That was quite the post. I hope you will forgive me if I can’t do it justice. There is a second reason besides your eloquent expression of ideas that might hold me back from an adequate response.
In this I know your mode of expression to be necessary for our age, as I mentioned in my first comment on this thread about philosophy reuniting with poetry. I had learned about their separation first through Strauss and some of his students who write on the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry. What keeps me from it is my personal history which is too long and tortuous to adequately express here, but suffice it to say it is something I have not yet had the strength to overcome.
This is relevant to your comment, I assure you, despite its seeming obscurity.
I think your recognition of thumos is astute and relevant to thoughts I’ve been having about eros, but I have no doubt what’s kept me from coming to any such connection of my own. Without going into it too much and so probably leaving it unhelpfully obscure at the risk of misunderstanding, I have a bad inner nature, and much of my growth has arisen from holding my instincts and inclinations at bay, including my drift towards philosophy.
I learned from Joseph Cropsey, another student of Strauss and Plato, that though the city contradicts us and angers our deeper nature, the city is also the place that allows us to practice philosophy and seek the good. For that reason I am trying to balance my relation to the city, while not allowing the city to inhibit the good it could otherwise nurture.
I also learned from Plato that poetry and even myth contain in them something closer to experience that technical philosophizing and description can never get at. In this I value them. But as my relation to pure experience is itself wounded, this is for me an issue as yet incomplete.
I hope that might suffice to explain why I cannot do your post justice.
This actually reminds me of the teaching of Plato, particularly in the Theatetus and The Statesman. In the former he teaches the incommensurability of knowledge, that is never complete, and how an incomplete knowledge causes an inevitable incomplete knowledge of parts which would be known in full in their relation to the whole. In The Statesman the eleactic strange talks about the inadequacy of theory to account for what takes place, for the the statesman must act beyond law using prudence or phronesis to deal with situations as they arise.
Also I believe it is the Symposium, but I may be wrong, Plato brings in the term metaxy, which is a term meaning a sort of ‘in-between’ state, and referrs to the way that concept and speech can only point to the greater whole but never describe it. This idea plays a significant role in the writings of Eric Voegelin.
My opinion is that you should go with what you feel, so if you find that you don’t like Strauss and your time would be better placed somewhere else, then that will probably serve you best.
If you’re interested in trying him out, you might consider reading some of his essays available free online first and seeing if you are interested in reading more.
Essays I found of particular interest are Existentialism, found here:
https://archive.org/details/StraussOnHeidegger
You will find it in one of the pdf links, the essay from that page relativism is also interesting but there is a degree of overlap between it and the Existentialism essay.
The Three waves of Modernity, here:
https://archive.org/details/HeideggerAndStraussOnNietzscheAndModernity
again, one of the pdf links.
If you’re interested, these are also good essays
https://archive.org/details/LeoStraussOnLiberalEducation
and
https://archive.org/details/LeoStraussOnEsotericismExotericism
The latter are about esotericism/exotericism, which are helpful if you feel you’d like to explore his writing more.
I became interested in Leo Strauss from reading a critique of him in the work of Sheldon Wolin, who follows Shadia Drury (who I have not read) in his criticism. They see Strauss as elitist and as a figure behind the inspiration for the Bush administration, an administration I am not personally fond of, not that I am fond of any modern politics. There may be some truth to that claim, but there is much to gain from reading reading Strauss, and I now find Wolin’s criticism a little naiive.
About the moralizing in Leo Strauss, I always took that to be his exotericism, but that might just have been a personal quirk of mine which influenced how I read him.
If you feel you would like to explore more of Strauss and his school, you could consider looking into the books Natural Right and History, or On Tyranny, both by Strauss himself. By his student Stanley Rosen, the book Plato’s Statesman: The Web of Politics is worthwhile, also Joseph Cropsey’s Plato’s World, and Nietzsche and Modern Times, by Laurence Lampert.
Lampert is more of a Nietzsche scholar than a Straussian, but he has written a couple of books about Strauss and there is a strong influence of Strauss in all of his work. The way he portrays it, Strauss is actually following Nietzsche, though returning to Plato rather than following him strictly. I think Lampert criticizes Strauss’s methods of using esotericism (not that he does it, but the way he does it). I actually incline more towards Plato now, though I find Lampert very illuminating. Lampert also points out how it was Nietzsche who first brought up the way that philosophers used to write esoterically in his book Beyond Good and Evil.
It was actually from searching the net to see if anyone was discussing Lampert that I found this forum, because I found posts where Sauwelios was discussing him. I have never actually conversed with Sauwelios here though.
In Strauss’s essay The Three Waves of Modernity (linked above) he talks about something like those ages, except he begins at Machiavelli and includes Rouseeau as the second between Machiavelli and Nietzsche, which I think makes sense considering Rousseau’s impact on the French Revolution.
But in The History of Political Philosophy Strauss wrote how he believes that writers had included political philosophy in their texts as early as Homer, and Strauss’s student Seth Benardete later did a study of The Odyssey which sought to uncover just that, together with Lampert’s writing on Plato, I see exactly what is meant by the ages of Homer, Plato, Machiavelli, and Nietzsche. I’m not sure if it was the intention in that expression, but I wouldn’t personally see those ages as mutually exclusive.
I could probably write a whole second reply to your post, and I think I did least justice to your poetry, but I think that much of it stands on its own, and besides I fear you might take my responses as unduly vulgar and politic, so I suppose it is my political maneuver here to dodge it entirely.