On Listening to Leo Strauss

The perfect book or speech obeys in every respect the pure and merciless laws of what has been called logographic necessity.  The perfect speech contains nothing slipshod; it in there are no loose threads; it contains no word that has been picked at random; it is not marred by errors due to faulty memory or to any other kind of carelessness; strong passions and a powerful and fertile imagination are guided with ease by a reason which knows how to use the unexpected gift, which knows how to persuade and which knows how to forbid; it allows of no adornment which is not imposed by the gravity and aloofness of the subject matter; the perfect writer rejects with disdain and with some impatience the demand of vulgar rhetoric that expressions must be varied since change is pleasant. 

-- Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958), p. 121

Let me say only this: Don't pay too great attention to that [unintelligible] of mine. What I said about this prehistory of Hegel--Kant and Spinoza--was a deliberately provisional statement to lead up to this new kind of thinking. If you have any difficulty, forget about it. . . .  

Just forget about it. Don't worry too much.  I just tried...And you are not a...you probably have no teaching experience. As a teacher one has to lead up from all parts of the horizon to something. And, uh, one is not always successful at that. That has to be...I mean, teaching can never become a scientifically conductible affair. 

--Leo Strauss, Seminar on Hegel's The Philosophy of History, University of Chicago,

 Winter Quarter 1965, Session 1, January 5, 1965

In my post several weeks ago on Embodiment and Intellectual History, I mentioned the audio recordings of courses taught by Leo Strauss that are now available at the website of the Leo Strauss Center at the University of Chicago.  Here are a few preliminary thoughts about them...



I

Those of us who study the last century-and-a-quarter or so of history have at least the possibility of hearing the voices of the people about whom we write. Some historical voices are familiar to almost all of us who study the past.  My guess is that the voices of every President going back to FDR are familiar to those who read this blog.  So are the voices of other major political figures of the recent past, such as Martin Luther King, Jr.

Other voices may be less familiar but are readily available...especially in the age of the internet. The voices of poets, for example, have been of interest since the beginning of sound recording. At the click of a mouse, you can hear Walt Whitman, William Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell,   Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, or virtually any other well-known poet of the recent past.

But away from politics and literature, the ability to hear voices from the past is a bit more hit-and-miss. While some of the people about whom I wrote in my first book have voices that are familiar to me--Orson Welles, Franklin Roosevelt, even Frank Capra and Hannah Arendt--I know others only through their literary voices.  My guess is that there are plenty of sound recordings of Erich Fromm, Bruno Bettelheim, Dwight Macdonald, and Clement Greenberg, but if I've heard them, I forget the qualities of their voices.  I don't know if there are any readily available recordings of many of the other, more obscure, figures about whom I wrote, like Calvin B. Hoover, the Duke University economist who was one of the first to use "totalitarian" as a term to link Stalinism and Nazism, and my guess is, if such recordings exist, they'd be harder to come by.

Encountering for the first time the (actual) voice of someone whose literary voice is familiar is always an odd experience, one which we often have with the living as well as the dead. Sometimes the voice is exactly what one expects. Or, at least, it matches one's literary experience. I remember, for example, the first time I heard J.G.A. Pocock give a lecture and being struck by both the oddness of his voice and how perfectly it fit the voice on the page.

More often, at least for me, the voices I hear of those whose words are familiar to me are somewhat different from what I expected. Mind you, I don't usually formulate a precise expectation of someone's voice by reading her prose. But like literary characters whom we meet in novels, we fill in the blanks about real people whom we encounter on the page. And the initial experience of hearing their voices is often like encountering a familiar literary character in a film or stage adaptation.  What we hear is often not what we imagined.

But there is of course a big difference. Especially if we are careful readers, the image of a literary character that we develop from the page has at least as great a claim to authenticity as the adapted versions we see on the screen. To the extent that those screen versions begin to displace the versions we imagined for ourselves, something real is lost.  But the voice we hear in a recording of an historical person is that person's voice...or at least a good deal closer to it than any imagined reconstruction we come up with when reading their prose.

I'm not sure how I imagined that Leo Strauss would sound, but I was surprised when I first encountered his voice, which reminded me in many ways of my Russian grandfather, who was just a few years younger than Strauss and who learned English well after becoming fluent in German and earning a PhD at a German university (at least that's my best explanation of whatever similarity I hear).  But now that I've heard it, Strauss's voice is inseparable in my mind from Leo Strauss, who has become more concretely embodied for me than he was before.

II

As I wrote in my post on embodiment, Strauss's recorded seminars are of particular interest because of the esteem in which his students held him as a teacher.  Richard G. Stevens's claim that Strauss was "the greatest classroom teacher in the history of Western civilization" is only the most extravagant of countless celebrations of his pedagogical charisma.

As the Strauss Center's webpage notes, for years, transcripts of these recordings were passed around among a select group of Strauss's students and his students' students, always with the admonition "Recipients are emphatically requested not to seek to increase the circulation of the transcription."

The preciousness, care, and even secrecy with which these transcripts were treated reflect Strauss's peculiar notions about the relationship of oral philosophical teaching to written philosophical works. The former can be much more frank than the latter, as they are addressed to a select audience and are not available to the vulgar.*

One of the things most immediately striking about the recordings of Strauss's seminars is how different they are from his writings. Not so much in content--I have yet to encounter any "secret teachings" in my listening--as in tone.  The two passages I quote above--the first in writing about writing, the second on tape about oral teaching--capture at least part of the theoretical aspect of this difference.  The second comes from Strauss's answer to a student's question about Strauss's very condensed discussion of Kant, Spinoza, and Jacobi with which Strauss had begun his introductory meeting of his seminar on Hegel's Philosophy of History.  In this quotation, Strauss puts forward a vision of classroom teaching that is utterly different from his notion of philosophical writing, which is, in turn, nicely captured in the quotation above it from his Thoughts on Machiavelli.  Strauss's method of reading philosophy entails assuming that serious philosophers are simply incapable of making errors...so any apparent error in a philosophical text (or at least in a pre-modern philosophical text) is an indication of some sort of esoteric teaching.  But clearly Strauss understands the task of oral instruction differently.  I suspect I am not alone, among those who find Straussian (written) hermeneutics hard to swallow, in finding Strauss's humility about the provisional nature of teaching refreshing.

And indeed the feeling of Strauss's seminar lectures (and these are very much lectures) is utterly different from the feelings of his writings.  Strauss's written work is dense, allusive, and often elusive.  Although followers of Strauss deeply value these written for, among other things, their style, many non-Straussians find them exquisitely dull.  "It is a general observation," Strauss writes in his essay "How to Study Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise" from Persecution and the Art of Writing, "that people write as they read."**  And Leo Strauss certainly treated the writings of other philosophers as esoteric puzzle palaces.

His lectures, on the other hand, seem different.  They are much more typical of good lectures in their approach than his books are typical of good books. Strauss emphasizes and reemphasizes important points. He incorporates examples from current events to illustrate his points. He interacts with his students in a way that indicates both that he takes them seriously, but that he knows exactly where he wants to lead them (his pedagogical persona is, unsurprisingly, old-fashioned in this regard).  While they certainly do not move me to agree that he was the greatest teacher since Plato, Strauss's pedagogical charisma is clear in them.

III

Now broadly available, the lectures provide an excellent new (to the rest of us) way to get a sense of Leo Strauss's approach to political philosophy. Take, for example, the Introduction to Political Philosophy that Strauss offered at the U of C during the Winter Quarter of 1965.  Like most of the courses for which recordings are available, this one is incomplete; only nine of the sixteen sessions are preserved on tape. As far as I can tell, the recordings represent nine of the first ten class meetings, with the last five meetings missing (the recordings are numbered one to nine, but there appears to be a lecture skipped in the midst of them).

For those unversed in Strauss, the arrangement of material might seem odd. Strauss begins his opening lecture by noting that political philosophy, in the classical sense, seems utterly impossible today.  He then spends the next six, hour-and-a-half-long sessions elaborating the reasons for this sense of impossibility. All of the first two lectures and the beginning of the third concern Auguste Comte and positivism.  The rest of Lecture Three, all of Lecture Four, and the beginning of Lecture Five concern the notion of value-free social science...and its inadequacy in Strauss's view.  The remainder of Lecture Five and all of Lecture Six concern historicism.

Strauss thus spends more than the first third of his class meticulously describing three of his major bêtes noires: positivism, the fact-value distinction, and historicism. All of this, again, is by way of explaining why political philosophy seems impossible in 1965.

Finally, in Lecture Seven, Strauss begins to tackle the history of political philosophy, which, Strauss argues, unlike political philosophy itself, is still seen as necessary.  He begins discussing the history of political philosophy by way of another great Straussian trope, the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns. This then leads to a discussion of Hobbes and Rousseau, who represent what Strauss sees as the first and second waves of modernity.*** 

Lecture Eight continues to describe the ways in which modern political philosophy departs from classical political philosophy, which Strauss has still not discussed at any length. At various times, Kant, Descartes, Hegel, and Nietzsche, the last the representative figure from Strauss's third wave of modernity, come into the discussion.  The lecture concludes with the thought that, unlike modern political thought, which locates itself outside the realm of everyday politics, classical political philosophy "has its stand within the political sphere."

In Lecture Nine, Strauss finally works his way to classical political philosophy and a discussion of Aristotle's Politics.

Strauss's extraordinarily long journey to the subject at hand in these lectures seems to instantiate his notion  (in his written works) of modernity's constituting a second cave from which we must crawl merely to find ourselves in the "natural" cave described by Plato.  The lectures also provide a concrete answer to what is sometimes seen as a core paradox of Strauss's work: the fact that this implacable foe of historicism appears to have devoted his career to explicating the history of political philosophy.  As Strauss explains in exhaustive detail in the early lectures, given that political philosophy seems impossible today, while the history of political philosophy seems not only possible but necessary, that history must be our path back to political philosophy itself.

I'm not sure that I would have gotten all of this out of these lectures had I not first read much Strauss, and much about Strauss. And from the point of view of intellectual history, the status of these seminars is complicated: they are both public and private documents, depending on how one looks at them. But they are a fascinating resource.
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* For more on this issue, see Strauss's Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952), esp. Chapter 2.  This is also not to say that Strauss is being entirely frank in his seminars. But he is certainly addressing a more select audience.

** Persecution and the Art of Writing, 144.

*** Strauss does not talk of the three waves in this lecture, but the idea structures his discussion of modern political philosophy here in many ways.

Disembodied Voices in Intellectual History

In his recent post on Embodiment in Intellectual History, Ben raised the question of how intellectual historians might more effectively or fruitfully consider the "embodied aspects of the people about whom we write." He suggested that a consideration of "intellectuals' physical presences may grow more important as disembodied communication technologies become more and more ubiquitous." 
I began to wonder:  when was the last time that our communication technologies weren't in some way disembodied.  We probably have to go back to prehistory for that.  But I forbid my students from beginning their essays at the dawn of time, or writing an introductory paragraph about the course of human history, so I will spare you a similar sweeping gesture.  Besides, we do (mostly) U.S. history around here -- our wayback machine doesn't go very far back (though it might be salutary for us if it did). 

So as I thought about Ben's post, and I thought about how intellectual historians might "do embodiment" well, I was reminded of one of my favorite sections of A Godly Hero, Michael Kazin's brilliant biography of William Jennings Bryan.*

Kazin's extended meditation on the sonority of Bryan's voice provides an excellent example of how intellectual historians can explore what someone's physical presence meant for the articulation and reception of his or her ideas.  In the Great Commoner's case, this particular aspect of Bryan's (self-consciously performative) self-performance seems to have imbued his ideas with a liveliness and appeal that they lacked when presented in mere text, as printed words upon a page.

Kazin writes about the almost magical power of Bryan's speaking voice.

How did he do it? One born too late to hear Bryan on the stump or in a convention hall can only gather up reminiscences and marvel that, in an era satiated with oratory, he could lead so many people, foes as well as allies, to describe him as the most compelling speaker they'd ever heard (48).

Listeners commented on the extraordinary timbre of Bryan's voice:

Nearly every recollection begins by describing the quality of that voice. "Sonorous and melodious," "deep and powerfully musical," "soothing but penetrating," "free, bold, picturesque," "clear as a cathedral bell..." (48)

As Kazin points out, such praise sounds very much like the aesthetic judgment audiences might have pronounced upon a stage actor's talents.

Like them, the Nebraskan could project his voice a remarkable distance. Mary Bryan recalled one day in 1898 when, from inside a hotel room in Corpus Christi, she could hear her husband perfectly "three long blocks" away.  At national conventions, before the introduction of amplified sound in the early 1920s, Bryan's was often the only voice that could reach every seat in the house. And his diction -- clear, precise, and rendered with a slight prairie twang that passed for no accent at all -- ensured that listeners could understand every word (48).

I am intrigued by the gendered aspects of Bryan's appeal.  Apparently, he sounded like a man was supposed to sound.  And I can't help but wonder: what were women supposed to sound like when they spoke in public?  "They weren't," would be the easy laugh line here.  But there were women on the Chautauqua circuit, and I suspect that someone like Carrie Nation could hold a crowd's attention.  But I don't know that her appeal was aesthetic -- or acoustical -- in the way that Bryan's seemed to be.  Instead, part of the draw there (in addition to audience interest in the content of her speech) might have been the sheer spectacle of going to see a woman -- and such a woman! -- speak in public.

In terms of going to hear women, I suppose that famous female vocalists and melodramatic actresses could have drawn great crowds wherever they performed. But except for stage performers and professional entertainers, I wonder if there were many women who would have been able to draw a crowd simply to hear the sound of their speaking voices, as crowds wanted to do in Bryan's case.

In the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, what were the aesthetic expectations for public female -- and/or feminine -- speech?  (I mean besides "Ladies, please don't!")  What acoustical features, what kind of sonority, might have marked a pleasing, public female voice?  If you have some bibliographic suggestions, please add them to the comments below.  This is something I'll need to look at in relation to my work in the early 20th century, and I should probably base my understanding of the matter on something more authoritative than Singin' in the Rain.  ("I caiiiiiint staiiiind him.")

In any case, Bryan's heyday may have been the age of oratory, but it was not yet the age of radio. Kazin writes:

A...GOP partisan named Ira Smith first heard Bryan in 1896. Half a century later, he recalled: "I listened to his speech as if every word and every gesture were a revelation. It is not my nature to be awed by a famous name, but I felt that Bryan was the first politician I had ever heard speak the truth and nothing but the truth." The next day, Smith read the same speech in a newspaper and "disagreed with almost all of it." He was glad, in retrospect, that "the most remarkable orator of the century" had passed his prime before the onset of radio. Otherwise, Smith, who ran the White House mailroom for five decades, believed the Nebraskan would certainly have been elected president (49).

To me, this is perhaps the most striking insight of all -- one of those "for want of a nail" arguments that sets history swinging on the hinge of a single slim contingency.

Heck, maybe old Ira Smith was right.

Or was he making the kind of appeal to technology's magic -- or to charisma's power? -- that often serves as a sop to our most simplistic explanatory urges?  For example, we've probably all heard some version of "Kennedy beat Nixon because of television."  That's a little too easy.  And I think it would be really bad history to say, "If Bryan had been broadcast coast to coast on the radio, he surely would have won the White House."  But Kazin, who doesn't tend to write bad history, doesn't say that.

Furthermore, as Kazin points out, it was not merely his voice alone that made Bryan so appealing; it was his deep sincerity. "Listeners enjoyed being in his presence and often felt inspired by a guileless orator who seemed an authentic representative of the producing classes. A politics of character thus blended into a politics of celebrity as Bryan's voice became known throughout the land" (49). That part about "being in his presence" suggests a whole performative rhetoric of look and gesture, physicality, sturdy manliness, that went along with that big sonorous voice.  So radio might not have helped Bryan much anyhow.

In their introduction to an audio clip of Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech, recorded in a studio twenty-five years after it was first delivered, the editors at GMU's History Matters site note that the recording "does not capture the power and drama of the original address."  Perhaps only listeners who had heard Bryan speaking live and also heard that recording could judge whether or not the recording "gets" Bryan.  Listening to his disembodied voice today, we have the challenge of wading through almost one hundred years of technologically mediated cultural history -- or culturally mediated technological history -- that have worked to shape what we think a (man's) voice ought to sound like.

But if audio recordings didn't seem to do justice to Bryan's oratorical gifts, that may have had less to do with the disembodiment of Bryan's voice than with the disembodiment of Bryan's audience.  Maybe it wasn't enough for Bryan to stretch himself out upon a Cross of Gold in a recording studio; maybe he needed a stadium full of people to bring power to his performance.

Along with Ben, I too would be interested to hear (!) our readers' thoughts on the more general question of how attention to embodiment can work in intellectual history.  I would suggest that exploring the (dis)connection between voice and presence, ideas and embodiment, matters not only in history, but for history -- for how we study it, for how we write it, and for how we perform it (and ourselves) here in the silent cacophony of the intellectual history blogosphere.

What say you?

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*If my discussion of this book seems vaguely familiar to you, it might be because I swiped a few paragraphs for this post from my old blog.  But I had, like, Seven Faithful Readers.  So I'm guessing it's new to you.

Embodiment and Intellectual History

I recently came across this picture of a Palestinian / American Jewish Roundtable sponsored by the journal Tikkun in the late 1980s. It shows (from left to right) Michael Walzer, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Michael Lerner, Edward Said, and Letty Pogrebin.*

What struck me immediately about this image, really the instant I saw it, was how distinctly both Walzer and Said are performing themselves in it.  My ability to say this about Walzer and Said comes from having seen both of them in action:  Said, twice, in graduate school, and Walzer, on a number of occasions over the years, most recently at the latest S-USIH conference last November.  For anyone who experienced Said, or who has experienced Walzer, in person, their gestures in the above photograph are extraordinarily evocative.  (For all I know, the same might be said about Abu-Lughod, Lerner, or Pogrebin, but I have no personal experience of any of them.)

Long before I experienced Walzer or Said in person I had read Just and Unjust Wars and (parts of) Orientalism.**  But seeing each in person altered my relationship to the words on the page...and indeed, expanded my sense of each as a thinker beyond the words on the page.

Historians--perhaps especially intellectual historians--tend to be oriented toward the written word. Over the years some of us have become better at working with media like film, photography, radio, or the plastic arts that are less dependent on the written word.  But one thing I don't think intellectual historians always do as well as we might is deal with the way intellectuals -- and I mean that term broadly -- embody their ideas, the way in which the physical qualities of an intellectual -- the tone of her voice, his self-presentation, her very physical presence -- can have an impact on the transmission, perhaps even the shape, of thought.



If anything, reminding ourselves and our students of the importance of intellectuals' physical presences may grow more important as disembodied communication technologies become more and more ubiquitous.

These questions are a particular issue in my current project on the legacies of Leo Strauss in American public culture.  Leo Strauss by all accounts possessed an extraordinary pedagogical charisma.  Richard G. Stevens has even declared that Strauss was "the greatest classroom teacher in the history of Western Civilization."***  Strauss's students and students's students so esteemed Leo Strauss's classroom performances that, for decades, they privately circulated transcribed recordings of Strauss's classroom lectures.****

But these transcriptions were not generally publicly available. And such a written record would presumably be a pale reflection of the purportedly extraordinary performances that they recorded.

In recent years, however, the Leo Strauss Center at the University of Chicago has begun to put online recordings of classes offered by Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago, Claremont Men's College, and St. John's College from 1958 through 1973.  This effort is the culmination of a slow but steady growth in the openness with which Strauss's students and his students' students have treated the legacy of Strauss. Through the 1970s, many of his students avoided even mentioning Strauss's name in print.  By the late 1990s, the classicist and Strauss student Seth Benardete published Leo Strauss on Plato's Symposium, based on transcribed lectures from a course on Plato's political philosophy that Strauss had given some four decades earlier.*****

There are now recordings of more than thirty courses taught by Strauss available online; twenty more will soon join them.  For those of us interested in Leo Strauss, they're an extraordinary resource that gets us a big step closer to the experience of sitting in the classroom with Strauss himself.

And yet, a voice recording is still not the same thing as watching someone lecture.  I would not have my reaction to the photograph above had I only listened to audio recordings of Walzer and Said.

Having access to such records of the objects of a study is, of course, a luxury reserved for historians of the fairly recent past.  Motion picture records of historical actors are only a little over a century old; audio recordings just a few decades older.

And experiencing these recordings only raises again the question that I've asked above: as intellectual historians, how do we deal with these embodied aspects of the people we study?  

Broader cultural changes certainly affect my reactions to a half-century old recording of Leo Strauss, which might be utterly different from those of a University of Chicago student taking the course at the time the recording was made.  Listening to such a recording while walking my dog as a tenured faculty member in Norman, Oklahoma, is very obviously a different experience from sitting in a no doubt challenging class as an undergraduate in Hyde Park.  

And to the extent that we can translate from our experience of such recordings to that of those present for the original performance (we often have the written remembrances of those who experienced the person in question to help with this process), how should we incorporate this knowledge into the intellectual history we produce?

Most often, I think, these embodied aspects of the people about whom we write get relegated to introductory paragraphs, in which we describe the person we're writing about before turning to the more important matters of the ideas (and texts!) they produced.  But I suspect, at least in certain cases, these embodied aspects of intellectual production are more important than we usually make them out to be.  But I'm not sure what to do with this thought in my own historical practice.

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* This picture appeared in Allen Graubard, "From Commentary to Tikkun: The Past and Future of 'Progressive Jewish Intellectuals,'"  Middle East Report, May-June 1989, 17-23 (JSTOR Link).

** In the interest of full disclosure, I may have experienced Said as a dinner guest of my parents during the year they were all at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (t-shirt slogan: "The Leisure of the Theory Class").  But as I was in fifth grade at the time, I don't think this counts.

*** Richard G. Stevens, "Martin Diamond's Contribution to American Political Thought: Editor's Preface," The Political Science Reviewer v. XXVIII (1999), 3.

**** These transcriptions were also particularly valued for another reason:  Strauss and his students, drawing in part on Plato (as they understand him), have often prized philosophers' oral "teachings" above written ones.  This is, in effect, a special case of the general Straussian assumption that careful speakers and writers tailor their words for their audience. The audience for a written work is necessarily broader and less in the author's control (which is just one of the reasons, Strauss believed, that philosophers write esoterically).  But philosophers can be more frank when talking to their students. For decades, students of Strauss (and their students in turn) privately circulated transcriptions of Leo Strauss's classroom lectures, each bearing the headnote "Recipients are emphatically requested not to seek to increase the circulation of the transcription."

***** This project began while Strauss was still alive, but he was apparently never satisfied with the material so it remained unpublished for decades.