It's Not exactly a linear Digression, but it starts like a fine academic satire.
A few months ago, I am not exactly sure when, I received a pdf from an anonymous account. Much to my own surprise, I am not even sure through which social medium. I downloaded the file and managed to save it, while somehow deleting the message that conveyed it to me. I am pretty confident that the sender had initially contacted me through Substack. And, as will become clear from what I am about to write, that what prompted them to send it to me was a link to one of my publications in one of my posts.
My paper is on the reception by analytic philosophers of Leo Strauss, and, especially, the role that Ernest Nagel played in providing the intellectual scaffolding of a whole number of subsequent criticisms of Strauss. While many polemics between Strauss and his followers and their analytic critics are not of enduring interest (although some are entertaining as polemics go), in my paper I argued that the exchange between Strauss and Nagel on the role of values in science is not just name calling. I even suggested that it is a bit of a shame that it was halted when it did because the debate has only recently been superseded by a well-known paper by Anna Alexandrova (2018) "Can the science of well-being be objective?." the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, which explicitly alludes to their debate.
In particular, in my paper I pointed to the existence of published (2018) notes, edited by Catherine Zuckert, of Strauss’ 1965 lecture course, “Introduction to Political Philosophy,” at The University of Chicago. In that course Strauss had assigned Nagel’s Structure (1961), and he responded to some of Nagel’s criticisms of him. These comments confirmed me in my view that the exchange with Nagel (who was then the more celebrated public intellectual) mattered to Strauss, and that there was more philosophy lurking in it than I had sketched in my paper.
What I did not know then, but do know now thanks to my anonymous benefactor, is that there exists another transcription of another Strauss lecture course. This lecture course, entitled, “Natural Right,” was a course offered in the autumn quarter, 1962, at The University of Chicago. The manuscript is edited by and with an introduction by Svetozar Minkov. While the name sounds like we have entered an Umberto Eco homage or better yet a tale by Javier Marías, he seems to exist for real (here at Roosevelt).
I was first introduced to Leo Strauss by a charismatic political theorist, Rob Devigne in my final year of college. After Devigne turned up on campus all of us started to take political theory courses. I have no idea what his own political views were — he looked like an aging hippy — but he made the collision of ideas incredibly exciting. I was not in his inner circle; but signed up for everything.
This excitement around Devigne created a modest existential crisis for me because in the Summer between junior and senior year I had just switched majors to philosophy. I admired the crystalline lucidity and conceptual clarity of the philosophers; and I had fallen under the spell of George Smith, whose year-long Newton seminar had drawn me into intellectual pursuits; and while I was trying to meet the philosophy major requirements I had become a bona fide Jody Azzouni groupy. And the idea had taken hold in me that I wanted to be like them — when I grow up.
Oddly enough — I realize I am meandering as if in a labyrinth — Devigne (himself a graduate from Columbia) had nothing to do with my interest to go to Chicago. During my junior year, while I was taking Devigne’s Hobbes seminar (and George’s Newton seminar), I also was taking a seminar on Milton with Fixler. Now, Fixler — an aging Milton scholar who looked like a rabbi and was obsessed with refuting Derrida — was the opposite of charismatic. His classes were under-enrolled, and I am sure there was pressure to nudge him into retirement. But I now understand that as a college student I was fascinated by academics in the grip of a scent of an intellectual trail.
Fixler had written me after I wrote an editorial in the school's Observer about the university budget, and talked me into auditing one of his classes. His particular obsession at the time were Platonic fourfold structures that were explicitly thematized in poetry and philosophy, and simultaneously unnoticeable unless you were paying attention to it. Fixler’s view was that Derrida was poking fun at this kind of formalism (in order to undermine Heidegger), and while Fixler himself had no desire to defend Heidegger, he wanted to use these fourfold structures for his own thematic ends. Fixler thought Pirsig was a fellow traveler.
The joke of my intellectual life, then, is that I have been accused of Straussianism at inopportune moments with even friends knowingly telling me that they have caught on to my oblique references, but in so far as I was trained at all into a disciplined way of reading between the lines it’s all Fixler. The Miltonist corrupted me.
Anyway, not unlike Pirsig, Fixler had been at Chicago and revered Norman MacLean. And he was the person that put the idea in my head I should consider going to Chicago, also because he had not denied that he (that is Fixler) was one of the models for Herzog. As regular readers know in the end I went to Chicago, but not because of Norman MacLean, but because of a fortuitous and live-changing conversation with Bill Wimsatt.
In those days (the early 1990s), Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind was making waves. And because of Devigne’s class I felt prepared to read it. I thought Bloom lacked a sense of humor (he railed at Zelig for no apparent reason) and all he seemed to offer was a kind of updated Nietzscheanism. By the time I made it to Chicago he was dead.
Now, Devigne taught Strauss Natural Right and History to upper-class students. And when I look back at my reading of it back then, I think I played at understanding. I have always suspected that Devigne caught on, and we lost touch eventually.
Like all (well I doubt I read all of them) of Strauss’ books it’s not that difficult to follow its train of thought—the writing is not obscure at the sentence or paragraph level; but you need to be patient, and you need to allow the discussion to unfold. That is, while it is a polemical work, I don’t think it’s for the impatient young person I was then. While Strauss can be shockingly direct, he doesn’t announce his views up front like I was taught by my teachers and as I continue to teach my students.
That’s actually all I wanted to digress on. And the reason for that is that I ran out of time to write Mr. Minkow to ask him permission to quote from his manuscript. (Oh, my dear reader, you already knew I am a tease.) I did toy with the idea of putting my reflections on his 1962 Strauss manuscript behind a paywall without permission.
I want to digress about these lectures in which Strauss engages with his students on the very material — journal articles appearing in real time, controversy unfolding, etc. — that I commented on in my published paper. The most important reason for doing so is this: Strauss, while his arguments are underdeveloped (they are really considerations) gets to the nub of his criticism of Ernest Nagel (who stands in as the best representative of modern positivism). And I found these very interesting (not only because my story about the Strauss-Nagel exchange is not fully told), but because there is something rather important lurking in it. As I understand it the Straussian criticism of Nagel turns on — inter alia — the status of the principle of sufficient reason and the possibility of philosophical self-understanding when one is cognizant of the limitations of one’s commitments. So much for my glimpse under the hood.
After my holiday, I will track down Mr. Minkov, and see what I may or may not do with this manuscript.
On Monday,
will share another ‘Amy’s Folly’ with us. And then these Digressions will have its annual Summer hiatus; it will be at least two weeks; maybe a bit more. As always, I am very grateful for your continued interest in these impressions, and especially honored by the steadily growing number of paid subscribers.