Here are a few notes for the month of April:
The Nationalism vs. Globalism course continues this week with a lecture on Leo Strauss’ conversation with Alexandre Kojeve over the character of philosophy and the possibility and desirability of a universal and homogenous world state. The audio discussion group will meet again on Sunday, May 1st.
As mentioned in our last update, there will be a new series called “Classical Conversations”. The first one will be with Phocaean Dionysius on Benjamin Constant’s “Comparing the Liberty of the Ancients with that of the Moderns”. If that goes well, we are considering launching a short co-taught course that would next move to Isaiah Berlin’s “The Two Concepts of Liberty”, Leo Strauss’ article “Relativism” which critiques Berlin, and David Sidorsky’s “The Third Concept of Liberty and the Politics of Identity”, which argues that liberty has undergone yet another development. Putting these articles together will allow us to gain conceptual clarity when people use the word liberty and to more starkly clarify the political objectives of the Right and the Left. The conversation on Constant will take place in the first week of May.
The second classical conversation will be with Mrs. MCC on Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and Camille Paglia’s book on the movie. The differences between men and women will be a chief topic, as well as the problem of popularized science. This will take place in the second or third week of May.
I’m toying around with the idea of reading short stories out loud (probably a couple of Hawthorne’s to start with) and then posting short interpretations of them. I would be curious if recording myself reading the story out loud would be a boost or totally unnecessary.
Some fun reading recommendations:
Here is a very cool poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow called a Psalm of Life. Very vitalistic!
If you are looking for Nietzschean inspired literature, Jack London’s The Sea Wolf is something you might find interesting. It it is much denser and more complex than Call of the Wild while building on many of the same things. Humphrey van Weyden, a soft handed literary critic, finds himself shipwrecked and is picked up by Wolf Larsen, a physically powerful amoralist, who forces Humphrey to join his crew. Many big questions are asked: are humans qualitatively different from animals? Does the fear of death felt by those who believe in an immortal soul undermine that belief? How much are we just a product of our ancestors and environment? The book uses the word “world” many times to refer to a bounded area that has its own mores, rules, or way of evaluating life; Humphrey’s past “world” selects for individuals who can manipulate words, but he now finds himself in Wolf’s “world” which selects for physical power and self-reliance. How do we adjudicate between the goodness of different “worlds”? Is there a non-arbitrary way to evaluate them or are we so conditioned by our “world” in such a way that we can’t produce an objective evaluation?
Finally, here is another substack that posts infrequently, but only posts excellent things. It offers an outstanding synthesis of Socratic thinking with New Right thinking. The article below is MUCH more than a mere book review; or, it shows how good a book review can and so ought to be.