Straussianism and Conservatism

I decided not to get too worked up about Prof. Irving. This wasn't so much a choice as a realization  that a masters student fighting a professor with tenure a SEU was a no-win proposition. Better to spend one's efforts elsewhere, which is a trick I learned from the board game go: if you are in a bad position on the board, stop playing there and come back to it later when the situation may have improved. Another variation on this theme is, "If you're in a hole, stop digging." I decided to focus instead on the upcoming spring semester's classes. They call this "shopping for classes," and as I was doing so I ran into a colleague. Cathy was from Eastern Europe, an ardent socialist, and a PhD student who was on scholarship and could have gone to another elite PhD program. As a baby masters student with a couple of engineering degrees, I looked up to her. Cathy was a little too serious, self-important, and argumentative, but this was graduate school, and she certainly wasn't the only one.

Cathy was going to take a class from a Straussian philosophy professor, Prof. Pauls. I said yes for one and only one reason, because I knew Prof. Irving hated Prof. Pauls with a white hot passion, so that was good enough for me: whatever he was selling, I was buying; whatever he was laying down, I was picking up. There was only one problem: I didn't really know what a Straussian was. As with most subject in philosophy, and here we're talking about political philosophy, there are multiple levels to uncover and examine. First, Straussians are people who follow in the footsteps of Leo Strauss, a professor at the University of Chicago, one of the key super-elite universities in the world. He wrote the book Natural Right and History, which I must have read as a graduate student but I remember almost nothing about. There's also Cropsey and Strauss's History of Political Philosophy, which we called "the purple Bible" and provides synopses of the west's great philosophers. But it's not what Strauss wrote so much as the way he read. You'll often hear the phrase, "close-reading Straussians," which highlights the perspective of a reader trying to understand what the writer was trying to say at that point in history rather than what the reader's modern interpretation might be. As an engineer, I interpreted Strauss as acknowledging an objective truth and trying to understand it however difficult rather than holding that the material world is up for debate, interpretation, and innovation. Straussians are often associated with Aristotle, who as an ancient tried to understand the natural world and got almost everything wrong, but it was his perspective and seriousness that left it's mark. But unlike an engineer, these Straussians tried to understand the world with words rather than numbers, an attitude that I appreciated and a method that left its mark on me. My engineering degree taught me math, my computer science degree logic, and my time in political philosophy, English. 

But the real question is this: What is the relationship between Straussianism and conservatism? Conservatism is something beyond just "close reading," but it's that Christian perspective captured by the Gloria Patri doxology, "As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end," which gets at the universality and reality of physics and engineering. If reality is that which persists after one stops believing in it, then physics and engineering capture that Straussian, conservative perspective: that reality is something to be learned, understood, and shaped within limits rather than something to be battled, dictated to, and shaped according to the desires of people. This is a working definition of the relationship among Straussianism, conservatism, and realism as embodied by physics and engineering. It's a topic that will be addressed again.