Close Yer Strauss, Open Yer Jauss, pt. 1

How to do wacky things with Strauss

Leo Strauss, 1939

I. Intro - Historicism and its Problems

Everybody has at least one problem with the assumptions behind the scholarly approach of historicism. The idea that every individual thing we know from the past is determined by its surrounding circumstances — be they social, political, economic, ideological, or whatever else — rather than actual people doing actual stuff is simply annoying on its face. No one enjoys the company of the nerd who denies free will and chalks everything up to genetics, or divine predestination, or whatever. Who wants someone like that at their party? Even more annoying is the belief that we should suspend our judgment when evaluating past actions or texts and instead try to evaluate them first according to the standards of their own time. Why can’t I give my opinion now? Why can’t I assume that my own age is more enlightened than theirs? What if the people back then really were a bunch of idiots? And more annoying still is the belief that in order to understand a piece of music, a poem, a work of philosophy, or just about anything from the past, we must learn as much as we can about the various circumstances surrounding its creation in order to evaluate it correctly. Who wants to do more reading? Who has the time for this nonsense?

It should come as no surprise that historicism has been attacked over and over again since it was first posited as an idea (I’d argue Herder gave it is first articulation, but some might disagree), and the attacks have come from pretty much from all sides imaginable. If you’re a believer in the “great man” theory of history, which is basically the belief that history is driven onward by great men doing great stuff, then you can’t really abide by historicism, since it is completely unable to account for the spark of genius (sometimes madness) that allows figures like Napoleon, Muhammad, Luther, Rousseau, Dante, or Christ to go beyond the delimitations of their age and push their race into a new direction. But then, even if you’re not that interested in “great men,” and you instead believe that society should strive to be liberal and pluralistic while collectively focused on the pursuit of truth, then historicism’s ethical and even epistemic relativism (which suggests an insistent disregard for absolute truth) can’t provide you with much, either. Moreover, since historicism adopts a relativistic stance, its own epistemological soundness is questionable: if everything is simply the expression of past circumstances, then how is historicism itself not exactly the same thing? How is it as a practice not merely an expression of its own progenerating set of circumstances, and therefore just as compromised as anything it seeks to understand?

Attacks on historicism can occur from both the political left and the right, but attacks from the left-liberal spectrum are more widely known. Following World War II, some intellectuals started to feel that historicism leads to a quietist perspective due to its lack of ethics and its unwillingness to make judgments. Men like Karl Popper, for instance, declared that its deterministic and morally relativistic stance is totally antithetical to the values of his “open society.” And if you go to the “criticism” section of historicism on Wikipedia, the critiques all take place within the left-liberal spectrum. But historicism can certainly be criticized from the standpoint of the right as well. Friedrich Nietzsche’s “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life” can be understood as an anti-historicist polemic, and Thomas Carlyle, whose “great man” theory I’ve already mentioned, directly opposed the historicist mentality. Then there are intellectuals like Leo Strauss, whose name is practically synonymous with modern conservatism yet whose criticisms of historicism are essentially liberal. And since this piece is called “Close Yer Strauss, Open Yer Jauss,” I’ll talk about him for a bit.

II. Strauss and His Adoption by the Conservatives

Strauss had problems with historicism for most of the reasons stated above and more. You can examine what he saw as historicism’s sins in bullet point form:

• It denies unchanging universal and unchanging truths in ethics and politics

• It’s self-contradicting in its assumption that truth is relative

• It undermines classical philosophy and the quest for timeless wisdom

• It ignores permanently fixed aspects of human nature

• It has contributed to the crisis of the sciences and the championing of logic and reason to determine truth

And perhaps most importantly for our discussion:

• It leads to ethical relativism and moral nihilism, which in turn encourages the rise of tyrants

Now, Strauss made this last point before something called “New Historicism” showed up, represented most notably by the Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt. But Greenblatt showed that the practice of historicism can be quite flexible and, in its own way, serve as a tool for promoting the kind of liberalism to which historicism’s greatest critics had been placing it in opposition. In other words, it was and continues to represent a kind of historicism that does few if any of the things that Strauss complained about. Why is New Historicism “new?” It isn’t, really. Greenblatt, a Shakespeare scholar, just interpreted Shakespeare’s plays against what kinds of social or political discussions were occurring in the background and analyzed them in a fairly liberal way.

In Shakespearean Negotiations (1988), for instance, he doesn’t say anything so gauche as, “Shakespeare was really a liberal, just like me!” but he does discuss how the swirling “social energies” of the Elizabethan era informed Shakespeare’s plays. He talks about how the theater, on the one hand, could reflect sociopolitical concerns that the public might have felt while also, on the other hand, containing those concerns and thus dissuading the public from taking decisive political action. While such an interpretation might not lead to Shakespearean hero worship, it can prompt questions like: what would the public have wanted to take action against back then? And if people were going to discuss his book, like (say) in a seminar room, then they would inevitably hold the values of Elizabethan times against the liberal-democratic values of contemporary society, using Shakespeare’s writing as the portal through which favorable and unfavorable comparisons might be made. We know that this is how it works, because it’s what journalists do when they write reviews for Greenblatt’s books, like this one, or the last paragraph of this one for Tyrant: Shakespeare on Power (2018). What Greenblatt realized is that if everyone in the seminar room shares the same liberal ideology, then merely addressing the political dynamics informing a text is enough to yield a liberal interpretation of it. Discussions of Greenblatt’s scholarship are thus more at home with discussions of shamelessly presentist liberals like Martha Nussbaum than earlier historicists like Herbert Butterfield despite Nussbaum’s and Greenblatt’s apparent differences in methodology.

My point here isn’t merely to say that Strauss’s most overtly political criticism of historicism was wrong and made no sense. It’s more that any philosophical or pragmatic approach like historicism doesn’t in fact have an “objective” meaning waiting for its proper audience to unearth it. There are clearly limits to any potential interpretation of anything, but the interpreters nevertheless are those who determine the meaning of a work of art or literature, or a scholarly approach like historicism, or even a philosophical system, since every such system will inevitably leave ambiguities and paradoxes for the audience to resolve. To Strauss, historicism justified tyranny. In the world of American collegiate pedagogy, however, historicism justifies and bolsters liberal-democratic values. This is a point that one ought to keep in mind when considering Strauss’s own ideas, since his response to what he considered the failure of historicism has itself been treated in a similarly divergent fashion.

Against the historicists, Strauss believed that philosophers rise above the sociopolitical circumstances of their time to convey what they see as the truth, and if they are living under oppressive circumstances, they will use “esoteric” writing to get past censorship or persecution; a kind of veiled, labyrinthine writing that only other wise guys like that philosopher will be able to understand. In this way, Strauss was able to look into the great books of the classical period and conclude that the texts can still speak to us today because of their trans-historic meaning. His ideas were embraced within various academic circles (the Straussians are still quite prominent in the University of Chicago and St. John’s College), and some Straussian readings of various texts have proven influential, like Allan Bloom’s interpretation of Plato’s Republic, in which Bloom argues that Plato was not in fact a hater of poetry or supporter of tyranny but was rather using ironic language to explore the relationship between philosophy and politics. The great advantage to Straussian thought is that you could always read the “great books” by yourself, with no supervision. You could carefully peruse through the undiluted primary sources (in translation, of course), and you didn’t have to feel the need to read what other historically contextualizing articles or monographs had to say. All you have to do is think through the original text’s implications and determine for yourself what was meant to be the author’s real message and what was meant to be an exoteric obfuscation of his true intended purpose. In other words, sola scriptura. What a relief!

Straussian thinking pretty much took over the entirety of the conservative movement. I won’t go too far into it, but Paul Gottfried has discussed in his book Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America (2013) how the most prominent Straussians were at first largely Catholic conservatives, and later on neoconservatives. The neoconservatives influenced the rest of the conservative movement quite strongly, even to such an extent that “neoconservative” has now become a pretty meaningless word, and it was largely through their influence that Strauss’s ideas would retain their currency. The neocons were fairly liberal non-Burkean conservatives who embraced the idea of America as a propositional nation, though they tempered their views with a tendency towards statism, mostly as a corrective to some of liberal democracy’s vulnerabilities which Strauss had identified. Starting in the mid-2000s and continuing throughout the ‘10s, a large amount of people who watched the Adam Curtis BBC Documentary on the American war on terrorism The Power of Nightmares (2004) perceived Strauss as some sort of war-hungry maniac who believed in bringing western countries together by using the power of perception and propaganda to fabricate external enemies out of thin air. And while it might be easy and sort of fun to blame the global “war on terror” on Strauss, the simpler explanation is truer: the neoconservatives were largely pro-Israel Jews who wanted America to have a foreign policy that would maximally benefit Israel, and the American public, with a large pro-Israel Evangelical Christian population, proved receptive to such aims.

In reality, Strauss’s influence on actual American policy was pretty minor. For most of the intellectuals and political commentators indebted to Strauss, his true value was in giving them a justification to quote Aristotle, Plutarch, or Thucydides in a flourish for an essay covering a subject that couldn’t be less relevant to what Aristotle, Plutarch, or Thucydides had actually been writing about.

III. Strauss and His Adoption by Wacky-Cracky Lovable Eccentrics

So that’s one aspect of Straussianism. But there’s another aspect that’s frankly rather bizarre, and part of me can’t help but appreciate it on some level. Strauss’s argument about “esoteric writing” had a real advantage in that it allowed people to feel like they were overcoming the burden of historicism, having themselves found a way to disentangle writers from their underpinning (and often inconvenient) societal conditions. But starting around 2014 or so, I noticed that Strauss’s ideas had started to influence people from an entirely different crowd than the mainstream conservative movement. I believe that this happened partly because of Peter Thiel’s essay “The Straussian Moment” written ten years prior. Thiel basically argued for the importance of Strauss by putting him in conversation with René Girard (his main intellectual influence) and, to a lesser extent, Carl Schmitt. It is curious that he made the essay ostensibly about Strauss, because he brought in ideas that Strauss never would have co-signed. For instance, he approvingly puts Oswald Spengler into the discussion, someone who couldn’t be more philosophically antithetical to Strauss. He also denied that Strauss’s more moderate sensibilities were in fact the solution to any of the problems that the latter had identified with modernity:

Let us recapitulate. The modern West has lost faith in itself. In the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment period, this loss of faith liberated enormous commercial and creative forces. At the same time, this loss has rendered the West vulnerable. Is there a way to fortify the modern West without destroying it altogether, a way of not throwing the baby out with the bathwater? At first sight, Strauss seems to offer such a moderate middle course, but his path too is fraught with peril. For as soon as the theoretical esotericism of the philosopher is combined with some sort of practical implementation, self-referential problems abound: the awareness of the problematic nature of the city makes the unreflective defense of the city impossible. In this way, Strauss’s recovery of the permanent problems paradoxically might make their resolution all the more difficult. Or, to frame the matter in terms of Schmitt’s eschatology, the Straussian project sets out to preserve the katechon, but instead becomes a “hastener against its will.”

The katechon is the Biblical restraining force that prevents the appearance of the Antichrist and thus the apocalypse. Carl Schmitt equated the katechon with liberalism and its restraint of the political element from re-entering into society, which could prove cataclysmic. And Strauss, if taken straightforwardly, is apparently hastening its removal rather than preserving it, his expressly stated goal.

Whatever the value of Thiel’s essay (I didn’t get much out of it, admittedly), its notoriety rose along with Thiel’s profile as a public figure. And unquestionably it led to a horde of right-wingers on the internet all of a sudden pretending to be fascinated by Girard and Strauss. You would see it almost every day around 2016 or so, right when Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign was underway and Thiel’s name was becoming more and more known, since he was a major supporter of Trump. This was also the year in which Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker wound up bankrupting the site, and Thiel was revealed as the man who funded the suit. It was quite the year for Thiel. Anyway, during this time, someone would log onto Twitter and say, “Hello, I’m a right wing intellectual, and I’m deeply influenced by the works of Leo Strauss and René Genard.” And then, after hitting the “Tweet” button, he would think for just a moment, open up the other tab on his browser containing Thiel’s essay, squint a bit, go back to his Twitter profile tab, and then post, “Sorry, that was a typo. I meant Girard. René Girard, that is. Good old Leo Strauss and René Girard. And did you know, I’ve been reading them for years?”

The reason for this newfangled interest in Strauss and Girard was pretty simple: these people wanted Thiel to notice them and give them a giant bag of money for their intellectual efforts. I think the plan may have even worked for a few of them, too. But whether it really did or not (who am I to say?), the intention was pretty obvious. I actually remember talking about Thiel’s essay to some Neoreactionaries who were really into Curtis Yarvin’s (then Mencius Moldbug’s) writings back in 2014 when I first noticed such heterodox discussion on Strauss. They themselves were absolutely intrigued by Strauss and Girard, and (of course) Thiel’s essay. I told them, “You know, Strauss was just a political theorist with grandiose ambitions and a few curious notions but ultimately weak scholarship, and moreover, he wasn’t particularly hostile towards liberalism or democracy. He basically was a believer in both! There’s nothing particularly revolutionary in his ideas at all. Maybe he was onto something with his esoteric reading of Moses Maimonides — though he never specifies what Maimonides was actually saying — but who cares about his reading of, say, Spinoza? How is this even compatible with your Neoreactionary project?” And they told me,

“No… read the first chapter of Persecution and the Art of Writing from 1952.”

“I did!” I said.

“And what does it say in that chapter?”

“Well,” I began, “It said that during times of political oppression, the philosophers have to disguise how they express themselves to escape obloquy, censure, or even persecution, because of their uncompromisingly stalwart commitment to the truth.”

“Yes,” they responded. “And so tell us, Kerwin: what do you think 1952 was like, a year that occurred amid the time of liberal-democratic global ascendancy? Right when the United States took over the world: the very prize that they had been accusing Hitler of coveting all along? Right at the time in which the effects of Eisenhower’s Morgenthau Plan were being felt, killing tens of thousands of innocent German POWs from starvation in his poorly-maintained, covertly genocidal concentration camps? Right as the ashes of the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still settling, as radiation poisoning was in the midst of unleashing untold horrors onto the unassuming flesh of the thousands of Japanese affected by these two Luciferian blasts, the Gog and Magog of American imperial power-lust? Do you really believe those were truly free times, Kerwin? Was there no whiff of potential persecution, however faint, wafting about the air in Strauss’s office at the University of Chicago during this dissemblingly trying cadence of history, this punctuation mark cordoning off the shattered dreams of a now-forgotten world? America may have won the war, yes, and the average fool may have felt that times were “peaceful” and “free.” Such is the nature of fools, Kerwin. But was the true battle not being fought more fiercely than ever among the back-biting eunuchs of the royal courts of academia, gossiping and chattering in hopes of securing supreme intellectual dominance, always ready at the helm, pining for the chance to throw one of their very own colleagues to the wolves, all in the hopes of receiving just one more table scrap from the master’s hand? Did you not read Moldbug’s treatise on how America is and has always been a Communist country? Can you really not perceive what Strauss was actually saying?”

And right then, I thought to myself, “Oh, my word! They’re using Strauss’s methodology reflexively, aiming it back onto his own writing! What the…!”

It dawned on me that these people may not have been quite right in the head.

Because, of course, if Strauss himself was using esoteric techniques every time he said something in defense of liberalism, or whatever else, or even in the exact same essay in which he explains what those techniques are, then how could anyone hope to distinguish “The True Strauss” from the fake, exoteric one, even at the most elementary level? It’s sort of like arguing for the first time that a seemingly straightforward novel has an “unreliable narrator.” That particular literary device certainly does exist, as we all know from writers like Poe and Nabokov, but the problem is that once an “unreliable narrator” has been posited, serious epistemic problems arise when the critic must distinguish the “unreliable narrator” subtending the text from the “author” whose real thoughts and opinions can supposedly be found within it. There’s simply no sure way to distinguish between the two.

And similarly: once you treat Strauss as himself using esoteric writing, then all bets are off. You can do whatever the hell you want with him, and indeed I think that’s what people were interested in doing. Around this time, Straussian esotericism was being freed up from stodgy professors and conservative gatekeepers because it became increasingly clear that pretty much anyone could take Strauss’s esoteric reading method and use it to extract whatever reading they wanted from whomever they wanted for whatever purpose they wanted. I can think of two pretty fun examples:

• In Costin Alamariu’s Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy (2023), which was originally composed as a doctoral thesis for Yale university, Alamariu uses an esoteric reading of Plato’s Gorgias to argue that Platonic philosophy’s true goal was the reconstitution of nature through paideia, or (in Alamriu’s reading) eugenic breeding practices decided upon by enlightened lawgivers. To establish this particular reading, Alamariu draws great attention to the word erromenesteros (ἐρρωμενέστερος), which connotes vitality and physical superiority, something Alamariu opposes to the inferior, man-made nomos. This is a word used in both The Republic and Gorgias, and Alamariu’s readings of both texts rely greatly on it. The erromenesteroi are supposedly the products of superior breeding practices, the kind which Plato advocates to prevent the tyranny of convention from taking over humanity, or the nomos overpowering physis (Alamariu sees these two concepts as opposed). Now, I gotta say. This is a hell of an idea. Ingenious in its scope and vision, and I haven’t even explicated his whole argument. But as this lengthy critical essay makes clear, there is little reason to believe that erromenesteros is used in the eugenics-specific manner Alamariu describes, itself being semantically quite flexible. And since Alamariu’s reading of Gorgias relies so heavily on Plato’s use of that word, it is likely that (believe it or not!) Plato did not really conceive of philosophy as a way to create a eugenics program. Go figure. Onto our next fun example:

• Jason Jorjani, the former editor-in-chief of Arktos Media and co-founder of the AltRight corporation with Richard Spencer, has used Straussian esotericism for a number of different purposes. In his first major book, Prometheus and Atlas (2016), Jorjani writes about plenty of fascinating things: sorcery, precognitive psychic abilities, the lost sunken city of Atlantis, ancient aliens and UFOs (if I remember correctly, he says or at least strongly implies that Yahweh from the Old Testament was actually an alien), telepathy and psychokinesis, Japanese anime cartoons, and other similarly fascinating subjects. The text is conversant with quite a few philosophers such as Foucault, Schelling, Nietzsche, Derrida, Bergson, Heidegger, William James, and more, and most of this highfalutin discussion is done in service of bolstering the case for the validity of ESP or extra-sensory perception, whose understanding Jorjani feels the Judeo-Christian tradition has suppressed, keeping modern man weak and enslaved, alienated from the true Indo-European spirit of Prometheus. Amazingly, Prometheus and Atlas is based on his doctoral dissertation from Stony Brook college, and it caused a minor scandal once the book was published because people were so shocked that it could have gotten past a doctoral committee. Anyways, Strauss plays a role in all of this: at one point, Jorjani performs an esoteric reading of Kant’s Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (1766), an attempt to discredit the dogmatic metaphysics of G.W. Leibniz and Christian Wolff by linking them to the mystical ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg. According to Jorjani, Kant’s book is not a dismissal of Swedenborg at all, but instead a secret affirmation of his value as a legitimate philosopher!¹ I have not read Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, so I will not comment on that particular topic, but it isn’t the only time Jorjani has made reference to Strassian esotericism. I can’t find the interview, but I recall hearing him on a podcast argue that the medieval Persian philosopher Avicenna’s Deliverance from Error, a confessional autobiography about his conversion to Islam, is in fact an esoteric critique of Islam.

Now, these are some applications of Strauss that I can get behind! Eugenic breeding camps in ancient Greece? Promethean endorsements of ESP? Kant giving props to Swedenborg? This is all great shit. It also demonstrates the sheer chaos that can come merely from enough people taking Strauss seriously. The title of this article might call upon people to “close their Strauss,” but then again, I see nothing at all wrong with wantonly invoking his name so much that he becomes permanently associated with this sort of slightly demented avant-garde mischief. That is also perfectly acceptable.

Would Leo Strauss have kind things to say about Alamariu or Jorjani? I’d guess no, not too many, and there are plenty of reasons as to why beyond mere political differences. For instance, both Alamariu and Jorjani are strong advocates, even evangelists, for Nietzsche’s philosophy — but Strauss sure wasn’t. Despite having great private admiration for Nietzsche, Strauss felt that he was a dangerous thinker and thus ought to be kept from any reader who lacks a strong philosophical foundation (in this regard he agreed with Heidegger). Considering Strauss’s theory on philosophical esotericism, such an attitude actually does make some sense. The esoteric writing method isn’t just there to avoid persecution but readerly misprision as well. Yet the internet, in which each voice struggles desperately to make itself heard, runs on an ethos inherently contrary to any kind of esotericism or secrecy, and therein lies the issue: if the Straussian concept of esotericism is itself made exoteric, and if Strauss himself can be esoterically reinterpreted, then his whole enterprise becomes clay in the hands of a child. And make no mistake: Steam Calliope Scherzos is a blog that appreciates child’s play. Only in today’s anything-goes environment has Straussian thought been able to achieve something truly special, namely, it has gone from bad political philosophy to an interesting auxiliary device for intellectual performance art.

Alright, now, this essay is supposed be about not only Leo Strauss, but Hans Robert Jauss as well, and I just realized that it’s been a little over 4,000 words, and I haven’t yet uttered a peep about Jauss. Whoopsie daisy! I’ll have to adjourn this discussion until next week. Have a great day! Be sure to get some sunlight! Fly a kite! Tan your balls! And keep reading my blog!

Update 6/16: I corrected a bad paragraph on Strauss’s influence on the conservative movement in America (the original falsely stated that Strauss’s influence began with the neocons), and tidied up a few other things, mostly the story about me talking to the Neoreactionaries.

1. Interestingly, he seems to have gotten this idea from Greg Johnson, the one-time Swedenborg scholar and current webmaster of the white nationalist Counter-Currents web site. Johnson wrote about Strauss when he attended graduate school, though, as shown by this quite good essay, which ends with a nice comparison between Strauss and Derrida.