What Are Natural Rights?

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0:00 you know, Meriwether Academy. This is our second time doing one of these symposiums. We did a men's retreat in April. We have another one coming up next weekend. The retreats are essentially these plus hiking plus speakers during the day, uh, plus all sorts of stuff. Um, so really our our goal is just to create a community where men can come together, pursue wisdom, um, learn from each other and, uh, yeah, you know, really it's kind of just creating its own identity as it goes. When we put it together, I didn't really want to put any like barriers on it like this is what it needs to be. Pretty much what I have identified is that it is a community of men seeking wisdom and that manifests itself in a variety of ways. Our motto is culture and wilderness. So we lean on a relationship with nature and a relationship with culture to uh further our understanding of ourselves in the world. And these symposiums have

1:01 have been just an absolute treat um to throw. So with all that said, Nick, you you've been a student of Michaels for some time now and and uh love to just pass the mic to you and let you start us off with the first question. All right. Um, so I'll read a quote from Strauss from the introduction to this book that will I think kind of set the tone and also the motivation for why we're studying this. Um, and also to connect to this theme that we're doing here with Meriwether in July of the American founding and how this book might help us answer some of the questions that we have. Um, so he starts out by quoting a passage from the Declaration of Independence, the most famous. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The nation dedicated to this proposition has now become, no doubt, partly as a consequence of its dedication, the most powerful and prosperous nations on earth. But does this nation in its maturity still cherish the faith in which it was

2:05 conceived and raised? Does it still hold those truths to be self-evident? And then he talks about this difference um that I think is very crucial between American and Western European thought um on one one hand and German thought on the other where he says at about the same time a German scholar could still describe the difference between German thought and that of Western Europe and the United States by saying that the West still attached decisive importance to natural right. while in Germany the very terms natural right and humanity have now become almost incomprehensible and have lost altogether their original life and color. So he then brings out this he establishes this distinction between German and American thought. goes on to say kind of an irony that Germany was defeated on the battlefield but seems to have conquered uh Western Europe philosophically and part of that is undermining this idea of self-evident truths and seems to connect that to the idea of natural right and then uh goes on to say like what do people in America

3:08 now believe and not necessarily the American people but American social scientists don't believe in natural right as more than a myth they believe that men are endowed by the evolutionary process or by some mysterious fate with many kinds of urges and aspirations but certainly with no natural right. So uh I guess trying to understand the the problem of natural right and why we're studying this um from what I take of Strauss's motivation here is that we need to understand natural right to understand the philosophical uh foundations of America's founding if they're secure or not. And then um connecting also to Bloom um the in the closing American mind he talks about the problem of American education as feeling like we're not on strong philosophical grounding and then also points to this German um philosophical challenge to the American ideals. So uh trying to understand if that's an accurate representation um why what is natural right why we're studying it and um this idea that the Germans uh philosophy

4:13 poses the strongest challenge to natural right that needs to be addressed philosophically. Yeah. So just uh thank you for that. U I'll respond in a moment. I just want to see did everybody get a chance to read the intro or most of you get a chance to read the intro or anybody take a look at the intro just to make sure that we're on the same page. Okay. Um, did anybody also happen to read chapter 4 just out of curiosity because I think that was the first uh uh messaging that went out. So hopefully I had a a chance to look at least at the introduction. Um, so yes, if you take the Frankfurt school as an example or even more broadly and more generally the post-modern leftist attack on American values, let's put it that way as a first approximation. Okay, that's not precise way of stating it. That's not how stress would take it. But if we start there already you see there's something and you guys have all experienced this in your own way as you look at higher education as you look at the prevailing opinions in um in in the culture let's say right which is that it's naive to believe that there's a kind of human right especially the kind of right that underpins a republic a

5:20 free republic so if anybody talks about rights anymore they talk about human rights in a way that undermines the American claim, you know, in a way that says America is a great fascist entity. America is a destroyer of human rights. The a lot of these leftist criticisms of American identity and American republicanism are designed to destroy the foundations of a Republican federal belief of of American identity, right? They try to show you like Strauss says I think it is in chapter 4 that uh no self-respecting nation wants to say or wants anyone to say about it that its roots are unjust and criminal. Everybody wants to see their founding as just noble and good or at the very least not as criminal, not as awful and horrible. But you know, especially before the election of Trump, there were projects designed to rewrite the meaning

6:20 of the American founding. This project that's been going on for uh many decades, you know, and to say that the founding is racist and the founding is sexist and the founding is imperialist and the founding is bad. So you have a somehow a war over the meaning of the American project, a war over the meaning of the American founding. And this war at the level of ideas both uses and reflects a serious philosophical disagreement about the status of the claims that constitute the basic American faith. uh from the passage that Nick read this faith in which the nation was conceived and raised a nation dedicated to this proposition which has become partly as a consequence of this dedication the most powerful and prosperous uh nation of the earth. So what do you do when you So there are a couple of different things here that people might take issue with. Can you reduce in some meaningful sense or distill in some meaningful sense the essence of American identity in this statement from the declaration

7:29 and plausibly the answer to that is yes you can that's absolutely significant if you got rid of that or if you undermined belief in that altogether you'd be destroying some very crucial component of American identity and yet it is exactly German thought so here we mean let's say broadly you could take a couple of different examples but let's call it a general tendency that treated with suspicion naive faith in what what right is. So right so here's a simple way of saying it on one hand somebody says oh we're endowed by our creator with such and such rights and somebody else says you know are you in kindergarten you're first of all there is no creator that's that's has that has been absolutely undone okay by the serious study of mythmaking and religion making and all of that and secondly uh nature what do you mean by nature there's no such thing as nature what you call nature and here we're not talking about trees sticks and stones We're talking about nature like the way the human being is human nature. Okay?

8:35 And in all of these conversations about nature, although the question about the being of sticks and stones and rivers and trees actually is important because it's part of the world of what is, it's not primarily what's meant by nature. We're talking about is there a way that the human being is? Because if there is then you might think that if we understand the structure of the human soul, let's call the human soul human essence synonymous here. If you understand the structure of the human soul, then you can pattern your political teaching accordingly and correctly on the basis of the hierarchy of the human soul. So very simple example, imagine that you think that human being has animal desires. Let's say, okay, we eat, drink, although we don't eat and drink the same way as animals. Animals do not gather in the same way that you've gathered to eat and drink and talk and have a nice time. But okay, fine. Animals have wants and appetites. Humans have wants and appetites. We know that. But we also have a desire for honor, for

9:35 recognition, for glory. And roughly we would want to say that the man of military valor is somehow actually more than the person who just eats, drinks and copulates all day, you know, somehow is more deserving of our respect, is more worthy of our support, has done more for the city. So there's a kind of sense that appetite is human, yes, but comparatively low to this other dimension. and that we also have wisdom, intelligence, reason, understanding, language, and that that's no small matter. You know, that's almost what's distinctly human about us. So, you have this hierarchy of the soul and a structure of the hierarchy of the soul. You can say human nature is that and a good education, a good system of law and good moral custom and habit will do its best to allow the human being to fulfill his nature. But if you say the whole idea of essence and nature is um you're trying it's like taking a snapshot.

10:38 You've frozen something that is actually very dynamic and mobile. So yeah okay fine 18th century white Europeans took a picture of the development of human history at a moment stopped at freeze frame and said that's universal human nature. No it isn't according to these critics. Okay. Why don't you look at Papa New Guinea? Why don't you look at this? Why don't you look at that? Why don't you look at that time and the other time? And if you do that, then you'll see that this idea that 18 17 18th century natural rights, modern rights, European man, that's historical. It's historical. And then you have things like NZ's study of the use and abuse of history for life because something can be historical, but once you really pay attention to that, then you see, okay, it can be antiquarian, it can be revolutionary. There's many different ways you can use history. But the consensus let's call it among the German thinkers is that history is decisive and that what we have called nature is this arbitrary snapshot. Now

11:41 that's only a first approximation because if you go deeper and deeper and deeper into that shift into history in H highaidiger and niche then you find something reappearing or recurring that is essence like or naturelike something that characterizes the human being and maybe here there's a saying that Strauss always repeats which is very appropriate and always a useful rubric to keep in mind uh which is that you can expel nature with a pitchfork nevertheless unless it returns. You know, that's a very old Latin saying here. The idea that you can try to say that there's no nature, but it's like that that uh Simpsons meme if you see where they kick Homer out and then he's back in again. You know, you can't you cannot kick nature out. It recurs. So even in NZ there's a notion of nature. Even in Hideiger, there's something akin to that. But it's now gone through the whole process of taking history seriously. And according to these German thinkers, the Anglo thinkers, the sort of modern thinkers, they are

12:43 philosophically unserious in that sense. They're behind German thought. You see, as Strauss said in those first few pages, um, you know, we characterized German thought as scorning um, natural right 40 years ago or however long ago, but now it's pretty widespread. I want to give you a quick a quick proof text because I think Strauss's book, I don't know, I think it's from the 50s. So here if you can see on screen this is a a book called the political theory of the American founding by Thomas West. So a more recent book. Okay. Now you should know that Thomas West is uh influenced by Strauss. So if you see some similarity that would be no surprise but here's what he says in his section on natural right just to show you that you know where we stand now. Uh if your own experience doesn't attest to the case. So he says, "Many today find the idea of natural right quaint and unconvincing." Like I say, quaint like, "Oh, that's that's cute. Do you believe in natural right? Like, have you never read the Frankfurt School? Have you re never read Nietzsche?" Um, that it requires a leap of faith. So that's also strange. You hold these truths to be self-evident and yet

13:52 somehow they require a leap of faith. and maybe it's not obvious how they match up to German philosophy or why we should take German philosophy as the standard. So all kinds of questions recur here and then that um that this reflects a postmodern view as Richard Rory says that uh that socialization and thus historical circumstance goes all the way down that there's nothing beneath socialization or prior to history which defines the human. So you see the problem right? The problem is like America seems to be based on call it a definition of the human being that ascribes to him a legitimate claim to certain rights and these anti-modern or postmodern historical thinkers say no that uh that's no good. So Strauss then has a dual intention. Nick stated the first one, and the first one is the most obvious one because it's what you see right away. And the original cover uh of one of the editions of this book had the

14:54 Declaration of Independence on the cover. You may have that. My cover has been ripped off like 20 years ago or whatever, so I can't show it to you, but okay. So, it used to tell you right from the beginning that the defense, the understanding and defense of natural right is absolutely like a patriotic duty if you don't want the country to disappear. But that's not all. Independently somehow of the uniquely American involvement in the question of natural right, Strauss seems to think it's an indispensable element of all political reasoning and all political life. Because as he says slightly later in the introduction, he says there's a need for natural right, which is as evident today as it has been for centuries and even millennia, which shows you that it can't be a uniquely American problem. although America maybe is very intimately related to the problem today and he says that the rejection of natural right leads to nihilism and fanatical obscurantism and that's a very serious problem somehow wherever you are

15:55 and whenever you have lived so um this is sort of the first statement of Strauss's if you care about America and if you believe that there's something to this statement in the declaration then you must understand that it's seriously threatened today by these intellectual movements that are coming from abroad. And I believe that if we look at higher education today and if we look at some of the cultural tendencies today, not the ones obviously represented by the academy and by uh people like yourselves, but the forces against which in some sense you're working, I think you'll see that Strauss's diagnosis is uh is um genuine. You know, it's it's accurate. It's accurate that the historical relativism has called the American identity into serious question. Okay. So, that was long, but that was just meant as a clarification. Um, yes, please. General questions. Uh, can can you speak more to specifically how the modern concept of human rights conflicts with

16:57 this idea of natural rights? So, there's there's too much at first to disambiguate. So let me just make let me say why and then I'll say a word about it. Okay. So first of all it's important that although Strauss begins with the notion of natural right as you see here talking about it in the title right saying the natural right is a is a problem Germans have attacked it. He does make some distinctions throughout the course of the book as you saw chapter 4 for example is about classical natural right. modern natural right differs a little bit in its understanding of the human being in the rights that are ascribed to us and even in the meaning of what it is for a right to be attributed to the human being. So the classical teaching represented for him by Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, um, Cicero, the Stoics and Aquinas represents a sort of tendency and then the modern break with that Makaveli Hobs lock as we discussed in part last time, Rouso and so on represents another tendency and historicism enters the

17:57 picture with Rouso and so on. But you could say if we play it out today the the notion of human rights which Strauss doesn't really treat here although I mean not directly in those terms but you can extrapolate some of the things that he says to see its underlying basis. Let me give you a quick example. Okay. So maybe not so quick but give me a moment to just state this u argument. First of all I'll appeal to something that I think we all know to a certain extent. Human rights as a notion tends to be super national because it's not primarily treating the human being in his civic dimension. That would be his that would be civic rights. It's treating the human being as liberated from civic identity as more important than civic identity as a human. In other words, globally. So human rights have a globalist dimension in this sense. They're treating human globally. Whereas both classical and modern

18:57 natural right treated the question of right as civic. You know the the political dimension of our rights was a civic question. It concerned belonging in you know it concerned the question of the naturalness of the political community and so on. Um so that's an old problem that for example if somebody comes to one place from another place he does not possess the same rights as a foreigner that you know a native or a cockinist or full you know or someone if my father's an Athenian citizen and you come as a foreign stranger to Athens well you lack some of the rights that I possess because place and civic identity have something to do with the meaning of civic right. Okay. So on in the modern case and you know some of the contemporary American debate is about this. Do Americans owe the whole world American rights? You know does some random person in another end of the earth have an equal right to the claims of the declaration of independence and of American jurist credential system of American uh dream.

20:04 The debate now is no, you know, no, no, it does like citizens come first and that just reflects a longstanding question and a long-standing tendency for the civic to be the primary realm here of the attribution of right. Okay, so that's the first thing I would say. Human rights are like post civic. You see what I mean? There's another dimension though I want to state very uh very quickly here. This is this is the kind of thing that's Strauss is so brilliant to me. He was the first teacher who did this, okay? Who took a notion that we all somehow know about or talk about and explained the reasoning behind it in a very clear way to my mind. Okay, your mileage may vary and you have a maybe other teachers who do this better. I think he was the one who did it best for me. So the global citizenship question, okay, treating the human as a human and not as Athenian, not as Spartan, not as Russian, Chinese or American. What about just as human? Well, Strauss at one point in this book, I think even in chapter four, he deres

21:04 it in the following way. And sorry, Nick, I'm getting kind of probably past the question here and Davis, but I think you're going to find this interesting and elucidating. Okay, so you know that there are laws. That's pretty elementary. There are laws, right? If I go 200 km an hour, 200 miles an hour in the States, you're going to get pulled over, arrested, your car is going get taken away, and so on because you broke the law. There are laws. Now you also know though that it seems like some laws can be unjust. Now if a person completely denies that there can be an unjust law, let's call that they think that law and justice are one in the same thing. Okay, we got to deal with those people separately. But for now, let's since I'm with a good group of people, let's take it for granted that we acknowledge the possibility of an unjust law, which means we appeal to something called justice. Okay. Okay. Now when we appeal to something called justice, we see justice as I mean it's the big question. It's a question of Plato's republic. You know what is justice? But let's say we again first approximations are very important here for Socrates and for Strauss. On a first approximation you want to see justice as something that

22:06 does good and not harm. You know if I if I'm just towards somebody that should be good and not you know that should be somehow good, right? Justice should be somehow good. Um, that's why you appeal from a law to a higher law because you think the higher law is better, more, you know what I mean? If it was worse, you wouldn't appeal to it. You appeal to it because it's higher, better, nobler, juster in a word, right? It's more just. Okay, fine. But now, there are some cases where it seems like what we would think is just can nevertheless be harmful to somebody. So, for example, we're let's say I'm in Canada, but let's consider I'm American for a second. Oh, no, fine. I'll be I'll be Canadian like I am. You'll be in America like you are. And um let's say that you have decided that it would be really good for you to annex Canada. Okay, I don't recommend it. We've got problems of our own, but if you do it for the territory and the natural resources, probably not so bad. Just give us the American dollar and we'll be happy, I guess. But imagine you take over Canada, okay? And imagine that in order to do that, you have to kill a

23:06 bunch of Canadians. Okay? But it's going to be good for you to do it. It's going to be just. You're going to have freedom, power, empire, whatever. You're going to help. Imagine that it helps your country so much that it's good from your point of view and it hurts my country so much that's bad for my point of view. Okay, so I just said it's bad for me, good for you, bad for me. So that means is justice doing me harm? Or to take a take maybe a simpler case on a individual level if I'm punishing a criminal? Okay, you may think that it's just to punish a criminal because you're sort of reforming him or correcting him or something like that. But there may be a case where we just face it and say, you know what, it's harm. We do him harm when we drop off his head. We like it. We're glad that we did it. It was the right thing to do. Okay. So, in other words, justice does harm because justice is political. And in politics, there are enemies. Friends and enemies. So, you want to help your friends and you want to hurt your enemies. Okay? In politics, that's 2 plus two equals four. That's as basic as it gets. Although, you'll see it discussed intelligently in in Plato's Republic and elsewhere. Okay? Friends and enemies. So now you say well look at

24:12 we want justice to do no harm but political justice does harm to the enemies. So in order to fulfill our aspirations for justice we need a world without enemies. In other words we need a global polity. We need a one world order because if you have a one world order if you have a global polity if you have globalism then you don't have the other. If you don't have the other you don't have the enemy. If you don't have the enemy then your justice does no harm. And so Strauss says this in chapter four that the classical view of this was the view that therefore the world must be ruled by divine providence. So the closest thing we have to a one world rule I mean before super intelligence singularity and all of that is the idea that the world is ruled by divine providence. So now I take it back to your question and again I apologize for taking a short question and making a lot of it but I think it's useful exercise to see how Strauss teaches us to sort of get into this. Um, the problem of human rights is associated with the problem of overcoming the division into closed societies that see each other as friends and enemies and

25:17 that therefore require justice to be watered down from the holy divine justice that treats everybody equally to the political justice that helps friends and hurts enemies. Today's human rights does it without all without all of the understanding that I just walked through, but it does it with a hostility towards closed political systems which it sees as violent and fascist and you know unjust. If you think that the closed political community is unjust, then you declare human rights and they become a sort of weapon against all countries. U Michael there's this um this line where it talks about the the variation of an all comprehensive society and a closed society and and Strauss discusses the idea of a an all comprehensive open society tends to be relegated to the lowest common denominator that the lower less politically mature societies tend to draw the higher societies down and I'm interested in hearing you kind elucidate on that idea. Well, imagine that in the Meriwether

26:21 Academy, you didn't let in the best and the brightest men you can find, but you let in just any random person walking down the street. Maybe you even insisted that they come join you at the table. Okay, now let's say that let's be very kind and say 85% or however many percent, I don't know, of the people that you meet are going to be decent. But it's probable that if they begin to outnumber you, they'll drag down the quality of your conversation, you know, unless you rule them with an iron fist. So that's always possible. The dictatorial response is always possible. Which is why Strauss's worried that an open society globally would culminate in a global dictatorship or global tyranny. Um but that's in some sense the concern that you know as you mix the high which is relatively rare with the low which is relatively common you're going to dilute things um you're going to just dilute things too far. Now Strauss did not believe uh let me put it this way in recapitulating the teaching of the ancients for us Strauss said that

27:22 they hold that the best solution is a compromise yes between the wise and the unwise. So he did not think that the classical teaching actually supported practically the absolute tyranny of the wise or the absolute what's called the absolute rule of the wise. Okay, the absolute kingship of the wise. Rather, it has to make some sort of compromise with the unwise. But there's a very specific way that it does that as you saw which is through the establishment of a fundamental foundational code of law like you know a declaration in a constitution something that sets the guidelines for the country for hopefully as long as possible uh even after the great founding generation has passed away so that it no longer depends on the continued existence of the great founders since after all they only have a lifetime but they can leave you a wise document for a long time and that wise document should provide guidance and uh rule somehow indirectly over the course

28:24 of affairs. So Strauss was very worried about the open society. There are other places where he analyzed it and uh and made predictions about what it would do. Those passages are pretty amazing and also precient and I think just true from top to bottom. But you know the the idea that a global society will be ruled by an unwise tyrant um somehow can be deduced which he discusses in the book on tyranny but uh but yeah that's the problem. So he says again characterizing the classic teaching and Strauss does say that in the um in the edition I have which is the seventh edition. I don't know if he says this in every edition but he says nothing that I have learned has shaken my inclination to prefer natural right especially in its classic form to the reigning relativism etc etc. So Strauss prefers this view that I'm telling you, but it's also true that we sometimes have to separate his characterization and his actual opinion. Okay. So yeah, when he characterizes the open society, he says for the classics, it's unnatural. The natural thing is for people to be grouped together, not for racial reasons, as you saw, but by the requirements of intelligent political

29:30 life. If you analyze what a political society is and what a political community is and what its requirements are and when it's good and when it's bad, when it's just and when it's unjust, and you use your basic experience as a human being who has lived alongside others, then you recognize that it's better, all things being equal, for you to know who you're dealing with. And you can't do that if you've got infinite number of people in an infinitely big space or let's call it right, the whole world's population in the whole globe. So the classics thought closed societies were the better answer. It's not that they never let anybody in. It's not that they had complete hostility to strangers and so on. It's that's what's required to keep a good legal order in a well-run commonwealth in their judgment. When you in your opening statement, you mentioned a little bit kind of led down this direction that the it could be extrapolated that the religion or the spirituality or the faith of their future is nihilism.

30:32 Am I am I reading that correctly? Well, Strauss said that historic you paraphrasing it this way. Strauss said that the rejection of natural right leads to a nihilism because it gives us no standard. It ultimately says I don't think he wrote this it's attributed to him maybe he said it he says something like it here on page three but he says if all values are relative cannibalism is a matter of taste. So in other words you can no longer say what's civilized what's cultured what's decent what's indecent. You need some sort of standard. Some sort of standard as he put it elsewhere that is stable, knowable and you know ultimately in the best case and in the classical case transhistorical. Doesn't depend on whether you live 100 years before or 500 years later. But in the absence of that yes we're headlong into nihilism as he says also fanatical obscurantism. So this is actually a very important point. I want to say something about it. We can you follow up as well but yeah the risk. So Strauss did not think we're faded to

31:37 go into a nihilistic period. By contrast, some the greatest of the German thinkers according to Strauss, Martin Haidiger, did in some sense say that we're faded to go into nihilism, but we're also going to come out the other end of it in a in a new era, a new epoch, a new beginning of philosophy. So Haidiger is a historicist, but he's not not quite, you know, a superficial relativist. He's the deep radical core of historicism. Strauss said I'll set to the side Strauss and Haidiger. It's a very difficult topic, but this is just to say Strauss didn't think it's like nihilism is our destiny. Nihilism is our fate. Um, no. Nihilism is where we're headed. But that just makes it all the more important that we resurrect the problem of natural right adequately and remind ourselves what's at stake and hopefully do everything we can do to have the alternative gain. you know have the alternative gain over the nihilistic tendencies and so Strauss and his students engaged in this project Alan Bloom Thomas Pangle Harry Jaffa

32:42 okay Mansfield and so on they all besides intellectually trying to understand these questions which they all did and besides being brilliant scholars and speaking of translation you know Alan Bloom translated Rouso and Plato and Thomas Pangle translated Plato's law so they all saw this as a great task for themselves for us as students um to sort of stem the tide of nihilism to a certain extent through the study of these great works. Um it's um it's it's uh yeah besides being interested in just the intellectual problem some of them were like really very keen on specifically institutional reform and you can see today institutions that owe their existence to the influence of Strauss and his students. I would say Claremont is one of those. There are others as well. And Bloom's like uh the Bloom, you know, examples like Bloom's book, The Closing of the American Mind, not only an analysis of uh souls without longing and of the crisis of higher education, also a kind of program. Um how I ever got into all of these questions is I had a philosophy professor in my first year of philosophy

33:46 who was a disciple of Alan Bloom. He didn't tell us about it. I reconstructed this by reverse engineering why he was so amazing years later. That's how I discovered Strauss by reverse engineering the effect of my first philosophy class which never mentioned Strauss or Bloom. Um but that's what Bloom you know ends up being an influence designed to help support the country the nation the founding you know the a way of life before it gets before it is destroyed by nihilism. I have a question. It would it be correct to contrast this nihilism towards which we may or may not be headed on the one hand with uh um what Strauss calls natural order on the other. Um he he what from what I can glean he seems to uh found the natural rights of man on this idea that he calls natural order. Um, does natural order simply refer to an objectively existing reality? Um, does it exist outside the human mind? Is

34:52 it something imposed on phenomena by the human mind? What is this um medical order? Okay, so again, a great question and um we should be more alert to the formulations of the questions than to exactly an answer at first because Service is interested in helping us to clarify the question. But I can say this that it is not emphatically not for Strauss an imposition of the human mind on a world of phenomena. Now I have to tell you why that is the case. Because for Strauss when we talk about the imposition of order onto a world of phenomena of the human mind onto the world we're speaking roughly as you may know or may not know of contean interpretation of these things. Now that's Emanuel Kant the German philosopher. Okay. So for for Strauss if our starting point maybe known to us maybe unbeknownst to us is this radical reinterpretation of the I mean Kant himself said that he was affecting a radical reinterpretation

36:00 um where you know we used to think that the world we used to think that the mind had to conform to the world but now we discover that the world actually conforms to the mind and Emanuel Kant writes the details of that out in his critique of pure reason. So Strauss would say, "Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, it's possible, but in order to judge for sure, we would have to know much better than we do at the outset what Kant was responding to. What was actually the view, not just the propagandistic postcontian view that yeah, they were all backwards and we now are knowledgeable, right? That was the world of prejudice. This is the world of enlightenment. That was the world of medieval darkness, right? This is the world of modernity. It's no it's no um no accident containment and so on. So you know it's like we need to understand what was the whole world and we need to understand it on its own terms of philosophy before con. So when we do that we see that no we can't talk and by the way this is why Strauss in uh in

37:06 teaching the republic again I learned this my first year philosophy class and then just later it grows on you and you understand more and more about it. Strauss always cautioned his students because other other teachers who didn't approach these topics in quite the same way. They said Plato's republic is about the ideal state. May maybe you have heard that. Has anybody heard that Plato's Republic is about the ideal state? Sometimes a common way of presenting it. Strauss says, "Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Ideal is a non-platonic term. The notion of an ideal is something in your mind that serves as a standard of unrealizable perfection against which you know the outside world can only be a series of approximations. But that's not that's not a Platonic notion. That's a Kian notion." And Kant and Plato are different. And so it's kind of like slapping something on top of Plato before you've even gotten started that distorts any possibility of learning all that there is to learn. Never mind the word state. That's another issue because the polace is not the state. You know the state is a let's say a modern

38:10 concept. In order to understand the state you got to understand Mchavel and Hobbes. That's true. But in Plato we understand the polace which is something not quite equivalent uh or identical. So, as I may have mentioned in our last conversation, Strauss is just as keenly interested in removing from between ourselves and the question, between ourselves and the thinker, between ourselves and the text, all of the layers of subsequent interpretation that make it difficult to get started. So, conteanm would be a part of that. By the way, there's much much much more to what I'm saying. Like I'm not trying to be dismissive in any way because in fact Strauss studied there was a school in Germany called the neocontians. The neocontians were primarily interested in philosophy as an account of the possibility of scientific knowledge. Okay. So science was the great idol and saying how is science possible was the great puzzle and using Kant's philosophy the neocontians addressed this puzzle of the possibility

39:12 of scientific knowledge and Strauss studied under that school initially. and gradually was dissatisfied with its fundamental presuppositions and dissatisfied with his treatment of political things and felt that it started somehow too theoretically and it missed the phenomena and so he in accordance with the phenomenological tradition tries to get that stuff out of the way you know so it's unlearning largely or that's here too in this book right he starts with what we know the declaration of independence he doesn't start with Xenophon because who who's read Xenophon And he doesn't start with Hustel because who's read Husterel? He starts with what we know. But then he takes us all over the place. He takes us to Zenifon and he takes us to but he's got to start with what we know. So um but that's not the natural order. Okay. The natural order there's a question about what exactly it is. On one hand it's the totality of everything that exists, but not quite. So you might say nature is everything. That's reasonable thing to think, right? Natural order is just everything that exists. That's not totally unreasonable. as of

40:17 like first approximation. But Strauss says no, that's not quite right for the classics because the classics made a distinction between things that are by nature and things that are um let's say made the natural things and the made things. If you take the set of all things that includes things that are not made by us and things that are made by us, right? That's in the totality. But the natural is only a part of that totality because of you see the na the made things are distinguished from the natural things. So the classics make a distinction between the natural and the made and also between nature and convention. So as I say the question is very legitimate very interesting and very important. I don't want to jump to an answer. I just want to sort of show you how Strauss begins to get into the question you know and has us formulate it more and more deeply then becomes a puzzle and it should it is a puzzle. For example, is it necessary if you have an account of human um right, not human rights in the way we discussed the global right, but

41:19 somehow you know here you say all hum all humans doesn't say all Americans, right? So all humans are endowed by their creator with unalienable rights. So do you need to have a theological account in order to understand that? Like do you need to have a cosmology in order to have a a um political anthropology? You know, these are all questions that Strauss raises. I think we discussed last time in what is political philosophy that Stro said it's often an objection against the ancient teaching that well they required an a cosmology as the basis of their political teaching but ancient cosmology has been refuted and therefore the the classic teaching has been refuted but he says no that's not true Socrates was in quest of knowledge of the whole he didn't possess it and he could still be in still still speak intelligently about the nature of political things weirdly because you might think how can you know the political things if you don't know the totality. How can you know a part if you don't know the whole? I think Strauss discusses that in chapter 4 too. So one thing I want to emphasize here, some people will like this and some

42:21 people will not like this. There are some authors that we read primarily for their answers. Okay, they give us clear answers. In some sense, I would say to a certain extent a book like this, okay, the political theory of the American founding. There's another one called The American Mind by C. Bradley Thompson, which again, if you, you know, if you've read Haidiger and Nichze, then he's just restating the naive principles of American faith in their own, you know, in nature and right and stuff like that. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I'm saying once you're aware of German philosophy as a challenge, you can't quite return to those. Those are books of answers. They're not books of questions. Strauss is first and foremost a um Strauss loves first and foremost philosophy. It's always like in order there it's not true of everybody that you read that the most important thing to know about them is that they love philosophy. That is the most important thing to know about Strauss and therefore you know how he understands phil philosophy and politics, philosophy and inquiry,

43:22 philosophy in nature, philosophy in the natural order. Um and this is all to say if the question seems sort of abstract or obstruuse or like just get to the you know just get to the point just get to the answer. I'm trying to give you a faithful representation of Strauss, okay? by showing you why for him uncovering deeper and deeper formulations of the question but starting from something that's familiar to us is really the adequate uh method like the proper the proper way to proceed. You know what I'm saying? Is that let me say very I I promise it's so hard because I always want to be I want to give as fair an answer as I can. I'll say one last thing very very quickly. Okay. Strauss at one point I think we even discussed this or you saw it in the reading last time. says um nature is the notion of nature is a philosophical discovery. This is weird but it's going to help one thing about the natural horses. The notion of nature is a philosophical discovery. So he has this argument that like there's no philosophy in the Bible because there's no word for nature in the Bible. So nature is a philosophical discovery. He says the pre philosophical notion of nature is a way the way that dogs are, the way that women are, the

44:27 way that trees are. So that's I I mentioned that as a possible shorthand for natural order, the world in which there's a way that things are. What I was going to ask was is is that uh distinction between uh giving clear answers and in proposing questions would you say that that's um or to to German philosophy from that time? Is it what? I'm sorry. Would you say that that's core to German philosophy from that time? I just missed one word there. Is it over over from German philosophy? Is it borrowed? Core core like fundamental to like a Oh, is it fundamental to German philosophy? Core. Gotcha. Sorry, I didn't hear that. Okay. Is it core to German philosophy at the time to raise the questions for Yeah. So for the people that Strauss so as I um let's put it this way at the beginning partially no and at the end partially yes. So let me just explain it

45:33 very quickly. As I mentioned the neocontthians that Strauss was studying with they were more dogmatic in the sense that they had a starting point that they themselves did not call into question as radically as he would have liked to. Okay. So they were somehow less able to see that there were still some fundamental questions that needed to be asked and more somehow applying a ready-made method to a given domain. As I said, contian method to the domain of scientific knowledge. Um but Nietzsche and Haidiger that's a different story. In Nietzsche and Haidiger the question takes uh you're you're in the world there of demolishing as much as possible. I mean Nich and Haidiger are not equivalent here obviously but take Haidiger who Strauss Strauss called Haidiger the greatest thinker of our time. So it's very appropriate I think to treat Haidiger as exemplary of German thinking here and Haidiger is all about the question. He's all about questioning. You know questioning is the motor of um our deeper and deeper access into the

46:33 truth of being. So yes, it the somehow the shift from the the neocontthians to Hasserel to Haidiger is a shift from like ready-made dogmatic methods to a deepening to like a total breakthrough into the world of the question. Hopefully that's helpful. I know it's kind of schematic but yeah I just wanted I just was interested in more elaborate you know so thank you. Yeah you're welcome. I mean I'll say one other thing very quickly you know I'll do my best which is on this question Strauss wrote in the 30s that uh after Nietzsche I mean this is this is about your question about the question okay that after Nietzsche all the settled questions are once again unsettled like everything that we treated as resolved is now up for debate again that's what he says he says Nietzsche has reopened every fundamental question and he says for example about the Jews. He's like, the Jews can never um you can no longer assume that the truth of the Hebrew Bible or the Torah rests with the prophets. You have to study also the

47:36 kings. In other words, everything's on the table again after Nietzsche according to Strauss in what he wrote. Uh there's a specific piece I have in mind. Doesn't matter what it is, but okay. So, he gives credit to Nietzsche for making everything questionable again. And uh the great benefit of that if you love philosophy is that suddenly you're no longer necessarily trapped by residual beliefs. I mean trapped by them, right? You may still act in accordance with residual beliefs, but intellectually you're free now to think. Obviously the downside though is what we see in the first page of natural right in history that if you undermine the beliefs of a political community if you undermine its faith in it its founding principles then you are on the way to um fanatical obscurantism nihilism and uh national um disintegration. So unfortunately the knife cuts both ways but that's very important for Strauss. uh it's very important that he

48:37 understands it and he wants us to understand it. Is that helpful? I'll ask a question. Um this was you touched on this in your first answer, but there's this this concept of a well-ordered soul. And I believe it's actually proposed as as the summit of human life is to achieve a well-ordered soul. Wondering what is that and how do we achieve it? Well, that's a that's a great question. It's true that for Strauss, it's a certain sort of pinnacle. He says the philosopher can't help but love well-ordered souls, which is why he's always on the hunt for other potential philosophers one. Okay, let's start with let's get let's start with how you achieve it before we even say what it is, which is appropriate method because again in the republic Socrates does something similar with justice before defining it. Uh you can do things in reverse order if you need to. So for Strauss, the the way that you fulfill the pinnacle of our

49:37 human possibilities in a word is education. Okay? In a word, it's education. So that means a big question about what education is, right? Does that mean going to Harvard and learning uh anti-racist baby or whatever? Obviously not, right? So education means something very specific. It's like the turning around of the soul from the things that appear to be to the things that truly are. to use the image from Plato's cave allegory. Okay, so education there's so much built into that notion, right? How do you study? With whom do you study? What is a life lived together with others seeking wisdom? Okay, that's extremely important. Uh and that's somehow even that's that's a highulutin sort of answer. So let me take it down. I'll tell you I'll tell you something that stuck with me from the first day of my philosophy class. Okay, you can think this is a simplification. You may have heard some version of it, but you know what? It's still pretty good and still pretty close. You can think of the soul

50:37 not not don't worry about it as you know eternal this that and the other thing. You could just think about the structure of the human uh core as consisting of reason, will and desire. And in a well-ordered soul, you will means you act in accordance with the things that you have reasoned about and that you you desire the good. You reason about the good, you desire the good and you act in accordance, you know, you act accordingly. So your desire is correctly oriented. Let's call it broadly speaking. Your reason is correctly oriented, broadly speaking. And your action is relatively ordered. Is well ordered relatively speaking. Okay. So if you have reason, will, and desire working in a certain sort of harmonious consonance within yourself, again, I'm giving you this as like a first approximation, okay? Because I like this. Keep in mind, right? It's one p what? Page one is one thing. Page 500 is another thing. So day one of philosophy is one thing, right? But I think it's a helpful starting point. Reason, will, and desire working together in yourself, but we're not an island. So you also have to have well-ordered friendships, well-ordered

51:44 families, well-ordered communities, well-ordered countries, you know, and maybe one great aspiration is a well-ordered world. Okay, but right, one thing is when Messiah comes or whatever, okay, and the uh however you see that issue of a well-ordered world, but you got to start where you are, right? So reason, will, and desire working well with one another individually and with others in small groups and communities, with your friends, family, and um colleagues. Okay. Well, we don't know right away what reason, will, and desire are, how they operate. Well, we know a little bit. You know, everybody has experience of somebody where you say, "I wouldn't want to be around that person." Like, I read a story today of somebody who killed somebody else in broad daylight to steal his Rolex. I think it was in New York. Okay. A young guy with the family wore a watch to an event, five-star hotel and casino. Somebody came up to him and murdered him for his watch. Now we ask, is murdering someone for his watch an act of a well-ordered soul? I don't think you need to have read Aristotle to say no. So we all have a sense and what Plato

52:46 and Aristotle and Socrates and Strauss do is they don't rewrite our sense from scratch. They help us to understand it. They deepen it. They help us to see more than we could see. Not by arbitrarily constructing some hypothesis that comes out of nowhere, but just by seeing this guy was courageous and this guy was cowardly. This guy was decent and this guy wasn't. I wouldn't mind leaving this guy with my son and daughter and wife, but this guy I wouldn't keep him, you know, 10 kilometers I get a restraining order against him. So if you if you start from the recognition of what you already consider to be a well-ordered soul and you just deepen your understanding of that possibility and then you know the the the great pinnacle the great flourishing of it obviously is for Strauss education and wisdom and then we have the additional question you know what does that look like when you've really gone all the way the last word I'll say about that is Strauss does like and does represent the classical admiration for the figure of

53:48 the statesman or the legislator in the exalted sense Moses right whatever right so a great bringer of order a great bringer of law and a great educator in that sense so one education is we sit we read and we discuss that's very important but Strauss also thought that statesmanship and the acts of great legislators I mean he was repeating Aristotle here but he agrees I think with the view those also remind us of what you know a truly excellent soul might look like. If you found a political order that improves people for centuries, then you've done no small deed and uh you've shown a great possibility of the human soul. Oh yes. So there so there's the um there's this idea if I'm interpreting it correctly that the philosopher you know he's he's up on the hill. his interaction with Apollos is um fairly hard to achieve. So there's this mediator which is the gentleman, right?

54:49 The gentleman is this person in between the philosopher and the people. The gentleman is essentially the uh he he is the one who is able to I guess digest the philosopher and bring that wisdom to the people. Um there was this line that we read gentlemen have this in common with the wise men that they look down on many things which are highly esteemed by the vulgar or that they are experienced in things noble and beautiful. So perhaps you could maybe elaborate on uh who this gentleman is, what what are his traits? So you could say it's the landed aristocracy as he put it, the the gentry and the urban patriciate. It's people who it's call it the quas, you know, the the aristocrats, the upper classes, not in the snobbish sense, okay? But the people who although they have businesses, although they have worldly affairs, although they're not living alone on the aisle of the blessed, nevertheless do have an interest in culture,

55:55 civilization, learning, wisdom, decency, they like to be around people like that and discuss people like that and support people like that and defend people like that. So I think you I mean I don't want to make suggestions about who the contemporary versions of this is but just think it would be a class of people who are generally speaking supportive of philosophy and who do see it as a high undertaking but who still have to tend to their farms who still have to take care of their business you know so I would say most of us aspire to be in some sense uh among the gentlemanly class. Okay, keeping philosophy as something out of reach. In other words, you know, we want to we want to have pra practical affairs, take care of them well and still have respect and understanding of and respect for and an openness to what we can learn from those who are greater than ourselves, you know. So, let's say the the lower the

56:55 people who are not gentlemen in this sense, they don't the guy who killed the other guy for his watch was not a gentleman. I mean that's he has no he's got no aspiration towards higher things in that sense right he thinks that you can take a life for some some material value so the gentlemen are you just have to think in that in that way right they can't dedicate their whole lives to philosophy in the way that say Socrates did we don't know we don't have Socrates whole life but Socrates is shown to us by Xenophon and Plato as somebody who dedicated his whole life to philosophy okay philosophy is all-consuming way of life for Socrates. Um, by the way guys, I have you on screen and not myself. So, if I'm super dark or anything is wrong or weird behind me, I apologize. I just I'm looking at you and not at myself. So, I can't see if anything weird is going on. But, uh, just a heads up on that. So, yeah, the gentlemen are people like that. They have affairs. They take care of them. They still want to be supportive of and around and learning from the reflected light somehow of the great people. So, I would say take

57:55 anybody who admires the founders. like admiration for the founders is a gentlemanly characteristic here or a gentlemanly trait. Okay. Um somewhat simplifying, but it's those who want to be noble and good. If you don't want to be noble and good, you're not among the class of the gentlemen. Just because you want to be noble and good, you're not necessarily among the class of the philosophers. So there's a sort of tripartite division there. And structurally it is part of uh it is part of Strauss's Platonic teaching that that second level. So let's say between the many and the and the very few okay between the founding fathers and everybody who lives in America and falls under the graces and the blessings of uh your great country. There are the people who reproduce the goals of the American identity and teaching who, you know, who who do the great work of carrying that forward. They're distinct from the

58:57 people who founded it, but they're very important because they're supportive of it and they actively promulgate it and further it. You know what I mean? They're active in its cause. Um but yes so in the classical sense in a nutshell noble and good but not necessarily possessing speculative wisdom would be my shortest formulation of it. Okay. And um it's an important theme for Strauss. He doesn't think that uh so let me give you an opposite view very quickly. Imagine this view not somehow non non-straussian. Okay. You have the few who know and the many who do not know. And how are you going to deal with this situation? Well, what is it that the few know science? They know that all religion is bunk. They know that belief in the supernatural is garbage. They know science. Okay, that's what they know. And what are they going to do to the many? Illuminate them, educate them, enlighten them. They're going to blast

1:00:01 the light of science into the darkness of the people of the cave and have a universal enlightenment. And the nature of the enlightenment is scientific knowledge is true and everything that you thought was true is false. But don't worry because we're going to elevate you here. Okay, that's one way. You see, there's no middleman there in some way, right? There's the illuminators and everybody's going to be equally enlightened or something like that. Okay, the goal is to destroy prejudices everywhere. Totally antiplatonic, totally anti-Souseian. For Strauss, it's much much much better if you can. You have the great light of the idea of the good to use analogy from Plato's cave allegory. You have the people who have the blessed vision. Okay, the beatitude I guess for Aquinas, the isle of the blessed and so on. And then you turn around and you give that light down. But it's always going to be stages. You know what I mean? This goes through intermediary stages and there you there's no destruction of the cave in Plato's world or in Strauss's world. You never get rid of the shadows. You never try to

1:01:06 completely bridge the gap between the vulgar and the wise and therefore the intermediary is always very important and in fact I said a moment ago that the figure of the legislator and the statesman is so important. uh in some sense the statesman and the legislator is already a kind of intermediary because the the the philosopher who has pure knowledge and let's say the people who don't well it's for it's out of benevolence and in order not to be ruled by his inferiors that the philosopher comes down again either directly himself to give a law or to educate a lawgiver so that the law can serve as a great educator of the many. Okay. So you could say in the a gentleman is between the many vulgar and the few philosophers and somehow between the philosophers and the gentleman there's also like this figure of the statesman or the legislator you know so you have the philosophers then let's say you have the founding fathers then you have the gentlemen who love the vision of the founding fathers and aspire to it to be noble and good and

1:02:09 then you have gradually all the way down to the degenerates and the murderers and the thieves And uh you know what I mean? They're deported. They're recently deported. You guys have a question? Um so I have a question about this idea of modern versus classical natural right and kind of similar to the distinction between modern and classic political philosophy that we discussed last time. Um, so I guess kind of in this history of ideas, um, what we talked about last time, Strauss kind of made this distinction between classic and modern political philosophy, um, at least concrete in this ter idea of like tracing it to Makaveli as enacting this break. I'm wondering if he kind of pioneered this idea of um, Can you hear us? What else? Yes, I can. I can hear you.

1:03:10 Good. Um, so, so we've got you here. Yeah. Um, so I'm wondering if he kind of pioneered this break between classic and modern natural right. Um, if that was like a consideration in his distinction between classic uh and modern political philosophy and kind of just taking this line uh from page 162 at the bottom or 161 at the bottom to the top of 162. Um it is important that the difference between the Arisatilian view of natural right and Mchu Mchavelianism be clearly understood. Mchavelli denies natural right because he takes his bearing by the extreme situations in which the demands of justice are reduced to the requirements of necessity and not by the normal situations in which the demands of justice in the strict sense are the highest law. Um, so kind of just reading that seems to point to Mchavelli as the devisor of this break. Also specifically on the question of natural right. Yeah, I'll say something about that in a minute. I

1:04:12 want you guys to know my microphone disconnected for a minute. So I think now it's using my headphone my um earbuds as a microphone. Does it sound worse? I would like to switch back if possible. It's good. You can hear me. All right. Oh, okay. Fine. Yeah, I'm good. We hear you. Um, okay. Good. Okay. So yeah the point uh just to reate there a little bit the idea that sometimes you have a well-ordered political community okay wellun legal system is operating but there's an emergency situation that happens sometimes and this is a big theme in modern political uh theory I mean like today's political theory and today's political theology deals with this issue of the emergency mergency situation because um especially after 911, okay, after the 9/11 attacks, this became a big theme in political theory since you maybe remember the Patriot Act and things like that. There were certain freedoms that had to be suspended for the sake of the defense of the law. So, um those are extreme situations when

1:05:17 there's an emergency, when there's an enemy, when there's a crisis, when there's a catastrophe. And it is an uncomfortable fact, but nevertheless a fact that at those times it seems like you can't put any constraint on the action of an intelligent political operative. In other words, everything's fair game. All options are on the table in an emergency. You don't want all options to be on the table all the time. You don't want a permanent state of emergency where you never know whether the law applies to you. Okay. So, some contemporary thinkers deal with this issue. They say that for example like COVID was it an emergency that deprived people of their rights. It was a medical emergency that deprived people of their rights and that somehow we live in a permanent state of emergency where you can never be assured that you have legal protection because somehow someone can always find an emergency justification for what they have done somehow extraleally. So, uh, Makaveli, as you see here, as you said, um, Nick,

1:06:20 Mchaveli likes that moment of the exception, the the found because think about it again, you take a simple view. I said, if I drive my car too fast, I get a ticket because I live in a legal order. But Makavelli is not as interested in that as he is in the foundational act of the legal order. So if I'm the founder, not not in the American sense here, let's think in a different sense. If I'm founding the moral order, if I'm founding the legal order, if I'm the one who's going to say what's permitted and what's uh not permitted, what binds my action? Because there has there's no constituted order until I make it. If I'm the ma if I'm making it, then it can't bind me because it's not made yet. So in other words, you could say that if you think that morality is largely, maybe not solely, but largely a function of law, you may think that the founder of the law is criminal or immoral or amoral, that he can he can do

1:07:21 things that other people can't do because he's the one who's establishing it. So, Mchaveli draws our attention in an uncomfortable and indecent uh and non-classical way to the idea of the criminal origins of uh of political communities by focusing on that rare weird moment when things are not quite up and running yet. Whereas most of the time the normal case most of the time you can think well things are you know 99.9 infinity% of the time things are up and running and we shouldn't we shouldn't look at the world like we're in a constant state of emergency like all the laws are suspended like everything goes okay no we should be like you know if you killed me for my watch then there's got to be or if you just took my watch or if you did this or if you did that or if I went too fast on the highway right there ordinary everyday laws so Aristotle has that moderation and sobriety the normal citizens perspective on the world you know on the world of politics stra said this very important that for for Plato

1:08:23 and for Aristotle political science begins with the citizen's perspective the citizens perspective is not no moral order binds me I can go shed blood so long as I start the a new regime and you know build it up from that's not the moral that's not how ordinary citizens encounter political phenomena right they encounter it in ordinary disputes of justice. And uh that's classical. The fact that contemporary political political theory is so concerned with emergency states of exception isn't only because of 9/11. It's not only because of COVID. It's very useful by the way their analysis of all of these things. But it's possibly also because we are in the modern tradition and the originator of the modern tradition, Mataveveli himself took his bearings by the extreme situations according to Stro. So, we're not used to doing it in an ordinary way, but we should. And I want to say, you know, we should according to this account. I want to say something. Those of you who have the book, maybe not

1:09:23 everybody did. If you just read the chapters somehow in separate PDF form, no problem. But those of you who have the book, you may have noticed that uh right before the introduction, there are two stories from the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible. Um, one is from they're not cited, okay? But one is from uh second book of Samuel, one is from the first book of Kings. And there's a site, the O Strauss Center archive that has digital transcripts of courses that Strauss taught at the University of Chicago elsewhere. So I looked these up to see if he'd ever mention them in his lectures and uh he had. It's helpful to do that, by the way, to see his discussion of these two passages in his lectures. Um, but these two passages have to do with cases of, call it an everyday ordinary kind where a justice dispute arose. Okay, I won't read them to you. We want to go over them, but I tell you them because it's pretty important, right? Why why did he do that? Why does he have two passages from the Bible? What's

1:10:27 their significance? How do they relate to the rest of the discussion? What do they have to do with what we're talking about, if anything? And what I want to say in relationship to exactly what we're talking about now is these aren't extreme situations of the founding of a commonwealth. They're not dealing with the suspension of the law in some radical emergency measure. They are showing that out of somehow ordinary situations of justice that occur, we get the resources for thinking through the problem of justice and the problem of natural right. Okay. And natural law and divine right. all of which are distinct uh in some way for Strauss. So Aristotle has that classical uh as Strauss put it in another situation um noble simplicity and grandeur. He doesn't have that exciting um extremism of radical inquiry into the founding moment or into the crisis moment. you know, he deals

1:11:28 in a nice way with the natural order, so to speak. So, you gota, it's very important to see as you get into Strauss, if you do, as you get into this question, I must have read this book 10 times before I really ever looked into the two stories. Okay? So, don't think that it's obvious that you're going to, oh yeah, he says something about whatever. There were two men in one city, the one the rich, the other poor. It took me a long time of reading this book before I actually tried to understand why, you know, why does he say that? what is it meant to teach us? And I had to look up, you know, how he discussed it in his lectures. So, don't be hard on yourselves if you didn't notice it, didn't care about it, or if it's not obvious even now. But I think the point is we all deal in everyday life with ordinary situations where justice is a question. And that is a kind of opening that goes very very deep if you walk through it. And that leads to some big puzzles and big problems. And you don't have to do what Maveli did and start from uh start from extremes. By the way, the parallel outside of political philosophy, but in let's say epistemology is you don't have to start with daycart and subject everything to

1:12:29 radical doubt. You don't have to have these radical gestures that cut everything that cut you know pull the rug out under everything which is it's a it's a modern thing to do and it's reflected in a lot of contemporary thought. Um so Strauss preferred the classics in their approach but yeah for Strauss Machavelli is the the first he's the inventor of modernity. Originally he thought it was Hobbes then he realizes Makavelli but um his last word seems to be Makavelli. Anybody want to ask one last question before we wrap it up? It it sounds like this justice is um is almost best preodern. So how so for you? Well, it it it becomes

1:13:32 it becomes complicated with with modernity and um and the the continual uh destruction of of specific structures in society going, you know, the the best example most recently is um uh sexuality and then eventually that will transform into uh human like identity identity politics moving into um the transhumanism and the next steps. So it it continues to to devolve in that sense. Yeah. So there was uh I think that it is um I'm trying to remember their their names right on the spot. I can't do it. Uh wait a second because it's important ish. Okay. I'll tell you their names later. There's a formulation of the basic problem by a couple of scholars in Strauss Zucker. Okay, Michael and Katherine Zucker. I think this is from them. They say here's the problem. Um, the classics are good. That's what

1:14:37 she said in some sense, right? The classic version of justice. Classics are good. America is good. America is modern. So that form that that gives us a problem. You know, if if you if if you say as you did that it seems like classical mo classical right is superior or preferable or good but you also think that America instantiates modern natural right and not classical natural right then you have a problem. Um, all the more so if you think America is good and worth defending and that you want to protect America from fanatical obscurantism and nihilism. And so this is a this is a theme in Strauss and the reception of Strauss and the schools of Strauss because there are some people who say I think Harry Jaffa was one of them. Uh, I know this part of the story less well than I know Strauss um, proper but they say look classics were good. Yes, America is good. Yes. But America

1:15:40 is a is a very good combination of classical and modern teaching and classical and modern trends and tendencies and okay they they emphasize the extent to which America is classical whereas Strauss you could say emphasize the extent to which America is a break from the classical. Um, so that's a that's a big thing. But yeah, if Strauss has a preference for the for the uh classical natural right, his reasons for that are worth understanding and going into. But if you think that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness where we started in the declaration is like Strauss does modern and not classical. The pursuit of happiness is for Strauss a modern understanding of right, not a classical understanding of right. and life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness is a modern understanding of right, not a classical understanding of right, then you have to somehow figure out where you stand visav the American project. If you prefer the classics, so all I said right now configures a big debate in the world

1:16:41 of uh you know these issues. some people taking the critical stance towards America but not in the leftist historicist way just in the way that America is the greatest compromise that you could make under the circumstances but Plato's city and speech is better you know that's that's another version of putting things in the right place Michael maybe on a closing note could you just uh you know share some practical advice for us on how we can continue to improve ourselves in this journey journey as Strauss puts it. Replacing opinion with knowledge and uh and become wiser men. So I have generalities I could say like continue to study these books. It's very important, you know, do your best not to go the way of wicked men and all of that, right? Stick to the path of the righteous. If you know that something is going to harm the well order of your soul, don't do it. If you did it, don't do it again. You know what I mean? So these are all sort of basic uh basic but timeless and uh profound pieces of moral

1:17:41 advice that you can find uh that I'm just referring you to. Uh the reason I'm a little bit cautious is because I do think from another perspective everybody has their own path into these questions and um and it's not easily replicable. You know what I mean? Like so getting together with people that are pursuing the quest with you like we're doing here, right? We're just we we all have an interest in certain topics. We're discussing them together. Maybe I've read them a little maybe I've read Strauss a little bit longer than you. So I'm leading this conversation. Another time you've read somebody longer. You lead the discussion. Okay? So we're all just trying to understand things. But be, you know, follow the path of the righteous and follow your specific path. My I had a winding road into all of these questions. I can't tell you do it the way that I did it. Strauss had a winding road. You know, he was a refugee from war torn Germany, Jewish refugee in America. His situation had something to say about how he approached these questions. Your situation will have something to say about how you approach these questions. And I don't know your situation well enough to give you any specific advice. That's why I give you the general advice. You know, look to

1:18:44 people who are moral stars in the great firmament of human history and follow their example.