Leo Strauss On Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Although Leo Strauss published little on Nietzsche, his lectures and correspondence demonstrate a deep critical engagement with Nietzsche’s thought. One of the richest contributions is a seminar on Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, taught in 1959 during Strauss’s tenure at the University of Chicago. In the lectures, Strauss draws important parallels between Nietzsche’s most important project and his own ongoing efforts to restore classical political philosophy. With Leo Strauss on Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” eminent Strauss scholar Richard L. Velkley presents Strauss’s lectures on Zarathustra with superb annotations that bring context and clarity to the critical role played by Nietzsche in shaping Strauss’s thought. In addition to the broad relationship between Nietzsche and political philosophy, Strauss adeptly guides readers through Heidegger’s confrontations with Nietzsche, laying out Heidegger’s critique of Nietzsche’s “will to power” while also showing how Heidegger can be read as a foil for his own reading of Nietzsche. The lectures also shed light on the relationship between Heidegger and Strauss, as both philosophers saw Nietzsche as a central figure for understanding the crisis of philosophy and Western civilization. Strauss’s reading of Nietzsche is one of the important—yet little appreciated—philosophical inquiries of the past century, both an original interpretation of Nietzsche’s thought and a deep engagement with the core problems that modernity posed for political philosophy. It will be welcomed by anyone interested in the work of either philosopher.

For Lampert, Strauss's essay is equally important for understanding Strauss himself. Lampert's Strauss is a sympathetic admirer of Nietzsche and his teachings, who ultimately situates him in the company of Plato and elevates understanding the contest between Plato and Nietzsche into the highest task facing contemporary or postmodern philosophy. Why, then, should Strauss have kept this admiration hidden while permitting such a distorted public view of his thought? And why should he have discouraged others from appreciating the teachings that had proved so important to his own philosophical liberation and training? According to Lampert, the answers lie in Strauss's own esoteric writing, full of subtexts, implications, and consequences. Strauss conceived of philosophy as a furtive undertaking, and believed Nietzsche had rejected the necessity of this role for philosophy in favor of a daring candor.

"In this book Heinrich Meier takes on the question of the meaning of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which has long proven controversial among readers. Meier closely examines the work to find a coherent structure and uncover the meanings in the figure of Zarathustra. By showing the unity in Zarathustra's life and teaching, Meier argues that the hidden architecture of the work reveals the development of self-knowledge for the philosopher. What Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? A Philosophical Confrontation makes clear in its careful attention to the text that Nietzsche's deepest concern is with understanding himself and the world, rather than with a view of himself as a prophet"--

The first comprehensive interpretation of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra--an important and difficult text and the only book Nietzsche ever wrote with characters, events, setting, and a plot. Laurence Lampert's chapter-by-chapter commentary on Nietzsche's magnum opus clarifies not only Zarathustra's narrative structure but also the development of Nietzsche's thinking as a whole. "An impressive piece of scholarship. Insofar as it solves the riddle of Zarathustra in an unprecedented fashion, this study serves as an invaluable resource for all serious students of Nietzsche's philosophy. Lampert's persuasive and thorough interpretation is bound to spark a revival of interest in Zarathustra and raise the standards of Nietzsche scholarship in general."--Daniel W. Conway, Review of Metaphysics "A book of scholarship, filled with passion and concern for its text."--Tracy B. Strong, Review of Politics "This is the first genuine textual commentary on Zarathustra in English, and therewith a genuine reader's guide. It makes a significant and original contribution to its field."--Werner J. Dannhauser, Cornell University "This is a very valuable and carefully wrought study of a very complex and subtle poetic-philosophical work that provides access to Nietzsche's style of presenting his thought, as well as to his passionately affirmed values. Lampert's commentary and analysis of Zarathustra is so thorough and detailed. . . that it is the most useful English-language companion to Nietzsche's 'edifying' and intriguing work."--Choice Selected as one of Choice's outstanding academic books for 1988

When Nietzsche published Beyond Good and Evil in 1886, he told a friend that it was a book that would not be read properly until “around the year 2000.” Now Laurence Lampert sets out to fulfill this prophecy by providing a section by section interpretation of this philosophical masterpiece that emphasizes its unity and depth as a comprehensive new teaching on nature and humanity. According to Lampert, Nietzsche begins with a critique of philosophy that is ultimately affirmative, because it shows how philosophy can arrive at a defensible ontological account of the way of all beings. Nietzsche next argues that a new post-Christian religion can arise out of the affirmation of the world disclosed to philosophy. Then, turning to the implications of the new ontology for morality and politics, Nietzsche argues that these can be reconstituted on the fundamental insights of the new philosophy. Nietzsche’s comprehensive depiction of this anti-Platonic philosophy ends with a chapter on nobility, in which he contends that what can now be publicly celebrated as noble in our species are its highest achievements of mind and spirit.

In the winter of 1965, Leo Strauss taught a seminar on Hegel at the University of Chicago. While Strauss neither considered himself a Hegelian nor wrote about Hegel at any length, his writings contain intriguing references to the philosopher, particularly in connection with his studies of Hobbes, in his debate in On Tyranny with Alexandre Kojève; and in his account of the “three waves” of modern political philosophy. Leo Strauss on Hegel reconstructs Strauss’s seminar on Hegel, supplemented by passages from an earlier version of the seminar from which only fragments of a transcript remain. Strauss focused his seminar on the lectures collected in The Philosophy of History, which he considered more accessible than Hegel’s written works. In his own lectures on Hegel, Strauss continues his project of demonstrating how modern philosophers related to ancient thought and explores the development and weaknesses of modern political theory. Strauss is especially concerned with the relationship in Hegel between empirical history and his philosophy of history, and he argues for the primacy of religion in Hegel’s understanding of history and society. In addition to a relatively complete transcript, Leo Strauss on Hegel also includes annotations, which bring context and clarity to the text.

In one of his last books, Socrates and Aristophanes, Leo Strauss's examines the confrontation between Socrates and Aristophanes in Aristophanes' comedies. Looking at eleven plays, Strauss shows that this confrontation is essentially one between poetry and philosophy, and that poetry emerges as an autonomous wisdom capable of rivaling philosophy. "Strauss gives us an impressive addition to his life's work—the recovery of the Great Tradition in political philosophy. The problem the book proposes centers formally upon Socrates. As is typical of Strauss, he raises profound issues with great courage. . . . [He addresses] a problem that has been inherent in Western life ever since [Socrates'] execution: the tension between reason and religion. . . . Thus, we come to Aristophanes, the great comic poet, and his attack on Socrates in the play The Clouds. . . [Strauss] translates it into the basic problem of the relation between poetry and philosophy, and resolves this by an analysis of the function of comedy in the life of the city." —Stanley Parry, National Review

This major work by Laurence Lampert provides a new interpretation of modern philosophy by developing Nietzsche's view that genuine philosophers set out to determine the direction of culture through their ideas and that they conceal the radical nature of their thought by their esoteric style. From this Nietzschean perspective, Francis Bacon and René Descartes can be considered the founders of modernity. Lampert argues that Bacon's positive claims for science aimed to destroy the dominance of Christianity. Descartes continued Bacon's radical program while providing it with the mathematical physics required for its success. Far from being solely an epistemological and metaphysical thinker, says Lampert, Descartes was a master writer whose comic ridicule helped bring down the Church to which he paid lip service. Both Bacon and Descartes used the Platonic art of dissimulation to achieve their ends by making their revolutionary aims appear compatible with Christianity. Once we recognize Bacon and Descartes as legislators of modern times in a specifically Nietzschean sense, we can also see Nietzsche in a new way--as the first thinker to have understood modern times and transcended it in a postmodern worldview. According to Lampert, Nietzsche provides a new foundation for culture, a joyous science that reveals the grandeur and purposeless play of the cosmic whole and yet avoids enervating despair or destructive, dogmatic belief.

It is difficult to spell out the precise political implications of Nietzsche's critique of morality. He himself never did so in any systematic way. Tamsin Shaw argues there is a reason for this: that Nietzsche's insights entail a distinctive form of political skepticism.

Plato’s dialogues show Socrates at different ages, beginning when he was about nineteen and already deeply immersed in philosophy and ending with his execution five decades later. By presenting his model philosopher across a fifty-year span of his life, Plato leads his readers to wonder: does that time period correspond to the development of Socrates’ thought? In this magisterial investigation of the evolution of Socrates’ philosophy, Laurence Lampert answers in the affirmative. The chronological route that Plato maps for us, Lampert argues, reveals the enduring record of philosophy as it gradually took the form that came to dominate the life of the mind in the West. The reader accompanies Socrates as he breaks with the century-old tradition of philosophy, turns to his own path, gradually enters into a deeper understanding of nature and human nature, and discovers the successful way to transmit his wisdom to the wider world. Focusing on the final and most prominent step in that process and offering detailed textual analysis of Plato’s Protagoras, Charmides, and Republic, How Philosophy Became Socratic charts Socrates’ gradual discovery of a proper politics to shelter and advance philosophy.