Longtime readers will know that there are three characters who get called “philosophers” that I really think are a disgrace: Jacques Derrida, Ayn Rand, and Leo Strauss. They each have acolytes, who hate me for saying out loud what any serious scholar or philosopher knows. Rand is most obviously an ignorant buffoon, but Derrida and Strauss are not much better: they are paradigms of how not to do a serious scholarly reading of a text. In the U.S., the Derrida infestation was mostly outside academic philosophy departments, and so was the Strauss infestation, which dominated UChicago political science for a long time (but is now basically gone), and then migrated to UT Austin political science, and still hangs on in a few other political science departments.

One Straussian who hangs on at an elite political science department, Harvey Mansfield, was interviewed by the very online economist Tyler Cowen, and the results are amusing:

COWEN: From a Straussian perspective, where’s the role for the skills of a good analytic philosopher? How does that fit into Straussianism? I’ve never quite understood that. They seem to be very separate approaches, at least sociologically.

MANSFIELD: Analytic philosophers look for arguments and isolate them. Strauss looks for arguments and puts them in the context of a dialogue or the implicit dialogue. Instead of counting up one, two, three, four meanings of a word, as analytic philosophers do, he says, why is this argument appropriate for this audience and in this text? Why is it put where it was and not earlier or later?

Strauss treats an argument as if it were in a play, which has a plot and a background and a context, whereas analytic philosophy tries to withdraw the argument from where it was in Plato to see what would we think of it today and what other arguments can be said against it without really wanting to choose which is the truth.

COWEN: Are they complements or substitutes, the analytic approach and the Straussian approach?

MANSFIELD: I wouldn’t say complements, no. Strauss’s approach is to look at the context of an argument rather than to take it out of its context. To take it out of its context means to deprive it of the story that it represents. Analytic philosophy takes arguments out of their context and arranges them in an array. It then tries to compare those abstracted arguments.

Strauss doesn’t try to abstract, but he looks to the context. The context is always something doubtful. Every Platonic dialogue leaves something out. The Republic, for example, doesn’t tell you about what people love instead of how people defend things. Since that’s the case, every argument in such a dialogue is intentionally a bad argument. It’s meant for a particular person, and it’s set to him.

The analytic philosopher doesn’t understand that arguments, especially in a Platonic dialogue, can deliberately be inferior. It easily or too easily refutes the argument which you are supposed to take out of a Platonic dialogue and understand for yourself. Socrates always speaks down to people. He is better than his interlocutors. What you, as an observer or reader, are supposed to do is to take the argument that’s going down, that’s intended for somebody who doesn’t understand very well, and raise it to the level of the argument that Socrates would want to accept.

So to the extent that all great books have the character of this downward shift, all great books have the character of speaking down to someone and presenting truth in an inferior but still attractive way. The reader has to take that shift in view and raise it to the level that the author had. What I’m describing is irony. What distinguishes analytic philosophy from Strauss is the lack of irony in analytic philosophy. Philosophy must always take account of nonphilosophy or budding philosophers and not simply speak straight out and give a flat statement of what you think is true.

To go back to Rawls, Rawls based his philosophy on what he called public reason, which meant that the reason that convinces Rawls is no different from the reason that he gives out to the public. Whereas Strauss said reason is never public or universal in this way because it has to take account of the character of the audience, which is usually less reasonable than the author.

Anyone who has read Strauss or Straussians on Plato (or who has read Rawls) will realize what a charade this is. Strauss on Nietzsche is actually worse, if one can believe that.

What Derrida, Rand, and Strauss all have in common is they appeal to those who don’t want to do the hard work of scholarship and argument, but who want to “feel” they are engaged in something profound.