Leo Strauss Statements Regarding Modern Psychology Collected from His Classes:

Collection in progress: send additions.

Leo Strauss often addresses modern social science, but rarely or never addresses modern psychology and psychiatry directly in print. He mentions Freud, but never Carl Jung. I will begin a collection of statements, as these occur occasionally in his classes, such as on the Gorgias.

Gorgias Class 1, at 1:12:00 It turns out that this section is not in the transcript, and is apparently from an Aristotle class tape over- the section read is .

Now …that virtue is of course the virtue of the human soul, and hence the statesman must have some knowledge of the human soul…[how we know the virtue of the soul…823, reads]

The politician must speculate about the soul, but he must speculate…for the sake of these things which we are discussing, and …[reads]… though he will do so…and only so far…to pursue the subject in further detail…

this is of course of utmost practicality and as it were what the doctor ordered for us…no scientific psychology is required for the understanding of the political things. I remember the case of the social smile which was discovered… and I told him this is not even important for election candidates, you know, who have to kiss babies, and it doesn’t matter if their smile is social or pre-social [laughter]. So this is a mere change..

full agreement with Plato and Aristotle…

no scientific psychology is required for the social sciences…and this is still true… the psychology Plato gives in the Republic is provisional, and as crude as that given here…

…Everyone in this room can refute Mr. Glen…don’t you remember… yea, but I would like to show you how simple the answer is by asking someone in the class… yea, but the good citizen is relative to the regime. There can be a good citizen in communist Russia, in Nazi Germany, but, and there can also be a good citizen in an aristocracy…but the good man is not relative…if you look at then you see … the good man and only the good man is fit to be a ruler in the best regime….

This is not…I mean…only the ruler in the best regime will show forth…in its fullness.

good man is… pay his taxes….

a judge must of course be just to a higher degree than the simple man who never….these things which lay dormant in the ordinary man are activated and actualized in the judge….

… they are co-extensive, because there there is no virtue which in its fullest form does not reveal itself in political action…yea, but bad politics is by definition defective politics.

I think it is very important, the distinction between individual happiness and social happiness…but at the very beginning he says…political science is concerned…man is essentially a social being, a political animal and so, the doctrine of the perfection of man …something in man which transcends the polis…

but this comes up only at the end of the work.

What is the difference between modern psychology and the crude psychology that Aristotle uses…In fairness to Max Weber, that much maligned man, one must say that he was sound regarding psychology. He did not think that modern psychology could be of any use for the social sciences…and he put it the kind of psychology that you need is that for playing bridge…you know, a certain understanding of human beings…that you need

Now what is the (distinction of) modern scientific psychology which Aristotle does not see…modern psychology is related to the notion …to manipulate human beings…

[whereas the statesman aims] to exhort, appeal to them, to preach to them…this word…to preach to them …Lincoln. Some of his greatest actions are connected with preaching….

mass society with its special problems may require certain studies, of whether people get tired at certain tasks…

science of postage stamps….

[Strauss then enters into the description of the parts of the soul in the Ethics.]

Protagoras, Class 2:

Opening of class 2 on Protagoras, at about 2:15 minutes, Strauss addresses psychology. The legislator must know the soul. Plato, Protagoras, spring 1965 | The Leo Strauss Center https://leostrausscenter.uchicago.edu › plato-protagoras-… “Plato’s Political Philosophy: Protagoras,” offered in spring quarter 1965,

 Plato makes us realize what one can call the stratification of the readers. Or, to use a vaguer term, the variety of human beings. This knowledge or kind of knowledge, is called psychology. Psychology is already a Greek word… something else which he calls ,”psychagogia,” guiding of the souls. Now this knowledge of the soul, or of the souls, and their guidance, is the basis of the political art, contrary to the view which Socrates suggests in the Gorgias that the fundamental part of the political art is the legislative art. The legislative art itself must ultimately be based on knowledge of the variety of souls. It must be based on psychology, or, in order to avoid some misunderstandings, let us say psychologia, lest we mistake it for what is now academic psychology. Socrates‘ explicit view of rhetoric is to the effect that rhetoric is a kind of flattery, a sham, a sham imitation of punitive justice–punitive justice being understood as the art of restoring the health of‘ the soul. This view of rhetoric is based on the premise that suffering injustice is better than doing injustice, whereas rhetoric itself is based on the view that suffering injustice is worse than doing injustice. (Strauss, Protagoras Class 2 )

 This statement allows us to identify psychology within the thought of Strauss,

There is of course the famous statement at the end of Book I of the laws, which is what I would have guessed he had in mind were I in that Aristotle class:

This then- the knowledge of the natures and the habits of souls- is one of the things that is of the greatest use for the art whose business it is to care for souls. And we assert (I think) that that art is politics. Laws 650b

The word “Psychology” did not exist for the Greeks, but this was a part of politics or political philosophy- as we maintain psychology is. Aristotle in writing de Anima comes closest to a separate science of psychology, and we hold that his knowledge of the soul is superior in his Ethics.

Strauss states: “The psychology Aristotle is going to use would have to be rewritten to coincide with the scientific teaching of the soul. Strauss then refers to the Republic, “another and longer road” (Class III on Aristotle’s Ethics).

The longer road is from the three part soul and city, toward the two part treatment as in the Ethics, where the fundamental division is between the rational and irrational parts, intellectual and ethical virtue. This happens to fit well with the two part cosmos of cave and above ground. This division, between two parts of the soul, corresponds to that between “psychosis” and “neurosis” as discussed from Freud, troubles effecting the mind on one hand and the character on the other. To know the health of the soul would seem essential to a scientific psychology.

S. Minkov relates that Strauss addresses the health of the soul in his class on Cicero. We are fond of asking the psychiatrists, “What do you say, is the health of the soul? -of which they diagnose the illness.

We often cite his statement in Natural Right and History referring to the “well ordered soul, the most admirable of all human phenomenon” (p. 124) in reference to the categories of personality disorder in modern psychology- where there is no comparable study of the well ordered soul.

Class on Republic, 1957, p. 53.) “But the considerations underlying medicine are too narrow; there are higher considerations than health and life. Medicine itself must be kept in its place. By whom or by which art must medicine be kept in place? The Platonic argument is that this must be done by the highest art whatever that may be. One might say the medicine of the soul.

Philosophy has been called the medicine of the soul- in the sense in which all men suffer the illness of human burdens.

Republic Class, 1957, p. 60: “Whenever we retell a story and wittingly or unwittingly change it, especially unwittingly, we reveal our character. You have learned this from modern psychology, but apart from this it is even true…”

From The 1960 class on Aristotle’s Politics, Class 15, at 1 hour :13 minutes:

[Same differences when people disagree regarding so called factual thing…disagree regarding facts in every science…the distinction between facts and values is only confusing, and the question seems to be how it came to have so much power…] Simple way of saying…the problem in other words, return to common sense and ignore the Aristotelian and Platonic cosmology. That is the question we discussed in the very first meeting. To some extent it is true, Aristotle’s Ethics is based on his cosmology… His Cosmology has been destroyed. Physics has no place for good and bad…there cannot be any place for value judgements…There is one theoretical science which is in indeed a part of cosmology which is an immediate link between cosmology and political science and that science is called Psychology…The characteristic of Aristotle’ and Plato’s cosmology is that they start from the soul and the mind…The characteristic of modern cosmology is that it starts from the inanimate things, and tries to ascend to…There fore the problem is concentrated in psychology. Is the psychology at the basis of the social sciences scientific? It does not become scientific by the fact that it is experimental.

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on the basis of premises which are…that stem from inanimate things, and in addition unintelligible things.. and brutes, that is the question. but it is a real question and no one has a right to say that we settle it by definition in favor of…Now that is a question, a very great difficulty …difficult problem and absolutely insoluble problem for people like me, I admit,…but there is a difference between very great difficulties and absurdities…the absurdity may be recommended by certain judges, something very difficult which should not surprise us. But what gives us the right to assume that there are simple clues to the fundamental questions. A whole other way of putting the thing…we must think of …cosmology has very much to do…

Student… If a lot of people many centuries ago made absurd assumptions about the universe which didn’t quite fit with,…kind of assumption… analogy, people make this kind of assumption about human behavior…

Strauss: Yea, but the trouble is it is absolutely impossible to show, from the great physical theories developed in modern times …psychology scientific…no such…

Student: some people say…physiology…

We know there is a blank check, renewed all the time,….without anyone having any knowledge of any facts…

impossible to show from the great physical theories, psychology … we must now return to the text (laughter…[1`:16]…

Cannot have the same over the health of his body and possessions…Whether the happiness of the individual is the same as the polis…

Class 17,

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At 25 minutes: …Student: …Argument between Aristotle and the invisible hand position…

Strauss…Sure, there is a close connection. Just as thie invisible hand doctrine says you contribute to the common good by never thinking about it…by…only in a fit of absent mindedness…because they are more likely. they do not preclude the possibility of producing the good. …You can produce a perfect puppy without thinking about it, apparently, or a perfect baby. You cannot bring up a child if you do not know what you want to do to him or her.You cannot produce the good without knowing it, that is Aristotles…That is called rationalism, which is surely a somewhat complicated word. And surely Aristotle is a rationalist, if that is what is meant. People think there was a man called Sigmund Freud who made this amazing discovery that most mean are irrational…I give a crude version of a crude view [laughter], and this condemns to insignificance all previous political thought, which was based on the view that reason was most important……think that these people did not know how unreasonable most men are most of the time. There is plenty of evidence for this view in Aristote’s Politics…but the only question is that men MUST be irrational,…

from 1:33 to the end at 1:42, there is a nice long section at the end of the Aristotle class, following the consideration of music.

the natural state that is the origin of this famous term….the normal, healthy, good state. If you are sick or something…can’t walk…see…

The state of natrue of man is of course the state in which he is in his best condition, and since man is a political animal.when he is a citizen in a good society, and when he is not… much more emphatically used [by the modern thinkers] than in Aristotle…

1:33: The state of nature…the original meaning of the state of nature…the best condition…enormous change in modern times…the most primitive stage….Hobbes Aristotle develops the whole question of the ancients and moderns…

Question…

Now there was one point which I wanted to make in connection with…something Mr. Brown [who is not present (!) …said, but I will omit…

Question student:…

Two lines of approach. the first is that it is not true that all pre-modern thought was in the Aristotelian sense, teleological….When Plato presented his notion of the universe in the Timaeus…different from Aristrotle…the common name for that was the capiscula doctrine….

but not between modern and ancient thought. Number one. Number two, Modern natural science was developed primariy as a doctrine of inanimate beings, the heavenly bodies as well as the terrestrial bodies which are inanimate beings. Think of

And now this doctrine of the inanimate bodies was meant to be the basis of an account of everything, even that thing commonly called the soul. There are great difficulties…And if you read the most intelligent Hobbes impossible to solve it then… Spinoza they developed a certain form of a psychology.the whole thing is in a form abandoned. I can;t go into that.if you take behaviorism, you study ….

The modern.scientist is burdened..to give an account of the human soul..and its actions and its motions. The Aristotelian natural science is open to, grave difficulties, not possible to simply restore…one very great advantage..superior to anything you’ll find in modern science: that it begins not with inanimate bodies, but with the soul, You may think…that may be so..story, the stone fals because it….but on the other hand, we have legitimately a perhaps greater interest in understanding the soul than in understanding the fall of bodies…When you say Final causes..then of course everyone’s back in up against that terrible thing, but if you say tendancies. not so terrible…and that is teleology…

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growth, you need a movement from, to that is a very simple… from which Aristotle starts, and he contends you can never understand it…only one could give us such a notion…the only way to understand the human things is the way of natural science…that is a wholly unwarranted, though prior to investigation plausible.

everyone falls for this notion once in his life…why don’t you do the same thing in the social sciences?…time to time I talk to peope who know these sort of things, psychologists,…what is not known to the ancients…very little…when the baby begins to have the presocial smile,….or perhaps a better account of slips of the tongue…if it is a better account, or of dreams, which he did discuss…does not mean this whole context is a sound one…one will not be able to understand anything, that the human things are not intelligible in these terms…I mean, read any of these scientific studies, see whether they enlighten you….they may contain certain factual things, that finds a very easy place in any psychology any of metaphysics…

motivations of the tyrant..And you know Aristotle has a simple formula..the man who loves wealth and power….Well the first objection one could make…Stalin and Lenin, for a cause, must be considered, and I gave some indications of that, so called ideologies. But Mr. Brown meant something else. He meant such things as Sadism. Ja, Hitler, What motivated him was not these a certain theory about things, the master race…but sadism..Nor was it his desire to eat ten steaks a day…That is a so called psychological explanation..where do you find such delicate things in Aristotle…Now what is a sadist?.I suppose it is a man who.derives pleasure from inflicting pain on other people without consideration of his own advantage..Not merely a ruthless man, advantage at all costs…sexual psychopathology…cruelty, a cruel man…that is not only ruthless, but derives pleasure…that this cruel conduct in a sexual perversion. Is this theory true…or could it not be that even the sexual perversions stem from a more fundamental perversion….how do we know that these kinds of sexual perversions are not the consequence of.a more fundamental perversion that also extends to sex…this particular kind of psychology dismisses this question…Now how can this be understood? There is something wrong with the sadist something wrong with him, sure, but what does this mean? the normal.thing is that one does not derive pleasure…is that one does not derive pleasure from infictiong pain on others…what trauma…make a distinction between 3 very different things….on all others, or on some others, or on a single other..very different cases reference to t5his kind of psychology.would be absurd. …case of revenge. Someone killed x’s father….not sufficient that the law does it…but this kind of revenge…does not…it is one man or some men Some men may be a whole nation…how can one understand a man who hates all other men….Timon of Athens, a misanthropos….society, Personalization of Society, with a capital S. There are people who hate society. I do not believe this…was possible…{end of tape}

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Republic 1957

Strauss comments on the three parts of the soul p. 113-121 is most pertinent, and will be addressed elsewhere.

p. 122 “:…If the legislator does not know the truth about the human heart, he will be a poor legislator. And who teaches him about the human heart? The good poets.”

p. 133

Before going on, however, let us look at Shorey’s note here (page 81):

Plato’s contrast of the two temperaments disregards the possible objection of the psychologist that the adventurous temperament is not necessarily intellectual.

What would he say to that? Do you need a psychologist to say that? Would Plato be ignorant of this very elementary that there are sometimes very boisterous and extroverted characters who are completely unable to think, even for a moment?…What Shorey did not see is that Socrates illustrates here precisely what he means. The context here is the change from Adeimantus to Glaucon….

p. 155: “In the pre-Socratic thought, ultimate reality has nothing to do with dogs and cats. Thus the claim on the part of the Socratics, Plato and Aristotle, as well as some later thinkers, that they alone preserved the phenomenon. They alone do not subvert human life radically by reducing the visible differences to homogeneity. What you find in present day social science is a reflection of this non-Socratic way of thinking. You view the political phenomenon through the non-political phenomena. I call your attention to the use of psychology and sociology in this respect.”

[Hence, a new Socratic psychology can begin from the phenomenon, as modern phenomenological psychology does. The suggestion is that this can be cultivated into a superior psychiatry. and indeed that anything done that actually does serve the goal of healing occurs by beginning from the phenomenon. An example is the treatment Sybil and its relation and lack of relation to Freud]

Class on Nietzsche, University of Chicago Audio

Strauss traces the beginnings of modern psychology of the unconscious to Nietzsche’s critique of Descartes. The Freudian “ego” and Id is derived from

On Aphorism 23 of Beyond Good and Evil, Class 3, pp. 76- U of Chicago transcript:

LS: So psychology—but Nietzsche explains it: he says physiopsychology. And the other point which he does not make here but which he made in an earlier paragraph, [aphorism]20 or thereabouts, where he spoke of the differences of linguistic structures, one could say, and one must say . . . historical physiopsychology, that is what ought to be the fundamental science. And one must come to see whether the psychologies which in away stem from Nietzsche, like Freud and Jung, to what extent they live up to that standard. But Nietzsche says something else: that psychology must or will again become the way to the fundamental problems, that psychology should again be recognized as mistress of the sciences: again. When was psychology the mistress of the sciences? I mean, it obviously excludes logic, which . . . in Nietzsche’s time, that is obviously excluded. But when was psychology recognized as the mistress of the sciences? It is possible, I think, that he thinks of Plato. And it would be most interesting if he thought of Plato, because Plato is the irritant for Nietzsche. Plato brings out of Nietzsche all these strange thoughts and the way in which the thoughts are uttered. But there is this great difference; if we compare Nietzsche’s psychology with Plato’s, what is the Platonic equivalent to the will to power, may I ask? Student: . . .LS: Ya. What makes life life. But what is the Platonic equivalent of the will to power?Same Student: Eros.LS: Eros. Just as simple as that. But here we have the difference. The eros is directed towards, in Nietzsche’s language, eternal values, and the will to power generates values.In Plato there is a self-subsisting order to which the eros is directed. There is no such self-subsisting order in Nietzsche. Therefore Nietzsche’s psychology is beyond good and evil, and Plato’s cannot be said to be [beyond] good and evil, because for Nietzsche there is nothing higher than life, but life can be higher or lower. And therefore psychology can be—I don’t wish to quote this wrongly; in aphorism 19, I believe it is—will as itself must be seized within the circle of morality, within the circle of vision of morality. This remains. There must be a distinction between the higher and lower life, of which there is a sign in the real-life distinction between strong and weak wills. A very inadequate sign,but still it points there, but indeed beyond good and evil.