Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…You want the best, and the best is in the original text. I don’t think you want to substitute for that original text trying to understand it. You need to pay careful attention to everything that is said in the way that it’s said and in the place that it’s said. Strauss had this concept of what he called logographic necessity. Logographic, meaning where a thing was or what a thing was said by a great books author had to be there. It isn’t an accident. There are no accidents in a great book. Everything is as it should be. To understand it, you don’t want to go to some second-rate explanation that doesn’t take account, or rather departs from, the text. Many people pick up Plato’s Republic, and they come away thinking it’s a mere homage to totalitarianism. Not all of these people are stupid. Karl Popper was not stupid, but I think he read the book completely wrongly. How is it one learns how not to do that today? You can’t study with Strauss. You’re not teaching at Harvard anymore. What does one do? Look for a Straussian or look at Strauss’s books, especially Natural Right and History. That’s the [easiest] one to begin with. Also, Persecution and the Art of Writing, which is his explanation of esoteric writing. Read what others have tried to do before you. As I began with, look for somebody to help. I get a number of emails when people write to ask about things they have seen and ways they would like to go.…

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