Leo Strauss. Neil G. Robertson
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of knowledge of the external world. Husserl’s phenomenology sought to pre-empt the turn to this kind of knowledge by engaging in a philosophy of the description of things as they appeared to the self, bracketing, or excluding, questions of causality or metaphysics. Strauss was deeply impressed by Husserl and took up his turn to the “natural understanding” – the way things appear to us naturally – as a beginning point for a philosophy that might point a way out of the nihilism of the age.
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was an assistant to Husserl and developed and radicalized Husserl’s standpoint. Strauss encountered Heidegger as a young academic in the circle of Husserl and was deeply impressed by the power of Heidegger’s philosophical inquiry both as a philosopher and as an interpreter of classical philosophy. Heidegger recognized that Husserl’s phenomenology could be transformed by situating its inquiry in time and history: the self or ego that engages in phenomenological description could and should be seen not as a timeless, situationless being, but as one necessarily confronting a finite, historical situation in which time fundamentally informs that finitude. Heidegger is the intellectual source of existentialism. He agrees with Nietzsche that the modern era is one of nihilism. He finds in his radicalized phenomenology a way both to understand and confront this historical situation more deeply, and to seek to find a way of thinking that might open a stance beyond nihilism. Heidegger’s most important book, Being and Time, was published in 1927. In 1933, he joined the Nazi Party. In many ways Heidegger’s mentor, Husserl came to be deeply disturbed by, and felt betrayed by, the radical tendencies of his student’s thinking. Husserl sought in his own last writings to contest Heidegger’s claim that his work drew out the proper implication of Husserl’s own phenomenology.
Having briefly outlined the standpoints of these three major figures in Strauss’s intellectual background, we can turn to sketch five key themes in Strauss’s own thought.
The Return to Natural Right
As a young man, Strauss was deeply struck by Nietzsche’s characterization of the contemporary western world as an age of nihilism. Strauss accepted Nietzsche’s account of the self-destruction of reason that produced nihilism as a loss of all moral meaning. The modern world seemed incapable of discerning truth, above all moral and political truth. Strauss’s “change of orientation” in the early 1930s was a movement away from Nietzsche made possible by Strauss’s recognizing that it was only modern rationalism that was in trouble; pre-modern rationalism could be recovered in order to develop a standpoint without the nihilistic implications of modernity. Further, what pre-modern rationalism allowed was a return to “nature” as a standpoint or standard that would allow the recovery of moral content and moral meaning. Hence the recovery of what Strauss calls “natural right” – Strauss’s way of translating the ancient Greek phrase physei dikaion, or “what is just or right by nature.” If there could be the recovery of a standard of right or justice based upon nature and so independent of history – including the history of modernity – then the apparent victory of modern philosophy over ancient philosophy needed to be reconsidered.
For Strauss, the most developed form of the modern project that ended in nihilism was “historicism,” the belief that all human thought and meaning is historically determined and historically limited. Historicism meant that nothing could be said to be simply true or good because, from a historicist perspective, truth and goodness were historically relative. The promise of the recovery of “natural right” was the promise of the recovery of a standard that was not historically relative, but true or good by nature. For Strauss, natural right is what emerges when the power of historicism recedes as it recognizes its nihilistic character. The great benefit of returning to ancient Greek philosophy, above all as shown in the figure of Socrates, is the remarkable fact that there could be the discovery of natural right as an object of philosophical inquiry. It was this insight that was made available to Strauss in his “change of orientation,” and was to determine the standpoint of his subsequent thinking.
The Theological-Political Problem
To understand the significance and source of Strauss’s change of orientation and recovery of natural right, we must place it in the larger context of Strauss’s intellectual concerns. Strauss’s own description of this larger context is the “theological-political problem.” One way to view this problem is to see it in personal terms reflecting the predicament Strauss found himself in as a Jew who could no longer adhere to the orthodox faith in which he had been raised, but who equally could not identify himself with the larger German culture in which he found himself. Strauss experienced this as an antinomy between modern thought – ultimately Nietzschean atheism – and orthodoxy. The way out of this predicament was, for Strauss, in the return to pre-modern rationalism. Strauss first came to this discovery not in Plato or Socrates, but in medieval Jewish and Islamic thought, above all in the figure of Moses Maimonides (1138–1204).
In Maimonides, Strauss found a particular way of framing and understanding the theological-political problem. The term “theological-political” Strauss borrowed from the title of a book by the seventeenth-century Jewish philosopher Spinoza. Strauss understood the phrase to refer to the need of philosophy to establish itself and to defend its freedom from the forms of authority that belong to religion as well as to political power. In this book, we will look at these two tensions in turn. In chapter 2, we will focus on the tension between philosophy and religion, the tension between “Athens” and “Jerusalem.” Strauss argues that the biblical revelation, specifically Judaism, presents the most radical challenge to philosophy and its claims to determine the question of the best way to live on the basis of natural reason alone. For Strauss, the question of “the best life” is the orienting question of human life, and so the contest between reason and revelation is the most basic human question. Strauss’s interest in this debate is not simply to secure the claims of reason against any competitor, but more fundamentally to see in the debate itself a shift in the meaning of philosophy. For Strauss, the standpoints of reason and revelation are mutually irrefutable. But recognizing and engaging this “problem” for Strauss gives birth to a deepening understanding of what philosophy is and demonstrates its inherent limits, showing that its very context is constructed of fundamental and permanent problems.
The Exoteric/Esoteric Distinction
One of Strauss’s fundamental and recurring arguments is that philosophy, as the life given to questioning in the pursuit of wisdom, is inherently opposed to the nature of the “city” (or, more generally, of society) as a way of life founded upon opinion and above all upon belief in the justice of the laws of the city. In order that philosophers would not be persecuted nor the city be harmed, according to Strauss, philosophers began to conceal their true teaching behind an outer or “exoteric” teaching that would, at least on the surface, suggest that philosophy supported the ways of the city. In other words, the tension between philosophy and the city gave birth to an art of writing for philosophy: the art of esoteric writing.
The exoteric/esoteric distinction can appear to be a plausible claim that philosophers, facing potential persecution, have not always been open about their thoughts, and so interpreters must “read between the lines.” At one level, Strauss is certainly saying this. Importantly, however, he connects this historical point to the deeper claim that underlying what appears to be an occasional strategy is a fundamental opposition between philosophy and the city.
Here we can see that the exoteric/esoteric distinction is also a manifestation of another crucial aspect of Strauss’s thought: “political philosophy.” For Strauss, political philosophy is not primarily a branch or field of philosophy; rather, it is a way in which, or an awareness with which, philosophy is practiced. Political philosophy is philosophy aware of its political context and beginning point. Strauss argues that classical political philosophy is especially self-aware in this regard. It is characteristic of modern political philosophy to practice esoteric writing in the service of seeking to change the world and so eventually