Carlo Altini: Philosophy as Stranger Wisdom: A Leo Strauss Intellectual Biography. Albany: SUNY Press, 2022.
Plato’s Athenian Stranger is a stranger because he is a foreigner in Magnesia, where the dialogue of the Laws takes place. More generally, Altini writes, “due to his nature, the philosopher is a stranger at home” as well as abroad, “belong[ing] to the city without however completely identifying in the citizen,” an exile wherever he is. If one believes “that knowledge is provisional,” not settled, that “the foundations of human life are a mystery,” not revealed, and that “the complexity of the world is irreducible,” not fully manipulable by human beings, then he will find a home neither in the city of man, the city of God, nor the city of Utopia as conceived by modern philosophy. Philosophy is rather “search for, not control of, truth.” The Apostle Paul ridicules certain women, latter-day Eves led astray by evil men, as persons who are “forever learning, never able to come to the knowledge of the truth” (2 Timothy 3:7). Manly, soldier-like Paul—who finds no meaningful distinction between philosophy and sophistry because each demurs when confronted with the things of God—evidently finds the way of life of zetetic inquiry a Hell-bound way, a way of life animated by the wrong kind of love, erotic rather than agapic. Machiavelli would later concur, as regards the philosophy of Plato, while adding Christianity to the list of womanish preoccupations. In contrast, Leo Strauss, admiring Socrates, considered that “philosophy has an intrinsically edifying character, showing the primacy of contemplative life over practical life, of comprehension over engagement.” In this book, Altini traces the course of Strauss’s life, showing how each way of life he encountered, including those he considered for himself, raised questions leading to further inquiry. Philosophy is therefore “stranger wisdom,” the wisdom of those who turn their souls to “the search of the truth on being” and thus take a critical stance toward “any established authority, any normative habit, any political myth, any social custom, and any religious tradition.” But this stance is not often openly critical, scoffing, because the Platonic philosopher is politic, understanding that the philosophic way of life must be practiced within the political way of life, within whatever city of man and of God he finds himself. Altini suggests that “in Strauss’s thought, political conservatism is the other face of the coin of philosophical radicalism.” “Moderation is not a virtue of thought, since thought has to be radical. However, its public expression has to be moderate, due to the problems posed by persecution, social responsibility, and the necessities of material life.”
Strauss did not begin with that stance. Just the opposite. His furtive reading of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche during his Gymnasium years showed him an alternative to the orderly regime of the Kaiser and “the traditionalist and nationalist” (i.e., German-nationalist, assimilationist) Jewish community of the Marburg region in Germany. Thus, although remaining confident in the prevailing hopes for the liberal humanism of German schools, he already knew the arguments of its critics, their animadversions against bourgeois dullness. And, as it happened, not only dullness: the Kaiserreich disintegrated in the Great War. In the war’s last year, Strauss served as a medical assistant; unlike many German civilians, who could not understand why Germany surrendered, he saw the results of carnage wreaked by modern battlefield technology. Nietzsche’s apocalyptic predictions were right; the Last Man was not only an imbecile but a dangerous, self-ruining imbecile. The modern liberal project of turning Jews into Last Men, of making them like all the other Germans, had also failed. He became attracted to political radicalism, but not to the radicalism of the Left, which “appeared to him a radicalization of liberal democracy.” And so, he turned to political Zionism, “convinced that the ideals of German humanism, which he had loved during his school years, were part of a glorious past, now dead and incapable of providing nourishment.” His university studies put him under the tutelage of the neo-Kantian thinkers, Ernst Cassirer and Hermann Cohen, themselves the intellectual progeny of the Enlightenment-era Jewish philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn. As Strauss later wrote, Cohen “belonged definitely to the pre-World War I world,” politically, and had no good answer to “the emergence and ever-increasing power of phenomenology,” of Husserl’s critique of modern rationalism. Neo-Kantianism was anything but vital, by then. Both political and philosophic modernism had failed. “Husserl had realized more profoundly than anybody else that the scientific understanding of the world, far from being the perfection of our natural understanding, is derivative from the latter in such a way as to make us oblivious of the very foundations of the scientific understanding: all philosophic understanding must start from our common understanding of the world, from our understanding of the world as sensibly perceived prior to all theorizing,” Strauss wrote. Heidegger’s lectures on Aristotle’s Metaphysics pushed Heidegger’s insight still further, showing that “our primary understanding of the world is not an understanding of things as objects but of what the Greeks indicated by pragmata, things which we handle and use.”
Meanwhile, in his political thought Strauss turned to the political Zionism of Vladimir (‘Ze’ev’) Jabotinsky, against Martin Buber’s softer cultural Zionism and Max Nordau’s spiritualist neo-Orthodoxy. Strauss wrote several articles for Zionist newspapers; while sympathetic, he did not conceal his misgivings about political Zionism’s lack of “cultural awareness and intellectual depth.” When he met Jabotinsky and attempted to steer the conversation toward the Bible, Jewish history, and political theory, “Jabotinsky abruptly interrupted him, asking him about his ability with guns”—a query very much in keeping with one of Jabotinsky’s most famous monitions, “Jewish youth, learn to shoot.” For his part, “Strauss did not show any interest for the practical and organizational aspect of Zionist policies,” and became increasingly impatient with political Zionism’s poorly conceived atheism, which substituted secular nationalism for Judaism. Against its own intention, political Zionism “strengthened the de-Judaizing tendencies of emancipation,” “being modern itself,” attempting to make Jews “a people like all the others” even as it rejected the assimilationist ambition to make Jews like all the other Germans, Jews, Englishmen, and so on. “Zionism considered emancipation at a community level, liberalism considered at the level of the single citizen’s rights,” but “the substance remained the same, a conception of “the Jewish issue as a purely human and social issue neglecting the essential aspect of Jewish tradition: faith.” For their part, his Zionist colleagues began to lose patience with the young man’s “sarcastic and aggressive tone” toward them.
Buber’s cultural Zionism was no better. Cultural Zionism “interprets the Jewish legacy a human and national culture.” But Judaism isn’t a culture, at all. It is “a divine gift and revelation, the meaning of which ends up being completely distorted once it is interpreted in the sense of ‘culture.'” While the founding of a modern state of Israel was a good thing, it cannot solve “the Jewish problem,” which is fundamentally unsolvable. “Human beings can only solve finite problems, not infinite ones, and, for this reason, they will never be able to create a society void of contradictions.” This holds true for Zionism, but also for Marxism, liberalism—all the ‘isms.’ As Strauss impishly put it, the Jews are indeed the Chosen People—the people “chosen to prove the absence of redemption.” And so, reading Franz Rosenzweig’s Hegelian ‘correction’ of his teacher, Hermann Cohen, and neo-Kantianism, Strauss immediately saw historicism with a Jewish inflection as yet another form of secularist modernism. Such a putative return to Judaism wasn’t authentically Jewish, and therefore no return at all.
“All that the young Strauss was left with was orthodoxy, the sole legitimate representative of Jewish traditional faith” in sharp contrast to Jewish neo-Kantianism and Jewish neo-Hegelianism. “Still, an eminent obstacle weighed on orthodoxy: Spinoza.” Strauss asked a “simple and audacious” question: “did the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus—that is, modern Enlightenment—really refute Jewish orthodoxy?”
“German Jews considered [Spinoza] the emblem of their emancipation.” Spinoza wanted the freedom to philosophize; he saw the path to that freedom in a kind of political freedom, namely, “the State’s freedom from ecclesiastical pretensions,” now called the separation of church and state, along with “the constitution of a liberal democracy” as distinguished from either a tyranny of one ruler or a tyranny of many rulers, ‘majority tyranny’ of the sort that inflicted the death penalty on Socrates. Spinoza wanted to guarantee freedom of inquiry, “rendering it independent from both temporal and ecclesiastical powers”; one element of that guarantee was “to show that the Scriptures cannot be an authority to limit freedom of research.” To do so, Spinoza needed to depart from Orthodox Judaism. Claims that liberalism can be derived from a continuous Judaic tradition cannot be true, instead evidencing what Strauss calls “the typical mistake of the conservative, which consists in concealing the fact that the continuous and changing tradition which he cherishes so greatly would never have come into being through conservatism.” Spinoza sees that “the foundation of the liberal State requires the abrogation of the limiting character of the Mosaic Law,” a law limiting Jews because it prevents their assimilation into any given state as rights-bearing individuals (liberalism) or within their own sovereign state among other states (nationalism). Indeed, Spinoza teaches that the foundation of the liberal State requires the abrogation of the limiting character of religious law generally, “against revealed religion in all forms, including Christianity.” Any “return to Judaism” would be possible only “after having completed a confutation of Spinoza, i.e., of modern rationalism.”
But was modern rationalism adequate to its purpose? In Berlin, where he and his wife lived between 1925 and 1932, Strauss continued and deepened his friendship with Jacob Klein. Klein, too, had studied Heidegger, taking his work to allow “a return to classical Greek philosophy and especially the possibility to make a radical distinction between ancient and modern,” especially between ancient and modern rationalism. Strauss, however, found Heidegger’s understanding of Plato and of ancient philosophy generally unpersuasive, “not a true return,” any more than Cohen and Rosenzweig had effected a true return to Judaism, but “a radicalization of modernity that abandoned the level of philosophical rationality” altogether. Heidegger extended and further radicalized Nietzsche, with whose writings Strauss had himself become, by his own account, intoxicated in the second half of the 1920s. With his characteristic themes of angst, resolution, and authenticity, Heidegger opposed modern rationalism, valorizing the will, ‘existentialism,’ decision, and the consequent abandonment of “the idea of truth,” the ancients’ quest for being. “While for the classics ‘being’ meant ‘being always,’ for Heidegger ‘being’ mean ‘existing,'” the things that change, ‘history.’ Existentialism opposes theory in the classical sense, “necessitat[ing] a radical criticism of contemplative life” in favor of the human freedom to create meaning, a freedom made possible by the recognition that being is nothing permanent.
German liberalism was embodied by the weak and philosophically shallow Weimar Republic, with its mechanistic, modern rationalism already seen as potentially destructive in the Great War, its politics consisting of egalitarian homogenization and government by bureaucracy. Even at the university level, the regime never went beyond neo-Kantianism and neo-Hegelianism, both derived from Spinozian rationalism. These hardly sufficed when confronted with the irrationalism of Nietzsche and Heidegger. And if irrationalism gave rise to a radical Rightist politics likely to threat European Jews and Gentiles alike, what then? Strauss “began to sense that modern reason was not the sole model of rationality, since the querelle des anciens et des moderns precisely regarded two different models of rationality: the first, the pre-modern one, founded on moderate skepticism (which he later defined zetetic); the other, the modern one, based on a dogmatic skepticism.” Could the older model of rationality avoid the self-destruction suffered by modern rationalism? To address this question, he took “two different and complementary directions”: first, to study medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophy “as bearer of a different model of rationalism” than that of the moderns; additionally, to deepen his study of modern rationalism by considering Hobbes, Spinoza’s precursor,” the philosopher “most representative of the modern conceptions of natural right.” Eventually, he would go behind the Jewish and Islamic philosophers to Plato, and behind Hobbes to Machiavelli. “The distinctive trait of Strauss’s thought,” even when preoccupied by theological and political concerns, remained “his substantially rational nature.”
In the early 1930s, Strauss considered Hobbes as the first philosopher to “determine the specific modern concept of culture, visible in the conception of the civil state as opposed to the natural state.” By civilization, Hobbes mean “a rationally based cohabitation of humanity,” founded on a ‘social contract,’ “which works with the aid of scientific progress until it becomes a community of production and consumption,” a community designed to overcome the nature in which man initially finds itself, a nature hostile to his very survival. Critics of modern liberalism, contemptuous of “bourgeois individualism,” never really address the philosophic challenge Hobbes mounts both to ‘ancient’ reason and to revelation. They fail to see how Hobbes (and also Descartes) not only practice skepticism with regard to religion (which everyone who has eyes to see, sees) but replaces religious dogmatism with “scientific dogmatism,” a dogmatism animated by “the faith according to which the human being can progress towards every greater freedom by subduing nature,” a conquest that “ends in nihilism” in theory (Nietzsche) and in practice (the Great War). “Strauss’s confrontation with Hobbes was not the result of an occasional historical or philosophical choice, but rather of the necessity to confront the highest expression of the philosophical-political paradigm of modernity.”
The philosophic core of Hobbes’s theory consists of a critique of both Scripture and Aristotle. “Strauss identifies the moral —not scientific—basis that lies at the foundations of Hobbes’s political theory and of the entire modern political philosophy.” Before the age of forty, Hobbes had thought within a framework set by Scholasticism and Puritanism in religion, the Renaissance Humanists in philosophy, and “the aristocratic atmosphere in which he lived.” But the modern scientific project envisioned by Francis Bacon reoriented Hobbes away from the high-minded, ‘aristocratic’ conception of virtue upheld by Aristotle, toward the more ‘do-able’ task of conquering nature for the relief of man’s estate, and thus towards a morality of usefulness. In this, the Christian and especially Puritan critique of aristocratic honor—that it is only pride issuing in endless fighting, never in peace—holds firm. For Hobbes, however, there is no God who punishes the prideful. Men punish themselves; not fear of God but fear of men, and especially of men inflated with pride, suffices to sober them. In Strauss’s words, “the most important and most difficult task is then to show how the project of a mechanistic-deterministic account of nature arises from this new moral principle,” namely, the fear of violent death. That is, in Hobbes’s philosophy, the moral principle is rationally prior to the mechanistic science. The moral principle in question is “right as distinct from the ancient concept of law.” But law provides a standard, a criterion of moral judgment; fear of violent death is only a passion, not a reason; it provides civilization with no foundation “that has the stature of truth.” “Strauss identifies in Hobbes’s theory of passions the roots of liberalism and modern culture, because the individualistic character of natural right constitutes a turning point in respect to Platonic and Aristotelian theories of natural law.” Modern natural rights are, in Strauss’s words, “subjective claims, originating in the human will,” neither in the will of God (divine law and the Scholastics’ version of natural law) nor in the natural law of the ‘ancients,’ pervading the cosmos that envelops and pervades human nature. In this, Hobbes rejects Aristotelian teleology; nature has no purpose, human beings no perfection, the summum bonum having been replaced by the summum malum—again, the fear of violent death, an egalitarian passion, one shared by all human beings who are honest with themselves. This is the moral foundation not only of modern science but of modern liberalism: “If the State does not have the function of promoting virtue or good, but rather that of safeguarding the natural right of each human being, then the State’s power finds its limit in the individual natural right, unpassable and inviolable,” but only so long as one ignores the nihilism beneath the surface of scientific rationalism at the service of moral irrationalism. Reason serves the passions, looking for sensible ways of self-preservation, which Hobbes finds in the mighty Leviathan, monarchic because any other regime permits dissent, inevitably leading to factional dispute and ending in the return of the war of all against all, the ‘state of nature,’ and commercial because peaceful commerce re-channels human ambition into the more modest, ‘bourgeois’ intention to make a buck. “The passage from vanity to fear represents the passage from [warlike] aristocratic virtue to [peaceful] bourgeois virtue” whose objects are utility, peace, security. “Work and accumulation, commerce and industry, freedom and capital are the characteristics of the modern ideal of civilization.”
The moral basis of Hobbesian philosophy notwithstanding, “the clear awareness of the deep fracture with philosophic tradition that is implied in Hobbes’s new and revolutionary moral conception only surfaces with his discovery of Euclid.” To empower man, to make his conquest of hostile nature complete, one needs a political science of surpassing precision, as seen in geometric proofs. But why would Hobbes suppose that geometry, one of the most ‘abstract’ forms of reasoning there is, could account for the actions of a nature said to be exclusively material? He pointed to Galileo, who showed that the planets, material bodies, move in predictable geometric patterns. Strauss, however, identified a more troublesome problem, a problem for Hobbes’s political science: “exact passionless mathematics is indifferent to passions; exact passionless political philosophy is in conflict with the passions.” Unless political scientists can show that human passions act like planets, they won’t really be ‘doing science.’ This has indeed been a persistent attempt of, and a persistent difficulty for, political scientists and of ‘social science’ generally, for the past several centuries, a discipline that has achieved very mixed results.
Finally, Hobbes’s anthropology opens philosophy to Nietzsche’s ripostes. According to Galileo, nature has no purpose; it just goes around in circles (or ‘epicycles’). For political philosophy, this “requires the systematic elimination of the issue of the State’s purpose” in terms of a rationally discernible good, a move that “is clear in [Hobbes’s] subordination of natural law to natural right.” Human beings deploy reasoning as a means to ends proposed by the passions; morality becomes a matter of the impassioned will. As a result, people learn to be morally impressed by resolution. The crisis of nihilism awaits, inherent in modern moral and political philosophy from the outset.
Strauss thus began to wonder if the problem wasn’t rationalism itself (as Nietzsche proclaimed) but the modern use of reason. He had already been studying Maimonides on the theological-political question, in a successful attempt to get away from the superficial understanding of Jewishness seen in political Zionism and also to confront the serious challenge to philosophy posed by Orthodox Judaism. Central to Judaic claims to know is prophecy. In Maimonides, he saw for the first time that there was an older model of rationalism, one “capable of identifying a balance between philosophical radicalism and political conservativism, between the search for truth and the necessity to accept common opinions, between philosophy and the city, between Athens and Jerusalem.” In considering the claims of prophecy with Maimonides as his guide, he saw that revealed religion posited not so much a philosophic theory but a political regime. A regime is, among other things, a form of government that ‘channels’ citizens in a way of life towards one or more purposes. Forms, ways, and purposes are rationally discernible and possible to reinforce with laws. Strauss addresses these matters in one of his least known books, Philosophy and Law, published in 1936, a book “in which Strauss builds, through an original reading of medieval philosophy, a strong philosophical and political interpretation of modernity,” a book in which he “seriously takes into account the impossibility of an immediate return to orthodox Judaism (the theoretical foundations of which are undermined by Enlightenment), as well as the impossibility of accepting the relativism resulting from the transformation of modern rationalism into historicism, i.e., modern sophistry.” He “began to think” that not only Maimonides but the Islamic and Greek philosophers addressed “the idea of the divine Law intended as a unique and total law that was, at the same time, religious, political and moral law.” Maimonides and his Islamic predecessors in philosophy—especially al-Farabi—take as their “central theme” not “the opposition between faith and knowledge, but between philosophy and Law,” a “Law that aims at its own perfection as well as that of humankind.” And behind these philosophers stands Plato, author of The Laws, a book that “provides medieval thinkers the starting point whence they can philosophically understand revelation, thus expressing the philosophical, skeptical, foundation of faith in revelation.” Maimonides appreciated the need for “the legal foundation of philosophy, a justification of philosophy in front of revelation,” God’s revelation of His comprehensive Law, and hence His regime. But Maimonides went further, “consider[ing] the necessity of the philosophical foundation of the Law, because the practical usefulness of the revelation cannot disregard the supremacy of theoretical life over political life.” That is, prophetology is “the place where the Law becomes an object of philosophy.”
And because any philosophic foundation will unsettle unphilosophic minds, the overwhelming majority of minds in any city, philosophers who consider that foundation will need a measure of reticence when they speak and write. Prophets, Maimonides teaches, need to employ “a metaphorical and imaginative language” in justifying the law before the bar of public opinion. Unlike the philosophes of the modern Enlightenment, who attempt to bring philosophic truths to everyone but end up in oversimplifying philosophy, turning it into ‘ideology,’ “Maimonides and his Islamic predecessors are skeptical thinkers, rationalist philosophers who deal with the relationship between philosophy, politics, and religion in a perspective that is at the same time (privately) radical and (publicly moderate, clearly different from the moderns’ anti-religious radicalism.” This can be done ‘in good faith’ because “the purpose of the Law coincides with the purpose of philosophy: the happiness of the human being, rendered possible by knowledge of truth, gain through contemplative life.” This contrasts with modern rationalism, which takes human purposes as irrational, a matter of the passions, and so makes reason primarily practical, not contemplative-theoretical. Prophecy aims at establishing “good legislation and a rightful government” aimed at the “moral and spiritual perfection of the human being.” “The purpose of prophecy is essentially political because the prophet has the duty to establish a society inside which the human being may attain its supreme perfection: theoretical life.” That not all, or even many, human beings will do so at a given time in a given regime does not mean that ‘the few’ are out to injure ‘the many,’ inasmuch as their philosophic inquiries in no way exploit their fellow citizens by conceiving of themselves as masters and ‘the many’ as slaves. Following Maimonides’ guidance, Strauss leaves that sort of claim to Nietzsche and Heidegger. Genuinely politic, prudent philosophers know that “theory, not politics, is the greatest good,” but they also know that “politics, not theory, is the ‘first’ good, because the human being, as a political animal, can only live inside a society.”
Against the modern claims that civilization is man’s much-needed improvement of what nature gives him—a life that is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short—and that religion is a failed or at best inadequate claim, within this cultural-civilizational effort, to produce such improvement, Strauss argues that “religion cannot be sufficiently understood inside the concept of culture, which expresses a way for the human spirit to produce, while religion is not a product of the human being, but it is given to it.” According to the prophets, speaking to ‘the many,’ religious revelation is given by God, the political regime given by God. According to the philosophers who lived before the modern philosophic project took hold, “religion and politics are the facts that transcend culture” because human beings are political animals by nature. Whether given by God or by nature or by God through nature, politics is a ‘given.’ Philosophers properly start their thinking with it and within it.
What Altini calls “stranger wisdom” comes in practical-prudential as well as philosophic form. Strauss demonstrated it, repeatedly, during the 1930s, always staying two steps ahead of the Nazis—in France, where he moved a year before Hitler came to power (he made several interesting friends and acquaintances there, including the Russian émigré, Alexander Kojève, while disliking the “disorderly Parisian way of life) and then in Great Britain (where he was pleased by the “measured political life,” “the sobriety of its literature”—especially the novels of Austen and Thackeray—and “the image of the gentleman,” but where he had no friends, except for Hans Jonas, and could find no secure academic appointment). He moved to the United States in 1937, an event Altini relates near the center of the book, as it did amount to a sort of hinge in his life, America being the place where he became a citizen, attracted students, and published his most important books. Many of his family members died in the Holocaust.
Teaching at the New School for Social Research throughout the war years, Strauss deepened his appreciation for al-Farabi. He had already understood that al-Farabi is no neo-Platonist doctrinaire, as some scholars had claimed, but “a skeptical philosopher,” alert to the “opposition between reason and revelation, philosophy and religion,” a man who effected “a fundamental turning point in the history of political philosophy,” decisively influencing both Islamic, Jewish, and Christian philosophers by teaching them the Platonic dialectic “between esotericism” or philosophic inquiry and “exotericism” or “reticent” writing “that characterizes all pre-modern philosophical-political thought.” Studying the Farabian texts in more detail, now, Strauss now came to understand how radically skeptical the philosopher was, how he deserves the honor of being considered “the founder of philosophy in the context of revealed religion and as Plato’s ‘heir.'” This discovery, and others like it, “consolidated” his critique of historicism, as it showed that the outward conformity of philosophers to the prevailing opinions of their times and places scarcely served as evidence for the claim that they were ‘products’ of those times and places. Given the way in which al-Farabi learned from Plato, and subsequent philosophers learned from both, Strauss concluded that “the essence of classical philosophy (in particular of Platonic and Aristotelian politike episteme) was not Greek, but rather universal,” and quite capable of “radically contest[ing] the Cartesian subjectivist foundation” of modern rationalism and the geometric-materialist reductionism of Hobbesian morality and the political science derived from that morality.
Although Strauss had little doubt that Germany would lose the Second World War, he saw that German philosophy was “colonizing” other Western countries, including the United States. This was conspicuously the case at the New School, which had been founded twenty years earlier by John Dewey and others who had been influenced by Hegel, Marx, and other historicist thinkers, ‘Right’ and ‘Left.’ Although German nihilism primarily occurred among philosophers of the ‘Right,’ German progressivism animated the ‘Left,’ which accounts for what Altini mistakenly calls “an internal contradiction of Straussian thought.” The supposed contradiction is that Strauss criticized “the political foundations of German culture that allowed the advent of Nazi barbarism” while criticizing “liberal and democratic modernity,” betraying “a certain sympathy towards the radicalism of right-wing thinkers against the domination of technique and economics that characterized Europe in the early twentieth century, in both its capitalist and communist version,” its “denunciation of mechanization and rationalization.” As Altini himself has already made clear, sympathy toward a radical critique of modernity does not mean the endorsement of such critiques in the forms they have actually taken—forms which, as Altini has noticed, often unwittingly partake of the ‘modern’ assumptions their authors intend to overturn.
Altini well describes Strauss’s main accomplishment during his years in America, his recovery of Platonic political philosophy by exegesis of Platonic writings themselves, unmediated by Maimonides and al-Farabi, although he continued to study both of the later philosophers throughout this period. In considering the Platonic dialogues, Strauss saw that Plato had found an answer to philosophy’s dilemma. While Socrates’ way of life, interrogating and thereby offending his fellow citizens with regard to their theological-political convictions, a way of life leading to his death, Plato saw that writing, particularly “reticent” writing, could enable a philosopher to continue his inquiries while staying alive. For his part, in best-known book, Natural Right and History, Strauss addresses his American fellow-citizens less in terms of divine or natural law, more in terms of natural right—that is, in terms Americans then revered. He distinguished, however, between modern and “classical” natural right, even as he had distinguished between “ancient” law and modern ‘rights.’ In this, he was aided by his discovery of the ‘modern’ who preceded even Hobbes and Descartes—Machiavelli, who does not dwell upon rights of any kind. The root of modern ‘rights’ in the unrighteous Florentine cleared the way for a critique of modern nihilism that does not depend upon the valorization of law as either divinely or naturally ordained, while providing a non-legalist and at the same time non-relativist criterion for moral and political thought and practice.
During these years, Strauss was able to show how later ‘moderns’ transformed Machiavelli’s teaching without altering its core. This is the argument of his 1959 book, What Is Political Philosophy? in which he describes “the three waves of modernity” along with the several splashes each of those waves made. Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke generated the first wave, undermining Christianity with a materialist naturalism that went beyond Epicureanism to claim that human efforts can conquer chance and nature itself. Rousseau, Burke, Kant, Hegel, and Marx generated the second wave. “Rousseau takes the decisive step in the criticism of classical natural right by elaborating the concept of ‘general will,’ which begins to delineate the process of historicization” of human thought. Whereas Hobbes and Locke take natural right to hold as a standard after civil society arises, “Rousseau changes course, underlining the necessity that civil life be built with the purpose of making such an appeal completely unnecessary A civil society built precisely following natural law automatically produces the right positive law, exemplified by the general will, which replaces natural right. However, if the ultimate standard of justice becomes general will, then no standard external to will constitutes the reference point for justice and for law.” This clears the shore for the third wave, generated by Nietzsche, Weber, and Heidegger, who radicalize the historicism of Hegel and Marx. For radical historicists, “the human being experiences suffering and the abyss,” as “nature and eternity are by then two categories void of sense in front of an essentially irrational services of events, dominated by the will to power.” Previous historicists retained an esteem for reason, holding that there are rationally discernable ‘laws of history.’ But with the radical historicists claim that “truth is neither desirable nor edifying, but mortal.”
Since reason no longer counts for much, the distinction between the philosopher, hitherto considered the man of reason par excellence, and the citizen, whose reason is prudential at best, simply disappears. Marxist-Leninist tyrants, who clung to second-wave modernity, justified mass murder as the rationally valid means of hurrying historical progress to its end, its culmination in the fully rational, faction-free, communal society, prevailing worldwide. But “history is not the court of the world” because the supposed end of history, “the universal and homogeneous State” is a thing of questionable justice (here, Nietzsche’s animadversions about the ‘Last Man’ come into play), and the human assumption of Providential power and wisdom is equally questionable. “Political philosophy does not deal with salvific expectations or secularized anticipations of the afterlife, in the certainty of their forthcoming accomplishment.” As for radical historicism, Heidegger’s adherence to the supposed “inner truth and greatness” of Nazism, even after real Nazism ended in catastrophe, confuses power, an instrumentality, with justice, an end.
As for the modern democracies, now in the grips of the milder historicism of Progressives, New Dealers, and their progeny, Strauss considered them very indirectly in his 1966 book, Socrates and Aristophanes. Aristophanes mocks the powerlessness of Socrates, of philosophers generally. They cannot “persuade the citizens that fill city squares and, therefore, [cannot] carry out a direct political power.” In this, the poets are their superiors. Yet, “Aristophanes expresses a sentiment which is midway between admiration and envy for Socrates, because the comic playwright knew” that the philosopher’s political impotence “is counterbalanced by a true advantage philosophy has over comedy”: the philosopher does not depend upon the applause of the crowd. Socrates enjoys “perfect freedom,” while the poet does not. The democratic politician acts under the same constraint, his rhetoric being a sort of political poetry. In Liberalism Ancient and Modern, published in 1968, Strauss contrasts modern, historicist liberalism, which cannot really liberate, with ancient or classical liberalism by means of a discussion of liberal education, by then under attack in America, the land of modern liberalism, from the New Left. “The concept of liberal education does not have success in the modern world, where the term ‘education implies a universal and popular education,” thanks to the regime of modern democracy and its “mass culture.” A genuinely liberal, liberating, education understands the “difference between philosophy and the city.” To learn to think along with a genuine philosopher, to read one of his books, requires sustained and intelligent attention to the particulars of that book, not the ‘quick takes’ that busy democratic citizens prefer. An introduction to philosophy requires time and patience, neither of which enjoy much esteem in democratic regimes. “What we call education today very often does not mean formation of the character,” moral or intellectual, “but rather instruction, training, and conditioning, which is a reduction of education to the leveling of consciences.” In democratic regimes, philosophers and their scholarly allies can nonetheless provide enclaves in which students are reminded, and thereby re-minded, “of the sense of human excellence, provid[ing] the antidote against conformism.”
In his last years, Strauss returned to the figure of Socrates as depicted in the writings of Xenophon. Under Strauss’s careful scrutiny, Xenophon may be seen as having distinguished the gentleman-citizen, the philosopher, and the tyrant. The citizen differs from the tyrant in his disinterestedness, his genuine concern for the good of his political community. Both differ from the philosopher. Part of the difference “resides in the different form of eros that animates the philosopher and the political man, which regards theoria in the first case, while in the second case it concerns popular recognition,” or, in “the worst cases, unbridled personal economic interest, ambition, or desire of power.” A philosopher, seeking wisdom, “wishes to be admired by a small minority, the political man wishes to be honored,” to be recognized, “by everyone.” One conceives of liberty as freedom from the need for popular applause, the other as the enjoyment of that applause. “The philosopher does not wish to govern”; “Xenophon does not mention courage or military virtue in his enumerations of Socratic virtues. This is because, strictly speaking, the philosopher is not part of the city. The only teachers that have a constitutive part in political society are priests.” In all of this, Xenophon takes a very different stance than Machiavelli, with whom he is sometimes compared. Machiavelli would have philosophers and the princes they instruct replace the priests, take control of chance, which by his time was labeled divine providence. Consequently, Strauss notes, Machiavelli cites none of Xenophon’s Socratic writings, confining his references to the histories. There is, nonetheless, one “important point of contact” between Xenophon and Machiavelli: neither “believes in the omnipotence of the word,” the claim of rhetoricians and sophists. In this, both men are philosophers of politics, thinking about what really is, not deceived by those who beckon us into wishful thinking.
Strauss’s The Argument and the Action of Plato’s “Laws” appeared after his death. The book “not only represents the completion of Strauss’s long studies on Greek classics, but also an ideal spiritual testament.” Strauss regard the Laws as the most important of the dialogues concerning politics, Plato’s “political work par excellence.” He continues to read Plato’s work “through the interpretive key elaborated by al-Farabi.” Strauss “retrace[s] Plato’s text almost line by line and inserted his reflections as a reader in dialogue with the text, questioning its contradictions and obscurities, posing questions, problems, and solutions more explicitly (but not entirely explicitly) than they appear in Plato’s writing.” Altini prudently recommends that readers of Strauss’s book first read it “for itself,” then re-read it while comparing it to Plato’s dialogue, “in order to verify the variations that exist between the original and its copy, trying to understand the theoretical reasons behind these variations, inside a writing based on the models of ‘repetition’ and ‘imitation.'”
There are two kinds of law. “The law is clearly the judgment of the city on the city’s business and therefore it is not physis, but nomos.” But conventional law requires justification; it is not self-justifying. In that sense, “the law aims to a higher judgment than the simple judgment of the city,” as “virtue is not limited to obedience to [conventional] laws.” Conventional laws, which “change from city to city, in an arbitrary way,” “must confront natural law,” “eternal and unchanging.” Natural law “indicates the limits of arbitrariness and shows the possibility of a good and just political order.” In his inquiries into nature, the philosopher must “elaborate strategies to preserve both freedom to philosophize and the possibility to live peacefully inside the city, respecting the requirements of political life.” As Strauss puts it, what is “first for us”—the law under which we live—is not “first in itself,” since nature precedes convention. To pursue the way of life that centers on inquiries into the natural law is to pursue a way of life unlikely to be entirely congruent with the “theological-political” way of life. “The philosopher is always a stranger, even at home, because he interprets the thaumazein,” wonder, “as a quest for knowledge, not as an original wisdom (be it revealed or traditional).” There is no “final solution” to this difficulty, only ways to lessen it.
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