0058 What is best political order?

Leo Strauss ends up asking the question that moderns evade.  According to the political philosophers in our current Age of Ideas, the political order institutes organizational objectives in the names of the righteousness of the individual, the class member, the citizen and the unrighteousness of the one who cannot be a citizen.  The ancient questions are ignored.  The political order is a means to an end.  Plus, modern experts define that end in the name of an objectified subject.  We are who the experts say that we are.

And that is not good.

0059 To oversimplify Millerman’s account, Strauss’s story starts with Spengler’s cultural relativism and ends with the eternal, natural philosophy of Plato.  Spengler conceives of a comprehensive theoretical project, where (as Strauss frames it) the task of philosophy is to understand various cultures as the expression of souls.

To me, that sounds like a huge complicated project.

So, of course Martin Heidegger, who sits in the same academic chair once occupied by Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, says, “Let me give this a try.”

0060 Now, projection is a huge temptation in trying Spengler’s project.  As soon as one projects one’s own terminology into the past, then the past will conform to present academic expectations.  Here is a clue that Heidegger avoids this temptation.  Heidegger claims that modern philosophers do not understand Aristotle or Plato, at least, not in the ancient Greeks’ own terms.

The admission pleases Leo Strauss, who happens to agree.

Out, out, damned projection!

0061 Historical studies are welcome.  Historicism, the ideology that philosophy is a symptom of the culture and the age, be damned.