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Leo Strauss's connection with Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt
suggests a troubling proximity to National Socialism but a serious
critique of Strauss must begin with F. H. Jacobi. While writing his
dissertation on this apparently Christian opponent of the
Enlightenment, Strauss discovered the tactical principles that
would characterize his lifework: writing between the lines, a
faith-based critique of rationalism, the deliberate secularization
of religious language for irreligious purposes, and an "all or
nothing" antagonism to middling solutions. Especially the latter is
distinctive of his Zionist writings in the 1920s where Strauss
engaged in an ongoing polemic against Cultural Zionism, attacking
it first from an orthodox, and then from an atheist's perspective.
In his last Zionist article (1929), Strauss mentions "the
Machiavellian Zionism of a Nordau that would not fear to use the
traditional hope for a Messiah as dynamite." By the time of his
"change of orientation," National Socialism was being led by a
nihilistic "Messiah" while Strauss had already radicalized
Schmitt's "political theology" and Heidegger's deconstruction of
the ontological Tradition. Central to Strauss's advance beyond the
smartest Nazis is his "Second Cave" in which he claimed modern
thought is imprisoned: only by escaping Revelation can we recover
"natural ignorance." By using pseudo-Platonic imagery to illustrate
what anti-Semites called "Jewification," Strauss attempted to
annihilate the common ground, celebrated by Hermann Cohen, between
Judaism and Platonism. Unlike those who attacked Plato for
devaluing nature at the expense of the transcendent Idea, the
emigre Strauss effectively employed a new "Plato" who was no more a
Platonist than Nietzsche or Heidegger had been. Central to
Strauss's "Platonic political philosophy" is the mysterious
protagonist of Plato's Laws whom Strauss accurately recognized as
the kind of Socrates whose fear of death would have caused him to
flee the hemlock. Any reader who recognizes the unbridgeable gap
between the real Socrates and Plato s Athenian Stranger will
understand why the German Stranger is the principal theoretician of
an atheistic re-enactment of religion, of which genus National
Socialism is an ultra-modern species.
Less than two years before his murder, Cicero created a catalogue
of his philosophical writings that included dialogues he had
written years before, numerous recently completed works, and even
one he had not yet begun to write, all arranged in the order he
intended them to be read, beginning with the introductory
Hortensius, rather than in accordance with order of composition.
Following the order of the De divinatione catalogue, William H. F.
Altman considers each of Cicero's late works as part of a coherent
philosophical project determined throughout by its author's
Platonism. Locating the parallel between Plato's Allegory of the
Cave and Cicero's "Dream of Scipio" at the center of Cicero's life
and thought as both philosopher and orator, Altman argues that
Cicero is not only "Plato's rival" (it was Quintilian who called
him Platonis aemulus) but also a peerless guide to what it means to
be a Platonist, especially since Plato's legacy was as hotly
debated in his own time as it still is in ours. Distinctive of
Cicero's late dialogues is the invention of a character named
"Cicero," an amiable if incompetent adherent of the New Academy
whose primary concern is only with what is truth-like (veri
simile). Following Augustine's lead, Altman reveals the deliberate
inadequacy of this pose and argues that Cicero himself, the writer
of dialogues who used "Cicero" as one of many philosophical
personae, must always be sought elsewhere: in direct dialogue with
the dialogues of Plato, the teacher he revered and whose Platonism
he revived. The Revival of Platonism in Cicero's Late Philosophy:
Platonis aemulus and the Invention of Cicero is a must read for
anyone working in classical studies, ancient philosophy, ancient
history, or the history of philosophy.
With Ascent to the Beautiful, William H. F. Altman completes his
five-volume reconstruction of the Reading Order of the Platonic
dialogues. Although published last, this book covers Plato's
elementary dialogues, grappling from the start with F. D. E.
Schleiermacher, who created an enduring prejudice against the works
Plato wrote for beginners. Recognized in antiquity as the place to
begin, Alcibiades Major was banished from the canon but it was not
alone: with the exception of Protagoras and Symposium,
Schleiermacher rejected as inauthentic all seven of the dialogues
this book places between them. In order to prove their
authenticity, Altman illuminates their interconnections and shows
how each prepares the student to move beyond self-interest to
gallantry, and thus from the doctrinal intellectualism Aristotle
found in Protagoras to the emergence of philosophy as intermediate
between wisdom and ignorance in Symposium en route to Diotima's
ascent to the transcendent Beautiful. Based on the hypothesis that
it was his own eminently teachable dialogues that Plato taught-and
bequeathed to posterity as his Academy's eternal curriculum-Ascent
to the Beautiful helps the reader to imagine the Academy as a
school and to find in Plato the brilliant teacher who built on
Homer, Thucydides, and Xenophon.
At the crisis of his Republic, Plato asks us to imagine what could
possibly motivate a philosopher to return to the Cave voluntarily
for the benefit of others and at the expense of her own personal
happiness. This book shows how Plato has prepared us, his students,
to recognize that the sun-like Idea of the Good is an infinitely
greater object of serious philosophical concern than what is merely
good for me, and thus why neither Plato nor his Socrates are
eudaemonists, as Aristotle unquestionably was. With the
transcendent Idea of Beauty having been made manifest through
Socrates and Diotima, the dialogues between Symposium and
Republic-Lysis, Euthydemus, Laches, Charmides, Gorgias, Theages,
Meno, and Cleitophon- prepare the reader to make the final leap
into Platonism, a soul-stirring idealism that presupposes the
student's inborn awareness that there is nothing just, noble, or
beautiful about maximizing one's own good. While perfectly capable
of making the majority of his readers believe that he endorses the
harmless claim that it is advantageous to be just and thus that we
will always fare well by doing well, Plato trains his best students
to recognize the deliberate fallacies and shortcuts that underwrite
these claims, and thus to look beyond their own happiness by the
time they reach the Allegory of the Cave, the culmination of a
carefully prepared Ascent to the Good.
This book argues that Cicero deserves to be spoken of with more
respect and to be studied with greater care. Using Plato's
influence on Cicero's life and writings as a clue, Altman reveals
the ineffable combination of qualities-courage, originality,
intelligence, sparkling wit, subtlety, deep respect for his
teacher, and deadly seriousness of purpose-that enabled Cicero not
only to revive Platonism, but also to rival Plato himself.
Based on a conception of Reading Order introduced and developed in
his Plato the Teacher: The Crisis of the Republic (Lexington; 2012)
and The Guardians in Action: Plato the Teacher and the
Post-Republic Dialogues from Timaeus to Theaetetus (Lexington;
2016), William H. F. Altman now completes his study of Plato's
so-called "late dialogues" by showing that they include those that
depict the trial and death of Socrates. According to Altman, it is
not Order of Composition but Reading Order that makes Euthyphro,
Apology of Socrates, Crito, and Phaedo "late dialogues," and he
shows why Plato's decision to interpolate the notoriously "late"
Sophist and Statesman between Euthyphro and Apology deserves more
respect from interpreters. Altman explains this interpolation-and
another, that places Laws between Crito and Phaedo-as part of an
ongoing test Plato has created for his readers that puts "the
Guardians on Trial." If we don't recognize that Socrates himself is
the missing Philosopher that the Eleatic Stranger never actually
describes-and also the antithesis of the Athenian Stranger, who
leaves Athens in order to create laws for Crete-we pronounce
ourselves too sophisticated to be Plato's Guardians, and unworthy
of the Socratic inheritance.
If you've ever wondered why Plato staged Timaeus as a kind of
sequel to Republic, or who its unnamed missing fourth might be; or
why he joined Critias to Timaeus, and whether or not that strange
dialogue is unfinished; or what we should make of the written
critique of writing in Phaedrus, and of that dialogue's apparent
lack of unity; or what is the purpose of the long discussion of the
One in the second half of Parmenides, and how it relates to the
objections made to the Theory of Forms in its first half; or if the
revisionists or unitarians are right about Philebus, and why its
Socrates seems less charming than usual, or whether or not Cratylus
takes place after Euthyphro, and whether its far-fetched
etymologies accomplish any serious philosophical purpose; or why
the philosopher Socrates describes in the central digression of
Theaetetus is so different from Socrates himself; then you will
enjoy reading the continuation of William H. F. Altman's Plato the
Teacher: The Crisis of the Republic (Lexington; 2012), where he
considers the pedagogical connections behind "the post-Republic
dialogues" from Timaeus to Theaetetus in the context of "the
Reading Order of Plato's dialogues."
In a 1934 speech, marking the Twenty-fifth Reunion of his high
school class, Martin Heidegger spoke eloquently of classmates
killed in the Great War and called on his audience to recognize
that the national rebirth now occuring in Hitler's Germany must
continue to draw inspiration from the war dead. In this process, he
refers to the war of 1914-1918 as "the First World War." Since the
condition for the possibility of "the First" is a Second World War,
Martin Heidegger and the First World War raises the question: how
could Heidegger have already known in 1934 that another war was
coming? The answer is to be found by reading Being and Time (1927)
as a funeral oration for the warriors of the Great War, a reading
that validates Heidegger's paradoxical claim that the genuinely
historical must emerge from the future. By using Lincoln's
"Gettysburg Address" as an archetype of the genre, William H. F.
Altman shows that Heidegger's concept of temporality in Being and
Time replicates the way past, present, and future interweave in the
classic funeral oration and argues that if there is a visible path
connecting Being and Time to its author's subsequent decision for
National Socialism, it runs through the trenches of the Great War
and its author's successful attempt to evade them. The analysis and
conclusions in this book will be of great value to students and
scholars interested in philosophy, history, intellectual history,
German studies, and political science.
When careful consideration is given to Nietzsche's critique of
Platonism and to what he wrote about Bismarck, Kaiser Wilhelm, and
to Germany's place in "international relations" (die Grosse
Politik), the philosopher's carefully cultivated "pose of
untimeliness" is revealed to be an imposture. As William H. F.
Altman demonstrates, Nietzsche should be recognized as the
paradigmatic philosopher of the Second Reich, the short-lived and
equally complex German Empire that vanished in World War One. Since
Nietzsche is a brilliant stylist whose seemingly disconnected
aphorisms have made him notoriously difficult for scholars to
analyze, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche is presented in Nietzsche's
own style in a series of 155 brief sections arranged in five
discrete "Books," a structure modeled on Daybreak. All of
Nietzsche's books are considered in the context of the close and
revealing relationship between "Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche" (named
by his patriotic father after the King of Prussia) and the Second
Reich. In "Preface to 'A German Trilogy,'" Altman joins this book
to two others already published by Lexington Books: Martin
Heidegger and the First World War: Being and Time as Funeral
Oration and The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National
Socialism.
In this unique and important book, William Altman shines a light on
the pedagogical technique of the playful Plato, especially his
ability to create living discourses that directly address the
student. Reviving an ancient concern with reconstructing the order
in which Plato intended his dialogues to be taught as opposed to
determining the order in which he wrote them, Altman breaks with
traditional methods by reading Plato's dialogues as a multiplex but
coherent curriculum in which the Allegory of the Cave occupies the
central place. His reading of Plato's Republic challenges the true
philosopher to choose the life of justice exemplified by Socrates
and Cicero by going back down into the Cave of political life for
the sake of the greater Good.
When careful consideration is given to Nietzsche's critique of
Platonism and to what he wrote about Bismarck, Kaiser Wilhelm, and
to Germany's place in "international relations" (die Grosse
Politik), the philosopher's carefully cultivated "pose of
untimeliness" is revealed to be an imposture. As William H. F.
Altman demonstrates, Nietzsche should be recognized as the
paradigmatic philosopher of the Second Reich, the short-lived and
equally complex German Empire that vanished in World War One. Since
Nietzsche is a brilliant stylist whose seemingly disconnected
aphorisms have made him notoriously difficult for scholars to
analyze, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche is presented in Nietzsche's
own style in a series of 155 brief sections arranged in five
discrete "Books," a structure modeled on Daybreak. All of
Nietzsche's books are considered in the context of the close and
revealing relationship between "Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche" (named
by his patriotic father after the King of Prussia) and the Second
Reich. In "Preface to 'A German Trilogy,'" Altman joins this book
to two others already published by Lexington Books: Martin
Heidegger and the First World War: Being and Time as Funeral
Oration and The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National
Socialism.
In a 1934 speech, marking the Twenty-fifth Reunion of his high
school class, Martin Heidegger spoke eloquently of classmates
killed in the Great War and called on his audience to recognize
that the national rebirth now occuring in Hitler's Germany must
continue to draw inspiration from the war dead. In this process, he
refers to the war of 1914-1918 as "the First World War." Since the
condition for the possibility of "the First" is a Second World War,
Martin Heidegger and the First World War raises the question: how
could Heidegger have already known in 1934 that another war was
coming? The answer is to be found by reading Being and Time (1927)
as a funeral oration for the warriors of the Great War, a reading
that validates Heidegger's paradoxical claim that the genuinely
historical must emerge from the future. By using Lincoln's
"Gettysburg Address" as an archetype of the genre, William H. F.
Altman shows that Heidegger's concept of temporality in Being and
Time replicates the way past, present, and future interweave in the
classic funeral oration and argues that if there is a visible path
connecting Being and Time to its author's subsequent decision for
National Socialism, it runs through the trenches of the Great War
and its author's successful attempt to evade them. The analysis and
conclusions in this book will be of great value to students and
scholars interested in philosophy, history, intellectual history,
German studies, and political science.
Leo Strauss's connection with Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt
suggests a troubling proximity to National Socialism but a serious
critique of Strauss must begin with F. H. Jacobi. While writing his
dissertation on this apparently Christian opponent of the
Enlightenment, Strauss discovered the tactical principles that
would characterize his lifework: writing between the lines, a
faith-based critique of rationalism, the deliberate secularization
of religious language for irreligious purposes, and an "all or
nothing" antagonism to middling solutions. Especially the latter is
distinctive of his Zionist writings in the 1920s where Strauss
engaged in an ongoing polemic against Cultural Zionism, attacking
it first from an orthodox, and then from an atheist's perspective.
In his last Zionist article (1929), Strauss mentions "the
Machiavellian Zionism of a Nordau that would not fear to use the
traditional hope for a Messiah as dynamite." By the time of his
"change of orientation," National Socialism was being led by a
nihilistic "Messiah" while Strauss had already radicalized
Schmitt's "political theology" and Heidegger's deconstruction of
the ontological Tradition. Central to Strauss's advance beyond the
smartest Nazis is his "Second Cave" in which he claimed modern
thought is imprisoned: only by escaping Revelation can we recover
"natural ignorance." By using pseudo-Platonic imagery to illustrate
what anti-Semites called "Jewification," Strauss attempted to
annihilate the common ground, celebrated by Hermann Cohen, between
Judaism and Platonism. Unlike those who attacked Plato for
devaluing nature at the expense of the transcendent Idea, the
emigre Strauss effectively employed a new "Plato" who was no more a
Platonist than Nietzsche or Heidegger had been. Central to
Strauss's "Platonic political philosophy" is the mysterious
protagonist of Plato's Laws whom Strauss accurately recognized as
the kind of Socrates whose fear of death would have caused him to
flee the hemlock. Any reader who recognizes the unbridgeable gap
between the real Socrates and Plato's Athenian Stranger will
understand why "the German Stranger" is the principal theoretician
of an atheistic re-enactment of religion, of which genus National
Socialism is an ultra-modern species.
Reviving an ancient concern with reconstructing the order in which
Plato intended his dialogues to be taught as opposed to determining
the order in which he wrote them, Plato the Teacher is devoted to
the theory and practice of Platonic pedagogy. Breaking with the
dominant paradigm of Plato's development whereby the aging
philosopher changes his mind and even abandons the idealism of his
so-called middle-period dialogues (including Republic), an approach
based on reading order considers the late dialogues--i.e., those
dialogues that follow Republic in the reading order of Plato's
dialogues--as dialectical tests designed to insure that the student
has embraced the visionary teaching of his masterpiece. Preceded by
a series of elementary dialogues that prepare the student to
penetrate its various layers and literally foreshadow its
soul-stirring teaching, the crisis of the Republic is the dead
center of Platonic education and reveals that studying dialogues in
the Academy is merely the prelude to philosopher's noble but
dangerous decision to practice justice amidst the shadows of the
Cave.Challenging the traditional view that Plato's purpose was to
create an ideal City, a student-oriented reading of the dialogue
reveals that the definitions of justice based on one man doing one
job and maintaining an internal harmony between the soul's three
parts depend on an inadequate methodology that Socrates explains
with the Divided Line. Once the so-called Shorter Way has been
linked to the hypothesis-determined and image-based methods
characteristic of the mathematical sciences, the student is free to
pursue a Longer Way based on dialectic: above all, a living
dialogue with Plato the Teacher who, by pointing to a greater Good
that abides forever unchanged, challenges the true philosopher to
follow Socrates by going back down into the Cave of political life
in order to defeat Thrasymachus and his modern avatars.
If you've ever wondered why Plato staged Timaeus as a kind of
sequel to Republic, or who its unnamed missing fourth might be; or
why he joined Critias to Timaeus, and whether or not that strange
dialogue is unfinished; or what we should make of the written
critique of writing in Phaedrus, and of that dialogue's apparent
lack of unity; or what is the purpose of the long discussion of the
One in the second half of Parmenides, and how it relates to the
objections made to the Theory of Forms in its first half; or if the
revisionists or unitarians are right about Philebus, and why its
Socrates seems less charming than usual, or whether or not Cratylus
takes place after Euthyphro, and whether its far-fetched
etymologies accomplish any serious philosophical purpose; or why
the philosopher Socrates describes in the central digression of
Theaetetus is so different from Socrates himself; then you will
enjoy reading the continuation of William H. F. Altman's Plato the
Teacher: The Crisis of the Republic (Lexington; 2012), where he
considers the pedagogical connections behind "the post-Republic
dialogues" from Timaeus to Theaetetus in the context of "the
Reading Order of Plato's dialogues."
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