Morality, nature, and esotericism in Leo Strauss's persecution and the art of writing

Review of Politics

Volumn 64, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 261-283

  Kochin, Michael S ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 31644444676     PISSN: 00346705     EISSN: 17486858     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0034670500038092     Document Type: Review

References (77)

1. Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1952; Reprinted Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 35 (henceforth PAW); see also pp. Ill n. 45,187;
2. Steve Lenzner, "A Literary Exercise in Self-Knowledge: Strauss's Interpretation of Maimonides" (Department of Government, Harvard University, typescript).
3. Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis, trans. Elsa M. Sinclair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984; originally published Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), p. 143.
4. See "A Giving of Accounts" in Leo Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought, ed. Kenneth Hart Green (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997), p. 462;
5. "Preface to the English Translation" in Spinoza's Critique of Religion, trans. E. M. Sinclair (New York: Schocken, 1965), p. 31.
6. Strauss first presents his defense of the old rationalism of classical political philosophy through the mediation of the medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophers in Philosophie und Gesetz. He then publishes a critique of Hobbes in the light of the old rationalism in The Political Philosophy ofHobbes. Finally, in "The Spirit of Sparta or the Taste of Xenophon" (Social Research 6[1939]:502- 536), Strauss gives his first unmediated account of the classical teaching. From this point, it is the direct teaching of the ancients that comes to dominate Strauss's work, though he continued to publish on medieval and modern writers until the end of his life.
7. Available as Appendix 1 of Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, pp. 467-470
8. Ibid., p. 467.
9. "Literary Character" is a very difficult essay when compared with Strauss's earlier, more straightforward, writings on Maimonides such as Philosophie und Gesetz, but is a marvel of clarity compared with Strauss's later notorious introduction to Pines's translation of the Guide, "How to Begin to Study The Guide of the Perplexed."
10. One of the books discussed in Persecution and the Art of Writing is itself a work divided into five parts, namely, Judah Halevi's Kuzari. There is an old legend that the philosopher, whose only personal appearance is in the first part of the Kuzari, is Abu Nasr Alfarabi, whose only thematic appearance is in the first part of Strauss's book.
11. Cf. Strauss, "How Farabi read Plato's Laws," in What Is Political Philosophy? (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1959), pp. 153-154
12. See Aristophanes, Knights and Wasps; Barry Strauss, Fathers and Sons in Athens: Ideology and Society in the Era of the Peloponnesian War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993);
13. Josiah Ober, "The Debate over Civic Education in Democratic Athens," lecture at Tel Aviv University, 31 May 2000.
14. Farabi, The Philosophy of Plato, sec. 36, in Alfarabi's Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, trans. Muhsin Mahdi, rev. ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969);
15. see also Lawrence Lampert's discussion of Strauss's Thrasymachus in Leo Strauss and Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 146-159
16. PAW, p. 36. The political crystallization of this teaching is a religious law, yet, as Strauss explains, the philosopher is not a lawgiver, since the law represents a practical, unphilosophic compromise of the rule of wisdom, the only truly legitimate form of rule. The law itself is thus a fossil artifact of philosophic rule.
17. See Joshua Parens, Metaphysics as Rhetoric: Alfarabi's Summary of Plato's "Laws " (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995).
18. Strauss follows Farabi and the Farabian tradition (including most notably Maimonides) in equating what we might think of as the cosmology offered by Timaeus, which Farabi even calls the "science of the essence of every being," with metaphysics as first philosophy in Aristotle's sense. This produces a highly.
19. See Plato Laws 766a; Arthur W. H. Adkins, From the Many to the One: A Study of Personality and Views of Human Nature in the Context of Ancient Greek Society, Values, and Beliefs (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), pp. 82-83, 158, 171 n. 1;
20. John J. Winkler, The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 64-70. Quintilian makes heavy use of the natural differences among human beings in describing the modification of the rhetorical education to suit each natural type {Institutio Oratoria 2. viii).
21. Leo Strauss, Socrates and Aristophanes (New York: Basic Books, 1966; reprinted Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 49.
22. See also Strauss's discussion of the superiority of Lucretius to his master Epicurus in terms of "a deep understanding of the feelings which obstruct the acceptance of the true doctrine by most men-an understanding which the master did not necessarily possess" ("Notes on Lucretius," in Liberalism Ancient and Modern [New York: Basic Books 1968; reprinted University of Chicago Press 1995], p. 92
23. In Falaquera's "Epistle of the Debate," the wise man persuades the jurist to take up the study of nature, that is, philosophy, by pointing to the natural difference between the many who are satisfied with mouthing dogmas and the few who wish to understand the legally prescribed beliefs; Shem Tob ibn Falaquera, The Epistle of the Debate, in Steven Harvey, Falaquera's Epistle of the Debate: An Introduction to Jewish Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press for the Center for Jewish Studies, 1987), pp. 63-65.
24. The differences among human types recognized by the ancients are quite distinct from the individuality valorized by the moderns. As Strauss writes, "the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns concerns eventually, and perhaps even from the beginning, the status of 'individuality'" (Natural Right and History, p. 323;
25. cf. Leo Strauss, "Perspectives on the Good Society," in Liberalism, Ancient and Modern, p. 261).
26. In "Note on the Plan of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil," in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983)
27. Strauss moves from an indication of Nietzsche's "ipsissimosity" to an elucidation of "the nature of the individual"-that is, the natural type within "the order of the rank of the natures" to which the individual belongs. Strauss acknowledges that in Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche "'platonizes' as regards the 'form' more than anywhere else (ibid, p. 175). The question is whether the platonized or typological Nietzsche of Beyond Good and Evil represents the whole of Nietzsche's teaching in the face of the modern, or rather, Christian and post-Christian, revaluation of the value of individuality. Lampert's Leo Strauss and Nietzsche unfortunately fails to come to terms with this question. One wonders if Lampert can characterize Strauss as an insufficiently prudent Nietzschean because Lampert's Nietzsche is the Platonizing philosopher of the origin of human species (plural, of course) rather than "Mr. Nietzsche" in all his particularized perplexities.
28. Spinoza, for his part, affirms the essential presupposition of the Socratic paradox at Theological-Political Treatise, trans. Martin Yaffe (University of North Texas, Department of Philosophy and Religion Studies, typescript): "For it is a universal law of human nature that no one neglects what he judges to be good, unless in the hope of a greater good, or from the fear of a greater harm. Nor would he prefer some evil, unless to avoid a greater one, or in the hope of a greater good: That is, everyone chooses which of two goods he judges to be the greater, and which of two evils seems to be the lesser" (chapter 16). On the account of choice, the only source of error is the chooser's misestimation of the relative good and evil in each alternative. Compare Plato Protagoras 351b-358d; Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditation 4.
29. Hiram Caton, "Analytic History of Philosophy: The Case of Descartes," The Philosophical Forum 12, no.4 (1981): 274.
30. See Strauss, "A Giving of Accounts," pp. 464-465
31. In Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. D'Alembert on the Theatre, trans. Allan Bloom (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), Appendix, p. 146.
32. Rousseau, it should be noted, defends the concealing of subversive opinions in the "Letter to D'Alembert" (p. 11); Rousseau's opposition to the Enlightenment aspiration to bring science to the many is expounded by Strauss in "On the Intention of Rousseau," Social Research 14 (1947): 455-87, esp. 484 ff.
33. PAW, p. 58;
34. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 198-99 n. 43.
35. The Jew of Malta, prologue, line 15; Strauss, Natural Right and History, p. 177.
36. Natural Right and History, pp. 182-183
37. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Ernst and Falk: Conversations for the Freemasons, first conversation in fin., trans. William L. Zwiebel in Nathan the Wise, Minna von Barnheim, and Other Plays and Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Continuum, 1991), p. 283;
38. Strauss, "Exoteric Teaching," in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss, ed. Thomas Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 64-65. Compare also Kant, Perpetual Peace, 366;
39. Strauss, Natural Right and History, pp. 193-94;
40. Strauss, "The Three Waves of Modernity," in An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays by Leo Strauss, ed. Hilail Gildin (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1989), p. 87.
41. For a contemporary vision of a just society whose justice consists in its rendering personal acts of justice and charity superfluous, see Thomas Nagel, Equality and Partiality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
42. Jiirgen Habermas, Theory and Practice, trans. John Viertel (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), p. 43;
43. cited by Shadia B. Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988), p. 138.
44. See in addition to the Tractatus Politicus, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, preface, and chapter 16.
45. "Some Remarks on the Political Science of Maimonides and Farabi", trans. Robert Bartlett, Interpretation 18 (1990): 3-30, p. 16.
46. From the point of view of the philosophers, that law cannot itself be regarded as a product of science. As Strauss has already put it in discussing Farabi, the philosopher is a king but he is not, qua philosopher, a legislator. The product of the "art and science of Timaeus" is a seemingly dogmatic metaphysical teaching addressed not to the many but to the few who are dissatisfied with the beliefs of the many. This teaching keeps these few politically docile while they learn its failings, thereby ascending from dogmatism to skepticism in its original sense. See my "Weeds: Cultivating the Imagination in Medieval Arabic Political Philosophy/' journal of the History of Ideas 60 (1999): 399-416.
47. Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, 2. 25;
48. cf. Kuzari 1. 67.
49. Spinoza's Critique of Religion, pp. 157-158
50. See PAW, p. 76;
51. "A Giving of Accounts," p. 465;
52. and On Tyranny, expanded edition, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth (New York: The Free Press, 1991; original edition 1948), p. 113, n. 23.
53. Halevi's (or Halevi's scholar's) defense of morality itself is primarily a defense against the ascetics, the heretics and the idolaters, not against the philosophers (see inter alia Kuzari, 2.45-50,2.60,3.1-9,3.11;
54. and cf. PAW, pp. 122- 126). What these sects have in common with the philosophers is that all seek to derive man's duties toward the divine by reasoning, instead of accepting the laws of the Torah on the basis of tradition {Kuzari, 1.97-99,2.26,2.60,3.22-23,3. 36-38, 3.49-50,3. 65,4.1,4.11,4.14-17,5.1- 2,5.14 in fin., 5.16,5. 21 in fin.). The ascetics also share with the Epicureans, supposedly the most anti-religious of the philosophers, the view that man's only relation to God is that of fear (see Kuzari 2. 45-50, 5. 25;
55. Strauss, Spinoza's Critique of Religion, chap. 1). Yet Halevi's critique shares with the philosophers the claim that the ceremonial laws are secondary to the rational and civil laws that bear directly on the survival of the community (2. 48). In place of the ascetic drive to conquer the passions, which is doomed to fail, Halevi's scholar calls for a politique governance of the passions (3.1-5). This turn from asceticism to politics has manifest Messianic implications.
56. Strauss here anticipates Thomas Kuhn's emphasis on the replacement of the study of "scientific classics" by the study of textbooks as among the characteristic aspects of contemporary science; Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
57. Leo Strauss, "On Collingwood's Philosophy of History," Review of Metaphysics 5 (1952): 586.
58. Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, chap. 15;
59. PAW, pp. 172,184;
60. also Spinoza's Critique of Religion, pp. 115-16
61. "Maimonides' Statement on Political Science" in What Is Political Philosophy?, pp. 166-67.
62. Cf. "How Farabi read Plato's Laws", p. 145: Strauss writes that according to Farabi, "Plato had discussed the question as to whether a man who knows nothing except the laws and does nothing except what the laws demand is virtuous or not, and as regards this question 'there is still grave disagreement among men.'"
63. Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, chap. 2;
64. translation altered slightly from Martin Yaffe.
65. "On a Forgotten Kind of Writing" in What Is Political Philosophy?, p. 227. The emphasis is mine.
66. One could also say that the success, so far, of such a project constitutes the inner or political vindication of modernity. Bruno Latour points the way beyond the inevitable Janus-faced character of pronouncements on modernity in his philosophy of scientific practice; see Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987);
67. and more explicitly We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
68. See John Rawls, "Justice as Fairness, Political Not Metaphysical," Philosophy and Public Affairs 14 (1985): 223-52;
69. now in Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
70. Strauss gave his own assessment of what one could call "the inner greatness of National Socialism", that is to say, the revulsion it embodied against the low and bestial but universal project of the Enlightened modem state, in a lecture on "German Nihilism," given 26 February 1941. This lecture was recently edited and published by David Janssens and Daniel Tanguay in Interpretation 28 (1999): 353-378
71. Strauss takes his stand on a point of honor in replying to a questioner at a lecture in Chicago in 1962 (Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, p. 329): "Questioner: The title of the lecture, 'Why Do We Remain Jews?'-am I correct that your answer is that we have no choice? Strauss: As honorable men, surely not."
72. On Tyranny, exp. ed., p. 98. 40.1 have modified R. H. M. Elwes's translation of this letter (Works of Spinoza, 2:417-18 [London: George Bell and Sons, 1883; reprint New York: Dover, 1951]) by to the Latin texts in Opera Spinoza, ed. Carl Gebhardt (Heidelberg: Carl Winters Universitaetsbuchhandlung, 1926), 4: 321-322
73. See "Preface to the American Edition" in 1952 and subsequent editions of The Political Philosophy ofHobbes, p. xvi; "Preface" in Spinoza's Critique of Religion, p. 30.
74. For an expression of moral outrage at the philosophers' mode see Annabel Patterson's anti-Straussian treatment of exoteric writing, Reading between the Lines (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), p. 8. One should add that for Strauss the convulsive assertion of atheistic probity belongs only to the "polemical approach" that Nietzsche adopts and not to the teaching itself-this probity is therefore at no time, including ours, a fundamental characteristic of the greatest thinkers; Letter to Karl Lowith, 23 June 1935, in Karl Lowith and Leo Strauss, "Correspondence," Independent Journal of Philosophy 5/6 (1988): 183.
75. Spinoza's Critique of Religion, pp. 139-140
76. Lawrence Lampert's certainty with regard to the second question (Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, p. 173) is untempered by reflection on the fate of those wretched peoples who lack a fatherland. What Hannah Arendt wrote more than fifty years ago has only been confirmed by all subsequent experience: "The restoration of human rights, as the recent example of the State of Israel proves, has been achieved so far only through the restoration or the establishment of national rights" (The Origins of Totalitarianism [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973], p. 299). The securing of national rights is no guarantee of human rights, especially when accompanied by the denial of national rights to those foreign to the nation in question, but it remains a practically necessary precondition of the securing of human rights. Note also that this "pragmatic sanction" of nationalism does not extend to a defense of remaining Jewish in any modern state, nor even in the state of Israel.
77. An earlier version of this paper was presented at a conference on "Haifa and Athens: The Leo Strauss Centenary" at Haifa University, 23 December 1999, and appeared in Hebrew in Iyyun: The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly 50, no.4 (2001). I would like to thank Ehud Luz, Cliff Bates, Steve Lenzner, Daniel Doneson, Eva Schorr, and members of the audience in Haifa, as well as Walter Nicgorski, and the anonymous readers for The Review of Politics, for their comments and suggestions