Extensions of the themes I have initiated: More Reflections
My reason for raising issues of this nature arose out of my work on Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, which culminated in an M.A. thesis that I wrote on them at Northern Illinois University(titled "Theological Politics v. Philosophical Politics: Eric Voegelin, Leo Strauss and the Reorientation of Political Science"; it is available at Northern Illinois University's Founders Memorial Library); after writing it, I had many more questions about the origins of the work that both Strauss and Voegelin did, and was especially interested in the question of the degree to which these thinkers were oriented in their thought by such thinkers as Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, Alexander Kojeve, and Friedrich Nietzsche. I then began work on this topic, and joined the department at NIU in pursuit of the doctorate in which program I am still enrolled (though I have taken a semester off). I have written a preliminary dissertation of about a hundred pages, but I am not satisfied with it: Although It gets, I feel certain, quite a good deal right about Strauss and his relationship to Nietzsche, it is wholly unsatisfactory to me as it stands; in addition to that I have written a long essay on Strauss, Heidegger, Neitzsche, Neo-conservatism and its relationship (quite intimate in my view) with German Idealism—which is more a questioning of these themes, and, itself, deeply flawed in its conclusions; nevertheless, I think that It provides a good starting point for examining the thought of this group of thinkers, and I try to show the relationship between them, the University of Chicago and the Vienna Circle: Nothing I say there is decisive, for political philosophy is questioning, not giving final answers; but without any starting points we would get nowhere—and there, in those works I have provided the beginings of what I hope eventually will be an interpretation of Western Political Philosophy, and its culmination in a certain kind of (in my view radical) German Idealism. Above all the provisional nature of this work is obvious, but I tend to write in a somewhat inspired manner and so am given to hyperbolic formulations (all of that needs to be kept in mind when the other material is read). My initial conviction—subject to modification—is that the thinkers of the University of Chicago created, in a sense, the political horizon of contemporary American and European politics;Strauss founded, or revived, the tradition of political philosophy, and Kojeve, in my view, founded (though Nietzsche is the fountainhead of both) Hermeneutics and the economics that today unifies Europe; if anybody should like to read these works they can find them on myspace at the following link, but again I would like to emphasize that they are provisional, and I have deep reservations about them, especially with respect to my Nietzscean view of Strauss; I think I too closely assimilated the one to the other in the preliminary dissertation work, and there is a Nietzsche essay there as well as some other writings(caution read with care, critical intelligence, not hostility:—http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog&friendID=287982265
