A New Politics for Philosophy: Perspectives on Plato, Nietzsche, and Strauss

338 Pages·2022·7.564 MB·English

by  George A. Dunn

A New Politics for
Philosophy

A New Politics for
Philosophy
Perspectives on Plato, Nietzsche,
and Strauss
For Laurence Lampert
Edited by
George A. Dunn
and Mango Telli
LEXINGTON BOOKS
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ISBN: 978-1-4985-7732-8 (cloth)
ISBN: 978-1-4985-7734-2 (paperback)
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Philosophy and Its Poetry 1
George A. Dunn and Mango Telli
Interview with Laurence Lampert 23
Conducted by Daniel Blue
PART I: THE CLASSICAL BACKGROUND: PLATO,
PROTAGORAS, AND XENOPHON 37
1 How to Read Plato with Nietzschean Insights 39
Liu Xiaofeng
2 On the Opening of Plato’s Charmides 53
Peng Lei
3 Socrates, Bendis, and Cephalus: Does Plato’s Republic Have an
Historical Setting? 67
Christopher Planeaux
4 Recovering the Wisdom of Protagoras: A Reinterpretation of the
Prometheia Trilogy 99
Marty Sulek
5 What Makes a Wise Man Laugh?: On Eros and Heartache in
Xenophon’s Hiero 119
Mango Telli
v
vi Contents
PART II: FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: PHILOSOPHER
OF OUR AGE 135
6 Zarathustra’s Crisis of Redemption 137
Heinrich Meier
7 Nietzsche’s Apology: On Reading Ecce Homo, or,
How One Becomes What One Is 159
Leon Harold Craig
8 Lange’s Consolation Prize: Nietzsche’s First Criticisms of
Schopenhauer 185
Daniel Blue
9 High Noon on Zarathustra’s Mountain: Zarathustra’s
Midday Vision 201
Paul Bishop
10 Renatured Humans on a Sacred Earth: The Power of Nietzsche’s
Ecological Thinking 223
Graham Parkes
PART III: STRAUSS, MODERNITY, AND THEOLOGICAL-
POLITICAL ENGAGEMENTS 249
11 From the Death of God to the Death of Man: What Lampert
and Nietzsche Can Teach Catholics—and Straussians—about
Environmentalism 251
Peter Minowitz
12 The Collapsing Ladder of Degree: René Girard and Leo Strauss
on the Origins of Modernity 275
George A. Dunn
Bibliography of Works by Laurence Lampert 317
Index 321
About the Contributors 327
Acknowledgments
The following publishers and institutions have kindly permitted us to reprint
or make use of images, translations, or portions of text to which they hold
the copyright. We thank these publishers and institutions for allowing us to
make use of these materials.
Cover image: The Creusa Painter (Greek, South Italian, Lucanian), Volute
Krater (detail), 400-380 B.C.E., wheel-thrown, slip decorated earthenware
with incised details, HT. 23 ¼ in. (59.1 cm), max. diam. 17 ¾ in. (45 cm),
Toledo Museum of Art, Purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment,
Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey, 1981.110.
Interview with Laurence Lampert: The interview was originally commis-
sioned by The Nietzsche Circle and was published on its website, www.
nietzschecircle.com, in 2008. It is reprinted here with the kind permission of
that organization. Laurence Lampert has also kindly consented to the publica-
tion of the interview in the present volume.
Chapter 1: Article reprinted by kind permission of Interpretation: A Jour-
nal of Political Philosophy, © 2016.
Chapter 4: Reprinted Theophrastus fragment no. 729 from Theophrastus
of Eresus. Sources for His Life, Writings, Thought, and Influence. Vol. 2.
Edited and translated by W.W. Fortenbaugh et. al. Copyright © 1992-[1999]
by Koninklijke Brill. Used by permission of the publisher, Koninklijke Brill.
Chapter 6: Article reprinted from Meier, Heinrich. What is Nietzsche’s
Zarathustra?: A Philosophical Confrontation. Translated by Justin Gott-
schalk. Copyright © 2021 by The University of Chicago. “Originally published
as Was ist Nietzsches Zarathustra? Eine philosophische Auseinandersetzung
vii
viii Acknowledgments
by Heinrich Meier, © Verlag C.H. Beck oHG, München 2017.” Reproduced
with the kind permission of both publishers.
Chapter 7: Reprinted material from “Plato’s Apology of Socrates,” in
Four Texts on Socrates: Plato’s Euthyphro, Apology of Socrates, Crito, and
Aristophanes’ Clouds, by Thomas G. West, Grace Starry West. Copyright
© 1984 by Cornell University Press. Used by permission of the publisher,
Cornell University Press
Chapter 11 (epigraph from Nietzsche and Modern Times): Lampert,
Laurence. Nietzsche and Modern Times: A Study of Bacon, Descartes, and
Nietzsche. Copyright © 1993 by Yale University Press. Reproduced with
permission of The Licensor through PLSclear.
Chapter 11 (epigraph from The Enduring Importance of Leo Strauss):
Lampert, Laurence. The Enduring Importance of Leo Strauss. Copyright ©
2013 by The University of Chicago. Reproduced with the kind permission of
the publisher.
Chapter 11 (epigraph from Nietzsche’s Teaching): Lampert, Laurence.
Nietzsche’s Teaching: An Interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Copy-
right © 1986 by Yale University Press. Reproduced with permission of The
Licensor through PLSclear.
The editors are immensely grateful to the many individuals who helped to
bring this project to completion, not least of all our outstanding contributors.
We would especially like to thank Peter Minowitz, Heinrich Meier, Alan
Udoff, and, of course, Laurence Lampert. George Dunn owes a great debt of
gratitude to Jimmy Kaltreider and the Thiel Foundation, as well as to Marty
Sulek and Christopher Planeaux, who offered constant support, encourage-
ment, and good humor. Mango Telli wishes to express his profound gratitude
to his beloved wife, Sâra Telli, and to his dear friend, Sigi Goessmann: each
provided indispensable support by giving unsparingly of her time, her perspi-
cacity, and her good counsel during crucial phases of this project.
Introduction
Philosophy and Its Poetry
George A. Dunn and Mango Telli
THE PHILOSOPHICAL LABORS
OF LAURENCE LAMPERT
The title of this book—A New Politics for Philosophy—refers to a line from
Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, the 1996 book by Laurence Lampert, the eminent
Canadian scholar and emeritus professor of philosophy at Indiana University-
Purdue University at Indianapolis. “The historic turn in morals now being
completed,” writes Lampert, “the turn to the autonomy of the herd, requires
a new politics for philosophy.”1 One would be hard pressed to find a pithier
enucleation of the fundamental insight guiding Lampert’s project.
For Lampert, the completed turn to the autonomy of the herd is a way of
speaking of one aspect of the rise of modernity, in particular, the triumph
of the democratic ethos epitomized in our reigning values of equality and
sympathy for suffering. The victory of this herd morality has rendered these
values virtually unassailable, but Lampert accepts Nietzsche’s judgment that
our modern morality is an assault on the indispensable prerequisites of human
greatness, which requires the discipline of great suffering and the affirma-
tion of an order of rank. Our democratic morality suppresses the exceptional
human being, whose harsh demands on himself and others smack of cruelty
and whose insistence on being the yardstick against whom others must be
measured affirms a natural hierarchy. This exceptional human being is the
philosopher—or, more precisely, the genuine philosopher—the rarest of
beings, who combines the deepest insight into nature with the longest view
of the human prospect.
The new politics for philosophy that Lampert advocates is thus a Nietzs-
chean politics, one that affirms an order of rank with the philosopher at its
summit. Unlike the practice of earlier philosophers, it does not dissemble
1