“Socrates’ turn to the human taught him that the humans in charge, the males in charge, judge nature to act unbearably toward humans, like a sea always in motion, always threatening humans and human constructs with destruction, always failing to distinguish worthy from unworthy. Xenophon’s images bring to light Socrates’ insight into the male need to master feared and hated nature, to conquer nature. They show Socrates, the student of nature and human nature, learning that he will have to persuade ruling males of what he learned they would dearly want to believe, that nature is not what she seems but wholly otherwise, end-directed for human benefit by caring gods who ensure that the worthy benefit and the unworthy suffer. Socrates has no quarrel with nature, but he teaches a fiction to make it appear that the male quarrel with nature misunderstands nature. To this degree, Socrates’s teleotheology is itself a project to master nature, to rule it conceptually; it is a conquest of nature that orders nature in accord with human wishes; it is a male project, the project of a real real man to conquer nature conceptually—if only exoterically." (Lampert, The Enduring Importance of Leo Strauss, page 126.)
Philosophic politics, like Socrates’, is not foremost about protecting philosophy from the non-philosophers, or protecting the non-philosophers from philosophy, or even helping potential philosophers actualise themselves—let alone about the grand political enterprises dreamt of by the likes of Jakob. The real real man builds his castles in the sky, much like the “real men” build their sandcastles in the path of the waves, but unlike them, he does so precisely for that fleeting show to bring the lasting truth into relief.