Leo Strauss was one of the most insightful and consequential if not otherwise controversial, political philosophers and classicists of the last century. To his critics, Strauss is the bugaboo guy who is the dark mastermind of American imperialism and neoconservatism (notwithstanding, such conspiracies have been thoroughly debunked and dismissed in academic studies). To his students and his defenders, Strauss was a great exegete of the classics who brought Plato, Thucydides, Al-Farabi, and Machiavelli to life for a generation of political theorists who had been cut off from anything written prior to Thomas Hobbes. Strauss brought back into academic study and consideration the insights of the classical political tradition shunned by the modern political science of post-Hobbesianism.

Athens, Jerusalem, and all That

Part of Strauss’s fame was his elaboration on the Western dynamic caught up by two cities and the concepts they represented. For Strauss, the Western tradition cannot be lifted out of the indissoluble tension between rationalism and revelation, symbolized by Athens and Jerusalem. The Athenian rationalist tradition, for Strauss, was cut-throat, pragmatic, and suffered from a tension between hubris and realism. The Jerusalemite revelatory tradition, by contrast, was moralistic and zealous but also suffered the tension of hubris and realism, albeit for different reasons. One need only look at the long history of Jewish and Christian messianic movements for how faith could be as equally hubristic as an aspirational form of political apotheosis.

Strauss never believed that there was a peaceful coexistence between reason and revelation. Instead, reason and revelation were at war with each other. This violent dynamic between Athens and Jerusalem was mediated by the ascendant Catholic Church, but that mediation was eventually broken by Machiavelli and the Protestant Reformation—though that mediation was already facing problems with men like Marsilius of Padua and from within the Catholic tradition like with Augustine’s separation of the city of man (rationalism) and the city of God (revelation). Although Strauss does give attention to that Catholic mediation (namely in his short but important reflections on Saint Thomas Aquinas), this mediation is a betrayal of the real dynamic between the two: conflict not synthesis.

Central to Strauss’s thesis on the Western dynamic is the theologico-political problem. What comes first? God or the polis, God or the state, God or the lawgiver, etc. To where do our loyalties orient themselves: the realm of the white rose and the city of divine love or the city of man with its deified lawgiver like Lycurgus, Solon, or Numa – or in the American context where Straussianism thrives as an intellectual movement, the Founding Fathers and Abraham Lincoln? This is the tension between Athens (the city of man) and Jerusalem (the city of God). The highest good in life for the Greeks was political life. The highest good in life for Jews and Christians was the theological and contemplative life (focusing on metaphysics, ontology, aesthetics, and morality, leading to the numerous philosophies and theologies of love that we have inherited). Some Jews and Christians eventually found minority support from a handful of Greek philosophers who maintained intellectual contemplation and politics were compatible goods (namely Plato and Aristotle), but this revision of Plato and Aristotle was exactly that—a revision, and Strauss wanted to reclaim Plato and Aristotle from that revisionism to highlight how the intellectual impetus of Plato and Aristotle was subservient to political ends rather than intellectual ends in of themselves. This division is significant, and in the world of political struggle, it can have serious consequences when contemplating the fall of civilization in an isolated monastery, which takes precedence over the defense of the political order and allows for contemplative mysticism in the first place.

Despite this irreconcilable difference, Strauss maintained that the dynamism and greatness of the West was the dialectic between these two antagonistic traditions. When Athens veered into hubris, Jerusalem was there to reel it back in. When Jerusalem veered into hubris, Athens was there to reel it back in. The medieval conflict between the popes and Holy Roman emperors, the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict, embodied this dynamic of conflict. The outcome of this tension between reason and revelation is compromise, and the population at large benefits from such compromise between the forces of political fanaticism and religious zeal.

What Athens gave to the West was political and military zeal and ingenuity, “daring, progress, and the arts.” What Jerusalem gave to the West was contemplative and spiritual discipline, a yearning for heavenly things, and a deep anthropology that contributed to the study of nature human nature, and created an important place for intellectual contemplation as a serious and noble pursuit in itself instead of the pragmatic, political-oriented, intellectualism of the Greek philosophers. These two forces produced a schizophrenic civilization and human person, but we have all benefited from this dynamic tension between pure politics and contemplative theological anthropology. For instance, the great treasures of Western art are the byproduct of this tension wrestling with each other; take the great art and literature of the West, so much of it influenced by Christian philosophies of love yet commissioned by political leaders to serve the purpose of political propaganda.

Classics and Moderns

The other famous distinction, or dialectic, Strauss drew was between the classics and moderns which is found in his magnum opus, Natural Right and History. Here the classical and Christian traditions were allied but allied only because they shared the same basic anthropology that humanity was social in its nature and had a telos undergirding it. While the Greco-Romans and Christians differed, Strauss noted that it was primarily the Catholic tradition of science and philosophy that kept the disparate visions of Athens and Jerusalem united under the principle of the common good and common understanding of human nature (though never a common or universal culture).

Contrary to popular misinformation, the modern project of philosophy was a complete break from Greek philosophy and not its resurrection. Any undergraduate in philosophy would know this. Yet, paradoxically, in breaking from the Greek philosophical tradition, modernity was also a return to the Greek philosophical tradition—namely, the pre-Socratic tradition of materialist sophistry. While Strauss saw Machiavelli as a forerunner, the culmination of this return to empty materialism and self-preservation as the highest end (read: lowest end) of life was in Hobbes, Locke, and Spinoza. While the moderns turned to the pre-Socratics for inspiration, namely in the assumption that metaphysics begins with nature or matter and not God or the Platonic Ideas/Forms, that’s where the similarity ends. For modern materialism, born out of the Renaissance and early Enlightenment, was guided by Francis Bacon’s New Science of scientific conquest and the transformation and mastery of nature – concepts alien to the pre-Socratic materialists.

In a dazzling exegesis of the so-called “classical liberals,” Strauss highlights how their philosophical outlook is premised on relativism, hedonism, and solitary and atomistic individualism. In rejecting a summum bonum, the classical liberals decisively destroyed the possibility of unity in a society. In promoting hedonism, or lack of bodily harm, as the highest good in life, the classical liberals turned everyone into a robotic copy of each other, destroying all distinctive particularity to life. In considering humans a-social and solitary creatures, the classical liberals denied the possibility of political virtue in its Greco-Roman form centered around patriotism and phronesis, or in its Christian conceptualization through the politics of the common good in service to each other as an expression of loving God (love God and love your neighbor).

Life in the state of nature was terrible. Even in Locke, who was nothing more than “the wolf Hobbes in sheep’s clothing,” as Strauss described him, the classical liberal solution to the problem of a brutish and short life in the state of nature was the imposition of the leviathan overall who came under the tentacles of the social contract. Locke goes as far as to state that part of the responsibility of government is to “decide the rights of the subject, by promulgated standing laws, and known authorized judges.”

Locke, as Strauss showed, is hardly the benign libertarian that he is made out to be on the internet by people who have never understood him (and perhaps haven’t even read him). After all, his rosy state of nature necessarily descends into the state of war, which compels us out of the primal state of existence. Conflict defines an atomized society in a war over the scarcity of resources. Thus, Strauss shows, after many close and intense readings of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, and others, that the logical conclusion of the modern liberal vision moves to “the outlawry of war or the establishment of a world state.” How prescient, all things considered. Even Locke’s political logic is the slow growth of statism—the more “rights” one has, the more power the state must have to enforce those rights “by promulgated standing laws, and known authorized judges,” as Locke himself states, whose legislature must be “sacred and unalterable.” What of Locke’s call for revolution, might one ask? If you read Locke carefully, he never advocates that in the way we moderns think of revolution; Locke’s revolution is a return to government because it has nullified itself, dissolved itself, through its own abuses and living under no government (now that it nullified itself) is the antithesis of our call into the social contract.

The crisis of modernity is, therefore, one of permissive nihilism and encroaching statism. With nothing to call citizens up toward besides comfortable living, the gains won by liberal democracy would be threatened. It was threatened by fascism but managed to survive, something that Strauss focused on in his lecture/essay “On German Nihilism” (1941). In Strauss’s time, liberal democracy was in a struggle with communism. From Strauss’s perspective, communism offered humanity something to be zealous for and strive to achieve. Liberalism, not so much. This would, in turn, Strauss feared, lead to non-communist young adults embracing communism because the apotheotic aspiration of communism was far more alluring than the empty hedonism of liberalism. Strauss wanted to avert this possibility.

Strauss was not an anti-liberal in the manner that Strauss’s critics ignorantly and erroneously charge (and one is often left to wonder if the critics ever bothered to read him). On the contrary, he was a friend to liberal democracy. He believed that the liberal democratic states, for all their metaphysical and philosophical problems, still retained the spirit of classical Athens and acceptance of spiritual matters and religion (even if in a much more depreciated form) in the promise of freedom of religion. Despite the problems of liberalism, Strauss believed that rejuvenating liberal polities with classical virtue ethics would safeguard it from slipping into nihilistic tyranny and from losing the contest with communism. In a world where tyranny was everywhere, liberalism—while in danger of falling into its own tyranny—had the most freedom to confront decadence and despotism from within. Strauss’s hope, then, was that the recovery of classical ideals and virtue would bolster the implicit nihilism and hedonism of liberal thought; this was only possible in liberal polities precisely because of their relative openness. Plato and Aristotle may have been forgotten, but they were not banned. As such, they could be recovered. Strauss was, in fact, a great friend and supporter of American Democracy and was deeply concerned about what would happen to the world if American Democracy decayed, degenerated, and failed to remain steadfast in its opposition to its more authoritarian opponents who followed the single path of creating salvation on earth.

Three Waves of Modernity

In his essay “The Three Waves of Modernity,” Strauss charted the tripartite struggle for modernity as an ideological one. Conservatism need not apply because conservatism was premodern and anti-ideological. The contenders in modernity were liberalism (including many who go by the label “conservative” in today’s world), socialism, and fascism.

Liberalism was marked by the discovery of humanity’s mastery over nature through technology (or what we call “science”). The essence of liberalism was to create safe, pleasant, and harmless lives through the instruments of the new science, “The purpose of science is reinterpreted: propter potentiam, for the relief of man’s estate, for the conquest of nature, for the maximum control, the systematic control of the natural conditions of human life. The conquest of nature implies that nature is the enemy, chaos to be reduced to order; everything good is due to man’s labor rather than to nature’s gift: nature supplies only the almost worthless materials. Accordingly, the political society is in no way natural.” Furthermore, Strauss writes in reflecting over the movement of modern political ideology, “I can here only assert that the increased emphasis on economics is a consequence of this. Eventually we arrive at the view that universal affluence and peace is the necessary and sufficient condition of perfect justice.”

The materialization of life and the triumph of scientistic-economism was the outcome of the first wave of modernity. It was reacted against by the second wave, or socialism. The head of the second wave was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as much a modernist as any Enlightenment philosopher before him.

Rousseau protested on behalf of nature, but he protested on behalf of human nature more than he did the green trees and flowery pastures interrogated on the rack of post-Baconian science, “[Rousseau] protested in the name of virtue, of the genuine, nonutilitarian virtue.” If liberalism was about remaking the world to make humanity’s consumeristic life pleasurable and peaceful, socialism also concurred with liberalism in this regard. Hence, the two movements are bitter enemies. They agree on the same end that “universal affluence and peace is the necessary and sufficient condition of perfect justice.” The difference is that socialism disagreed with the means to the end.

According to Strauss, the discovery of the second wave of modernity was the dissolution of any form of realism in nature. While the assault upon nature commenced in the Renaissance, in the writings of Machiavelli, and especially Francis Bacon, it wasn’t until the aftereffects of the Scientific and Industrial Revolution that the true war on nature was unleashed with the belief that nature was entirely changeable, reducible, destructible. The goal of life wasn’t harmony with nature, wasn’t to be taught by nature, wasn’t to dwell in the beauty of nature; the goal of life was the transformation of nature for the self-pleasure and contentment of man. Technology made this possible. If you refuse to be part of this project, you will be made to journey to a better world whether you want to or not. As Rousseau said in The Social Contract, “whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body, which means nothing other than that he shall be forced to be free.” The world of freedom through the mastery and transformation of nature is the only world that we must create. This was a communal endeavor, not an individualistic one.

While the second wave of modernity came to these conclusions from the spirit of the first wave, the real difference between socialism and classical liberalism was socialism’s moral fire vis-à-vis liberalism’s moral relativism. Here, one can see Strauss laughing like Democritus. While there were some religious socialists, most socialists have been, and remain today, anti-clerical, atheistic, and opponents of religion. Yet they were filled with the moral spirit of Jerusalem, lending credence to the dismissive jeering of socialism as a “religion” or new “theology,” a religious faith for those who have lost their religious belief in a Transcendent Deity like the Christian God. Liberals, in their Athenian and Thrasymachean materialism, were the unintentional heirs of Athens, just like socialists became the unintentional heirs of Jerusalem with their moralism and zeal for reform. The new dialectic of Athens and Jerusalem was between the cut-throat materialism of Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke against the sentimental materialism of Rousseau and his heirs, especially the Romantics. Socialism preached the gospel of techno-sentimentalism, or “scientific socialism,” a transformation of the world for moral ends using the same means and methods as classical liberalism’s transformation of the world purely for the self.

Then Strauss reached his elaboration on fascism, which was the cruelest of all the modern ideologies. Fascism was defined as “the experience of terror and anguish rather than of harmony and peace, and it is the sentiment of historical existence as necessarily tragic.” The perpetual struggle was what would bring humanity happiness. Herd life, the life of the “last men,” was simply to have a full stomach and a warm bed to retire to at night. To the fascist, the emptiness of modernity was where humans lived “without any ideals and aspirations” and simply wanted to be “well fed, well clothed, well housed, well medicated by ordinary physicians and by psychiatrists.”

The seductive danger of fascism was achieved through its synthetic combination of discoveries of the first two waves of modernity. From liberalism, fascism took the cult of technology and science to new levels of repression, interrogation, and control. From socialism, fascism took over criticism of liberalism as morally weak, relativistic, and too self-centered. With the power of technology now in the hands of the Übermensch, the new brave new world of could be made real. The purpose of life was the struggle to make that world a reality since nature and technology called for a world of control to be established. If liberalism was the thesis of modernity and socialism the antithesis to liberalism, then fascism was the synthesis that drew on the discoveries of liberalism and socialism while also rebelling against liberalism and socialism. Far from a “reactionary” movement like the medieval romanticism of the nineteenth century opining for a return to the throne and altar, fascism was an intensely modern and forward-looking movement. Fascism represented the synthesis of liberalism and socialism, the totalizing embodiment of modernist philosophy and science gone awry.

In this contest of ideologies, fascism had fallen with its defeat in 1945. At the time of Strauss’s death, liberalism and socialism remained. From Strauss’ point of view, socialism could have still emerged as the victor when he died in 1973. The ever-present threat of a socialist victory in the ideological wars of modernity and the slow-growing nihilism and relativism that lay at the heart of liberalism was something with which Strauss was extensively and intensely concerned.

Strauss Today

The importance of Strauss for many in the present is in his exceptional classical scholarship and his recognition that in liberalism lay a deep relativism that would exhaust into permissive nihilism. The collapse of moral norms would divide society which was unified by the force of the law under the social contract. With no more external enemy to threaten liberalism, liberalism’s internal contradictions would prove to be its own worst threat. Without the great external foe, liberal polities would grow politically impotent as society relativized itself and liberal states became impotent to act.

Contemporary Straussians, then, tend to be virtue ethicists. They believe in the importance of the classical conception of virtue, either in its Greco-Roman or Catholic flavor, as the great buttress against relativized disintegration. (Strauss follows the classical theorists who, in assessing the decline of classical Greece, latched onto the idea of moral softness and materialism as the primary cause for their degeneration into tyranny, civil war, and eventual conquest—despite their wealth and large militaries—to comparatively poorer entities: Macedon and, eventually, Rome.) Strauss, who knew Oswald Spengler’s thesis in Decline of the West well—he even references Spengler directly in his seminal essay “The Three Waves of Modernity”—feared that without virtue in political life the eventual political impasse of an increasingly decadent, relativistic, and nihilistic West would leave itself open to the return of the politics of force, tyranny, in which the formerly relatively free and open polities of the West would slip into despotism.

Spengler argued that in the final descent of the West’s civilizational death, politics would become so untenable that force would be the only answer to political problems. Caesarism was the future because Caesarism coincides with political and cultural decadence. This is precisely what Strauss feared and was warning against.

Thus, Straussians tend to be conservative only insofar that they understand the enemy of liberalism is itself; more specifically, the hollow relativism embedded in Hobbes and functionally present in Locke, which threatens to destroy the very world that liberalism helped to create, is the enemy within liberalism that must be addressed. The conservative reputation of Strauss is because—unlike fanatical Whigs who do not think we have anything to learn from the past—he saw much wisdom from the ancients to help us with the questions of life, politics, and the destiny of humanity which moderns have shunned or lowered the standards of. Ancients concerned themselves with how humans should live. Moderns, according to Strauss, “start from how men do live.” However, in taking this approach, “one must lower one’s sights” to the lowest common denominator of human existence: self-preservation. Ironically, Strauss is more an idealist than a realist in that he wanted to return to what we could become rather than what we are. The low realism of hedonistic self-interest, which rests at the core of modernistic anthropology and philosophy, does not permit anything beyond this and, therefore, the striving for a superior life (intellectually, morally, aesthetically, spiritually, etc.) disintegrates into an atomistic relativism of everyone pursuing their self-interest which produces weakness within society.

The victory of modernity, the crowning achievement of Whig civilization, is that we simply live and then die alone in a warm bed with three meals a day provided by the state. There is no striving. There is no goal. There is no telos for humanity to consummate. If we live comfortable, peaceful, and pleasant lives, we have won the game of life according to the New Science ideology of modernism. This is why, in the 21^st century, so many children of the victorious liberals of World War II and the Cold War are abandoning liberalism and turning to alternatives that offer them something to strive for.

Those who present Strauss as a closet fascist, a synthetic philosopher of rationalism and religion, a reactionary, or an opponent of liberalism have not read him or portray him in deceptive and misleading ways meant to advance their own grinding axes. In concentrating on classical natural right and the philosophers and historians of Athens, like Plato, Aristotle, and Thucydides, we begin to see the kind of intellectualism that Strauss advocated: a return to the rationalist philosophy of Athens and not the moral revelation of Jerusalem. Why? There is a kernel of moral virtue deep within the atheistic rationalism of Athenian philosophy, and that is the only path amenable to moderns who need saving from their own apathetic nihilism and the totalitarian moralism of utopianism but who cannot accept the love of God and neighbor as the highest good in life because of hyper-individualism, leaving the cultivation of individual virtue in the city of man as the only possibility for moderns. This, however, would require a return to the classics—not to serve the New Jerusalem but to reinvigorate the New Athens. When all is said and done, Strauss endorses the only city he believes truly exists, the city we do, in fact, live in: the city of man.

The post Getting Leo Strauss Right and Wrong appeared first on The Miskatonian.

The well-known political philosopher of the University of Chicago, Leo Strauss (1899 – 1973), said that liberal education led us toward culture and sought to form a man cultivated in mind and in accordance with his nature.

As we all seem to forget today, the term cultivation comes from the word agriculture, which means to take care of the land so that it produces; in this sense, education would be the cultivation of the mind according to its nature, therefore, it would be absurd for example to cultivate vegetables replacing water, fertilizers or light by other means, that is to say, pouring whiskey instead of water we cannot expect our crop to flourish, in the same way, it is not possible to think about the development of human nature if we do not give it what it requires for its development and wellbeing.

In this sense, teachers would be like farmers of minds dedicated to making them bear fruit.
However, as the great teachers (those great minds who were not the disciples of any previous teacher) are even scarcer to be found than the teachers themselves (who are not abundant compared to the farmers), this would be a severe problem. Still, one with an immediate solution, for although we do not have the teachers in flesh and blood, we do find them in their texts, that is to say, through the reading of the so-called “Great Books.”

Thus, “liberal education will then consist in the careful and proper study of the great texts which the great minds have left us, a study in which the more experienced pupils assist the less experienced pupils, including the beginners.”

The term liberal education might initially generate some confusion for those who are not familiar with Strauss’s work or who are not situated in the world of political philosophy. We should not confuse the adjective liberal with the noun liberal.

When Strauss speaks of liberals, he refers to the adjective. A liberal is a person who practices liberality (generosity). For this, he must be a person with certain wealth but who uses it in a moderate way. That is to say, he enjoys it but also shares it with those who need it without losing it or squandering it because, in that case, he would cease to be liberal (practicing generosity).

Liberalism, as a noun, can simply be called an ideology that is identified with freedoms or rights, such as freedom of the press or freedom of expression, and appeared in the 19th century.

Clearly, liberal education is not the training of individual rights defenders but rather of citizens and human beings capable of fully developing their natural potential.

Following the classical literature, we could say that liberal education differentiates a free man from a slave (passions).  The full understanding of the meaning of liberal education can be found, for example, in the literature of Plato (The Laws and The Republic), Aristotle (Politics), and Xenophon (Education of Cyrus), as stated precisely in a passage found in Plato’s Laws: “liberal education is education from childhood in virtue, and which inspires the ardent desire to become a perfect citizen who knows how to govern and how to be governed with justice.”

Certainly, two dimensions can be perceived in liberal education. The first one advocates a moral and religious education linked to the constitution of good citizens, as one would say, an education of the heart, while the other, more transcendent, corresponds to philosophy, to the education of the mind found, for example, in the seventh book of The Republic.

Following the classics, civic education was thus based on the formation of character to achieve virtue.

For example, Aristotle understood that the virtues (courage, affability, for example) were all those qualities necessary to be able to develop our human nature fully and that this was possible through the help of the city, hence the close relationship between ethics (which is nothing more than the formation of character) and politics. In contrast, the philosopher’s training was much more demanding in the sense that the search for knowledge has no limits and could, therefore, be fundamentally dangerous.

The essence of philosophy is permanent doubt, so in this respect, it can be seen as antagonistic to authority. The philosopher then had to write in an esoteric manner to mislead authority and thus conceal his true intentions.

There is no doubt that the liberal education of the philosopher, based on dialectics, is fundamentally more important than civic education. Still, we also know that without civic education, there is no point in talking about the cultivation of the mind (without a city, there is no philosophy).

Civic education, i.e. education that moderates the character and curbs the instincts, also inculcating patriotic or moral values, is significant for the progress of the city, in fact, civic education would be the prelude to the development of philosophy.

Strauss also thought that liberal education would serve to shape a good political regime in accordance with human nature, which also made sense of the following definition of liberal education: “Liberal education is the ladder by which we try to climb from mass democracy to democracy as it was originally“.

Democracy had to be understood as the government of free men as opposed to the mass democracy that would be constituted by those men not yet formed by civic education. Democracy, in fact, would be the regime that stands or falls by virtue:

“… democracy is a regime in which all or most of the adults are men of virtue, and as virtue seems to require knowledge, a regime in which all or most are virtuous or wise, or the society in which all or nearly all have developed their reason to a high degree, or the rational society. Democracy, in a word, becomes an aristocracy which has expanded into a universal aristocracy“.

However, as Strauss rightly pointed out, the predominance of political science in these times has served to make us see democracy exclusively in merely descriptive terms, appearing more as a procedure that serves, for example, to elect public servants in a competition open to all, in which public posts are contested, rather than as a form of government whose means and ends are virtue, that is, in a normative way, as political philosophy put it.

In this sense, it is understandable why, today, still under the influence of positivist discourse, the scientific thesis of democracy dominates, and thus, the concept of democracy as mass participation, as mass democracy, is assumed. This mass democracy, in turn, generates a mass culture that is achieved with the least intellectual or moral effort and lacks aspirations of transcendence. As Strauss pointed out, the people formed by mass culture are satisfied reading the sports page or the jokes page of the newspapers, but they can hardly be interested in public affairs, let alone be in a position to hold public office.

Evidently, the fact that our society is in crisis and its political institutions completely disqualified is an unmistakable symptom that mass culture and mass democracy have imposed themselves and that this situation is not gratuitous. In fact, this occurs when the spaces for forming and cultivating people, such as the family, the school, and the university, lose their meaning and purpose, thus abandoning their task of forming free and responsible men and women. Such an event only forces us to turn our eyes towards this form of education, which, amid our desolate panorama, appears as a resplendent oasis waiting to serve those who dare to reach out to it.

Sources: 

Hilail, Gildin (ed.). An Introduction to Political Philosophy, ten essays by Leo Strauss. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975.

Horwitz, Robert H. The Moral Foundations of the American Republic. Buenos Aires: Editorial Rei, 1986.

Pangle, Thomas L. The Ennobling of Democracy, the challenge of postmodern age. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

“What is Liberal Education?”, in: An Introduction to Political Philosophy, ten essays by Leo Strauss. Gildin, Hilail (editor). Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975. p. 311.

The post Liberal Education and Mass Democracy appeared first on The Miskatonian.

Rather than succumbing to either of two extremes – one that insists that the less useful a thing is, the greater dignity it has, and another that wants to squeeze the last drop of its essence out through mere application, leaving nothing else to the imagination – philosophy, or those of us interested in it, should take up the middle ground that Aristotle said is the place of virtue. Courage is more than cowardice and less than rashness, and you don’t want to be either a spendthrift or a scrooge. As in archery, the sweet spot is the center. We are closer to the target when we acknowledge that philosophy has a special dignity as both a purely contemplative affair and a practice that improves practice. If you’ve read much Plato — and if you haven’t, take my word for it — then right about now, you should hear the little voice of Socrates starting to interrogate us: who improves the practice of fighters? Their trainers. Who improves the practice of sailing? A good ship’s captain. Who improves the practice of collective singing? A choirmaster. Why, then, do we look to the philosopher for improved practice and not to the various expert practitioners? When it comes to business, entrepreneurship, and money-making, what, if anything, can the philosopher add?

There was once a great man in Athens called Alcibiades. He was the most beautiful, daring, and promising youth. Socrates, by contrast, was old and ugly. The kind of people who look down on Socrates often look up to Alcibiades (action vs. talk, etc.). And yet, Alcibiades admired, or even loved, Socrates. So, on the authority of Alcibiades himself, Socrates deserves our attention. Similarly, the kind of people who look down on philosophy often look up to financial success. And yet, you can often find among the financially successful an admiration for philosophy, one that even gives it some credit for their financial success. So what have businessmen, entrepreneurs, and moneymakers themselves said about what philosophy contributes to their practice?

Naval Ravikant, the multimillionaire entrepreneur, has said that “a lot of the top investors, a lot of the top value investors…these people sound like philosophers,” and when recommending a course of study that helps with the “broad-based judgment and thinking” necessary for the investor, he says that “the best way to do that is to study everything, including a lot of philosophy.” Why? Philosophy, for Naval, helps with emotional regulation and, therefore, improves the quality of our judgment and decision-making.

Here’s how Robert G. Hagstrom describes the practical benefit of studying philosophy in his book on investing (Investing: The Last Liberal Art):

“The ‘cash-value’ of studying philosophy is very real. Put quite simply, it teaches you to think better. Once you commit yourself to philosophy, you find that you have set yourself on a course of critical thinking. You begin to look at situations differently and to approach investing in a different manner. You see more, you understand more. Because you recognize patterns, you are less afraid of sudden changes. With a perpetually open mind that relishes new ideas and knows what to do with them, you are set firmly on the right path.”

Another famous philosopher-entrepreneur, Reid Hoffman, has discussed the influence that philosophy had on his understanding of human nature, which informed the design of his business platform, LinkedIn. (You can listen to his interview about that here). Peter Thiel, the billionaire entrepreneur, has written about and taught a range of great thinkers and philosophers, including Rene Girard, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, Alexander Kojeve, Karl Löwith, and Vladimir Solovyov. Elon Musk credits a book that he considers philosophical, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, with orienting his creative wonder and technical skill towards the formulation of ever richer questions. You can find Marc Andreessen of a16z discussing Nietzsche, Stoicism, Agamben, and others. Writing in 2022, Andreessen said that over the previous five years, his “entire conception of the structure of society” — something clearly relevant to making investment decisions — had become much more “grounded in history and philosophy” than it was previously. Apparently, the world makes better sense with the assistance of philosophical insight than without it. The popular leader of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, who refers to himself as “CEO of El Salvador,” also calls himself a “Philosopher King,” indicating with these two titles a link between philosophy, on one hand, and business, on the other, and for Bukele, business is good (“Bukele has amassed a genuine support base by measurably improving the lives of many Salvadors,” Foreign Policy reports).

Iosif Gershteyn, CEO of ImmuVia and my business partner at VisionXForm.com, explains the significance of philosophy for entrepreneurs as follows:

“I think there is one simple selling point, which is burnout. If you’re working hard and that work is not connected to a deep meaning, then there’s a much higher chance that you will quit the marathon because you’re treating it like a sprint. The other question, which is arguably worse, let’s say you get to the finish line but there’s nothing there, and you feel empty. You’ve spent all this time in your life to get to some sum in your bank account but no feeling of accomplishment or a feeling of emptiness. Well, that would probably be worse in some ways than failing. ‘What is the value of gaining the world if you lose your soul’? So thinking about what is your soul, what am I willing to do, what am I not willing to do, and more importantly, what am I trying to accomplish and why am I doing this? …Does this connect to something that resonates inside me and that can be an expression of my being that I can be proud of?”

Although I began my trajectory towards business from a starting point in pure philosophy and Iosif moved towards philosophy from a starting point in pure business, we discovered a sweet spot at the intersection of philosophy and entrepreneurship, devoting many conversations to analyzing our lives and business with the help of philosophical approaches. Thinking about ends, purposes, aims, and meaningfulness, in general, about the telos of business, and also about the ideal of human flourishing involved in being engaged, was one element that philosophy helped with, as reflected in the quote above. But there was much more. Wittgensteinian language games help with developing flexibility of thought. Platonic dialogues on gain shine light on the relationship between profit, value, worth, and expertise. Machiavelli and, more broadly, the tradition in political philosophy that discusses the founder presents fruitful parallels for the startup founder. Nietzsche’s description of his most intense creative moments writing Zarathustra provides actionable insight into how to be open to subtle ideas intuitively received. Philosophers provide resources for understanding power without becoming slave to it or to the desire for it, and desire itself is a great theme in writings throughout the history of philosophy.

Perhaps the most surprising application of philosophy to entrepreneurship is the novel use of Martin Heidegger’s fundamental ontology in management consulting and executive coaching. Heidegger is the philosopher I mentioned at the outset of these remarks, the one who called philosophy sovereign but useless knowledge. In fact, his philosophy has been put to use in a way that, in my opinion, at least, remains true to his important discoveries about the nature of being human. Together with his coauthors Charles Spinosa and Hubery Dreyfus (a Heideggerian scholar of artificial intelligence), Fernando Flores, who once served as Cabinet Minister in Allende’s government in Chile, has very thoughtfully used Heidegger to discuss entrepreneurship in his book Disclosing New Worlds. In organized, practical workshops and seminars, thousands of businesses and leaders have been influenced by the largely Heideggerian methodology of Werner Erhard’s EST and Landmark training programs, as discussed in detail in the book Speaking Being and in the foundational coursework at VisionXForm.com.

In short, despite conspicuous claims to the contrary, philosophy does not need to see itself as useless and does not need to be regarded as such by practical men and women. From Plato to Heidegger, the great thoughts, methods, ideas, and discoveries of philosophers have made a valuable contribution to the real work of entrepreneurs and investors, not only the most famous ones like Thiel, Musk, and Andreessen but also to small businesses and even so-called solopreneurs.

As a closing note, consider the following. My neighborhood barber, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, once said to me, “Philosophy saved my life.” Add to that the fact that one of the two most famous deaths in the history of the world, Socrates’, was the happy death of a man whose life became synonymous with philosophy (the great Plato dedicated his unmatched talents to the dramatic depiction of that life). Philosophy — something so good that it is good for the local barber, big-time investors, and even leaders of countries, so good for both living and dying — might sound too good to be true. Then again, where but in philosophy do you turn your attention so fully to the beautiful questions: what is good and what is true?

The post Philosophy and Finance appeared first on The Miskatonian.