ultima strauss!

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Who is Leo Strauss? And why should we care? (National Disgrace Exposed!)

May 18, 2009, 12:20PMTPM-----------------------notesFrom Deborah

Subject: Re: ultima strauss

I know the Weekly Standard (colorfully called Rupert Murdoch's Neo-Con rag) isn't something that goes down well when swallowed whole —but this morsel does give some taste of the discomfort those as Eros-centered as — say, all of us, certainly Jung—have with what passes as philosophy, with those endless whole nine yards of hard-line analytical academia.

All this is missed by the Strassian-embracing Neo-Cons, even as they suck down the sublime waters, bending stiffly from the waist, kowtowing toward the same ultimate source as Rosen... Guess Rosen must have glanced up at the right moment—seen the human reflection?

"The Beautiful is difficult."

Minding your own vision, reading sources as directly as you can: Isn't that the message in the bottle that keeps bobbing up, washing onto our shore? Easy for hard heads keeping everything sorted, all the ducks in rows, deeming negative capability the height of slop, to look down long noses at the flare of the more passionate nostril. So what? May their mouths relax enough to receive some kiss, some great O of surprise, some ahhh of humble-awed knee-trembling mystery. Some great Frenching tongue... The elements, everstirred by Eros, only standing still when one wraps tightly in his wings: Life—life so much bigger, big enough to contain death and for death to contain it back again.

Was that a poem? Anyway—here's a better one as well as the article:

what time is it?it is by every star a different time,and each most falsely true;or so subhuman superminds declare—nor all their times encompass me and you:when are we never, but forever now(hosts of eternity; not guests of seem)believe me, dear, clocks have enough to dowithout confusing timelessness and times.Time cannot children, poets, lovers tell—measure imagine, mystery, a kiss—not though mankind would rather know than feel;mistrusting utterly that timelessnesswhose absence would make your whole life and my(and infinite our) merely to undie -e.e.cummings

Modern Ancients Stanley Rosen's achievement. by Hibbs 11/25/2002, Volume 008, Issue 11

summa felicitas,

deborah

note: Freud wrote to his future wife that

"it is neither pleasant nor edifying to watch the masses amusing themselves; we at least don't have much taste for it. . . . I remember something that occurred to me while watching a performance of Carmen: the mob gives vent to its appetites and we deprive ourselves. We deprive ourselves in order to maintain our integrity, we economize in our health, our capacity for enjoyment, our emotions; we save ourselves for something, not knowing for what. And this constant suppression of natural instincts gives us the quality of refinement. . . . Why don't we get drunk? . . . Why don't we fall in love with a different person every month? . . . Thus we strive more toward avoiding pain than seeking pleasure. And the extreme case are people like ourselves who chain themselves together for life and death, who deprive themselves and pine for years so as to remain faithful, and who probably wouldn't survive a catastrophe that robbed them of their beloved. . . . Our whole conduct of life presupposes that we are protected from the direst poverty and that the possibility exists of being able to free ourselves increasingly from social ills. The poor people, the masses, could not survive without their thick skins and their easygoing ways. Why should they take their relationships seriously when all the misfortune nature and society have in store threatens those they love? Why should they scorn the pleasures of the moment when no other awaits them? The poor are too helpless, too exposed, to behave like us. When I see the people indulging themselves, disregarding all sense of moderation, I invariably think that this is their compensation for being a helpless target for all the taxes, epidemics, sicknesses, and evils of social institutions."

Gertrude Himmelfarb aside, what we see is that open sexuality in the 19th C -- and Jung was born in 1875 -- was associated with the lower classes. (They were like beasts of the field in the mind of the century's most open confessor, the writer of My Secret Life. Reading him astounds because of the contradictory and unconscious attitudes he so freely conveys .) But -- my point is that Jung, like most all his generation, carried the same baggage he was working out openly in his theories: Sexual repression was part of a 'respectable' class identity.

Jung wrote this about Freud, and I think it applies well to our current crop of conservatives:

The historical conditions which preceded Freud were such that they made a phenomenon like himself necessary, and it is precisely the fundamental tenet of his teaching-namely, the re­pression of sexuality-that is most clearly conditioned in this his­torical sense. Like his greater contemporary Nietzsche, Freud stands at the end of the n era, which was never given such an appropriate name on the Continent despite the fact that it was just as characteristic of the Germanic and Protestant countries as of the Anglo-Saxon. The n era was an age of repression, of a convulsive attempt to keep anaemic ideals artifi­cially alive in a framework of bourgeois respectability by con­stant moralizings. These ideals were the last offshoots of the col­lective religious ideas of the Middle Ages, and shortly before had been severely shaken by the French Enlightenment and the en­suing revolution. Hand in hand with this, ancient truths in the political field had become hollow and threatened to collapse. It was still too soon for the final overthrow, and consequently all through the nineteenth century frantic efforts were made to prevent the Christian Middle Ages from disappearing altogether. Political revolutions were stamped out, experiments in moral freedom were thwarted by middle-class public opinion, and the critical philosophy of the late eighteenth century reached its end in a renewed, systematic attempt to capture the world in a unified network of thought on the medieval model. But in the course of the nineteenth century enlightenment slowly broke through, particularly in the form of scientific materialism and rationalism.

This is the matrix out of which Freud grew, and its mental characteristics have shaped him along foreordained lines. He has a passion for explaining everything rationally, exactly as in the eighteenth century; one of his favourite maxims is Voltaire's "Ecrasez l'infame." With a certain satisfaction he invariably points out the flaw in the crystal; all complex psychic phenom­ena like art, philosophy, and religion fall under his suspicion and appear as "nothing but" repressions of the sexual instinct. para 45, Sigmund Freud in his Historical Setting CGJUNG CW 15

Deborah

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my daughter liz added

Them Straussian neo-cons — it makes perfect sense: the ancients, just like the neo-cons, had no concept of universal human rights. They're a very good match.

And, by the way, neither Plato nor Aristotle were supporters of democracy. Though it is completely debatable whether he thought it could be realized, Plato argued for a utopian oligarchy, and Aristotle's student, the author of the Ath. Pol., does not seem to have a decided taste for democracy (see his take on Theramenes, for example).

Likewise, as Stockton argues, it's difficult to discern any strong bias towards any particular political system in many of the ancient sources, including Thucydides and Herodotus.

In fact, the more I study the radical democracy of the classical period, the more it seems that the ancients really did very little theorizing about democracy, but that democracy came into being as a new device in the aristocrats' political arsenal. Really—aristocratic dynamism. The democracy of the Greeks—literally in Aristotle: the right of the people to gather in the same place. The Greeks had no concept of rights theory; democracy for them was a way of settling civil disputes.

All of this is just evidence that the neo-cons want to stamp out the obvious debt of American democracy to the Enlightenment. And why should they want to do that?

love to all, e