Fascinating, I’m excited for your thoughts! Hahaha I’m glad my fixation on a specific German-American philosophical school could be helpful to you! Jaffa has this fascinating sort of secular thomist/scholastic tendency in his thinking to which I would attribute some of his unpleasantness on the subject. There is a straussian tendency to view male/female as the most basic unit of nature and thus to be extremely uncomfortable with attempts to alter that pattern via feminism etc, but this is A: hardly unique to the school, and B: to my knowledge none of the other first generation students made opposition to homosexuality quite as much of a hobby horse as Harry Jaffa.
Yes, the frequency and ferocity with which he attacked the subject certainly seems suspect! But it might just stem from the stubborn instance on reconciling reason and secular faith at the cost of what is in front of one's eyes. I also find the deference to Aquinas difficult to understand on an intuitive level: I was brought up with a strict understanding of sola scriptura and the scriptures obviously point to Jesus as the main event and He did not seem obsessed with questions of gender. From my limited understanding, it does seem like the Straussians exhibited an almost irrational fear of relativism. I read The Closing of the American Mind before I knew anything about Bloom's personal life, but in retrospect it is astounding how he didn't allow himself to admit what a Nietzschean life he was in fact living.
I would say the not admitting is crucial to his practice, although in general if you have a sense of how Straussianism works Closing is at times shockingly frank, almost what the conspiracy theorists call “revelation of method” for Bloom’s worldview, which is probably why Jaffa viciously and homophobically denounced it! Strauss at least exoterically identified relativism as the cause of the various horrors of the twentieth century, and much of his subsequent tradition is (at least exoterically) concerned with trying to encourage nonrelativistic morality. To horrifically generalize, the contention between the Straussians largely circles the question of whether this nonrelativistic morality (natural right) is in fact Truth or if it’s basically an edifying myth to keep the masses from killing each other. Jaffa was in the “Truth” camp, Bloom in the edifying myth.
Fascinating, I’m excited for your thoughts! Hahaha I’m glad my fixation on a specific German-American philosophical school could be helpful to you! Jaffa has this fascinating sort of secular thomist/scholastic tendency in his thinking to which I would attribute some of his unpleasantness on the subject. There is a straussian tendency to view male/female as the most basic unit of nature and thus to be extremely uncomfortable with attempts to alter that pattern via feminism etc, but this is A: hardly unique to the school, and B: to my knowledge none of the other first generation students made opposition to homosexuality quite as much of a hobby horse as Harry Jaffa.
Yes, the frequency and ferocity with which he attacked the subject certainly seems suspect! But it might just stem from the stubborn instance on reconciling reason and secular faith at the cost of what is in front of one's eyes. I also find the deference to Aquinas difficult to understand on an intuitive level: I was brought up with a strict understanding of sola scriptura and the scriptures obviously point to Jesus as the main event and He did not seem obsessed with questions of gender. From my limited understanding, it does seem like the Straussians exhibited an almost irrational fear of relativism. I read The Closing of the American Mind before I knew anything about Bloom's personal life, but in retrospect it is astounding how he didn't allow himself to admit what a Nietzschean life he was in fact living.
I would say the not admitting is crucial to his practice, although in general if you have a sense of how Straussianism works Closing is at times shockingly frank, almost what the conspiracy theorists call “revelation of method” for Bloom’s worldview, which is probably why Jaffa viciously and homophobically denounced it! Strauss at least exoterically identified relativism as the cause of the various horrors of the twentieth century, and much of his subsequent tradition is (at least exoterically) concerned with trying to encourage nonrelativistic morality. To horrifically generalize, the contention between the Straussians largely circles the question of whether this nonrelativistic morality (natural right) is in fact Truth or if it’s basically an edifying myth to keep the masses from killing each other. Jaffa was in the “Truth” camp, Bloom in the edifying myth.
Ah yes, but which? (This in regards to the proverbial "Hello, Norman." I look forward to reading this properly soon!)