Great video. The idea of religion (church) vs. philosophy (state) is interesting and you can see the influence of Greek rationalist philosophy on modern philosophy, but I just find it hard to accept that this is a time of politics-as-God. I think if anything, the defining feature of modernity is the subordination of the theological and the political both to science (theological methods applied to nature) and commerce (economics over politics). This man-as-political-animal is not the way we view man currently. We see man-as-natural-animal with nature-as-God and in this view has constructed the most unnatural life imaginable.. This is the real danger of modernity imo, but that view is collapsing into skepticism and scientism in real time, which is a potential danger in itself. So I think Strauss was wrong about Greek philosophy in modernity. We don’t really have it as it was, but as the perfect caricature of a Marxist’s bourgeois thinks it should have been. The politics revolutions of the 18th century are relevant here. If man really is a theological and/or political animal then the philosophies of modernity are downstream of the changes that took place in those arenas during the dawn of modernity. Strauss sort of just forgets that real politics happened and matters, that it’s not just a change of ideas, but who is pushing them. I think he also ignored the influence of Hegel and idealism, which is in truth of neither Jerusalem nor Athens.
Strauss talks about Hegel all the time in so many of his writings. He also explicitly wrote modern politics, as an anti-politics, is the triumph of science and economics over all life. His point, as emphasized here, was that Greek philosophy is necessary to recover a genuine political life freed from the tyranny of science and economics, and while the spirit of love (from theology) was important, it is not politics.
LOL. Yeah, as a teacher and scholar whose work has been cited and responded to, that's exactly how we react. Conspiracy theories and outright lies, like the ones alluded to in this lecture, need to be smacked down. We don't have any time for that crap to spread. And those lies have spread far and wide.
