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Why the Best Men will not Lead us
What we mean is the difference ---between the Philosophers (S-P and A) and the Framers of the Redirection (Enlightenment) Descartes-Klein; Hobbes-Hegel; Hegel-Kojeve)--- is a difference in kind. These two, the group of the ancients and the group of the moderns (as Strauss is not embarrassed to call them), differ in the nature of their enterprise.
The Greeks understood and achieved transcendence as the necessary condition of philosophic inquiry. (And this is why they did not suppose "philosophy" is a part of the human condition.) Strauss, and certainly the Redirection philosophers, feared (for opposite reasons) it was such a thing; this being why they made sure to destroy it (or in Strauss's case it is his conviction that "revelation" and philosophy constitute a "diremption" such that the discontinuation of Aristotle's Telos by Cartesian science, Hobbesian Speech, and Hegel's application of the sources of these two things in a transcendental History, makes philosophy impossible --or religion). In any case the Founders effected their destruction in several ways, but mainly they did it by "destroying" transcendence.
By transcendence all of the Founders --those modern philosophers named here --understood and practiced the transcendence of experience as given. In effect they appeared to make the Part the Whole. While this is a genuine transcendence as ingeniously contrived by exceptional men, and deceiving ones --effectively in all three cases by intentionality itself (by symbol in Descartes, by Speech in Hobbes, by History in Hegel -- a type of "Speech" derived from Cartesian Thought or Mind), these three related conceptions of transformation of given Being, the Redirection of Western peoples concretized Being "fixed", this being their separate teachings of Certainty which form the single transcendent skein whose meaning is actualization --the realization of the collapse of the Terms of all Existence in God, Self, Society, World. What is today Science (Certainty) v OpenSociety (Uncertainty) is the action of these collapsed Terms or Science Self-Society=World; i.e., the World State via the convergence of Islam and Western Elites. DP Printer-Friendly
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