I need to say thank you again

[Michael Eisenstadt]

Hans,

A long time ago you found Bury's edition of Plato's Symposium
at a garage sale and bought it to give to me, it being the standard
edition of that dialogue.

As the Symposium is perhaps the most beautiful (thus the most
rereadable) of Plato's dialogues, your book often winds up next
to the bed for reading one self to sleep with.

This is a gift that keeps giving and giving and giving like the
Energizer Bunny. And especially recently as I have in hand a
just published book which is a transcript (from it having been
taped) of a course Leo Strauss gave on the Symposium in 1959
at the U of Chicago.

Leo Strauss who died in 1973 has recently been in the news
because some of the screwball so-called neoconservatives who
have been advising Bush and had been pressing for a war
against Iraq have been claiming that they are Straussites which
is preposterous.

To give you a flavor of the man, here's a quote from the book --

"Crude insolence in Plato's Socrates is impossible. In Aristophanes'
Socrates it is a bit different. Here he is always well behaved. As I
mentioned before when we discussed irony: irony noticed by the
one who is being ironized is insolence. Try this experiment and you
will see that this is true. Irony is a very interesting phenomenon
because its primary inspiration is humanity, of course. Not to hurt
other people by showing one's own superiority -- this is the
primary meaning of irony in higher sense of the word. But if this is
noticed, if the superior man is indelicate, stupid in his irony, then
he hurts someone. We, who have so much time to read this at
leisure, can of course find out what the people present at the
moment could not. They couldn't rehear it, they couldn't say, as
a student I knew said, repeat that sentence you just said and
repeat it again."

Fantastic students there must have been at the U of Chicago.

Mike