Josherich's Blog

Alex Priou: A Straussian Generation?

This is one of the virtues of Strauss, as he sees, similar to what Franz H. Perger is doing, he saw around him, in people like Schmidt, in people like Jung, or even in people like Heidegger, and to some extent Nietzsche, this kind of reactivity. And he saw that there was some merit to it, and he gives it its merit, and it should be given the merit of being a very real reaction to a very real problem. Where are the works, like Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind today, that really touched on these nerves? It was, I think, a feather in the cap of Strauss that Bloom wrote that book and was able to address so powerfully and provoke such a reaction. Where is the corollary? Or are we just losing our sense of the compass? I really think this is an important thing that scholars need to take more seriously as part of their work.

Hi, hi, welcome, welcome. This is the From the New World podcast. Today, I’m speaking with Alex Prio, a philosopher, the author of three books, Becoming Socrates, Defending Socrates, and Musings on Plato’s Symposium, and the Interim Dean of the Center for Intellectual Foundations at the University of Austin. Oh, and he’s also the host of the New Thinkery podcast, which if you enjoy this episode, you should definitely also check out as well. We discuss the role of mentorship and the new generation of politically motivated youth, esoteric writing in the age of new media, and the work of Leo Strauss, Carl Schmitt, and Thomas Hobbes. If you liked the episode, the best way to help us out is to let a friend know, either in person or online. That way, you’re not only helping us, but hopefully you’re helping someone find something interesting and informative. Without further ado, here’s Alex Prio.

But you hear now with all of the Doge kids that they need to gain a real education. And I think there’s a genuine truth to that, you know, as fans of Strauss and of Plato. Why is it important for youth to have guidance? You know, I mean, Annie, first of all, thanks for having me to talk with you. You bring up Plato, right? And Strauss kind of comes with this too. I mean, he started a school and he obviously had a great influence over very many smart people’s lives and gave them kind of form and direction to their lives. But you see this in Plato where you’re young, you’re going out into the world, you’re kind of venturing into your community, you’re wondering what your place is, how your interests might align with the place.

And it’s very easy for wherever you put yourself in the world or wherever the world pulls you, it’s very easy for that world to give shape and contour to your desires. In fact, it’s probably already been doing it before you even venture out there since you’re quite young. And there is this kind of supposition we have that if we can just find some kind of work or job or task or some kind of purpose within the community that roughly aligns with our own sort of interests that we’ll be happy and flourishing members of our society and as individuals all at the same time.

But it would be a mistake to simply identify the similarity of your interests to what you’re doing as a perfect identity, right? To say that simply because this sort of, you could say that the community might be parasitic on your desires, right? And parasitic on your interests. And you can think of so many people who have gone out and they’ve really found a job that’s doing what they love. And then they find that it’s not really actually satisfying them.

And the reason it’s not satisfying them is because often the world, in wanting to maximize your talents and interests, preys on them. And suddenly the thing that excited you as a kid is no longer fun anymore, right? And you have to kind of rediscover it. Say nothing of the fact that this often doesn’t exhaust all of our interests. And if you want to be alive to the way in which justice, the just life, the life that’s in contribution to the common good might not be wholly satisfying of your deeper yearning just to live well and be happy, you do need somebody who’s very smart, who’s thought about this, who’s maybe not fully at home in the world or not fully at ease with the world to help you reflect on the traditional or conventional paths to quote-unquote success.

In that way, mentorship, in the strong sense too, we kind of think of mentorship as like, “Oh, you’re interested in this? Oh, this person is kind of proficient in it. Go talk to them. They’ll tell you how to do it.” No, mentorship here is way more robust, way deeper and more profound. It involves talking to somebody who understands you quite a bit and can think about your motivations and help you think about your motivations and thereby reflect critically on them and find a sure, if more difficult, path to happiness and flourishing.

That’s a really important aspect that you highlight. A lot of young people I know, they’re very talented. They see the world as very broken. They don’t know who to trust. They think the old order is dysfunctional, if not fully illegitimate. And yeah, they have this tension where they’re trying to, I think, cultivate some sort of discipline, some sort of virtue, but the world feels very cold to the touch and mentorship can maybe be an aid to that. If what I’m describing is what mentorship ought to look like in the highest sense, it’s very intimate, right? It’s closer to something like friendship, and the kind of friendship where you’re critically examining one another and holding each other to account, right? You’re sort of looking into each other’s souls and saying, “Look, there’s much good here, but there’s much that needs work, right? And much that requires reflection that’s not thinking clearly about what you ought to do.”

Yes, exactly, exactly. And before we started rolling, we were talking about the dialogue between Alcibiades and Socrates. Alcibiades, who’s this young, ambitious man. Here’s why it’s important to pursue the just life. And he goes into this kind of extensive dialogue. But an aspect that really stood out to me is that Alcibiades, he looks at the world, he looks at the injustice in the world. It’s something that’s very felt, right? I think a lot of people have this experience of like, oh, these people are like obviously corrupt. These people are like obviously, you know, incompetent. Why should I care about justice? I believe there’s like a line that’s very close to this. And not to completely recapitulate and ask for a summary, but like, why is that? Why is that important?

The Alcibiades is a fantastic dialogue. It was considered for much of antiquity to be the proper introduction to Plato’s works. And I wrestled with why, because it’s, it is kind of, it’s not like most Platonic dialogues, which are trying to answer a what is question, what is knowledge, what is courage, what is virtue, right? But it’s really about Alcibiades’ desire to address the Athenians and take the reins of power. And the question is, is with what right, with what justice does he take those?

So he sees around him a kind of incompetence. He senses his own superiority. But Socrates asks him very simply, okay, let’s take it that you are superior. I look at you and I see an impressive young man. I’ve been following you, even though you’re still quite young, I’ve been following you for some time now. What’s the basis of your superiority? Why are you so certain of your own success, of your own abilities to govern Athens better than anyone else? And what Socrates does is he forces Alcibiades to give an account of himself, of his possible paths to political power and political success. And he tears them down one after another, right? If at times Alcibiades says, I have a superior nature. By nature, I am superior to all. That’s one of his recourses. Another is he’s very well connected. Another is, he seems to know what justice is.

And Socrates asks him questions like, you know, when did you get this knowledge? Who were your teachers, right? Are you really that superior in education? Because I can point to people who’ve been far better educated than you and seem to be far superior to you. And so Socrates strips these one after another until Alcibiades has to face the fact that he has no, nothing to ride on, right? He has no support of this. And he has to look at himself in all of his nakedness, his ambition, and its irrationality and all of its nakedness. And he is struck and he’s ashamed ultimately by his own unjustified ambition. It’s a testament to Alcibiades’ character that he’s capable of feeling the shame because very few characters in Plato do and very few characters react well to it.

And as a result, he goes from being kind of at the beginning of the dialogue, put off by Socrates, like, who the hell are you? I’ve never met you before. You’re really weird. So at the end, he says, “I’ll never leave your side.” And it’s an interesting fact of the dialogue that the first words are, “Oh, son of Clinius.” Alcibiades is Clinius’ son. This is Socrates addressing him. And the last words are, “Sucratese,” which is a pun on Socrates’ name. So it starts from Alcibiades’ as child of Clinius and it ends with a pun on Socrates’ name, which means something like “overpower you” and the “you” being Alcibiades there.

You could say that that’s in a way a symbol of the dialogue. It’s replacing the rule of the father with the rule of Socrates over Alcibiades. So with all the difficulties that this entails, Socrates is they are worried that the city will overpower him and Alcibiades, right? And so this seems to me that Socrates is forever associated with Alcibiades. This is a perennial problem for philosophy. If it wants to affect the world, it has to go to the ambitious and it’s forever associated with the ambitious for better and often for worse.

In this way, you can see that mentorship is a kind of stripping of the soul, right? And an establishment of the authority of critical reflection on your motivations, something like philosophy, as the true and only path to something like legitimacy. The problem being that that path rarely gets to its goal of legitimacy and authority and the knowledge that renders one competent to rule. It seems rather to lead to a host of questions. And so for me, that kind of answers the question of why this is the proper introduction to Plato. If you’re picking up…

Yes, this is perfect. I was just about to ask this. You said it was the introduction. Why was it the introduction? And then why do you say was? But answer that is…

Well, it was because fashions have changed. I still think it is a very good, if not the best, introduction of Plato. But if you are interested in Alcibiades, if you’re kind of drawn by that name and all the sort of impressive and scandalous things that happened in Alcibiades’ life, and you look at the titles of Plato’s dialogue and that’s the one you pick up, you’re likely to be an ambitious person interested in the glamour of politics and you’ll want to know about Alcibiades and specifically the intrigue of his relationship to Socrates.

You’re kind of drawn to the glory and dazzle of political life, but also by the sort of interested in Socrates or philosophy in some way. And they’re presented with an image from the very first page of great political power, of even world domination that Alcibiades dreams of or that Socrates insinuates or puts into Alcibiades. You can debate that question. And you look at it and you see Alcibiades justifying his sort of ascent to the political stage. He’s about to address Athenians for the first time. And Socrates stripping all of these away and leaving him a kind of stripped shell of himself, not sure of what path he has to success.

And you are brought to see the myriad ways in which human beings justify their taking power, taking hold of political power, and then seeing all of these fail before the reality of who one is and what one has learned and what one has actually done. The fact that one is not actually deserving of the position one would hope for oneself. And when you’re faced with all of that, you’re brought to maybe appreciate Socrates all the more as a result and appreciate critical reflection. And it opens you up, therefore, to the rest of the dialogues, which spell out various arguments, caveats, little questions that spell them out in greater detail.

It is also, I’ll just say this, another reason why it might be the proper place to begin. It is the earliest depiction of Socrates that we get. We get narrations of earlier depictions of Socrates, but those narrations as narrations come later, right? So they’re actually, it’s like a later revelation of an earlier event in Socrates’ life. For the earliest, as regards to the actual date of the narration or the outer frame of the dialogue, because some of them are kind of narratives of earlier events, it is the earliest one.

So you start reading there and then you go off from there and you can start thinking about the whole of Socrates’ life. You helped organize the Strauss symposium at UATX. What was the goal of the symposium and what was the kind of reaction to it?

So this is the second year we’ve done it. We’ll have a third year next year and then we’re hoping to have funding going forward. The idea behind it is to take young people, undergraduates, primarily this year or early graduate students, that we had some more graduate students and people from the professional world last year, the first iteration. The idea is to bring them in, take them and give them a week of roughly of intense reading and study with other very young, smart people.

But a week of intense study of Strauss with some prominent professors, people like Mark Blitz of Claremont McKenna, also Christopher Nadon, University of Missouri. A number of people. I don’t want to leave anybody out, but I also just want to move on. A number of really, really prominent teachers and commenters on Strauss’ work and just spend a week reading natural right in history primarily or selections from it as well as some essays and other pieces so that they can get a kind of sense of Strauss’ thought, who he is, why he matters, et cetera.

It’s filled with dinners, lunches and breakfasts and like meals and talking with one another. It’s a week of real immersion. And then the hope is, you know, people start to see that Strauss is a deep and fundamental thinker. One of the, if not the most important intellectual figure of the 20th century. And somebody who, as such a towering figure, is still worth reading in 2025, nearly, or actually I think more than 50 years now after his death.

Yeah, and something that’s very interesting about Strauss is that in some ways you can see a parallel between the relationship between the natural sciences and philosophy and the relationship between Alcibiades and Socrates, right? So you have the situation, I think Strauss coined the term, the cave below Plato’s cave, right? That’s the kind of modern notions of science, maybe mischaracterizations of science, has led to a much greater ignorance on some questions.

Yes. Yes. Yeah, there’s a, the cave is an interesting metaphor because it looks very pessimistic from a modern enlightenment position. We like to think everybody’s going to leave the cave. Everybody gets to see the light. That’s what enlightenment means. For Plato, it’s only a rare few get out. I think the real kind of deeper teaching is that, about the cave is that, I’m not even sure anybody gets out of the cave wholly, right?

And there’s sort of textual indications of this, but you could say that everybody, the reason the cave is so powerful is that we’re all kind of aware about how our opinions are circumscribed by events, political events, and by convention, right? That we look around us and we all kind of believe in equality. We all kind of believe in freedom. We might differ about how to understand those principles and how to apply them where they do and do not apply. But we’re kind of all on the same, and we have a sense that it has something to do with our regime, the American founding 250 years ago.

Okay, great. We’re all sort of aware of that. That means we’re aware of the cave. We’re also aware that in sensing this, how we’re circumscribed in this way, we’re also aware that there’s got to be more, right? That people once believed in Zeus, and we now believe in X, Y, and Z, and there’s got to be something more going on there, or some deeper sort of investigation. Whether that means that there is a path out of the cave is another thing.

One very optimistic thing about the cave is that there seems to be only one road. Once you get up and turn around, you kind of look, there’s one road out, right? A more pessimistic view would be to say, well, maybe there’s multiple paths, and only one leaves out. Maybe there’s 50 paths, and if we take the wrong one, we’ll end up in some dead end somewhere, right? Or we’ll end up in a different cave, or we’ll go deeper down.

Maybe there are multiple paths into the light, and one leads to a desert, one leads to a beautiful field, right? And we might come out. Maybe there is no exit from the cave. Or maybe there is an exit, but what human beings do when they realize there’s a cave is they dig, rather than trying to find a way out, right? And if you start digging, which is what I think the cave beneath the cave metaphor is, is you end up digging yourself deeper. And you might even be very proud of how deep you’ve dug.

And you might even be proud of how beautiful, right? So you can see these underground civilizations that occasionally have lived where they have like whole communities underground. And you could even imagine a very beautiful, smooth surface with pretty images that you yourself have put up there and a very comfortable living environment and HDTV.

Yeah, yeah, you have the fully automated luxury Plato’s cave. Yeah, yeah. And it’s of your own devising. And so it’s not just beautiful, but you’re very proud of yourself for the work you have done. This isn’t just something you find yourself in. And so in that sense, you could say that the cave beneath the cave or the hole beneath the cave, if you want to call it that, this thing that you’ve excavated and built is another possible reaction.

And what Strauss is trying to say is, you shouldn’t be too proud of that. Also, you should actually try to recover the original cave to understand what its contours are. And that means you should try to get out of this cave. And also, you shouldn’t be too proud if you manage to get out of that second cave because you still have to get out of the first one, right? Now, if you go to Plato’s cave, even if you turn around, you look around, you have to sort of question what the images are, the source of the question and these people who are holding up these like little figurines and making these noises.

And then he says, and then somebody might drag you up. Now, there’s two people I think involved there. One is the person who says, isn’t that thing he’s holding up just like the image on the wall and you kind of realize where it’s coming from? And then the other person is the person who drags you up. I’ll suggest there’s kind of two images of philosophy there. One is the one that makes you kind of aware and that kind of makes you aware that you’re in a cave and the limits of your conventional beliefs.

The other is the one that tries to bring you to full enlightenment. And I’m not sure that the second actually exists. The first certainly does. That’s Socrates, right? He’s always pointing out how misguided your opinions are, your conventional beliefs are. The other one who brings you out into the full light and makes you see everything, you know, your eyes adjust and then you’re finally illuminated. I don’t see any precedence for that in Plato, right?

As far as an actual lived philosopher. It seems like an hypothesis of what philosophy in the best sense might look like. And so it might be that you have to give up your cave beneath the cave, your very impressive cave of your own devising for another cave that’s far more rudimentary, involves very old fashioned language about like your soul and justice and the gods and things we don’t like to really take seriously these days. And then it might be that the questioning beyond that doesn’t get you to full illumination.

And so you have to give up a very impressive accomplishment for a very meager accomplishment. But a meager accomplishment in terms of the actual wisdom you have that is far realer, that’s grounded not in your own pride or vanity or hubris, but that is grounded in the sort of actual reflection on the actual hopes and desires you have and the degree to which they can actually be satisfied. You’ll be in greater possession of yourself, though maybe not as impressive a figure as you once deemed yourself to be.

Yeah, you mentioned there that, you know, you’re returning to this cave that seems very mysterious. One of Strauss’s most famous ideas, most important ideas is the idea of esoteric writing. There may be more to these, this writing that maybe if you stumble upon what looks like a contradiction, there may be more to this writing than you think there is. In some ways, I feel like young people like Gen Z are like natural Straussians, natural esotericists.

Yes. You know, Zoomer humor, Zoomer media is very often about this kind of irony, these layers, these references that you have to look deeper. There’s like alternative reality games where you’re kind of digging into rabbit holes in the internet and you need to know the context behind it to really get the joke. Is this an optimistic kind?

Yeah, especially with like COVID. So young people, this is always something that’s so scary about teaching is somebody who’s 18 who walks into my classroom right now was born in 2007. Right. And it’s very strange to think that they were one when Barack Obama started his first term as president. And so what to me is like a mature thing from when I was in my twenties is for them, they don’t even remember it as a child. Somebody who’s 18 in 2025 was like 13 when COVID started.

So they’re just kind of becoming, they’re going through puberty. They’re starting to care about the world. They’re having like real feelings for the first time and they’re cut off from the world. And since 2020, right, for the last five years now, it’s crazy to think it was five years ago, but for the last five years now, there’s been a kind of going hypocrisy. Right. There’s been a sense that we’re told one thing when another is true.

And this has always been the case, but it’s way more obvious than it’s ever been. And you’ve been asked to pay lip service to something that you don’t actually believe. Right. Whether it’s an ideological thing. And so you go from in 2020, these riots that you weren’t allowed to call riots. Right. You had to call them mostly peaceful protests as there’s flames in the background to now being able to say that’s all BS. That was all BS.

And so when that’s your formative years from 13 to 18 is the quashing of dissent in 2020 to now just a floodgates opening to this ability to say things you, you couldn’t, you thought you’d never be able to say again, five years later. Uh, if that’s your, um, your sense of, of, of the world, of course, you’re going to be palpably aware that sometimes people say things that they don’t believe because they don’t want to get in trouble. Right. That you just want to try to get along in the world and you’re not going to give up the possible hope of like owning a home and happy, having a family, like attaining these good things simply because you want to criticize, you know, uh, vaccines or something like that.

Right. So there’s been a kind of greater permissiveness. I think young people now are very much aware of the way in which politics, uh, asserts itself over your speech and forces you to, to say things you don’t believe. And so when Strauss talks about esotericism, of course it makes sense. Now the way Zoomers do it with their memes and everything is in a very, very small way.

I think you always have to situate these teachings about, uh, esotericism within a larger context, not just of trying to save yourself, but also trying to educate others. And that means to get them to reflect on their beliefs because it’s not simply the fact of the matter that now that we’ve kind of let our hair down a little bit, uh, in 2025 is not simply a fact of the matter that we’re somehow beyond the problem of esotericism.

No, the problem of esotericism, uh, has to do with the very nature of politics itself. Right. These young people might, might be, uh, more close to something like partisans who are forced to hide their speech because of the hypocrisy of one side. But there is always an hypocrisy in, in politics that has to do with the very, very nature of politics to lay claim to providing you a good and happy life.

But it can’t because the standards for that are much too high for anything like law or political, uh, governance could ever, uh, um, hope to achieve. To go back to the example of Alcibiades, if justice is ultimately good and for it to be good, it needs to provide your good as an individual person. And that means what’s good for your soul to actually provide guidance to you and help you to live a good and happy life.

Politics, whoever’s in power, whoever’s crafting the law needs to make those laws in such a way that they will satisfy, satisfy and guide each and every soul in all of its different concerns, upbringing, questions, et cetera. Right. That’s not going to happen. Justice, it seems like is more at home, not in the political community or justice in this sense of providing the good for the soul would only be achieved with people who really know you with friends and mentors.

Right. And so it’s always been the case that, that, uh, parents, uh, offer extra guidance to their children because they know that the community only can do so much in the deepest sense. This is a, this is a reflection of a deeper sense of mentorship and guidance that involves actually getting to know somebody. And so friends are often the best, best point of guidance because you can really get closer to them.

So my, my caution to Zoomers in this, in this way is that don’t think that because you can speak more freely that suddenly, uh, you’re beyond this question. The tension has to do, uh, with a tension between political or civic education on the one hand and a liberal or philosophic education on the other. And the fact that the one can never become the other, even liberal education as you find it in, in committed universities is not really hitting the mark, even though it’s much closer.

What we’re talking about here is a far deeper, uh, and, and harder to achieve sort of education. That’s rare. Even if you take it seriously, that’s rare to actually come by. Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s an, a point worth dwelling on Alex. There’s all of this, you know, reform. We can say things again. We can say, tell the truth again.

It’s American glasnost. What do you mean? I still have to worry about SS terrorism and I still have to worry about, you know, hidden meanings. What other hidden meanings could there be? Well, yeah, I mean, this is, uh, this is the difficulty. So at University of Austin, where I teach, uh, we have this idea of open inquiry and, and, uh, entrepreneurship and building things and trying to do so in such a way that it contributes to your own flourishing and to the flourishing of others.

It’s all very nice and high and exalted language. Uh, and then when I got there, there was a lot of students, not, not doing their work in their core classes that were rushing with the entrepreneurship side and, and they weren’t reflecting actually. And so I, I had to caution against it, but one I’ve thought about this, if I were to give a talk next year, I’d like to give a talk criticizing the idea of open inquiry.

Right. I think a lot of students at University of Austin and, and, uh, come there thinking now I can finally say and argue whatever I want. And my, my, my sense is that inquiry can never be wholly open. Maybe even not with your closest friends, uh, that on some level, you have to play your cards close to the chest precisely because education is always starting from a certain point and going in another direction, right? In the direction of the truth.

And you have to take that viewpoint seriously. You have to sort of massage these opinions and think about them from that perspective. In that sense, it’s never just open. It’s, it’s somehow beginning from a closed position and nudging at the seams to see where things start to fray. Right. In that sense, uh, you have to realize that all thinking, uh, as thinking begins from a position of ignorance and tends in the direction of knowledge.

And so always has an element of closeness to it that it needs to reflect on and to see whether it’s actually closed or not. And in that way, your inquiry is never entirely open. Right. But it’s always, always kind of, uh, um, taking something for granted. If you’re alive to that, you’ll realize that even in an institution like my own, where you are obviously much freer to argue and discuss things.

I go into class and I teach Plato and I have only so much time to cover a lot of texts. My students don’t know Greek, right? Uh, there, these are all elements of the circumstance and of their souls. That mean that whatever we discuss is going to be closed in some way. And we can push in the direction of openness, but you have to, you have to sort of take that, that for granted and know that there are limits to what you can say and, and to what you can accomplish in your time.

Yeah. You, you know, the thing, the thing with the plate cave below the plate below Plato’s cave is that, you know, you dig up, you finally see a little bit of light trickling down and you think, you know, I’ve done it. I’ve escaped the cave. Yeah. Yeah. And then, and then you’re still there. I’m struggling to recall, as you’re saying this, I was struggling to recall how I really came to this, the experience of this.

And the closest thing that comes to mind is, uh, drawing upon a different, uh, Plato dialogue that the first dialogue of, uh, Plato’s laws of the laws of Plato. And it’s a very famous dialogue, you know, it, it opens with, are your laws given by God or given by man? The moment, um, the moment, I think, uh, one of them responds and says, you know, of course given by God, um, the moment that’s how they respond. You know that you’re in a different situation.

You’re not quite in a situation where you can just say anything because, um, even if you’re just narrowly focused on, you know, persuading, um, these people about, um, the goodness of, of the law and the right law, you now understand that there is blasphemy. There is going through too far. This, this is a kind of negotiation and you can’t fully be just, you know, esoteric and just say, say everything if you, not necessarily because you’ll be persecuted, but just because do you want them to get there?

Do you, do you want to, you know, bring them out of the cave or do you want to just mouth off? I think I came to this before reading the laws that when I was younger and I, I, I’ve always had a very bittersweet relationship with it. I think the feeling for me is just that it is profoundly unfun to engage in this kind of negotiation to, to kind of acknowledge that, you know, people are in this state of ignorance or have, have in, in some ways their own God-given laws.

And it’s, it’s just a very, um, it’s just a very difficult truth to accept. I’m not sure if you have advice on that, um, for, for me or for anyone else.

Yeah. So about the laws, let me say a couple of things to help provide a little context of what I think is. It’s the only dialogue, uh, that in the epinomis, which comes after it, but it’s the only dialogue, uh, in which Socrates is neither present nor, nor, uh, um, is not present at all.

There are other dialogues where he doesn’t speak very much like the Timaeus, the sophist and statesman, but it’s the only dialogue where he’s not present. There is an Athenian stranger who looks a lot like Socrates. It’s also the only dialogue that doesn’t take place in Athens or around Athens. Uh, it takes place very, very far away, right? In, in Crete. I tend to think of the laws as Plato really coming into his own. Socrates never left Athens.

What would it be like if he left Athens? The closest you get to kind of pious old men like Clinius and Macillus is Cephalus in the Republic. Uh, though he is somebody who came to Athens and so he’s somewhat compromised by Athenian decadence. The way this shows up is that, uh, he was brought there by Pericles, uh, as an arms dealer. And so he’s racked with guilt. So he’s a pious man racked with guilt.

And so he’s having apparently these nightmares about being tortured in Hades or whatever. And so he pays money, does his sacrifices and now he can sleep well. He’s doing all right. He can sleep well at night. He’s not haunted anymore. Um, Plato, uh, he commits himself to giving a kind of version of the philosophic life of Socrates. And it’s highly obviously fictionalized, but then he decides maybe later in life, but he decides to write the sort of conversation Socrates never had the chance to have, uh, the, and that’s the conversation if he had left Athens anonymously so that his reputation wouldn’t precede him.

And he found two older men and they decided to talk about law and the first few books of the laws, uh, um, is Socrates kind of massaging Clinius and Megillus to a position of greater acceptance of Athenian openness, right? So it’s not full decadence in the way you see in Athens, but there is a justification of drinking, right? And, and a kind of intoxication. They don’t actually drink, but they kind of, uh, get drunk on the speeches, uh, a little bit, which is what you often see in Plato.

So one way to think about what Plato is doing there is he’s showing how something like Socrates or Socratic philosophy can be achieved in a non-Athenian context, in a context that is, uh, governed not by this sort of, uh, um, easygoingness about the laws that you see in Athens and this kind of rampant impiety, right? And innovation going on, but among peoples that are not inclined to innovate, that take their laws and their divine support seriously, and therefore want things to largely stay the same.

And it’s no accident, therefore, that the laws became, for many medieval thinkers, a kind of guide for how to make, uh, philosophy safe in, under, in political circumstances where they were guided by far stricter religion or revealed, uh, religion. And so it has, it actually, it’s interesting. Plato’s like, okay, I’m going to try to recast this for non-Athenians. And it worked. It kind of seemed to work actually.

And, and to have a kind of, uh, um, afterlife. And the laws, you could say, therefore, gives us a far more, uh, um, powerful, uh, uh, image of, of what it looks like to try to think freely under very unfree circumstances. The Republic seems far more relevant to our circumstances because we do live in a decadent society that’s addicted to innovation that has, because exercise is a kind of democratic empire in a way, a democracy exercising hegemony, at least, if not outright empire over, over other states.

And it produces certain longings, uh, in young people that you see very much on, on, uh, the stage with, uh, Glaucon and Ida Mantis in that, in that, uh, dialogue. Uh, all the same, uh, these are some of the ways in which you might start thinking about how to read Plato and how to apply Plato to, uh, one’s own life.

I would suggest to, to the other, I think, question that you’re, you were sort of dancing around at, I would suggest that there’s actually something quite joyous in this, in this, uh, in understanding these, uh, constraints. Uh, I had the experience, I’ve written a few books now. The first book was a kind of updated version of my dissertation on Plato’s Parmenides. And it is like many dissertations on Plato.

It’s taking a 40-page dialogue and it’s writing 120,000 words on it, trying to spell out what’s going on and is trying to be as exhaustive as possible in crafting a kind of overarching reading of this, uh, dialogue. Um, and I challenged myself after that to try to write things that are a bit more condensed and, uh, a bit more provocative as a result. I don’t try to explain everything, but try to point, uh, to an overarching narrative or trying to appoint, uh, point to all the basic puzzles of the work and how to start thinking about them.

And where you might, what are some of the possibilities you might have to wrestle with in thinking about them? So offering guidance, but not answers, right? Uh, not strict, uh, strictly speaking answers, though, intimating answers. And, um, I wrote a book on the symposium, Musings on Plato’s symposium that, that is made up of 49 short aphorisms and just on the various parts and puzzles of, of the dialogue.

And part of the reason I wrote a book of that style was in thinking about attention spans of, of people nowadays of the kind of reading they want to do. And even very serious people, uh, attention spans, limited time that people have. It struck me that part of the reason people like Twitter, they like Twitter threads, uh, and things like that is because, uh, they can read something in about a minute, a minute and a half.

And then as they’re driving around or they’re going about the day, they can chew on it. Right. Uh, people like podcasts because while they’re cleaning their house or they’re driving around, they can kind of listen and kind of pay more or less attention as they’re going along and get something out of it that they can chew on. Same thing with Twitter. I think people are sitting around waiting, uh, waiting for their friend to show up, waiting for their DoorDash to show up.

And then they can, they can kind of process something for a few minutes, but then it can kind of sit with them. And so it struck me that this was remarkably similar to the aphoristic style. And so that are interesting or good book on Plato or any good book, uh, in general might want to be made up of not of seven to eight page sections or something like that, or 20-page chapters, but of page one page to four or five page aphorisms on a specific topic that can then be, uh, dwelled on Nietzsche is incredibly popular nowadays.

I think for this, but Nietzsche wrote, Nietzsche wrote over, yeah, he wrote over a century ago and a lot of his references are not our references. Right. And so you read Nietzsche, you know, like, oh, I got to go read Goethe and, and Petrarch and I have to go read the Aristophanes. And, and that’s a good thing to have to go off and read them. Uh, and, or I have to hunt down an aphorism that’s touching on some of the questions, uh, uh, today.

Um, and that can be a little bit more difficult. It would be nice if people, and some people do this though with, uh, um, you know, varying degrees of depth, be nice. If people wrote things that that fit into life as we’re living, you can look at the internet at Twitter. You can look at the contemporary sort of demands of, of labor nowadays and say, man, this stinks. You know, this is not a, this is not an age in which I can sit down and study Montesquieu’s spirit of the laws for three or four years, unless I go to grad school.

Well, that was a book written for a certain, uh, kind of readership that, that frankly doesn’t exist now, except for in the academic community. This is not, that’s something that like a, uh, you know, one of the founders who has people taking care of their estate can sit and read in, in his leisure time for hours a day. We don’t have that as much unless you’re extremely wealthy. And so what are young, thoughtful people going to have time to read?

That’s a constraint that’s actually quite liberating. You can lament it, or you can find a way to work within it and to write in that sort of way, um, can give you real readers, readers today. And you can write things that are, that are inviting to those readers. So now when I think about what I’m going to write as a serious work, not as scholarship, but if I were to write something for a broader, uh, readership, I try to think about what, what I could, uh, actually do for them.

And I think other people should do that. And so these constraints, you were talking about divinely revealed law, but the constraints around you, uh, can actually give you access if you understand them. They’re not simply things to be lamented, but they are the sort of necessarily limits of, of, of, of discourse nowadays, and you can try to act, uh, to, um, optimize your writing for those contexts and therefore gain readers and gain friends.

I’m sorry. I’ve been infinitely distracted by this. Who is that in your background?

Oh, that right there. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I was wondering because, you know, he’s kind of far away. Um, that’s a picture that was given to me by one of his, uh, students. Uh, I, one of my teachers, Lawrence Burns, uh, who studied with Strauss after he passed, uh, his, uh, widow gave me a number of things and that includes this picture of Strauss, which I don’t think anybody else has.

And it’s quite a nice picture. It’s him reading. There’s always this picture of him, like smoking a cigarette, looking like some kind of evil mastermind. And it’s just him, uh, in a sweater and a tie reading and he’s smiling to himself. It’s, it’s quite a nice, it’s quite a nice portrayal of, of what Strauss’s, uh, private activity might’ve looked like, you know, thinking and reading and all that.

Yeah. Have you seen the, um, the political cartoon of Strauss, you know, reading Plato and with the, uh, puppet strings over, over George Bush?

Yeah. I lived through those years. So it was a bit ridiculous at the time, but still so now.

Yeah. Yeah. The, the, the Straussian menace. I think somebody at the time pointed out there were more Straussians in the Clinton administration than in the Bush administration, but nobody seemed to care because they just wanted a boogeyman, but yeah, I, I believe it. I don’t know. Clinton, you can see their influence maybe even more than even, even more than in Bush.

But returning, returning to this point, kind of focusing on again, there’s, there, there’s something about, uh, modern politics or modern, um, modern communications, let’s say modern media that creates quite a, quite a different path. If you think of, um, if you think of, um, if you think of, in, in, in some ways, the main lesson of Alcibiades and Socrates of their dialogue being that Alcibiades is forced to confront the places where he has not questioned, there’s a way in which objective science distracts from that, right?

And of course, this is a core aspect of Strauss’s work, but there’s a way in which we can see a modern re-imagining of, of the dialogue between Alcibiades and Socrates. And then Alcibiades, you know, when he, when he’s questioned about why he should rule, he will say something like, oh, you know, I have this pedigree. I went to Harvard to have, you know, uh, a 160 IQ, um, and which take away from this aspect of questioning and reflecting upon, upon the fundamental premises, right?

This is something that is not necessary to be done. You know, maybe, maybe you need like some fundamental premises of mathematics, but you don’t actually need, um, that many fundamental premises to get like a high, high IQ test score. Right. So, so what are the ways in which, um, there’s a kind of tension between, between science and reflection or science and philosophy?

Oh my gosh, that’s such a big, uh, Yes, it is. Uh, you know, there’s a lot of ways and there’s a lot of people have obviously written on all sorts of things. I’m hardly an expert in these things. It’s, it’s something I’ve thought quite a bit about, you know, at my, prior to university of Austin, I taught at university of Colorado in Boulder in a program called the Herbst program. It’s basically teaching humanities to engineers.

And, and, uh, and so in that position, I had to think quite a bit about, um, uh, natural science, building engineering technology. It encourages people, uh, it encourages people, uh, to live. And it’s something I still have to think now in a more entrepreneurial context, but still in a kind of, uh, tech development context. And there’s a whole, uh, host of, of, uh, questions that are, are raised there.

The basic issue with, uh, the scientific method is its primary focus on material and efficient causality. Now material causes, is, um, what is this? Like if you’re going to build an engine, right? And I say, uh, Brian, you, you seem pretty scientifically smart, uh, um, build me an engine, but I want it to be beautiful. Can you build me a thousand horsepower engine out of gold? Your immediate reaction will be, it’ll melt immediately. There’s no way to keep it cold while making that power. It’ll be useless.

So you understand, uh, what the, um, the matter can do. And so every engineering, uh, um, discipline is going to have some kind of, uh, um, materials class, right? And, and so students always take a materials class because you need to understand what you’re working with. It’s limits before you start thinking about applications, right? Um, efficient causality is about, uh, the actual, actual mechanisms of, of things, right?

So if I put fuel in the cylinder and some air, and then I, I spark it, it’s going to push the cylinder up. That’ll push the drive shaft around. And then another cylinder will do that, keep pushing it around.

And eventually I’ll have, uh, you know, a rotating, uh, drive shaft that goes into a drive train and that moves the wheels.

I’ve got a car, none of that. All of that is very effective and efficient in that sense. It’s effectual in that way to use the Machiavellian term.

Yeah. But it’s, uh, it doesn’t tell me where to drive the car, right? It doesn’t tell me, uh, um, what to do with the car, right? It doesn’t provide the goal or the end of that.

And this is one of the difficulties of modern science technology is that it’s focused on these two very basic level, uh, um, causes that have to do with the matter of things.

And it’s able out of this to create new forms, new kinds of, of things, cars and airplanes and, and, uh, you know, AI language learning models and all that sort of, uh, of stuff.

We’re able to create these new things, but we’re not sure what these things actually are, right? Uh, what their actual essence is.

One of the interesting things about technology is you, you make a technology and you think it’s one thing, but then it is another, right? You think that Twitter is a platform for free speech.

It becomes a platform for suppression, for, for debate. You think it’s going to be liberal, uh, liberating—quite the opposite. It’s not necessarily liberating.

And, and so often, uh, these, uh, founders and builders become disenchanted with their own creations.

So Jack Dorsey seemed very happy to be free of, of Twitter and to go work on something else. This is, you never know what it is you’re actually building until it’s out there and it’s put into.

Yes. And he’s done this three times now. So, so he’s made blue sky, right? And, and, and then, you know, that turned into, um, well, it turned into blue sky and then, and then he, he, he made another one now, but sorry, I interrupted you.

Continue.

Yeah, no, no, it’s, it’s, it’s, and so the reason we don’t know what it is, is because when we, uh, technologists are not humanists, they’re not thinking about human desires, human motivations.

Um, a real clear example of this is every time a technologist argues on behalf of their technology, they always ask, what does it look like in the hands of the most intelligent and the most capable?

What will AI do for builders? Well, it’ll be great. If you start a, make a startup, you can just, uh, subscribe to a, an AI, uh, uh, um, uh, service. It’ll replace a lot of the lower level coding and stuff like that so that you can actually build a startup and, and great.

Okay. Hey, that’s what it looks like in the hands of, of, uh, um, the optimal person. Fine.

What does it look like for the average person or the, the lower levels of society? They don’t write papers. They don’t learn how to formulate their thoughts.

Their thoughts, therefore, are more beholden to their passions, right? They’re not forced to argue, to think them through. And so they just become kind of reactive.

It robs them of a kind of intellectual labor, just as industry has robbed us of a kind of physical labor, and you become an increasingly, uh, shallow sort of being, right?

Uh, and what do you do? You sit at home, you get food delivery, you watch Netflix, you never have to interact with somebody and you become a kind of blob person who just kind of satisfies their desires and then dies.

And so, uh, the alleviation of labor that technology gives us is great for those who really want to work and find their flourishing in a kind of activity for a great many human beings who just want to be relieved of labor.

And that’s it. It robs them of the virtues they might’ve had, right? It robs them of the sort of independence and the qualities they would have been forced to develop.

And so if you read Machiavelli, he’s very clear about this. Some people, the popular, the people, they just don’t want to be ruled. They want to be relieved.

They want to be free of work and free of other people determining their lives. Other people, they want to be free and then to have rule. These are the great or the grandi, right?

If you take that psychology of modern man, which is not an exhaustive psychology, but it is very descriptive of the sort of human beings Machiavelli helped make, right?

Or how to develop us into or denature us into, however you think about it. If you attend to that in developing a technology, you might be more aware of what’s going to happen when you put this thing that is effective and that’s built on a certain material substrate.

You’re going to be more aware of how it’s going to, uh, uh, interact.

And so on, on the primary problem, I would say with modern natural science, the scientific method, and with modern sciences sort of causal awareness, is not aware of what these things are that they’ve made their forms because it hasn’t put them into the hierarchy of human beings and the hierarchy of ends or goals that we pursue.

What happens when you take the base motives of human beings and you put them into this technology? What happens when you put the higher motives and you put them into this technology?

If you start thinking in that way, you’ll be able to better understand technology, kind of, uh, find workarounds for the problems and also optimize, uh, that technology for human beings rather than always playing catch up, which is what we’re doing nowadays, right?

Is we, we have a technology to say, Oh, this is going to be wonderful. And then it comes out and people are lazier and stupider and fatter and all these awful things that they’re not, they’re not working hard to become better versions of themselves because, and we have to find some kind of bandaid after the fact.

And as we do that, and we find some kind of workaround, a new technology comes around and we have to deal with the effects of that.

And it feels like a lot of the problems of modern science, if we were a bit more ahead of them, that couldn’t necessarily maybe be solved.

That might be too optimistic, but we could be aware of them and, and, and be working on them as they arrive, uh, rather than having this feeling that science is greater ease of life and also greater alienation from our own happiness.

At the same time, we live more comfortably. We are, we are more effective. We can have greater leisure than we’ve ever had before.

We also have unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, suicide. And you look at that and you say, there’s something off here, right?

How do we actually start thinking about our motivations and our desires and our happiness in a deeper sense, uh, by trying to reflect critically on our history and, and critically on our own motivations, while also thinking about the constraints and the demands that the modern world, uh, puts on us, we might be able to live happier, uh, in this world.

So being very serious about your longings, your deepest longings will somehow prepare you for this, but modern science doesn’t think of causality that way.

It hates thinking about goals. It’s very hands-off. It wants to say, you live your way, I live my way, which is very helpful because it allows people to sort of devise new paths, pathways to innovate, and all the stuff that we hold to be good nowadays.

On the one hand, on the other hand, it makes us incredibly unserious and flippant about our deeper longings.

And so you do find this situation where very wealthy, successful people are not happy with the world that they’ve made, are not happy with the environment they live in, and they want something more.

There is so much there. I think one way to start down this road is I think you mentioned several causes.

Um, I think maybe you’re talking about the kind of Aristotelian sense. What are the causes, like the four causes?

So we have, we talked a little bit about material and a fishing line. Material is just matter, the stuff that’s around. And it’s part of what makes a thing a thing, right?

If you don’t have part of the reason whales, the largest mammals, live in the water is because if they’re on land, they wouldn’t be able to survive.

Right. Or like taking even one step back, like what, what is the purpose of the causes? What is the question it’s trying to answer?

It’s good to explain what makes a thing, uh, a thing, right? So what, what are the, the, when you ask, why is this, right?

Why is this, this, uh, uh, desk, right? You say, well, the desk is part of what caused the desk is the wood. If there were no wood, you would have no desk, right?

Uh, another one is the efficient. How did it come to be? Well, somebody had to make it. There were machines, I think, involved in this desk, but somebody had to put them together and to engage in the sort of mechanism that brought from the material this thing.

Okay. Another thing that explains what it is, is its purpose or its goal. The desk is so that I can talk to Brian for, uh, about, about philosophy and technology and so on.

So the purpose that it serves, I can grade at it. I can do all those things. That’s part of what makes a desk a desk.

And the last thing, uh, is the sort of structure. So the desk has a flat surface so that things don’t slide off of it, right?

And it has legs so that it rises above my lap and, um, it possesses a little nest for my plugs for my computer and my phone and things like that.

And it has a certain form based on its purpose, based on its material, et cetera.

And if you put all of these together, you’ll have something like a, uh, a causal account of the desk in terms of its material, the way it came to be, the purposes it serves, and its structure or form, the way that it looks to us.

Modern science begins by, uh, with this, this focus primarily on material and efficient cause. What is the stuff in the world and how do I manipulate it and make it into larger things?

So you look at a tree and that’s one thing you can make with wood, which is a funny way to think about it, but that’s essentially how it is.

Wood comes from the tree, but also it’s one form of wood. If I break down the tree to its basic stuff, even to its chemical, uh, composition, I can start making new things, synthetic wood or something like that, or, or new materials, plastics and things like that, or carbon fiber.

And now I’ve got something even stronger and lighter and more capable than these old things.

So early cars are made of wood. Now they can be made of carbon fiber and steel and all this sort of, uh, high-grade stuff.

If I’m able to do that, I can start imposing new forms. So instead of taking the tree as a tree, I take it as a compilation of matter and efficient cause that made this thing come about.

I break it down to the basic stuff, periodic table of elements, let’s say, and I break it down to the basic mechanisms, how I can start linking those things together into complex molecules.

And suddenly I can make new, new substances and I can make new forms. The forms are not just given to me the way they are under Aristotelianism; the things in the world, uh, admit of greater variety, and I impose them.

And so forms and what I do with them suddenly become a function of human will rather than something given by the world.

Whereas Aristotle might look at a tree and say, oh, the tree has this form and it’s good is to be watered such that it bears fruit and et cetera, and all that and acorns, and you can make new trees from those; they kind of grow out of that.

Instead, those purposes and those forms can be something I exercise. The problem with that being that if there is any kind of, uh, basic human nature in particular, um, I might make forms that are horrific, right?

I make, make forms that are destructive of my potential. And so part of what— and this is part of what, what Strauss is essentially encouraging—is that we’re not inclined to think on our ends, to think about our variety of ends or the heterogeneity of our ends.

And that puts us in a situation of discovering our unhappiness only after the fact. You got to think again about, uh, the ends of, of man and put them together with this natural science in some way.

And if you can do that, maybe have solved the $20 million question of, of the history of, of Western thought. I think a lot more than that, but, um.

No, you’d be happy, which would be the bigger thing.

Yeah. Have you ever encountered this phrase from economics, revealed preference?

No, no, I think I’ve heard it, but explain it to me.

Oh, okay. That’s, um, yeah, that’s quite surprising to me, but, um, the idea of revealed preference, it relates to a lot of what we’re talking about, but the concept is that by choosing an action, people are revealing what they truly want and that, you know, we shouldn’t cast judgment.

We shouldn’t cast judgment about people’s choices because, uh, even if they might seem to us like they are bad for the person themselves, because they are simply showing us that that person has a different preference.

Someone who is spending a lot of time on social media, they are revealing their preference. Someone who is on, you know, certain drugs, let’s say, let’s say legal drugs, let’s say legal drugs.

They’re revealing their preference. Well then in that case, illegal drugs too, maybe they should be legal if it’s a preference.

Yes, many make this argument as well. That, that as well.

I had a, a colleague of mine who’s an economist come up to me a couple of weeks ago. He’s like, can I talk to you for a second? I was like, yeah, sure. What’s up?

And he’s like, uh, you know, I’ve noticed, uh, students are kind of judgmental about preferences here. He’s like, do you know why that is?

I don’t know if he suspected I was behind it or something like that, but.

Is this a deep, dark Straussian mystery?

Well, no, I mean, it’s, I’m inclined to encourage students to be judgmental about their preferences, to not to view all of their desires on equal footing.

When I talk about the heterogeneity of ends, I’m talking about how justice is different from a yearning for a noble life, is different from just a simple good and happy life.

How what’s profitable or what’s advantageous is different or the same as, or has like sort of Venn diagram overlapping with what’s noble or base, right?

With what’s beautiful or ugly and so on and so forth. And if you start engaging in that kind of analysis, and if you’re really especially serious about living, let’s say, remarkable or noble life as maybe some students at least here are, you’re going to look at somebody who wants to just play all their time and spend all their time playing video games and consuming like various weed gummies.

And you’ll say that is a base and shallow life. And I take that to be a sign of moral seriousness, right? About willing to say that, look, you can live your life how you want, but I’d rather die than live your life, right?

And that’s a way of dealing with that. And I think we tend to think of people’s desires in terms of preferences or their values.

And to some extent, that’s fine. It could be a preference like I prefer chicken to pork, right? Or something like that. And that’s all fine and well.

But when it comes to actually thinking about a meaningful life, I mean, we don’t want to be flippant about meaning, right? We want to take meaning seriously and we want to live every day with purpose and with people that make us happy and that contribute meaningfully to our lives, that care for us, that understand us, that understand our limitations and what would make us happy and that help us live those lives.

And if you’re going to do that, I’m sorry, but there’s a principle of exclusion, right? If you’re going to have a society that encourages that, I’m sorry, you’re going to have a principle of exclusion.

And that doesn’t mean intolerance necessarily, but it does mean looking at people and saying, okay, fine, you go live that life. I’ll be damned if I will, right?

Like taking in that strict sense even of damned, like I would not be able to live with myself. No, I would not be able to live with myself. I would feel like I was condemned to live that life.

And it might be that those sentiments ultimately need to be held to a higher standard. And I think they do.

But you have to at least start from that, right? You have to start from a position of moral seriousness about what makes a person a good person.

And I would suggest that economists maybe need to take something like virtue a little more seriously and need to take something like the human longing for meaning a little more seriously.

And they might respond and say, well, there’s preferences and then there are these higher-order things.

Well, higher-order things might make certain preferences intolerable, right? You might need to actually take certain things off the table when we’re trying to live a serious life.

You’re really preaching to the choir here. I think that there’s been a turn where a kind of legal pluralism that was really about the controlling of state religion and the controlling of war.

We can talk about natural right in history, but let me just lay out my position. In my view, there was a kind of Hobbesian classical liberalism or proto-classical liberalism that was very much about a pluralism of actions.

I think that part of the difficulty in explaining this is that the blurring of the lines between war and communications has gone so deep that it is difficult even to find the language.

One of the more provocative things that people will quote from my philosophy is that John Stuart Mill was the Judas of classical liberalism.

We went from a kind of classical liberalism that was excited or that was encouraging of judgment and encouraging of discernment and encouraging of expressed difference to one that was a kind of repression of discernment.

And ultimately, you know, I wouldn’t attribute this part to Mill, but what it ultimately culminated to was the blurring between, you know, speech and violence altogether.

That’s interesting. And so you end up with the situation where I always go back to, you know, the quote from Hamlet of, you know, what separates man from beast is the willingness to die for an eggshell.

The Hobbesian solution is that, you know, you preserve the eggshell. You’re still willing to pursue your valor, your conscience, your religion, your faith, your revelation.

Especially with the kind of erosion of tradition, the Millian solution is that, like, no one should have eggshells.

And this, I think, is really the core difference. And we can talk about natural right in history and how, you know, Strauss disagrees with me, or I should say, you know, I disagree with Strauss.

But, but did you have thoughts?

I don’t know. Sorry. I just gave it a speech there. Hamlet’s one of my favorite plays.

I want to unpack that detail. This is very interesting. Prior to the eggshell line in that same soliloquy, he says, examples gross, gross as earth exhort me.

And what’s the example as big as the earth? An eggshell. So I think you have to keep those two lines in mind, which is somehow a man being willing to die over an eggshell, to die over a plot of land, not even big enough to bury them, he says, right?

That’s the biggest thing in the world. That’s as big as the world is the human commitment to the small.

Now, the problem is, is he’s wrong. It’s pretty clear that Fortinbras and going against Poland is not actually after Poland, but it’s an excuse to come back and maybe try to conquer Denmark.

So originally Fortinbras was going to go and fight against Denmark. He’s coming from Norway. He’s going to go down into Denmark and he’s going to fight them.

And Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle father, he sends back and he cautions Fortinbras’ uncle and says, your nephew should not be doing this. So he comes back.

Fortinbras is drawn back by his uncle. His uncle chastises him and he gives him some money to go back out and fight against Poland.

So oddly enough, Fortinbras is now fighting again, but now with greater resources. And so he goes off to Poland, but then he comes back at the end of the play, apparently uninvited, and just comes into Norway.

But he waltzes right in because nobody’s fighting because the domestic affairs are in such disarray that nobody’s looking at foreign affairs.

So what I think Hamlet misses there with Fortinbras is that they’re not fighting over an eggshell. They’re fighting over something quite big, Denmark.

And that he thinks that human ambition is to be willing to die over an eggshell. I think what Fortinbras shows us is that human ambition is to turn your eggshell into an egg, let’s say, into a chicken, perhaps even into a whole flock of birds.

You know, it’s got a kind of stretching yourself out and expanding.

And this is as politically as imperialism, which is what’s going on, right? Denmark seems to have established a kind of empire.

It’s had a war with England that England seems to have lost. There’s intellectual commerce over to Germany in Wittenberg. There’s also travel over to France.

That’s where Laertes is going. There’s all kinds of influences over in Poland, et cetera. The world is becoming more global.

There’s foreign markets, we find out. There’s new technology. There’s a kind of rapidly expanding world.

And Hamlet is trying to think about how to defend his father. He’s not thinking about how to rise and expand his own sphere of influence or to kind of intellectually sort of expand his realm.

And so what I would say in response to your thing is, okay, there isn’t a way we’re committing ourselves to an eggshell. We’re committing ourselves to a small part of the world.

But we should also be on some level committing to seeing in the small the potential for the large, right?

And that’s in a way what’s going on with Alcibiades, to kind of bring it back to that. He starts off as, Socrates addresses him, oh, son of Clinius, which is a diminutive form.

It implies he’s not yet his own man, right? But he’s somehow still derivative.

And throughout the dialogue, you see all the ways in which Alcibiades is derivative. Derivative of his birth, derivative of his connections, derivative of unimpressive host of leaders in Athens.

In all those ways he’s derivative, Socrates strips all this and he finds something really interesting in Alcibiades.

This kind of openness, this sense of shame that he might have tried too early to rise to kind of political promise.

And guess what? That’s what makes Alcibiades actually interesting. Out of this eggshell, he finds something of profound significance and interest that we can all still learn from 2,500 years after the actual Alcibiades actually lived, right?

And so my sense of things would be, we tend to think of the reaction to liberalism and the reaction to a kind of indiscriminateness of ends as trying to recover this kind of cave in a way.

And sure, you want to do that. Another way to think about that is to take yourself as a given, take your commitments as a given, and try to find something of profound significance within them.

And then you could read the books that influenced your life, one with an eye towards your tradition, but another with an eye towards what they teach you about the deeper problems.

And, you know, I was not raised religious, but I love reading Genesis, Exodus. I like reading the Bible because I see in taking the world that they portray seriously and taking the ways of life that they offer seriously, it opens me up to possibilities and to larger questions that I might not see otherwise.

It provides me a kind of means of access to that. I don’t mean to make this instrumental. Part of it is to say, who am I? What am I?

What kind of, you know, I’ve been taught these texts or I’ve been taught in this tradition, and it lends me to a certain life on the one hand. On the other hand, so I can read it and therefore understand myself and live a fuller version of this, but I can also see its limit and how the larger questions that it opens.

And that’s, if you can pull that off, you’ll have gotten out of the Hamlet problem, which is, he’s trying to justify the narrow.

The narrow is already there. You have to accept the narrow. The trick is to find the breadth and the profundity and the depth in the narrow.

That is not actually as narrow as it seems to be. It’s not an eggshell, right? Poland is not an eggshell. Denmark is not an eggshell. Denmark is an empire, right?

And there’s something inherently desirable in what it’s figured out. The, I was just thinking about Ernst Jünger’s essay, Total Mobilization.

And what’s interesting about that is he’s wrestling with America’s successes in World War I, which would become similar to its successes in World War II.

It’s ability to mobilize citizens and industry around some sort of common military purpose. And he was there looking at a country that Germans might have looked down upon for certain reasons and to some extent have over time.

But he was looking at its successes. And he was able to find in what you might call a smaller country, a kind of weird new country, he was able to find something of deep profundity and a kind of virtue of it that they had not taken seriously, that they were forced to take seriously by political and military events.

That, I think, is the real challenge, is to see that the eggshell is not ever really just an eggshell.

That insofar as it gives meaning, it has to say something or intimate something, at least, of these deeper concerns and these universal questions.

Yes, there’s a lot of ways I can take this. I think my gut reaction, my first reaction, the tension between the eggshell as a piece of honor and the eggshell as a kind of utilitarian poker chip, almost.

That you’re betting, that you’re betting, and you’re right, can absolutely grow into something much greater. In some ways, that’s the tension of Carl Schmitt and his reflections of Hobbes.

The significance of the eggshell, to me, is the point of honor, right? The eggshell itself is sacred, but the point to me is that it is a kind of piece of revelation.

It’s not subject to the kind of rational musings of others, right? In some ways, it’s the eggshell, because other people may believe that it’s insignificant, but it’s significant to you.

Hamlet’s tragic flaw is that he is overly prideful. He’s not considering the whole. He’s not considering the greater, the kind of real-world significance.

And this leads to, you know, spoilers for Hamlet, almost everyone, including him himself, dying.

In my, you know, youth and immaturity, I’m looking up a bit too much to a guy who dies in the end.

I think that this is significant to Schmitt, is that he sees the liberal political theory of subjecting, you know, all of this to debate and all of this to some, to the pursuit of some kind of universal law as inevitably resulting in a kind of totalitarian state that is, that is even more totalitarian than the kind of Hobbesian Leviathan.

There is this tension between your piece of discernment, your eggshell, and your greater ambitions. There’s this tension here where if you pursue the greater ambition, and if everyone is engaging in this competitive way of trying to parlay their eggshell into an egg, and then the entire egg industry, and then the world, then you have this equilibrium where you end up chasing the one world totalitarian state.

Let me bring out what I think is a kind of tension in what you’re saying, which is on the one hand, you’re calling it an eggshell. On the other hand, you’re calling it a kind of revelation.

And I think the latter pushes against the former. If it is an eggshell, it’s an essentially meaningless piece of nothing, right?

But if it is a revelation, it’s somehow pointing beyond itself, whether to the sacred, whether to something larger, right? So, like, I think this is one of the things that’s helpful about reading, like, Homer, for example.

Like, I read Homer, and I don’t feel the pull of Zeus or Athena, obviously, at all. But somehow the world can make some sense to me.

And this suggests that in any kind of sacred text that can actually speak to human beings and make them convinced of the gods, even, right?

It can only do that if there’s something more or something else going on, right? So, like, when you read the Bible, if you read Genesis, like, the narrative is very spare.

There’s very little to go on. But when you start tugging at it, you start to see really consistent characters, right? Like Jacob, for example.

He’s very risk-averse. He’s always doing what seems to be he relies on his own cunning, and he tries to avoid certain dilemmas. He flees his brother.

He’s tricky in trying to flee his father-in-law or fleeing his father-in-law. When he re-encounters his brother, he sets up this series of layers to kind of protect him and his favorite son and wife.

He’s always doing the risk-averse thing. And then, finally, this upsets his sons when it comes to the rape of his daughter.

And so you start to see there’s a vivid portrayal of human life. And we might not understand what it’s like to be like a shepherd in – a nomadic shepherd getting sort of – being speaking with God in the desert, right?

And trying to turn one’s family into a kind of tribe or something like that, which seems to be what’s going on with Jacob’s trajectory.

But we can understand his character. We can understand how he might respond to those sorts of situations.

And we can get – and then we can get a vision of how that fits within the biblical tradition and its specific contours of a certain kind of God, a mysterious God, who’s made these kind of covenants and promises to his chosen people.

And we can begin to think about how a certain type of person fits into a certain vision of the world.

And suddenly, a text that a lot of very sophisticated people nowadays we call mythological, that’s a mistake, or dismiss as archaic and retrograde even, and sort of say this is it worth thinking about, suddenly is deeply illuminating.

And it can only be that. It only ended up having traction over human beings in a broad and in the sense of giving a form to a people, right?

It only was able to do that because it was in touch with these deeper issues of human nature and human life.

And it spoke to them and gave them a specific kind of shape or gave them an outlet, gave them a place, a hierarchy, you could say, by giving an articulation of the world.

Maybe you’ll never believe that this God is the one and true only God and you should have no other gods beside him.

You might not actually follow that law, but you can understand it as a possibility and something worth really thinking about.

And if you take it as a possibility, you might start to say, huh, who knows what happened all that time ago in a desert.

And suddenly, this eggshell, this thing you’re willing to dismiss, comes to have profounder significance as a way of life and as one that might actually have grips on you.

Yes, I think there are great parallels between this kind of unveiling, this kind of greater significance. Can I now, can I tie this back to Schmidt?

I just had, I realized I forgot to cover one thing. Yes, feel free.

Yeah, so that’s what genuine pluralism might actually look like. If you read Alan Bloom’s Closing the American Mind, the introductory introduction, I think it’s paragraph 26, he kind of articulates a version of this.

Liberalism, to go back to Schmidt, this idea that it is kind of totalitarian, it’s totalitarian in his lack of seriousness.

And the fact that it wants you to reduce all your deepest convictions to mere preferences and not to assert them as having binding on yourself and maybe even binding on others.

And the problem is, is that liberalism makes its lack of discernment binding on you.

And it forces you to not take your commitments or anybody’s commitments seriously. Genuine pluralism, a regime of multiple traditions, might require looking at those traditions and saying, how might they actually be true?

Can I actually refute these traditions? Or is there some way in which I’m just living in a time where I don’t take it seriously?

Really excavating and doing this kind of archaeology and thinking about these texts as having a kind of bind.

That’s what real seriousness about other traditions looks like. Instead, what we do is we transform them into kind of baubles of our liberalism.

When I lived in Boulder, Colorado, there was this store I would always pass.

And it was kind of like a hippie store. And so it had all these like tie-dyed Buddhas and Buddha bongs and things like that.

And I thought, what kind of regime smokes weed out of another people’s gods? Do you go to Buddhist societies and you see a Jesus bong where you’re smoking weed out of his head or something like that?

I mean, it’s utterly perverse.

Yeah, try that with Muhammad. See where that gets you.

What’s that?

Try that with Muhammad. See what happens.

Yeah, it’s not going to get pretty bad.

But there’s a kind of, and obviously this has to do with some of the tenets of Buddhism and how nihilistic they can seem and therefore how amenable they are to these terms.

You’re not doing it out of Jesus even in the West. So often people smoke weed with pages of the Bible because it’s so thin, right?

So maybe it’s not that uncommon. But yeah, when you look at that, you realize, oh, this is a feature of our way of life.

And far from being open, it’s incredibly flippant and even disrespectful.

And okay, we see that with foreign traditions and in our kind of liberal tolerance, we say, okay, maybe we shouldn’t be smoking weed out of Buddha or like looking at Buddha tie-dyed through a black light or something.

Maybe there’s something disrespectful. It’s also disrespectful to your own traditions, right, to be that dismissive.

And this includes, you know, the Christian traditions, whatever traditions, Jewish traditions, to act as though these are just kind of whatever, right?

And we treat them in an easygoing way.

You know, Schmidt has as much to offer him and much not to offer him. But what he does have to offer is he’s trying to get around this thing.

What he doesn’t have to offer him is that he kind of just comes back to a kind of knee-jerk reaffirmation of the eggshell.

What I want to suggest is that, no, the eggshell is more than an eggshell and it always is.

And you have to sort of take it seriously in its primary form. This is what it means to get back to the original cave.

You have to somehow be willing to say that the original cave is superior, but still something to ascend from that has to point beyond itself.

The relation between the friend-enemy distinction and the eggshell, it’s merely political, right?

You know, Strauss has this critique of the concept of the political.

It’s not merely a political problem. Famously, the critique is, like, stylized as, you know, Carl Schmitt is still too much of a liberal.

The substance of that critique is that he’s thinking about the flaws or the contradictions of liberal political theory without touching liberal metaphysics, right?

Without touching the nature of reason and debate.

I think I agree with you on this point. You have to dig deeper. You have to say there is something more to the eggshell.

It can’t merely be an eggshell. You have to have that respect for it.

I think you’re absolutely right on that point. So one way to look at this in Strauss’ own works is he’s writing the concept of the political, or his notes on the concept of the political, on Schmitt’s work, the concept of the political, as he’s working on his own Hobbes study.

And if you go read the Hobbes study, especially with the later preface, what you’ll see is that Strauss is offering a different way of criticizing Hobbes.

And he’s looking at how Hobbes gives you people like Hegel and Nietzsche, and it’s kind of historical art.

But he’s also recovering from within it the influence of Machiavelli.

But he also shows how the Habesian worldview is based on a certain change in the Aristotelian worldview.

So if you look at Aristotle’s ethics, you have three peaks. You have justice as a peak of virtue. You have greatness of soul as a peak of virtue.

And then you have the contemplative life. And what Hobbes is doing is emphasizing justice and equality over and against the longing for a noble or the longing for a contemplative insight into the nature of things.

And what Strauss does very carefully in his book on Hobbes is to recover this and to show that Hobbes hasn’t actually argued against it.

He’s kind of trying to show that he relied on summaries of the ethics. He didn’t really engage.

And so the modern turn begins in an incomplete critique of the ancients. And therefore, as he notes in his later preface, you need to reopen the quarrel between ancients and moderns.

And that means to reconstruct this. And so when you look at Hobbes saying all human beings just are longing after power after power that ceaseth only in death, there is no greatest good.

And then you go to chapter two of the ethics and you see Aristotle poses this possibility, but then says, well, that would be empty longing.

So let’s take seriously that there is some good. And you realize he’s not asserting that there is a highest good, but he’s seeking the good.

He says, this is the good we’re searching after. And you start to realize there’s a kind of greater openness and non-dogmatism of Aristotle.

And one of Strauss’s virtues is to recover a non-dogmatic reading of the ancients, which as non-dogmatic can withstand or promises to withstand the modern critique of ancient idealism, right, as imaginary or made up, right?

And he’s able to say, no, there’s a kind of zetetic, probing, Socratic quality that’s not so different.

Now, Strauss takes this seriously. He takes the Machiavellian turn seriously.

He’s trying to ask the degree to which there is a superhuman standard, something like nature or even like God, that’s worthy of taking seriously in light of the modern position.

That, I think, is a more robust critique of Hobbes that’s not just trying to get around liberalism because you’re upset about what it’s done, but it’s trying to take seriously how liberalism came to be or how it involves a kind of a shift on the Aristotelian world and how a recovery of that world might open you up to a more robust understanding of human motivation.

So all that Schmitt gets you is something like commitment to the eggshell, as we’ve been putting it.

What Strauss does is he recovers the heterogeneity of the peaks of virtue and therefore the heterogeneity of ends, the just, the noble, and the good or the true, right?

And how that contours politics. He shows that what Schmitt is longing after, what other of these German thinkers of the 20s and 30s were longing after, is a recovery of a kind of natural basis to our moral longings, right?

That Aristotle spoke to the best of anybody in history. I’m most familiar with this in terms of natural right and history.

I should read the more extended work on Hobbes.

It’s extended, but it’s earlier.

But if you want to see how Strauss is wrestling with the same problem as Schmitt at the same time, it’s really valuable to be thinking about them together.

I think in trying to understand his path of thinking, you want to understand how he goes from his early work on Hobbes to natural right and history.

And then he has this later essay on Hobbes in what is political philosophy.

And you’ll want to put those all together.

But if you want to see how he’s – what he’s writing as he’s responding to Schmitt and how he’s dealing with the same problems, you’ve got to read that work.

And it’s among the most readable and therefore popular works by Strauss, among non-Straussians at least.

With the understanding that I’m speaking from a kind of youth and inexperience, my understanding of Strauss’ critique of Hobbes is that he sees Hobbes as neglecting these higher virtues.

Where my reading of Hobbes really differs is that I think that when you have freedom of conscience, that the higher virtue comes from – you could say it comes from revelation.

You could say natural theology almost. But that there is still a presence of higher virtue, but it comes out of this pluralism, right?

So this is my big contestation. Have you ever seen – this is a deep cut. This is a deep cut.

There’s this Japanese manga series later turned into an anime called Monster. Do you know about this?

No. I grew up in the age in which anime was kind of on the fringes coming in and getting more popular, but it never took with me.

Okay. Understandable. The arch antagonist in Monster. It’s a very philosophical work of art. He is the Nietzschean overman. This guy, Johan, the person with the most agency, the most will to power. And he has this line, the only thing men are equal in is death. And this is seen as, you know, this like character defining—this defines his Nietzscheanism.

And it’s very curious to me that this is in many ways a restatement of Hobbes. That, you know, when Hobbes says we are all equal, he says man is equal in that although some have greater body and mind than others, you know, all men are capable through deception or conspiracy to kill another. In some way, he is saying the same thing as this, you know, arch Nietzschean villain. The thing that men are equal in is death. That’s something that’s very hard to contest, right?

On one hand, I really respect the critique given by Leo Strauss. I do have a great respect for the ancients. You know, we are talking about this. We are spending more than two hours talking about this. And at the same time, I see a political system which has a kind of separation of higher virtue and survival as critically important.

To mix metaphors, we all understand not everyone’s coming out of Plato’s cave. We all understand that this is a virtue that is only going to be pursued by some and that the governance of the state, there is going to be a layer of abstraction, of separation between those two things. I think that is important and that is possible without the full discarding of those greater values. That you can believe that, you know, they can still come in the form of freedom of conscience and in the form of revelation while still believing in the Hobbesian political system as it is described.

Yeah. So, I mean, this is a difficult question. There’s countless things written on liberalism and how to ennoble it, right? And one way to reformulate your question is freedom of conscience equivalent to faith, like in the deepest sense, right? If I’m understanding my faith as an act of freedom that’s trying to reconcile my conscience with the world, that seems to presuppose or take off the table certain faiths, certain kinds of—you don’t even want to call them faiths, right?

This is the big problem the right likes to point out, like how do you have a nation of self-determination and free sort of self-legislation in the United States? And then also people who believe in Sharia law, that it ought to apply to everyone. What happens when those who don’t share your faith are infidels and you take that very seriously? And that the way of dealing with infidels is a kind of forced conversion, right? Whether we’re talking about like the Spanish Inquisition or we’re talking about jihad, right?

I wonder whether the Hobbesian system might require something like Protestantism. If that’s the case, then we’re begging the question, right? Because we’re saying this is a solution, but the solution requires the framework of the question actually just shows that the question needs to be formulated again and in a more radical way, right? The answer is not an answer, but a restatement of the problem. If that’s the case, then you have to dig a little bit deeper.

I mean, one of the interesting things about Hobbes is if you take this justice, so we’re equal in that we can die, but he actually says we’re equal in the fact that we have a fear of violent death. It’s not just like death because you could fear death, but you’d be like, oh, it won’t be so bad. I’ll be surrounded by my loved ones and maybe I’ll go while I’m sleeping and it’ll be very peaceful and quiet. I won’t even see it coming.

He’s talking about like somebody dropping a rock on your head and you go into like spasms and you’re just afraid of violent death. So the reason you want a strong sovereign is to deal with that. But this idea of taking fear of death as primary, requiring a Leviathan, this smacks obviously of Christianity, right?

Yes. But also just the biblical, the idea that—he overtly says it, right? He talks about the biblical justification of the Leviathan. The Leviathan, it comes from, I believe, the book of Job. Um, yeah. And even something like Nietzschean courage presupposes this fear, right? So getting around this is a bit difficult.

And you might look at the Old Testament and you look at how human mortality is heavily stressed there. And our nobler longings are downplayed consciously, right? Like the age of heroes is gone, right? Like we’re not going to have Achillean or noble types in the same way. Uh, in fact, when we come around to Kings, it’s only very begrudgingly later, much later in the biblical narrative.

What’s far more emphasized is a kind of human equality, uh, um, before God’s power, right? And a kind of fear that wisdom begins in, in fear of the Lord, not, not in wonder and not in a kind of, uh, captivation with beauty, but in a captivation with your fear.

When you start thinking about these questions in a larger sense, you do get this feeling that if you’re going to take the fear seriously, you might have to, as the fundamental determinant of your life, not fear necessarily. Obviously, you fear other human beings, but if you are really struck by your mortality and you want to be ushered through your mortality, what you really would want is not a Leviathan or the sovereign. What you’d want is God, right? You’d want a God who integrates your life into a larger historical narrative, into a providence over many thousands of years, if not longer.

And that brings you, fits you into this larger purpose of the peoples. And so the Bible often emphasizes human fallibility, our foibles, our limitedness, our mortality. It raises very flawed men to positions of prominence, but they’re all integrated within this larger, uh, narrative of how a man, Adam becomes a family, right? Uh, Abraham and it becomes a tribe, Jacob, his sons and beyond, it becomes a nation under Egypt, becomes a people with a law with Moses and even with Kings after that.

And this kind of political development, that’s the primary thing to which all these, into which all these human lives, these fallible, deeply flawed lives are integrated, given meaning. And to some extent, uh, redeemed, is that what’s at stake in our fear of violent death? Like in our sense of our smallness, is that what we want to, to sort of redeem it?

Well, then we’re talking about something very different from a kind of freedom of conscience, right? And I think that difference needs to be underscored if we’re going to take seriously what our hopes actually are. The problem with liberalism is that we’re not willing to give that full articulation of our hope and longing because it seems so ridiculous to us. Because we think these kinds of narratives in this way of life are so primitive and rudimentary, but it might be all too human.

It might be that the primitive, um, we scoff at it or we don’t take it seriously at our own peril. And it might be we never get back there, but at least we understand what it is we want and we can think seriously about it.

Well, I don’t see it as primitive at all, at all.

Well, neither do I. Orthodoxy, I think, has a certain traction, but that is a difficulty people have. You know, we’re all Straussians here and this is the exoteric reading, but I think in many ways Hobbes’ own theology, um, is in line with this. This goes back to the central, you know, Schmittian critique of there are things that threaten the state itself.

And, and then, you know, there’s this tension between the freedom of conscience and the Leviathan. It must be resolved in some way. I think in practical terms, you can see Leviathan as a response to, you know, the 30 years war. Right. And so I think he at least believes that, you know, this is a system of compromise that is possible between Catholics and Protestants.

I think there’s a similar thing going on with Descartes, by the way. He comes up with this idea of a humanistic, charitable, natural science aimed at alleviating us of our ills. For some reason, while he’s acting as a doctor on the front lines of the war, he’s brought to reflect. He’s like, I don’t know why. He’s obviously being ironic. He’s like, I don’t know why.

But I was thinking about how it’s much better when one person designs a system than with multiple people do. The reason being that when you have multiple people, you get Catholics and Protestants, right? When you have Luther and the Pope, then you’ve got a real problem, right? But when you have Descartes saying, it takes a lot of disenfranchised Christian philanthropy, and he redirects it through a philanthropic natural science that culminates in medicine and mechanics, right?

It’s going to help you heal bodies and make life easier. Isn’t that what you want? Or the way Bacon puts it is, is new mercies through his own hands rather than through the hands of God, right? So, yeah, absolutely. I think they’re all preying on this. And this is a new opportunity opened up by the Reformation that wasn’t available in Machiavelli’s time.

But partly as a result of certain actions taken by the Popes in Machiavelli’s time, and by exposing the Machiavellian-ness of the church, perhaps he helped to encourage something like a Reformation. I don’t know if that’s true, whether it’s him encouraging it or people just observing this obvious thing.

But it seems like as a result of the Reformation, you create this new political circumstance that allows these modern philosophers to offer a kind of mode of systematic thinking that can help to heal this divide, but by leaving behind this sort of old, deeper question. This is exactly why I kind of say the things that I do about Mill, even though I in some ways understand where he’s coming from and the problems and the kind of, you know, exoteric circumstances he’s facing as well.

But Mill is where I think the turn really goes from a kind of pluralism of multiple traditions that I think is very clear in Hobbes, and I think is genuine and sincere, to a disrespective tradition, right? There are thinkers before Mill as well. But I think Mill is where the liberal political order becomes, you know, almost one in the same to the disrespect of tradition and the disrespect to older ways of thinking and the disrespect to revelation.

This is kind of the big open question that I’m trying to pursue. There’s often this critique of, actually, of the people who call themselves classical liberals today, that they just want to go back to the 90s, or they just want to go back to the 60s. And one of the questions that I’m trying to answer is that, can we go back to a kind of Hobbesian version of classical liberalism without going down the Mill route, and while maintaining many of the criticisms raised by Strauss and by Schmidt?

And I honestly don’t know the answer. I’m trying. I’m trying to figure it out. I’m trying to make it work. But I just don’t know. I mean, this is such a difficult question of what the future holds.

I mean, I recently wrote a review of a book, and I ended this review. It was on the place of technology within Republican politics, what it could look like if it were properly ennobling. This is the technological work. Is this the Alex Karp?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the Alex Karp book. My sense of what makes that book valuable and interesting, and why it should be taken seriously, is it is considering the possibility of ennobling politics. But it begins engaging with, in a kind of twofold inquiry that all modern human beings have to, which is, look, modernity is not a unified thing. It is full of different modern philosophers, their thought is describing, while also giving form to emerging institutions and features of our life, insofar as they attain some degree of fame.

They’re definitely giving form to our life and inspiring people to act in a certain way and to view their lives in a certain way. All of that is true. But one of the difficulties is that it feels like every 20, 50, 100 years, whatever it is, new parts of this tradition become more emphasized than others.

And so one of the things I think one has to do is engage in a kind of genealogy of the current situation, right? Yes, absolutely. And so one of the things that I think is interesting is to think about the relationship between state and sort of these sort of global economic corporations, right? These actors. And there are features of Descartes that are really interesting here.

And then there’s features of Hobbes that are really interesting here and thinking about the two of them and how. So, but when you do that, you do that in order to get a sense of what are the forces driving our world? Which ones do we just have to accept as part of it? And technological innovation is one of them.

I think it’s driven, obviously, by the fact that we’re engaged in insane amounts of deficit spending that require growth. And growth requires innovation to make labor irrelevant. And this is having all sorts of negative effects. But I don’t know how you do this while avoiding economic collapse. Maybe the Doge kids will do it. But I’m not trying to get too hopeful about what the results are going to be so early still.

But when you look at that, you have to accept certain necessities. And something like a sort of maybe a tech oligarchy is just the only way out of this. And you have to accept it. That seems to be what Karp is arguing for. And I was very struck reading that book. And I put this in my review that even though it talks about a Republican, there’s very little said about Republican politics.

Very much said about how technologists ought to organize themselves. And this suggests that there might be a little sleight of hand going on here, whether intentionally or not. But at the very least, I think what you have to say is you have to take certain givens. You have to engage in the geology. See what possibilities are open.

While also reflecting on the fact that just because you have to accept certain aspects of the regime is perpetuating themselves or becoming more and more powerful doesn’t mean you have to take them as definitive for how you live your life or how you view the good life. And so I think one way to think about what the future might look like is you engage this genealogy to understand how it’s limiting.

But also you have to constantly, this is what every modern thinker has had to do, you have to engage in something like a philosophic anthropology that isn’t also a metaphysics that recognizes the heterogeneity of human ends, recognizes the trade-offs involved, and tries to create a flexible framework for thinking about how these innovations plug in.

This is sort of what we were talking about a lot earlier. But somehow being able to equip leaders, whether in technology or in politics, with a kind of way of thinking about these ends. And you can get that from studying the ancients. You can get that from studying Aristotle’s ethics and politics. But I think also it requires, as all civilization does, a restatement in our words.

So to go back to what we were talking about earlier about the constraints of the moment, people need to write about these topics in a way that’s not purely academic and in a way that’s not vulgarized for popular press, but that appeals to a thoughtful, practically engaged elite in technology or politics that takes seriously the constraints of time, of their energy, and how they can get the most out of this sort of reading.

And so that, to me, would be what the task going forward would be for any kind of philosophically serious individual who really wants to be thinking about our situation and also writing for our situation. It’s the problem of exoteric writing, right? This is actually something that I’m also fascinated by.

I think it’s a good way to bring us out of the trenches. I think you’re absolutely right that that is the political project of our time or the philosophical project of our time. I am much more respectful of Mill than the phrase, you know, Mill is the Judas of classical liberalism would imply.

And the reason for that is that there’s a charisma in being the firebomber. And of course, this has always existed, right? You can see Machiavelli as still being the, you know, ultimate champion of this technique. But it does seem like we’re in a present time where this is more important than ever, where this is very conscious in many of the most kind of popular, like online philosophers, you know, Jarvan’s like this, Bronze Age Pervert is like this.

You know about these people? Yeah, yeah, of course. I actually met Jarvan not that long ago when he was at UATX engaging in debate. But I like your take on Mill. I usually like Mill because I think about Bentham and I’m like, well, at least he’s not that guy.

Yeah, yeah. There’s a way in which he can be used to push against our inclination to cancel those we disagree with. And I kind of like that because it fits within a lot of frameworks. But you’re right. There’s something very presumptuous at the heart of his work that I think is worth thinking about.

But you have to be careful that your provocations and exaggerations are still plausible, right? And so the way that Plato does it, I had a student ask me a question that was—it was a fantastic question in part because I got to go off on one of my favorite topics in how Plato writes. But he says, he just asked, why does Plato hide these little things, especially if they’re not as controversial or something?

I said, well, we tend to think of esoteric or exoteric writing as merely to escape persecution. But I think it’s something more than that. I think what Plato does is he writes books that get a reputation. So when you hear about the Republic, you say, oh my gosh, it’s magisterial. It’s huge. It covers everything on the other side.

My God, it’s frightening. It’s a utopia that looks a little bit scary. And there’s something very exciting about that. There’s a clash with Thrasymachus and then you get this. And so there’s something really dazzling about this and really provocative about it.

And that’s attractive to a certain kind of person. Even the title, Republic, Politeia, Regime or Polity, it’s got this grandness to it. And you think, oh, it’s about the regime. It’s about Plato’s ideal regime. And then you read it, it’s like, no, it’s about Socrates’ polity. It’s about the people he’s talking with who have these longings.

And those longings produce this ideal regime. And what you realize is that Plato does something very, very tricky. He gives you something exaggerated, something almost scary in its exaggeration, but something also compelling. And it’s compelling to a certain type of reader who, by virtue of the work’s reputation, is drawn in.

But if they’re drawn in and they’re thoughtful, they’ll start to reflect on the fact that what they wanted or what they were seeking to get out of this work is not ultimately what it’s about or that what they ultimately wanted is impossible. Symposium is another great example of this. It’s the leading lights of Athens.

It’s all about love. It’s not this ugly Socratic conversation, but these beautiful speeches about love. But it becomes more conversational. It promises this uniting of the beautiful and the good in a life of immortal fame. But when you start reading it, there’s something kind of hollow at the core of this because he never actually fully justifies it.

He never fully answers all the questions that he puts on the table. And you start to realize that the same sort of person who’s kind of gossipy and who’s interested in fame in this thin sense rather than in the sense of glory, where these are poets rather than people like Alcibiades, like statesmen, the same person who’s going to have that peaked in him is also going to have it kind of tempered and dealt with.

And that’s another form of exoteric writing where you recognize there are certain people with certain longings. You write a book that’s exaggerated in a way that plays to those longings. That person is going to pick up those books. They’re going to reflect on it. And they’re going to be changed as a result if they are truly thoughtful and serious about why they picked up the book in the first place.

And lo and behold, Plato writes these dialogues and they find their way into Rome. Rome then shifts out to the east to Constantinople. They find their way to the Muslims. It provokes there. They find their way back into Europe. It provokes there. And now in the 20th and 21st century, it provokes yet again.

And Plato has had this remarkable history over 2,500 years of finding his way into regimes and into civilizations that don’t know him and creating a kind of renaissance and a sort of life of letters wherever he ends up. That’s a hell of an accomplishment.

And it’s worth thinking, insofar as we’re trying to do something small and provoking for our time, it’s worth thinking about how one can write. And that’s a kind of exoteric writing that’s not merely being afraid of being persecuted. You could just avoid writing altogether nowadays. But it’s actually doing something—I said this earlier, but I’ll emphasize it again.

It’s trying to find friends. I think that’s a better way to think about it. There are everywhere about you potential friends. And they might even be among your enemies. It’s one of the most remarkable facts of the Republic, and one worth really reflecting on, that Thrasymachus lashes out and apparently, this seems exaggerated, wants to kill Socrates.

He looks like a beast. And by later in the dialogue, Socrates is saying, we were never enemies, and now we’re friends. Thinking about how to solicit friends among your potential or apparent enemies, ones who are not actually enemies but could be friends, is a good way of thinking about what exoteric writing might do in the higher sense.

Not just avoid being clawed by Thrasymachus, but maybe turning him into a kind of convert to that way of life. Which he seems to be—he tries to get up and leave in book one. As far as we can tell, he stays the whole time, all night, listening to Socrates, speaking only once thereafter.

Maybe this goes to what we were talking about earlier in terms of the aphorisms, in terms of writing in a way that modern people are more amenable to. I really appreciate your wisdom about, you know, the way that Plato goes about it, creating this sort of archetype of the kind of desire that someone is trying to satisfy when they’re going into, you know, the symposium.

I really appreciate that. You can definitely identify that characteristic in, for example, Bronze Age Pervert, right? He is fulfilling the wish of masculinity and maybe, you know, looping people into a deeper understanding of Nietzsche and Strauss. To some extent, if you are like—if you’re on the path of thinking and something’s provoking you, like Nietzsche, which he did for me when I was in undergrad, I loved Nietzsche.

And I engaged in all the delusions that had come with getting into Nietzsche. Undergrad experience, Nietzsche. Yeah, typical. But then, you know, you gain reflection on it. He never really got past that. I was struck in his dissertation where I was reading Selective Breeding that he said he formulated his ideas when he was, like, 20.

And that struck me as kind of damning, a 40-something-year-old guy who’s still trapped by the ideas of his 20-year-old self. But there’s a kind of—it’s fairly obvious, I think, that the reaction to liberalism, to the fear and the comfort desired by liberalism, is a kind of courage and riskiness that Nietzsche speaks to.

What Bronze Age Pervert is doing is, from a philosophic perspective, is a very obvious trick that I think ought to be moved past in the direction of deeper levels of inquiry. And part of the problem is his reading of text betrays that he goes into it with an ulterior motive, right? His readings of Plato, of Nietzsche, of Strauss, of Pindar, even, are all lacking.

And in many cases, quite wrong. One way to write something that will appeal to people is simply to appeal to the visceral reaction of others that you yourself have had, which is grounded in some reality. I want to be clear about that. The other way is to have a good grasp of the basic problems and to have reflected on how that kind of reaction is but a moment’s reaction.

And this is one of the virtues of Strauss, as he sees, similar to what Bronze Age Pervert is doing, he saw around him, in people like Schmidt, in people like Jung, or even in people like Heidegger, and to some extent Nietzsche, this kind of reactivity. And he saw that there was some merit to it, and he gives it its merit. And it should be given the merit of being a very real reaction to a very real problem.

And it has some legitimacy in it. On the other hand, the legitimacy is not final, and it has to be held before a higher court. And a higher court is going to take away a lot of the things that made that reaction appealing in the first place. And that’s going to be something one has to live with.

But if you get a good grip on the possibilities and the deeper problems, and you’re able to speak powerfully to it, and to write powerfully about it, you will, I think, I hope, gain an audience among those who really want to figure out these problems and not merely scream into the abyss, which seems often to be the problem.

So you can appeal to the screamers, you can appeal to the thinkers, you have to figure out a way maybe to do both, I don’t know.

Yeah, you scream into the abyss, and does it scream back? I don’t know. How does Bronze Age Pervert’s reading of texts, what and how does that betray his motivations? Go into more detail about that.

I’ll give an example from Pindar, because that’s probably—I spent a lot of time with Pindar when I was working on Xenophon. I was just reading quite a bit of it. And he goes through Pindar, and he picks out the word nature, or the word nature is used. Whenever somebody focuses on one word with minimal context and understanding that word, you get worried that it’s cherry-picked, right?

And he gives this view of nature as having this connection to one’s breeding and origins, and all that seems correct for like a Greek mindset. He even comes up with this idea that nature might suddenly flourish after being dormant for a couple of generations, and suddenly somebody has a victory in battle or in a game, as it were, right?

And it could be even dormant in a person’s life, and in an old age, it comes up. Oh, fine. It was very clear to me from the very beginning that he was cherry-picking, because there is one ode, and that he had not engaged in a wholesale interpretation of Pindar, but had just been focused on this.

In one ode, Pindar makes clear, the poets used to be sort of grand and to create their own sort of visions. Now they’re for hire. Now they’re like prostitutes, and they flatter their audience, and they have to flatter their audience wherever they go. It’s in one of the odes.

And so the question immediately becomes, is this account of nature, and is even the Greek mindset about nature that Bronze Age Pervert adopts here, is this idea of nature a genuine, justified, and true account of nature, or does it reflect the vanity of Greek aristocratic sensibilities? Is this a view of nature that maybe has a bit of sense?

I mean, it does make sense that there are more or less dormant bits of nature. Whether you want to fledge that into a full-on racial theory, that’s going to the extreme. But maybe that more racial version or extreme breeding sense of it is a function of poetic flattery.

Maybe a lot of it has to do with Pindar’s ability to speak to it. And to exaggerate it, because maybe this guy who wins in a game despite his age, it’s because of lackluster competition that year, right? This is always like the battles for greatest of all time in football or basketball or whatever. It always comes up with the question of who is the competition, right?

Who is the competition? Alexander Uzyk is the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world right now. He’s a smaller guy. I wonder whether he could have held up against Mike Tyson and Lennox Lewis. And I wonder whether he could have held up against Danali. I don’t know. But you start to think about this and you realize there’s a whole host of reasonable grounds for skepticism.

At the very least, as a matter of textual interpretation, it’s totally lacking. Totally lacking. I mean, you would at least have to address this passage. He’s completely silent on it. And he never cites it. And he never cites it, I think, because the word nature is not used in it.

This suggests that it’s cherry-picked. But a good Straussian would say it’s precisely those passages where he doesn’t speak about nature, where you might want to go look for what he truly thinks about nature. Because it would be in the passages where he says poetry is for sale.

And poetry exaggerates that the word nature would be replaced by poetry. The word nature would be replaced by human making. That the poet preys on the vanities of a certain type of person. All of this means we should, at the very least, I’m not saying throw it out, but at the very least, temper these extreme versions of what he’s saying.

And think of them in light of a larger dynamic, of the human quest for greatness, of the need that great deeds require of great speeches. About the incentive structure of embellishing and exaggerating those speeches. About the fact that nature never just operates cleanly and is not just represented like a clean mirror by the poet.

But it’s embellished and exaggerated, given context, even transformed from what it really is. So as to justify the sentiments and the prejudices of his aristocratic audience, and therefore to make a buck. Because that’s what he’s talking about, right? And this is revealing that he’s not willing, or doesn’t recognize even, to see the baser motives of the poet.

And how that might distort our vision of the Greek world, or of Greek aristocracy. That to me was, from the very page one, when I started reading that, I was immediately not convinced. And so I was going to write a review of it, but my friend Dustin Sable did, and he did a fine job of it.

The reason I focus on the Pindar is that’s one of the things that was missing from his review, and that I think is worth getting out there. There’s this strange way where the kind of online right is still very much in the mood of science. At least as it is narrowly applied, right?

That the anthropology comes first, and it does feel like this attempt to co-legislate, right? To give a novel interpretation. An interpretation that kind of gives status in the same way that the Athenian stranger is giving status to the gods of Crete while also trying to shape their laws.

When you’re thinking about these things, how much do you weigh the esoteric message of what someone like Koston writes? And how much do you weigh the esoteric aspect? I mean, I think it’s there. I think when I was describing the aphoristic style, I think one thing he gets right is there’s a kind of playfulness, an irony in it, and a kind of joy that’s there that’s so missing from scholarly writing and so missing from so much.

And he also writes in an aphoristic style that lends itself to discussion. So you’ll see Twitter spaces on certain parts of Bronze Age Mindset, right? And you’ll see people returning to and discussing tweets of his. And so he’s understood, I think, extremely well what form of writing is going to work in this day and age.

And he deserves credit for that, and it would be foolish not to take that mode of writing as instructive, right? And obviously, I think there’s a bit of esotericism in there on the one hand. On the other hand, this is where I go back to the question of provocation and compulsion.

There’s a certain compulsion that people feel behind it, but once you start studying the text seriously, once you start thinking really seriously about the material, you start to realize that he hasn’t done his homework. This is my friend Dustin’s review is very good on this. He just shows this, that the reactive element overrides the thoughtful element.

And therefore, what kind of way of life you’re drawn to. So Dustin wrote that essay, I think, with an eye to addressing some reservations or incipient reservations that young readers, thoughtful readers might have and fleshing them out so that they can see there’s another path, right? Or there’s a deeper and more thoughtful path going there.

If there is irony, and I do believe there is irony, and I think the playfulness and the provocation, I think there’s exaggeration often for the sake of provocation on the one hand. On the other hand, I don’t find it compelling at all as a reading of history and of texts.

To some extent, scholars should take this as a warning to them that they haven’t been doing a good job of addressing the real living concerns of the young. And you see this. Sometimes I go to see a prominent scholar, a very thoughtful scholar whose work I think is amazing, speak about current political events, talk about current issues.

And they’re just—they just don’t understand where students are coming from. They don’t even know how to start addressing how they’re actually reading things. For all of their sensibility and all of their mentorship of students, they sometimes don’t even understand the students before them. And I think that’s a real problem.

Like, Sakri spends his time with the youth. He’s deeply in touch with their concerns. As the Peloponnesian War is unfolding, and you see this in Plato, and as new longings are coming around or long suppressed longings are giving outlet, he’s able to address them and to work with them.

He’s thinking about them live and on the ground until the day he dies, even after the collapse of the Athenian Empire. He’s still thinking about what’s going on and what it points to and what deeper questions these longings can help him see. He’s still doing that.

You know, the reason you’ll get Academy on one side and BAP on the other and other kind of right-wing intellectuals is because the Academy hasn’t been doing its due diligence. For all the monographs on Plato, and I’m guilty of this myself, and I’ve had to reflect a little bit on my own sort of activity as a teacher and author.

For all the monographs on Plato, which are very helpful, where are the works, like Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind today, that really touched on these nerves? It was, I think, a feather in the cap of Straussians that Bloom wrote that book and was able to address so powerfully and provoke such a reaction. Where is the corollary?

Or are we just losing our sense of the compass? I really think this is an important thing that scholars need to take more seriously as part of their work. Coming from the other side of that perspective, as you know, a younger person who has seen all of this does have an interest in academic philosophy, but is mostly immersed in the world of Zoomers and kind of technologists and so on.

On one hand, it feels like a particularly philosophical moment, especially with the recent election and with all of the changes that are happening now. You know, random founders are now asking me about Carl Schmitt. Take that for whatever sign you will. But young people are really bound up by this Silicon Valley way of thinking.

It’s in some aspects, scientism. It’s in some aspects much more philosophical than that. It’s much more, yes, it’s much more aphoristic. It’s much more short-tempered. It’s a very distinct style. There’s one narrative that I think has a bit of truth to it, which is the kind of McLuhan, this is the natural result of the medium.

I think that there are aspects of that that are absolutely correct. On the other hand, you have to have both. You have to have explanations that account for the change within a medium, that the environment is different now, different in the current moment, different in the age where, you know, Trump is now in office.

And all these philosophical questions now feel alive to the touch, but also account for the difference between now and, say, Reagan, right? Where I think was another moment where these questions were alive to the touch. Why are these things different? Some of it is going to be the medium. Some of it is going to be the event. Some of it is going to be the attitudes and the fashions of the age.

If we were to really distill this question in, like, the plainest form of, like, why aren’t more of your friends reading Strauss, right? Like, this question is being asked to me. Like, you know, you’re this, like, Zoomer technologist, you know, founder type. Why don’t more people, you know, read Strauss? Or why don’t more people, you know, read academic papers and philosophy?

The answer is that the telos just isn’t there. That the idea that you read philosophy and it changes your life course, that it changes not just the way you think as a kind of academic idea. I think people still believe that. Like, you’ll give you a different theory about the world.

But as a thing that changes the course of your life, people no longer believe in that. If I were to choose one, the answer, that’s what I would say.

Yeah, that might be the case. I mean, so Strauss, one of the difficulties with Strauss is that he very rarely kind of speaks in his own name. He speaks, he’ll do it when he’s framing an inquiry. But he will typically just spend most of, almost all the time interpreting a text.

And part of—you have to keep in mind, Strauss is writing before there were Straussians, right? Before there was all this literature. And so, I mean, what he was doing, one way to look at what he was doing was opening up. I mean, he’s got his own path of thinking. He’s trying to work things out.

He’s trying to write down how his thinking has developed along the way. But on the other hand, he’s trying to open up new vistas with each thinker, new ways of reading these things. And when you look at the host of texts and periods that he comments on and that he offers sort of heterodox views on, I mean, it’s remarkable, right?

In the multiple faith traditions, there’s all periods of the history of philosophy. And he’s a force to be reckoned with. And he provides a kind of roadmap of questions and sort of insights that need to be spelled out. Like he doesn’t spell everything out.

And there’s a kind of weird way in which he often seems to be like just hiding things or skimming along the surface. But he definitely creates a series of vistas to go on to open up. Great.

Okay. So that’s one thing that he’s up to. To get a technologist to start thinking about that stuff is difficult. They need to be convinced that their own mode of thinking is part of the problem, right?

So in this review I wrote, I asked a question which I think is really important for anti-ideological technologists to wrestle with, which is, isn’t ideology a kind of technology? Isn’t it creating a system of ideas, right? And a series of institutions that when properly placed will be able to provide us some kind of guidance.

In the same way that a car, when we get inside of it and we start to know how to use it, starts to get us around town. In fact, might it not be, therefore, the queen of technologies, the one that most properly guides technological thinking? This is what I think Karp is doing in that book is he’s engaged in a kind of attempt to move beyond ideology and to provide a new framework of ideas, which is just another ideology.

But to be a technologist might mean, at bottom, to be a kind of crafter of ideologies. But if ideology is somehow the problem, if it’s somehow anathema to the spontaneity of thinking, which I think people in startups know that you have to be thinking on the fly, building on the fly, and adjusting constantly.

I know this myself at the University of Austin that you just got to do a lot of things all the time if you’re going to get things going correctly. It looks like the technologist needs to start thinking non-technologically, if he also wants to think non-ideologically.

If you could flesh out that argument through a kind of account of the history of technology as coeval with the account of the history of ideology or the development of ideologies out of its sort of Machiavellian origins, you would have a compelling case that starts on the technologist’s own turf and forces them to wrestle with certain basic issues if they are thoughtful.

There’s always going to be people who just want to get rich and get powerful and go to orgies and things like that, whatever these people do. For the ones who are seriously concerned with these issues, people like Karp, I think, they would have to think about these questions more.

Yes, and that’s a great place to end it. It’s been an amazing three hours, Alex. This has been fantastic. I think I’ll listen to this many times in the future. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Thank you, Brian, for having me. This was a pleasure. You’re a great interlocutor.