Leo Strauss. Neil G. Robertson
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devices. Strauss’s judgment, arising from his sense of nihilism, is that this modern project has failed. It is only in classical political philosophy, which is aware of the irreducible difference between philosophy and the city, and which practices esoteric writing in the service of that difference, that we can find a stable standpoint and so escape a nihilistic result.
Classical Political Philosophy
A great deal of Strauss’s standpoint rests on his understanding of classical political philosophy, and many of his writings can be seen as contributions to his recovery of classical political philosophy. Strauss articulates this recovery through the interpretation of classical texts, above all texts that have as their focus the figure of Socrates, with whom Strauss associates the origin of political philosophy. The texts central to this for him are the dialogues of Plato, as well as dialogues by Xenophon, Aristophanes’ play The Clouds, and some comments by Aristotle. However, it would be fair to say that Strauss’s consideration of classical political philosophy extends to more than these works: he includes not only other works of classical philosophy and classical literature, but beyond that (and in a more complicated sense) the work of the great Jewish and Islamic philosophers, above all Alfarabi (872–950) and Maimonides, whom Strauss understands to be continuing in the practice of classical political philosophy. Still, the central and defining figure in Strauss’s account of classical political philosophy is the Socrates of Plato’s dialogues.
Strauss’s recovery of classical political philosophy is, as we have seen, a response to the crisis of modernity: nihilism. Further, in Strauss’s view, historicism – with what he sees as its moral relativism and moral nihilism – represents the most extreme manifestation of that crisis. For Strauss, what classical political philosophy does is to give access to a reality untouched by history: nature. But the “nature” Strauss finds in classical political philosophy is not a metaphysical account of nature. The traditional reading of Plato and Aristotle and other ancient philosophers finds that Plato’s and Aristotle’s standpoints bring to light a metaphysical realm of ideas or forms that underlie and cause all reality; this accords with what Nietzsche and Heidegger find. Strauss, following his esoteric reading of texts, argues that this surface or exoteric account is not the true standpoint of classical political philosophy. For the careful reader, argues Strauss, the true teaching of classical philosophy, and above all that of Plato, shows itself to be focused on philosophy as ceaseless questioning, rather than on a metaphysical solution to those questions. What Plato teaches esoterically is Socrates’ “knowledge of ignorance,” philosophy as the life dedicated to the quest or pursuit of knowledge, rather than to its possession in and by metaphysical knowledge. For Strauss, this is crucial if classical political philosophy is not going to be subject to the critiques of Nietzsche and Heidegger, who argue that the metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle in fact leads to modern nihilism.
For Strauss, the possibility of an ahistorical, non-metaphysical political philosophy rests upon recovering the Socratic beginning, seeing philosophy as arising from the philosopher entering into the agora, the space of public opinion, to begin a process of questioning and dialectic that seeks to uncover the abiding reality – nature – that public opinion points to. What this means is a turning to what people say, to their speeches, and not trying to seek an underlying causality that treats what is said in a reductionist way. In doing this, the fullness of humanity can be recovered: the “high” is not seen from the perspective of the “low.” Classical political philosophy’s turn to speeches can be seen as the beginning necessary to avoid the outcome of moral nihilism that belongs to modernity. Strauss’s whole work of scholarship is, then, a sustained effort to recover this way of doing philosophy, as the thing most needful in the face of the crisis of the West.
The Critique of Modernity
The final theme we will explore is Strauss’s explanation of the history that has led to what he sees as the modern crisis. The first thing to understand is that history is, for Strauss, fundamentally a history of ideas. The modern world, or “modern project” as he sometimes calls it, is not primarily a result of social, economic, or other historical causes; it is primarily the work of changes in thought, and above all the work of changes in political philosophy. The most fundamental change was a shift in the meaning of political philosophy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries so that it was no longer seen to be a life in pursuit of theoretical knowledge, but became dedicated instead to the alteration of political reality. For the modern, knowledge became no longer the knowledge of what is, but of how to change what is. In short, political philosophy became dedicated to effecting historical change. More specifically for Strauss, in the modern project historical change was aimed at constructing a world dedicated to fulfilling human needs and purposes.
Strauss came to see the modern project as consisting of three stages or waves that bring out a progressively deeper radicalism. We will have a chance to explore this development in detail in chapter 5. But at this stage, the general point to see is that, according to Strauss, modernity began with a break from the pre-modern made by political philosophy, and came to a kind of conclusion in the crisis of the moral nihilism and relativism of twentieth-century life. For Strauss, this places us, as inhabitants of a modern or postmodern world, in a terrible dilemma. We have lost our capacity to orient ourselves morally and politically. We cannot simply turn back to an earlier moment in modernity; its history has shown that modernity generates its own undoing. Even if we find a way to recover the standpoint of natural right through a study of classical political philosophy, for Strauss it is hard to say how that can and should guide us in a world that is no longer classical. As Strauss stated, “only we living today can find a solution to the problems of today” (CM 11).
Strauss argues that, rather than a “solution,” what emerges from the insight that fundamental problems are irresolvable is a way of living with the problems: the recognition that moderation and practical wisdom are the proper standards of political life. Nature can function as a kind of guiding star in terms of natural right, but it does not provide an ideological map. For Strauss, one of the marks of the modern project is its tendency to become ideological, to move toward a fixed determination of the workings of the world. In Strauss’s mind such ideologies tend toward reductionism. At the heart of Strauss’s political philosophy is an effort to liberate thinking from reductionist or ideological accounts of politics and of the human more generally. For him, it is only when reductionist tendencies are resisted that the fundamental problems can emerge – and that political philosophy will be able to become, as Strauss called it, “first philosophy” (CM 20).
The Thesis of this Book
Beyond trying to introduce readers to the often-challenging thought of Leo Strauss, this book does have a thesis about that thought as a whole. Strauss always called himself a “scholar” and not a “philosopher.” This was not simply due to modesty on his part; it is actually central to his basic claim. If Strauss is simply recovering a pre-existing standpoint – that of classical political philosophy – his basic work is scholarly recovery. But the claim of this book is that Strauss is doing more than “scholarly recovery”: he is a key contemporary thinker precisely because his work is philosophically original. He is not simply recovering the thought of Plato, as he presents himself to be doing; nor is he simply occupying an already-established contemporary standpoint, whether it is that of Nietzsche or Heidegger, as some critics of Strauss have alleged. Strauss developed a distinctive contemporary position – and it is this distinctive position that we will be trying to uncover as we go through Strauss’s thought.
However, precisely because he is more original than he allows, Strauss’s claims to recovery are more open to question than he allows. The focus of this introduction to Strauss will be not primarily on his interpretations of specific texts, but on his own thought. That thought was undoubtedly worked out in and through his readings of ancient and modern political philosophy, but it was not determined by those texts. Our effort will be to see Strauss as himself a key contemporary thinker.
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