A Note on Professor Leo Strauss

I have been asked,  “what more was Strauss to do?” He was a conservative; assailed social science and liberals, in fact intellectuals of every stripe as democrats “of a certain kind” etc. Do you mean he should have led his students into the streets like all the rest of these professors? Strauss remarks importantly in his essay on Lucretius about a review of the famous Epicurean in which the reviewer advised what Lucretius “should” have said or done. Strauss’s important remark is this: “As a rule it is wise to abstain from telling a superior man what he should have done.” LAM 128. In this connection there is another (of many) profound remarks Strauss makes in this same essay. See p. 90 wherein Strauss leaves untied a knot Lucretius himself used, perhaps to imply that Heraclitus used language “fools admire…[of] things which they can see hidden beneath words turned upside down….” No reader of this essay by Strauss, to say nothing of his writing overall, would dare to tell Strauss what he should have done.  What rises superior to the term “should” in Strauss’s abjuration to us as to the reviewer is “abstain.” This is the “wisdom” we are to see is the “rule.”   

At least my reasoning here, my meaning, is (and must be) Strauss’s rule turns upon what he would have had in mind as the “rule” of the Jews where speech is concerned. It is not to speak ill of people; even the worst men on the “scale of merit.” The Language of the Evil is wrong ever to use on principle. So the question would be what do you say about failure to rise to the consideration of the Enlightenment; of philosophy, so as to anticipate the destruction or at least the endangerment of Western peoples (and of course, with this also the Jews. Even especially the Jews because they are so painfully implicated in the Elites and in convergence with Islam –again, the “advanced case…” etc. There is no one body of peoples more responsible for the convergence if not also for the Enlightenment than the Jews –defending it against Jews and Jewish religion; and against Israel).  Strauss, so far as I know from reading him, was a stout and open defender of Jews. He was far from any such joining with this body of Jews (the great majority, especially among the Elites, and still more especially among the educator and Speech Elites). Strauss did not shrink from standing up for the Jews. This is not the easy and foolish siding with the Jews as liberals do, and from which soon comes the telltale abhorrence or condescension for “religion” and for God. Strauss did not do this. In fact his “diremption” was presented as a form of public doubt about the case, as he puts it, between philosophy and God.

Here, in this piece, mine where the Jews and Israel figure mostly silently but still largely (again “the advanced case…” etc), I am directly applying a criticism of Jews and of Israel and Judaism. It concerns Speech. One could say, probing it a bit, it concerns or maybe some might think an unspeakable criticism of the Jews; of Israel and Judaism.  Here surely it is wise to abstain from telling superior men as they are seen in God’s eyes what they should or should not say or do.  

RJL

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