Strauss Quotes

“Even before the First World War there was a strain in European art and music – in Germany more than anywhere – that was turning from ripeness to over-ripeness and then into something else. The last strains of the Austro-German Romantic tradition – exemplified by Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss and Gustav Klimt – seemed almost to have destroyed itself by reaching a pitch of ripeness from which nothing could follow other than complete breakdown. It was not just that their subject matter was so death-obsessed, but that the tradition felt as though it could not be stretched any further or innovated any more without snapping. And so it snapped: in modernism and then post-modernism.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“It had been an implication of phenomenology to distinguish between the scientific view of [the] world (the view, elaborated by modern science) and the natural view of the world, the idea being that that natural view is prior to, and the1 basis of, the scientific view: the scientific view of the world I emerges out of the natural view by virtue of a specific modification of approach. Now it became clear that that basic view, the starting point of the view elaborated by modern science, more precisely: that the world as it is present for, and experienced by, that natural view, had been the subject of Plato's and Aristotle's analyses. Plato and Aristotle appeared to have discussed adequately what had not been discussed by the founders of modern philosophy, nor by their successors. For Hegel had indeed attempted to understand "the concrete," the phenomena themselves, but he had tried to "construct" them by starting from the "abstract." Whereas this was precisely the meaning of the Socratic turning: that science must start from the known, from the "known to us," from what is known in ordinary experience, and that science consists in understanding what is known indeed, but not understood adequately. (E.g. to deny motion, is "madness," for 8i]llov E� E-rraywyfis; but Ti Ecnt KiVT)Aristotle.”
― Leo Strauss