Re: The weird men behind Bush's war

[Jim Farmelant <farmelantj@xxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 6 Apr 2003 14:08:34 +0100 "James Daly"
<james.irldaly@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> I found Leo Strauss's *Natural Right and History* (Chicago University
> Press, 1953) illuminating and instructive when I first read it. It
> supported Plato and Aristotle against the Sophists' relativism,
> claiming that natural justice was something in its own right, and
> not
> the result of compromise over the use of force between naturally
> selfish and violent individuals. He also argued that the Hobbesian
> enlightenment is a return to the Sophists. He criticised Weber's
> relativism, for which ideals and values -- including "rationality"
> in
> Weber's perverted sense according to which (though I don't think
> Strauss noticed this) capitalism is "rationality" in economics --
> are
> only "demons" between which we have to make an irrational choice.

As you note, a bit later, Strauss advanced a hermeneutic
in which he distinguished between exoteric and esoteric
interpretations of philosophers and their texts.  Applying
this hermeneutic to Strauss' own writings, such as
*Natural Right and History*, if read esoterically,
then Strauss' real position was that the sophists were correct,
concerning the true nature of natural justice, but that the myth
of a natural justice, that is more than just a compromise between
antagonistic individuals, is one that must be maintained for
the sake of preserving social order.

>
> I found Strauss's later development and his followers' -- an
> inconsistent mix of Aristotle, Locke, Nietzsche and Heidegger --
> unintelligible, and the division of esoteric and exoteric
> irrationalist and contrary to the universalism of philosophy and
> rationality. His is a right wing anti-relativism.

It can be argued that he was only an anti-relativist, exoterically.
Esoterically, he held that the relativisms of Nietzsche and Heidegger
were correct, but these truths could only be revealed
to an "enlightened" few.  For them to become generally
accepted would be socially destructive.

>But there is a
> leftwing anti-relativism -- and it is found in Marx. Those who
> interpret Marx as a continuation of the relativism of the
> Enlightenment forget that that sophistic relativism favoured the
> employment of eight-year-olds in factories and mines. Marxist
> progressivism, which rules out a priori any return to "the dustbins
> of
> history" in which it would place Aristotle as a product of a
> slave-owning society, is ignorant of the fact that Marx's own basic
> thought is Aristotelian, and that he lavished as much praise on
> Aristotle as he did on Hegel.

I believe that the neo-Thomist, Mortimer Adler, many years
ago, pointed out Marx's Aristotelianism.  It has since been
discussed by a number of commentators.  Richard W. Miller,
in his *Analyzing Marx* discussed Marx's Aristotelian
eudaemonism, among other things.  A number of writers
have argued that it is this Aristotelian eudaemonism that
underlies his critique of capitalism.

>Scott Meikle's *Essentialism in the
> Thought of Karl Marx* (London, Duckworth 1985) was pathbreaking.
> Other
> sources are found in George E. McCarthy (editor) *Marx and
> Aristotle*
> (Savage, Maryland: Rowan and Littlefield, 1992). Meikle points out
> that
>
> "Marx ... can be identified as an Enlightenment thinker only with
> the
> serious qualification (so serious that it casts doubt on the
> identification itself) that in the analytical foundation of his
> thought he is a very traditional European thinker, and draws for his
> philosophical resources in evaluating enlightenment modernity,
> capitalism, and economics, on the same pre-modern tradition of
> Aristotelianism in philosophy which the Anglophone moderns from
> Hobbes
> onwards were so passionately committed to ploughing up. It is a
> paradox that of the most revolutionary thing about Marx is what is
> most traditional about him". (Scott Meikle, editor, *Marx*, Ashgate,
> Aldershot, page xix).
>
> James Daly
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>


________________________________________________________________
Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today
Only $9.95 per month!
Visit www.juno.com