Thread by @seth_benardete

For Leo Strauss's 120th Birthday, here's a thread of quotes from and reflections on Benardete's "Strauss on Plato"

"What philosophy is seems to be inseparable from the question of how to read Plato."

Leo Strauss's "achievement amounts to, in my opinion, as great a recovery as that of al-Farabi, who rediscovered philosophy in the tenth century."

"Since after paganism the three revealed religions were already infected by philosophy to various degrees, they had to recover revelation in its true form at the same time as they recovered its opposite."

"Philosophy had to be rediscovered by Socrates long after there had been philosophy. Plato has Socrates call his rediscovery a second sailing. The second sailing is philosophy, and it is never first. The false start of philosophy can alone jumpstart philosophy."

Benardete discusses Strauss's combination of caution and daring, that is, moderation and courage. The difficulty of this combination is evident from the end of Plato's Statesman.

"Strauss's mastery was such that its inherent difficulty does not strike home until one tries it oneself and comes up with quite arbitrary links that do not in fact encompass all the particulars and hence fall short of the truly general."

Benardete compares Strauss to a nameless contemporary. I think he means Klein.

"In the element of Socratic dialectic Strauss saw and practiced his own way."

Essential to that is the double sense of τὸ διαλέγεσθαι as dialectic and conversation: "the communication among men involves the articulation of things."

(Benardete refers to this as "this Heraclitean insight"—he means fr. 1.)

"What is peculiarly [Strauss's] discovery was that once argument and action are properly put together an entirely new argument emerges that could never have been expected from the argument on the written page."

On p. 409, Benardete makes an incredibly important distinction between "two kinds of esotericism, ancient and modern."

The paragraph as a whole:

The difficulty of Benardete's writings, including his consistent emphasis on linguistic peculiarities, follows from this insight. If "it is in the nature of things that things are hidden," then the fundamental problems will be latent in λόγος itself.

But this is not some typical continental insight. Crudely put, continental philosophy asserts metaphysical esotericism without political esotericism. This is certainly true in Heidegger's Rektorsrede, and though diminished in his later thought it may nonetheless persist.

"Metaphysical esotericism recognizes and reproduces [the hiddenness to things] through trapdoors in arguments."

Benardete discusses al-Farabi's line about Plato combining the ways of Socrates and Thrasymachus. My sense is that Thrasymachus stands for the thumoeidetic, active in every character who isn't Socrates: Plato plays all roles, whereas Socrates played one.

On p. 410, Benardete notes the tension between Aristotle's four causes and the Socratic turn.

"Socrates [replaced] efficient, material, and final causation with his hypothesis of 'ideas,' which Aristotle pretends to be a fourth modality of causation that can readily be adduced to the other three rather than an abandonment of causality as it was known before Socrates."

This leads to an incoherence in principles between Aristotle's De Anima, Physics, and Metaphysics.

On "pretends," recall the first line of "The Argument of the Action": "Virtually everyone knows that Aristotle sometimes lies."

Also compare the first line of the Metaphysics.

The Socratic turn promoted the soul "as a nonderivative principle. Ontology, epistemology, and psychology were thereby joined and hence transformed, and it was one of Strauss's most beautiful discoveries to put together logos, being, and soul."

A beautiful discovery!

The next paragraph (p. 411–12) is incredible. The thrust of it is that Plato's success in demonstrating the priority of the question of the good entailed it would be forgotten.

His notion of "the Cave beneath the Cave" goes hand in hand with this: back and forth to Plato.

Benardete closes by mentioning "the soundness of *his* view that political philosophy is the eccentric core of philosophy."

Strauss's view!

This is fascinating:

Strauss's observation that each dialogue abstracts from something has to do with "opinion, which has failed to take something decisive into account. Plato's procedure is based on the idealism of opinion."

This must be why we never see two philosophers conversing.

Benardete connects it to Strauss's interpretation of the Republic: "The city…is the locus of idealism."

Apparently, Benardete once quipped, at the end of the question period following a talk he gave at SJC, that everyone in the Republic believes in the forms except Socrates.

"It was through the transformation that a temporal segment [of a dialogue] underwent when it became part of the whole that Plato imitated the relation that always obtains between a part apart from the whole and a part as part of the whole."

This is another way of understanding the relationship between argument and action. It's more or less what I got from studying Plato's Parmenides.

(So save yourself time and money and just ponder that one line.)

"To begin to philosophize…is to encounter a question that has been incorrectly formulated."

"The question reflects the true question, but it is not the true question."

"Strauss's way of interpreting Plato, so that he [who?] became the model of all genuine philosophy, raises the question of poetry and its ancient quarrel with philosophy."

Benardete understands Strauss to draw Plato and the poets quite close; he eventually remarks: "The logos of Plato unveils the mythos of poetry for the logos that it is."

Does this mean every action has an argument? It seems to mean that to read anything is to read it Platonically. It would also have huge implications for the tension between reason and revelation.

Is this what Benardete means when he says the following?

"Strauss's recovery of Plato opened up the possibility of gathering into the fold of philosophy more than philosophy had ever dreamed of."

Benardete closes with a long quote from WIPP on the philosophy, specifically in Plato's trilogy. Most relevant to the last point is the last sentence of the quote and so of Benardete's essay, as well:

Philosophy "is graced by nature's grace."