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.Others were unexplained and eerie: such as, for example, hisinsistence that Socrates  seduced his hearers.But more to thepoint was an indefinable, ominous sort of quirkiness whichoverhung every discussion.Eventually it became clear to me, that Strauss, throughStanley Rosen, had made the same sort of imprint on my friend,that Strauss s teacher Martin Heidegger had made upon Strausshimself.In the insightful account of Shadia Drury,  Nothingmade a greater impact on Strauss than Heidegger s manner ofstudying a text.He was totally struck by Heidegger s analysisof Aristotle s Metaphysics; he thought that Heidegger s ap-proach laid bare the intellectual sinews of a text; and it wasunlike anything else he had ever seen or heard.Strauss s reac-tion is not unusual.Heidegger s style of teaching was reputedto have a totally mesmerizing effect.He has been accused ofa certain  mystical bullying. The goal was not so much under-standing as initiation in a mystical cult.This is precisely whyKarl Jaspers s letter to the Denazification Commission advisedagainst Heidegger s return to teaching after the war.The gistof Jaspers s letter was that Heidegger s style was profoundlyunfree, and that the students were not strong enough to with-50 CHILDREN OF SATANstand his sorcery.The youth are not safe with Heidegger untilthey can think for themselves, and Heidegger is no help wherethat is concerned.On a much smaller scale, the same can besaid for Strauss. [Drury, 1997, p.77]Kabbalism in AnnapolisWe also have imprints in the LaRouche movement of SaintJohn s College, in Annapolis, Maryland, and Santa Fe, NewMexico, with its  Great Books program, another offshoot ofthe University of Chicago.I had the chance recently to speak with a relative of one ofour members, who is in effect an evangelist for Saint John s,and soon he was giving me thumbnail sketches of each of thecourses there.When he got to a class on a Plato dialogue, hesaid that the teacher had stayed up all night, counting eachword in the dialogue, so that she could show her class thecentral word: word number 25,000 out of 50,000 words, forexample.The notion is that the central word in this sense,points to the central idea of the work. It sounds just like Strauss! , I burst out.Yes, he said, Straussis influential in the Greek classics program at Saint John s.The influence is probably broader.Already in the 1950s, SaintJohn s in Annapolis was headed for years by Strauss s lifelongfriend Jacob Klein.Strauss retired from Chicago in 1967, andspent a year at Claremont Mens College in California.Then,from 1969 until his death in 1973, Strauss was scholar-in-resi-dence at Saint John s at Annapolis.Now was it an accident that Strauss s books, especially hislater books, were unreadable? No; I came to see that it wasdeliberate.The purpose was to ensure that the huge majority ofreaders will  tune out, after finding nothing but some familiar-sounding exhortations, such as advice to be moral, patriotic,and god-fearing.This is largely how Bloom s Closing of theAmerican Mind was read during its ten weeks on the best-sellerlist: as a pile of salutary exhortations.The mass of people willfind nothing but pablum.But, the few  intelligent youngmen,  and it s always  men or  boys, never  women or people, but  men or  boys,  the few intelligent young menwill be intrigued by these obiter dicta, or these fragmentaryTHE SECRET KINGDOM OF LEO STRAUSS 51remarks, which are almost always off the subject, and they llsay,  Now, what is that really all about? I ve got to get into it;I ve got to understand. And, then, they re taken aside, andtaught in private, individually.The case is the same as that of the police infiltrator, who,whenever anything important comes up in a meeting, says,  Ihave to talk to you about it after the meeting. He will neverdiscuss anything of significance in a meeting, but only one-on-one, because he is habitually telling different things to differ-ent people.By far the best book on Strauss is Shadia Drury s 1988 ThePolitical Ideas of Leo Strauss.It may be that part of its excel-lence, is related to her awareness that there is a sense in whichno woman could be a Straussian.In fact, Strauss said that nowoman could be a philosopher.But, for many of the brightyoung boys, or men, their purpose for studying with Strauss,was to become  philosophers.Illustrative of Strauss s method, is Shadia Drury s report ofa debate between two long-time leading Straussians: ThomasPangle and Harry Jaffa, which ran in the Claremont Reviewfrom fall 1984, through Summer, 1985, and continued in Na-tional Review on November 20 and 29, 1985.Pangle had impliedthat for Socrates (i.e., for Strauss), moral virtue had no applica-tion to the really intelligent man, the philosopher.Moral virtueonly existed in popular opinion, where it served the purpose ofcontrolling the unintelligent majority.Elsewhere in the debate,Pangle implied that for Strauss, philosophy had disproved reli-gious faith.As the fight continued, Pangle said that Strauss hadcharacterized America s distinctiveness as  modern, which forthe Straussians is one of their worst term of abuse.Harry Jaffa found  Pangle s interpretation completely foreignto his own understanding of his teacher and friend of 30 years,in Shadia Drury s summary. Jaffa observes that such a visionof Strauss is Nietzschean, and he denounces Pangle for havingperverted the legacy of Leo Strauss. [Drury 1988, page 182]How is this contradiction possible? As Drury says, .Strauss taught students such as Jaffa and Pangle differentthings. [Drury 1988, page 188] The esoteric, or supposedlysecret teaching which was inculcated into Pangle, Bloom, Wer-ner Dannhauser, and many others, including, reportedly,Bloom s protégé Paul Wolfowitz, was indeed pure Nietzsche.52 CHILDREN OF SATANIn fact, the version which Pangle represented in that 1984-85debate, as outrageous as it may have seemed to Jaffa, wasgreatly watered down.From Nietzsche to Leo Strauss, only thenames have been changed, as they say [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]