“Meier’s claim that Strauss rejects ‘the illusory security of a status quo of comfort and of ease, in holding in low esteem a world of mere entertainment and the mere capacity to be interested’ is also a distortion of Strauss’s thought. Strauss consistently rejects the manner of thinking that holds comfort and ease to be at odds [with] depth and greatness. Strauss rejects, for example, the atheism from (secularized Christian) probity that rejects belief in God because it is comforting or provides ‘illusory security’. Against the existentialists, he questions the identification of Angst, unease, and discomfort with human seriousness and philosophical intransigence. He prefers the taste and sensibility of Jane Austen to that of Dostoevsky. And he appears to endorse the ancient perspective according to which the city at peace, or at rest, is more naturally human, and more conducive to order of human excellence, than the city at war.”—Robert Howse, “The Use and Abuse of Leo Strauss in the Schmitt Revival on the German Right—The Case of Heinrich Meier” (rough draft online).
The “Superman” in the title is, of course, not the superman of the Nazis and Schmitt (to whose thought, in the excerpt above, Strauss’s is being opposed), but the Superman of popular culture—the one generally maligned for being so good as to be boring. Captain America might have done nearly as well. And the only point of putting those “dull” superheroes together with Strauss—and apparently also Jane Austen—and, I would add, G.K. Chesterton—is the celebration of normalcy in which they all, in exceedingly varied ways, engage.
Vive la loi naturelle?
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