wind doesn’t fill the sails of the philosophic boat, then you, the philosopher, must row, turning to speeches (logoi) and ideas in order to attempt to understand causation.

The ideas he discusses in this dialogue, the Beautiful, the Good, and Bigness are themselves unchanging. Change occurs, however, in the natural phenomena according to whether or not the “participate” in one or more of the ideas. Socrates then “uses the ideas to prove that the soul is immortal,” and Kebes accepts the proof. Since no one has ever quite explained what it means for a thing to participate or fail to participate in an idea, the whole doctrine is suspect. Lampert simply remarks that this was Socrates’ next step in his philosophic odyssey, and that he was content if young gentlemen like Kebes took it as their last step. 

The Parmenides takes Plato’s readers back to Socrates in 450 BCE, at age 19, when the philosophers Parmenides, then 65 years old, and Zeno, then 40 years old, visited Athens and conversed with him. By then, Socrates had already rejected materialist naturalism, discovered and questioned the adequacy of teleology, and turned “to the speeches and to the ideas as cause.” Socrates was “a philosophic prodigy, a young genius in philosophy who by age nineteen had thought through the whole history of Greek philosophy before him and arrived at his own novel solution to the problem of cause, his view of the ideas.” In arguing for it, he presents it “in the way a nineteen-year-old philosophic innovator would present it: he is proud, competitive, victory-loving; he is eager to prove that these two famous philosophers are wrong and that he, only he, solved their great problem, the problem of cause.” Far from being indignant at the upstart, Parmenides and Zeno very much like the young man, for “they saw in the young Socrates a man of their own kind, a great rarity of the kind a philosopher always seeks.” Parmenides gently “suggests” to Socrates “that there is way too much love of victory riving him” because he cares too much about the “opinions of men.” He has nonetheless “made the fundamental step of philosophy and learned for himself that things have natures“—even as Odysseus had learned the nature of the moly root—that “each thing belongs to a kind, a natural kind: that is what the ‘idea’ of a thing means.” If no such thing as a “kind” exists in nature, then understanding itself, the telos of philosophic inquiry, is impossible and nature is unknowable. The philosopher himself exemplifies a “kind” of the human, itself a “kind” in nature. Parmenides effectively challenges Socrates to show whether or not he can “discover and show others the grounds of the possibility of philosophy.” 

Lampert suggests that in the Parmenides Plato has written a dialogue that “is only for the passionately interested few, nameless future travelers from afar, potential philosophers.” “This is how Plato thinks the tradition of philosophy works, how Socratic philosophy will be passed down: the essential esoteric Socrates is embedded in the preserved conversations of the exoteric Socrates.” Further, a comparison of the Parmenides with the Phaedo shows how, “on the last day of his life, at age seventy, in the last argument of his life, Socrates teaches young Pythagoreans the very view of the ideas that he himself, fifty years earlier, learned from Parmenides was rationally indefensible.” He does this because Phaedo and Socrates’ other young friends are not philosophers; “they are not of Socrates’ kind.” He gives them the doctrine of the ideas in order to save them from their doubts about the gods and their fears of death, and perhaps even more to make philosophy “publicly defensible as morally trustworthy.” It is political philosophy, philosophic poetry, ministerial poetry. (In modern China, too, surely philosophy needs to be seen as morally trustworthy.)

The last dialogue in this series is the Symposium. Strauss calls it the only dialogue that takes “praise of a God,” who happens to be Eros, Love, as its topic and the only dialogue named for the occasion upon which it takes place—a “drinking party at which wine loosens tongues and things are said that might otherwise not be said.” In this dialogue, those things are profanations of the religious mysteries; “it tells what it is a crime to tell, a secret about the gods and what they know.” It was Alcibiades who had been accused of having profaned the mysteries in 416 BCE, seventeen years before this party, just prior to the time of Socrates’ trial. Socrates was accused of corrupting the young, including Alcibiades. This year, 399 BCE, “was a time of fervent religious purification” in Athens, a movement or change, a change of public opinion, “to which Socrates fell victim.” It was also the year when the oracle at Delphi supposedly said that there was no wiser man than Socrates, effectively designating him as a worthy successor of Protagoras. That is, the religious purification of Athens, leading to the death of a most eminent philosopher, contradicted the judgment of the highest religious authority in Greece. This must mean that Athenian public opinion must not understand the judgment of the religious authority it acknowledges as authoritative. How so?

And if Socrates is indeed wise, how did he become so, what caused his change from unwisdom (where we all begin and most of us end) to wisdom? “In the Symposium we hear Socrates tell the genuine story of his wisdom.” The Symposium profanes not the Delphic mysteries, as Alcibiades was accused of doing, but reveals “the most hidden truths of philosophy that Plato will ever reveal, an unveiling of the mystery of Socrates’ being as a philosopher that is at the same time an unveiling of the mystery of being itself.” Like the Delphic mysteries, hidden by human beings from human beings, nature itself hides, as pre-Socratic Heraclitus revealed. Although the mystery of being or nature “can be divined,” it can be divined only “in a way that is itself mysterious, true to the hidden ways of nature.” At this point, we know from the Protagoras that Socrates “had already completed his philosophic education” before the year of the dialogue, 434. His philosophic education predated his political-philosophic education. Now, in 416, he claims to be ignorant, except for “the things of eros,” things more likely to be revealed during the course of a drinking party, as the inhibitions ingrained by conventions weaken. 

Socrates converses with Agathon, a young poet who writes tragedies, and introduces a memory of Diotima, whom he met in 440. “Diotima” means “honor the god”; a prophetess, she was said to have delayed the onset of the plague in Athens by recommending that they make a sacrifice. In her discussion with Socrates, she refuted Socrates’ opinion, shared by Agathon, “that Eros is good and beautiful and wise.” On the contrary, Eros is none of those things. But neither is Eros bad, ugly, or ignorant. Eros “is a between.” Eros desires what a soul takes to be good, beautiful, wise. Diotima leads the young philosopher to self-knowledge, to recognition of his own nature as an erotic being of a certain kind, one passionate for wisdom. The philosopher begins his inquiry with “correct opinion”; his soul must at least be pointed in the direction of the good, beautiful, and wise; it not be misled by incorrect opinion, which points the soul to the bad, ugly, and ignorant. This is why philosophers take care to craft philosophic poetry, not only to incline the polis to a regime that will let philosophers philosophize but to give the few potential philosophers a better chance of becoming real ones. Socrates recognized himself in Diotima’s portrait as an erotic man of the type she described.

Philosophy, “driven erotically” in the right direction and knowing itself as erotic, “can best think the reality that lies between those abstractions of permanence and flow”; he recognizes nature as a whole within himself as a particular instance of nature. “The philosopher can come to know by knowing himself.” When Socrates asks Diotima what kind of power eros has, she calls it the power of “ferrying,” of “mediating or carrying things between the immortals and the mortal.” One is reminded also of the god who ferries souls from life to the realm of the dead.

And who, Socrates asks, are Eros’ father and mother—that is, “what are the origins of eros?” Shockingly, Eros is not a god at all and it has no parents. It turns out that eros is self-making, self-generating; “eros as self-generating power never simply is but is always coming into being as a result of its own activity and always slipping out of being as a result of its self-expenditure, its dying away in [is?] its expressing itself.” Intellectual eros and physical eros behave exactly the same way because they are both part of nature. “The deep structure of eros always disappears into the concrete experience that it enables,” “masked in the particular that it always disappears into.” It is dynamic, relational, temporal, “directed by its very nature to fulfillment or satisfaction, and its fulfillment always drains away and revives seeking fulfillment.” And that is what nature as a whole is, too. So, when Socrates says he is ignorant of everything but eros, “he seems to make a modest or moderate knowledge claim” but in fact makes “the largest of all possible knowledge claims,” that he knows “the character or way of all that is,” what Strauss calls “the nature of nature.” The nature of nature may be seen at the top of Diotima’s famous ladder, which the philosopher and the philosopher alone reaches. At the top of the ladder is a beholding, a beholding of the erotic character of being, but, like eros itself, the beholding also engenders, makes; it makes philosophic poetry. This is the coming into being and the slipping out of being, the slipping out of being involving what Socrates in the Republic calls the return to the Cave, the polis, the place of convention, where philosophic poetry can replace the shadows of idols no longer taken as real by the citizens. 

Lampert calls attention to the rational character of the knowing the prophetess reveals. The trajectory of Socrates’ philosophic way of life, his regime. He wanted to know the answer to “the question of cause concerning generation and destruction as a whole,” not only of the human things but of all things. His second sailing brought him to the idea of the Ideas as the cause of generation and destruction, but Parmenides refuted this with his “proof of the rational impossibility of transcendent ideas.” The third stage came when Diotima taught him that causation lies between the “pure flow” (asserted by Heraclitus) and the permanence of what are often miscalled Platonic ideas. Rather, “everything that is has the dynamic, relational, temporal character of eros.” The Delphic command, “Know yourself,” is exactly what the philosopher must do, if he is to know the nature of nature. In this way, Socrates may be said to ‘profane’ the mysteries not in the sense of betraying them but in the sense that he “prepares an initiation into them” which is “available for all future Agathons, for you and me,” my Chinese auditors. 

As Strauss remarks, Nietzsche replaces Platonic eros with the will to power. The way in which Nietzsche became Nietzsche is the topic of the final two lectures.

 

Notes

1. The importance of Alcibiades’ presence is remarked by Patrick J. Coby: Socrates and the Sophistic Enlightenment (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1987). See “Plato’s ‘Protagoras'” on this website under the category, “Philosophers.”
2. The “Young Socrates” or Socrates the Younger, also a philosopher, whom Plato’s readers meet in the Statesman. 

 

Laurence Lampert: Strauss, Plato, Nietzsche: Philosophy and Its Poetry. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2024.

 

In 2015, the eminent political philosophy scholar Laurence Lampert was invited to lecture at Remain University, Beijing by Professor Liu Xiaofeng, who had read his book, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche. This “turned out to be the best intellectual experience of my life,” as Lampert found the Chinese students to be attentive, exceptionally well-versed in classical Western philosophy, and eager to engage in dialogue. For his part, Lampert carefully honed his talks in view of the needs of philosophy students living under the regime in China. His topic was the relationship between the philosophic intentions of Plato, Nietzsche, and their astute interpreter, Leo Strauss. In his first two lectures he considered Strauss’s account of Plato and Nietzsche, in the second pair he considered Plato’s account of Socrates, and in the third pair he considered Nietzsche’s account of Plato and of Plato’s Socrates.

Lampert began with Strauss’s (now familiar) rediscovery of the techniques of exoteric writing as practiced by Plato and Xenophon. In a series of letters to his friend Jacob Klein, written in 1938-39 as the twin tyrannies of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ menaced the liberal republics of Europe, Strauss expressed his delight “at discovering what the philosophers had written as if it were just for him, which in a way it was“—just for someone like him, a Jewish thinker with family members who would soon would perish in the Holocaust, a thinker who might well be alert to techniques of literary legerdemain practiced by writers who needed to protect themselves from persecution. Strauss told Klein that he had noticed something in Moses Maimonides, no stranger to the hazards of expressing heterodox views in a political regime hostile to heterodoxy and the heterodox. Ten years earlier, Strauss had taken Maimonides as “a believing Jew,” just as Maimonides evidently wanted to be taken by the majority of his readers. Upon more careful reading, Strauss noticed that Maimonides actually regarded the world as eternal, a heterodox view indeed. Maimonides further defined Judaism as a tradition of law, with Moses as the lawgiver. “In Plato,” Lampert writes, following Strauss’s argument, “Plato the philosopher is the ideal lawgiver.” Maimonides accepts the ‘ontology’ of the philosophers along with the politics of the great political philosopher. Strauss saw that Maimonides points his readers to the heterodox core beneath the orthodox shell of his writings by leaving marks on the shell, directing his most alert, ardent, and tenacious readers to look within. The esoteric core of the exoteric teaching hides that teaching “in plain view, if you know how to look.” 

In their youth, Strauss and Klein had shared a fascination with Nietzsche, a fascination not at all uncommon among young European ‘intellectuals’ before and after the First World War. Nietzsche too understood the need for exotericism, remarking three “true but deadly” doctrines that previous thinkers had often concealed: in Nietzsche’s words, these were “the sovereignty of becoming, the fluidity of all concepts, types, and kinds; and the lack of any cardinal difference between man and the animals.” These truths are deadly to political society because they are “deadly to the beliefs on which society to depends for its health.” That is, Maimonides, Plato, and Nietzsche all saw the need for philosophers to be ‘politic,’ prudent in the presentation of their teachings, the publication of which might harm the regimes under which they live and invite harm to themselves by those regimes. In the presentation of Socrates, both Plato and Xenophon hinted at, but did not fully disclose, that Socrates was “a kind of ruler and a kind of founder,” the founder of “a new kind of empire,” the “empire of a philosophic ruler” who questioned the moral conventions that prevailed in his polis, Athens, conventions upheld by the man of kalokagathia, the good and noble man, “the Greek gentleman, the pillar of civic life in the Greek civil order.” Whereas for the gentleman the virtue of moderation meant temperance tout court, including obedience to the laws of the polis, for the philosopher moderation means “controlling and guarding what you say or write”: “Philosophic moderation means in part continued use of the old moral words but understanding them in a radically different way,” a way that departs from legally sanctioned (and sanctioning) conventions. Philosophic moderation guards not an indiscriminate set of passions but a particular passion, the passion to know. “Exotericism protects society from philosophy and protects the philosopher from society.” It also provides a means by which young persons who might come to be philosophers can be tempted in both senses of the term: led by their curiosity to philosophizing, tested for their capacity to philosophize. 

Perhaps even more remarkably, Strauss found exotericism in a poet, Hesiod, who, as Strauss wrote to Klein, taught that “the first things are not the gods but such things as earth, sky, stars, ocean which at one place are expressly distinguished from the gods simply.” As Lampert summarizes, “Learning what the unborn things are illuminates what the Olympians are; it shows what the gods who care about the human things are: the inventions of wise poets like Hesiod. and this enlightenment shows what wisdom is: wisdom is the knowledge of nature and human nature, and knowledge of what a god is.” Following Strauss’s hint, one of his students, Seth Benardete, would later show that “the founding poet of Greece,” Homer, was also a philosopher, indeed Greece’s “founding philosopher.” He, too, knew nature and human nature and what a god is. Strauss, Lampert remarks, “regarded the Symposium—which he called the most beautiful, thus the most poetic, of the dialogues—also as “the most important” of them “because it reveals the real secret of the [Delphic] mysteries,” the “secret truths about philosophy and the philosopher.” Maimonides learned that truth by exactly that careful reading, which requires the reader to infer conclusions that the philosopher he is studying only suggests. To understand what a philosopher thinks “you have to earn it, you have to work” at it, following his argument to its center, its core—sometimes located in the physical center of the book he has written. 

In his essay on the Republic in The City and Man, Strauss makes his central paragraph a discussion of the education Socrates proposes for children in his “regime in speech,” an “education through poetry, a most important word.” The gods and heroes depicted in stories for children “teach the right kind of behavior and warn against the wrong kinds of behavior.” Socrates, Strauss writes, “lays down two laws” concerning the depiction of the gods in these stories; Lampert tells his audience that this means “Socrates is a legislator,” one who “lays down laws for the gods”—an ambiguous phrase, inasmuch as it can mean laying down laws for how poets shall depict the gods and/or laying down laws that the gods must obey. To presume to do the latter suggests that the gods are man-made, not really gods at all. This matters, because “the untrue stories the citizens [of Athens] absorbed as children are what the grown-up citizens believe: what is taken in during one’s childhood is what one continues to believe and act on as an adult”—the laws underlying the laws citizens make for themselves and their own children. This matters not only for the city generally but for Socrates’ interlocutors, which include some young Athenian gentlemen, Adeimantus among them.

Adeimantus “was beginning to experience a death of the gods,” that is, disbelief in the gods. The Homeric gods often behave badly, unjustly. If the very gods behave unjustly, why should he not do so, too? As a “decent and noble young gentleman,” Adeimantus “dearly wants to continue being decent and noble,” but “why should he take that hard and difficult way himself,” when the gods set such a bad example? Adeimantus and his brother, Glaucon entertain such doubts because they “have been brought into touch with the Greek enlightenment,” that is to say, the Greek philosophy of nature, which throws conventional opinions about the gods, opinions fostered by the poets, into question. Strauss observes that Plato’s Socrates doesn’t say what, or who, the gods are at any point in the Republic. Why not? Because Adeimantus is neither a philosopher nor a potential philosopher; he hasn’t asked ‘What is a god?’ but only ‘Why the gods aren’t more just, more moral, more trustworthy than they are.’ Socrates accordingly turns to the question, ‘What is justice?’ That is, Plato’s Socrates takes care to understand and respond to the circumstance in which he speaks, both the character of his interlocutors and the moral and political ‘atmosphere’ of the polis, Athens. “At the time of the Republic, Homer’s and Hesiod’s gods were in crisis. Socrates in the Republic sets out to be a philosophic ruler during the crisis time of Homeric religion when Homer’s gods were dying.” With his dialogues, Plato writes “philosophic poetry.” Nietzsche understood this, going so far as call Socrates “the one turning point and vortex of so-called world history”—so called, it might be added, by Hegel and his historicist followers, who may or may not be writing philosophic poetry with their claim to find reason, dialectics, in history. Chinese scholars, living in a regime animated by Marxist historicism, might be led to wonder how much of Marxism is philosophy, how much poetry.

Poēsis means making. If philosophic poetry is something philosophers make, what or who is the philosopher? And what is “the understanding of being or nature that lies behind” these poetic, theological-political efforts? And if philosophic poetry concerns the gods, the question of what a god is is a “question about being,” a question about what “the highest possible being” is. Adeimantus wants to know a principle that can guide his practice; the philosopher wants to know the answer to a theoretical question. The philosopher’s exoteric teaching is the moral, the theological-political answer; his esoteric teaching is his theoretical answer to a different question. There is a relation between the two kinds of answer because the nature of the gods has bearing on human practice, and therefore “legislating what a god is is in part an instrument in the philosopher’s rule” in Socrates, Plato, and Nietzsche. In the center of the Republic, Plato has Socrates say that unless philosophers become kings, or unless kings adequately philosophize, cities on earth will remain troubled, unjust. Socrates will never rule Athens; indeed, Athens kills him.  But “Strauss shows how Socrates the philosopher actually ruled: a philosopher rules by laying down new laws for the gods; a philosopher rules by ruling the view of the gods that will rule the minds of the young men.” In the final book of the Republic, Plato has Socrates make the gods “the moral judges of human behavior” and “makes the soul immortal, living out is next life in reward and punishment for its actions in this life.” He quite literally re-forms the gods of Homer and Hesiod, reaffirming the decent, noble inclinations of the young gentlemen. Strauss calls this not only philosophic poetry but “ministerial poetry”—ministerial in the sense that it serves the regime, which has now become the regime in speech of the philosopher insofar as decent and noble young gentlemen may well become sympathetic to philosophy because kindly old Socrates, defender of decency against cynical Thrasymachus, has won their minds and hearts. Ministerial also because it is therapeutic, “giv[ing] aid and comfort to those like Adeimantus who suffer spiritually from the loss of their beliefs in justice and in the gods.” In the regime not of speech but of practice, the Athenian regime, philosophy and philosophers have not always flourished; Socrates will die at the hands of outraged citizens. Given time, the Athenian regime might have become more friendly toward such a man as Socrates, if Adeimantus and his fellow gentlemanly youths rule it.

Nietzsche famously denounced Socrates and Plato because Platonism (specifically, the theory of the ‘ideas’ or ‘forms’) made Christianity possible by preparing the minds of Europeans to accept a holy god, a god who transcends nature just as the ideas transcend the ‘cave’ that represents the conventions of the polis. Lampert considers Strauss’s presentation of Nietzsche in his second lecture to the Chinese scholars. Strauss placed his chapter, “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil,” in the center of his book, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, following the chapter titled “Jerusalem and Athens.” “Strauss seems to be saying quietly: in the study of Platonic political philosophy, Nietzsche now occupies the central place, just after Jerusalem and Athens.” Now: after Nietzsche’s forthright challenge to Christianity and to the Platonism he claims to have spawned it. Just as the Symposium is Plato’s most beautiful dialogue, according to Strauss, so is Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche’s “most beautiful book,” a well-made example of “the exoteric art” in form, intention, and reticence. Nietzsche charges Plato with the “fundamental error” of inventing, in poetically making, the ideas—particularly the ideas of “pure mind” and “the good in itself.” In the Symposium, Socrates discloses what Delphic Diotima told him, that “human beings can only strive for wisdom or philosophize” but “gods do not philosophize” because they are wise. This is the supposed secret of Delphi that Socrates “blabbed.” On the contrary, Strauss’s Nietzsche counters. “Nietzsche divulges after the proper preparation the novelty, suspect perhaps especially among philosophers, that gods too philosophize.” As Lampert points out, in other dialogues (the Sophist and the Theaetetus) Plato suggests that the gods do philosophize, and further suggests that “the gods who philosophize are the philosophers themselves“—a blasphemous thought in any religion. If so, then Plato and Nietzsche may not be such antagonists as Nietzsche exoterically says they are. “Strauss suggests to a reader who is paying attention that Plato thought what Nietzsche thought but found it desirable to teach something different through Diotima.” Nietzsche himself ‘blabs,’ divulging “the secret about the gods philosophizing by introducing the philosophizing god Dionysos.” Qua philosopher, Socrates, Plato, and Nietzsche each knows the secret about the god, Diotima’s “noble lie about the gods that serves Plato’s political purpose for philosophy”; moreover, “Nietzsche, Strauss may also suggest, may divulge that secret “in order to serve his political purpose for philosophy.” Both Plato and Nietzsche “platonize in the service of philosophy,” having interpreted “the spiritual situation of their times” and having taught “what the times required for the well-being of philosophy.” 

Strauss ends his chapter by contrasting the teachings of Plato and Nietzsche on the virtues, “one of the themes of the second main part of Nietzsche’s book,” where he attends especially to “the virtues of the philosopher of the future.” Nietzsche’s nature—aristocratic, “noble nature,” with its hierarchy of rank—”replaces nature as Plato taught it, nature and the super-natural that transcends it.” (Although Lampert says that Socratic eros is “the good in itself,” Strauss says it is “the striving for the good in itself.”) For Nietzsche, “the world is will to power and nothing else”; “will to power is Nietzsche’s name for the being of beings, the nature of nature.” Both nature as eros and nature as will to power endanger the polis. In that sense, Platonic eros and Nietzsche’s life principle, the will to power, are “deadly” truths, even if life-giving in the more comprehensive sense. Or, as Nietzsche puts it in his thirtieth aphorism, “What serves the higher type of human being as nourishment or refreshment has to be nearly poison to a very different and lesser type”: hence esotericism and exotericism. Thirty-three, the age of Jesus Christ when He died, is the number of the aphorism in which Nietzsche cautions against “devotion”—to God?—and “sacrifice for our neighbor”—that is, Christ’s Great Commandment, the sum and substance of God’s Law. Nietzsche calls such “feelings” seductions to be resisted. It is Platonism, with its City in Speech, that inclines Europeans to posit a world beyond nature, a City of God, the God Who is Logos— speech and reason. To posit, as Plato seems to do, a disembodied Mind to go along with his disembodied Ideas takes the path taken “consciously or unconsciously” by every advocate of God. Today’s philosophers ought to be more suspicious of the claim that Mind leads them to a truth, or even that the truth is more to be esteemed than appearance, an assumption Nietzsche treats as “a moral prejudice” in Aphorism 34. Life itself would not exist “if not on the basis of perspectival valuations and appearances”; a disembodied Mind contemplating a disembodied Idea would be lifeless, and he who attempted to live, so seduced, would soon perish (as Machiavelli also says of Christianity and of Platonism). Truth and neighbor-love are very far from being the same. When a Voltaire (whom Nietzsche quotes in the aphorism immediately following) says that “he only searches for the truth in order to do good,” “I bet he finds nothing!” Life is harsher than that, imposing an order of rank that puts the free minds, the undeluded ones, above the suckers. The real nihilists are those who believe in the Ideas and/or God—those nothings, according to Nietzsche. 

Lampert guides his readers to look at Aphorism 36 and Aphorism 37. “Aphorism 36 is reasoning; it is philosophy. Aphorism 37 is only a kind of corollary because it follows the reasoning with something that is not reasoning but that belongs to religion.” It is an example of Nietzsche’s version of “philosophic poetry.” Lampert judges the reasoning to combine “the strictest philosophical logical seriousness and play,” presenting a “strictly logical inference about what the mind can know of the self, the other, and the world of the whole,” namely, that it is “will to power and nothing else.” He promises his audience that he “will look at the reasoning in my last Nietzsche lecture,” but there is nothing wrong with looking at it now. 

Nietzsche begins with a somewhat Cartesian move, with introspection, his well-known “method.” For Descartes, introspection is the surest way to know what we can know, inasmuch as the world presented to us by our senses, thoughts, and passions may be illusory, very much including what words may be said to reveal to us about God. “Supposing nothing were ‘given’ as real besides our world of desires and passions, that we could go down or up to no other ‘reality’ than simply the reality of our drives—since thinking is only a relation of these drives to one another—: is it not permissible to make the attempt and to ask the question whether this given or something like it is not sufficient for understanding even the so-called mechanistic (or ‘material’) world?” This is more than permissible; “the conscience of method demands it.” Must we not then “recognize the will as efficient?” If so, and if (as the free spirits of the modern Enlightenment, including Voltaire himself) maintain that human beings are no different essentially from animals and the rest of nature, is not everything animated by “will force”? “The world viewed from inside, the world defined and determined according to its ‘intelligible character’—it would be ‘will to power’ and nothing else.—”

How strict is this logic, really? Is thinking “only a relation of [our] drives to one another”? In making this ‘thought-experiment,’ I incline to doubt that it is. If, for example, I think ‘2 +2 = 4’ I must have some “drive” that makes me want to think that more than anything else I might otherwise have on my mind, but the thought itself isn’t reducible to a drive or concatenation of drives. Yet that is the premise of Nietzsche’s argument. Lampert calls his argument “a comprehensive rational conclusion about the nature of nature, about what philosophy ultimately seeks,” but I think otherwise.

Lampert then turns to Aphorism 37, in which Nietzsche draws “a kind of corollary or inference” from his philosophic argument. This corollary is directed to “the free minds that Nietzsche is training,” minds that, though ‘enlightened’ in accordance the Machiavellian-Cartesian-Baconian modern project, retain the Voltairean squeamishness about abandoning the moral teachings of Christianity. “What?” they exclaim, “Does this not mean, using a popular expression: God is refuted but the devil is not—?” Nietzsche answers immediately, “On the contrary! On the contrary, my friends!” Lampert calls the addressees of this exclamation, Nietzsche’s friends, the free minds, who are experiencing “a deeply human reaction to philosophy’s rational conclusion.” Even if they are free of religion, notional deniers of God and the devil, they have yet to abandon the Christian morality in which they were imbued since childhood. But if the God of the New Testament, “the transcendent God of Christianity,” has “condemned the world as the kingdom of darkness, as the place of the devil from which he would redeem us,” and if nature is life force, will force, will to power and nothing else, then “that God, the refuted God, is the devil, the refuted devil.” Nietzsche’s will to power has a place, not for that God, but for “gods” of a different sort. “Nietzsche’s ontology introduces a new way to think about divinity, about what a god is,” and “Strauss has led his reader into the heart of this temptation“—the reference to Genesis being salient—that Nietzsche has formulated for him. More, “Strauss had suggested that Nietzsche and Plato may not differ on what a god is,” that both take “the philosophizing god Dionysos” to be the god of the philosophically-minded. This talk of divinity might confuse atheistic minds, minds ‘free’ of the belief in God, but Strauss points to passages where Nietzsche argues that human beings cannot live “without gods” of some sort; they are “necessary for a healthy social order.” Life itself justifies belief in gods, just not belief in life-denying gods. The God of the Bible does in fact give life, indeed offer eternal life, but those teachings must be false, according to Nietzsche and his “friends,” the free spirits. Real life does not transcend life as we know it on earth. Accordingly, Aphorism 57 clears the way for a new religion, “a new poetry of divinity for humans whose world can turn only around a god”—now, according to Nietzsche, the real, living god of the will to power. This is Nietzsche’s philosophic-poetic replacement for Plato’s philosophic poetry.

The exoteric doctrine, the public teaching of the new religion is the eternal return. The eternal return is “a new ideal” for human beings, just as Plato’s Ideas were a new ideal replacing the dead or dying Olympian gods. Instead of world-denying Platonism or the world-denying Christianity that, according to Nietzsche, gained traction thanks to the doctrine of Ideas, the eternal return unqualifiedly affirms life. In Strauss’s word, it is “the eternal Yes-saying to everything that was and is.” Among the Stoics, the first to give a full account of the eternal return, the cosmos undergoes periodic cycles of destruction and rebirth; for them, the moral imperative is to endure this, as a past, ongoing, and future reality, without sniveling. Christian writers denounced this as a denial of God’s promises. Nietzsche’s new religion adjures the free spirits neither to merely suffer it, nor to deny it, but to embrace it as life itself, the supreme manifestation of the will to power. As Lampert puts it, “eternal return is not a vicious circle but, on the contrary, the virtuous circle of life made eternal, made god in some sense,” “the making divine”—notice “making,” as this is an act of poēsis —of “the whole natural cycle of things,” one in which you, free spirit, will return, with the same nature and the same life experiences, as you have undergone, undergo, and will undergo in this cycle of life. “Eternal return is a non-theistic vindication of God,” an answer to what theologians call the problem of evil. It also vindicates God’s promise of eternal life. Philosophy says, “to be is the to be will to power and nothing else”; the new religion, the “political philosophy or philosophic poetry” Nietzsche makes from that insight is this “new highest ideal, the affirmation of the world as it is,” leading “to a vindication of god”—now, in the lower case—of “what alone can make a world possible for humans.” Nietzsche founds this new religion because it meets the needs of certain human beings, the free spirits, who, like the young gentlemen of Socrates’ Athens, are experiencing the ‘death’ of their own beliefs about divinity. In a sense, this parallel is a (willed) example of the eternal return.

The new religion propounds a new morality, “beyond good and evil,” as Nietzsche puts it. The “new teaching on human virtue arises out of Nietzsche’s new understanding of nature”; that is, it derives from Nietzsche’s philosophy, even if it seems to come from the new religion. “Nietzsche went beyond seeing human nature, to act on what he saw.” Human nature has been led astray by Christian de-naturing, but that isn’t the most urgent dilemma now, in Nietzsche’s time. Belief in Christianity is dying, indeed already dead in the minds of the free spirits. But Machiavelli, Descartes, Bacon and their followers have proposed the conquest of fortune and of nature by means of modern science. Modern science uses the experimental method to torture nature into revealing her secrets and then, with those secrets in hand, to invent technologies that will beat her down, conquer and master her. But, as Strauss writes, “there are no assignable limits to this conquest.” It could extend to the conquest of human nature, as “the direct result of modern virtue.” By modern virtue, Nietzsche evidently does not mean the real modern virtue, Machiavelli’s virtù, but the secularized Christian virtue of Voltaire, the attempt to remove suffering and inequality. Lampert quotes Strauss, looking at aphorisms 237 and 257: “Suffering and inequality are the prerequisites of human greatness,” including philosophy, the greatest human greatness. Aphorism 237 is an attack on what would come to be called feminism, the attempt to make men and women equal, a project Nietzsche deems contra naturam; Aphorism 257 is an attack on democracy, another form of egalitarianism. “Every enhancement so far in the type ‘human being’ was the work of an aristocratic society—and it will be this way again and again: a society that believes in a long ladder of rank order and value-difference between one person and another and in some sense requires slavery.” On this, Lampert claims, “Strauss’s point is Nietzsche’s point: the limitless conquest of nature threatens to bring about the end of philosophy.” One might add that this is exactly what Strauss says in his own voice in his exchange with the Hegelian Communist, Alexandre Kojève. [1]

Philosophers make arguments, but they also take actions. “The actions of the highest natures, the history-making philosophers,” consist of “postulat[ing] as true what they see as beneficial to philosophy and humanity in their times.” All of these postulations, all these claims, are “acts of the will to power on the part of the highest natures.” Nietzsche’s legislation, his act of the will to power, his postulation of the eternal return, “is not fundamentally a description of the way the world is, although it may be lived that way by most people”; it is really “a statement of desire, the desire of a lover” of nature who seeks to limit the conquest of nature, which “is not to be conquered through alteration but celebrated as it is.” Lampert calls this “the first comprehensive ecological philosophy.” Nietzsche is the first ‘post-modern.’ 

Or at least in part. “Nietzsche embraced the scientific aspects of the modern revolution while modifying or assigning limits to its technological aspects.” Modern philosophers “tamed Christianity with their philosophic poetry, their modification of Christianity’s other-worldly promises into worldly promises promising a paradise at the end of history through a scientific technology applied to nature.” This has begun to threaten human nature itself, including the highest manifestation of human nature, the philosopher. This Nietzsche seeks to prevent; evidently, the religio-poetic doctrine of the eternal return cloaks the possibility that human nature might destroyed permanently, if a philosopher does not stand up to set a limit on the conquest by calling upon free spirits to turn against the remnants of Christian morality, against the humanitarian compassion, the spirit of ressentiment that seeks revenge upon the world as it is. In becoming friends of philosophy (if hardly philosophers themselves), the free spirits will help philosophy, the activity of the highest persons on nature’s order of rank, to continue philosophizing.

What relevance has this account of Strauss have for Chinese scholars? What does Lampert’s account of Strauss’s accounts of Plato and Nietzsche bring to the Chinese? Several things, perhaps. Strauss’s account of exoteric writing and esoteric teaching would surely interest thinking men and women living in a regime in which persecution of heterodoxy is not unknown. A thoughtful Chinese might already have thought heterodox thoughts, and Plato’s critique of the gentleman, Nietzsche’s critique of the free spirits, might give encouragement to young persons among China’s ruling class to persist in thinking for themselves. If philosophers know and love nature and human nature, where does that leave Hegel, Marx, and other historicist thinkers, who suppose that nature can be triumphantly mastered? (With its air and water heavily polluted, will not an “ecological philosophy” prove healthful, live-giving?) If they do so persist, if they experience the death of the ideological ‘gods’ of their time and place, even as the young Athenian gentlemen and the modern free spirits experienced the death of gods in theirs, what gods will they put in the place of Maoist Marxism? With his account of ‘how Strauss became Strauss,’ Lampert suggests to any young potential philosopher, and to the much larger class of young free spirits, how one might become a philosopher, and how many others could become friends of philosophy, the activity of the true gods. Such persons will surely not believe that a political ruler is a true god, inasmuch as philosopher-kings rule spiritually, leaving practical politics to others. They do not believe that theory and practice can be unified, much less embodied in a human being like Stalin. Finally, there is the theme of temptation, testing by an effort at seduction. The late Professor Lampert was quite the old charmer, if his death notices are to be believed. His lectures make the claim plausible.

 

Note

1. Leo Strauss: On Tyranny. Revised and expanded edition. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth, eds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. On this website, see also: “Strauss’s Critique of Hegel,” “Historicity and Reason,” and “The Philosopher-King: A Contradiction in Terms?” all under the category, “Philosophers.”