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The Recovery of the Theologico-Political Problem

Scholarly and journalistic interest in Leo Strauss has increased in recent years. But as the attention Strauss has garnered reminds us, being a person of interest is at best a mixed blessing. Much of this attention has flowed from the ill-informed and incredible belief that Strauss is somehow responsible for masterminding the Bush administration’s approach to foreign policy and its use of military force in the Middle East. If it were not for the dishonor these kinds of frenzied machinations heap upon Strauss’s life and his own thought, such portrayals would be laughable.

Fortunately, the past several years have also witnessed the publication of a number of serious books that seek to engage Strauss critically as a thinker in his own right. Several of these works, most notably Heinrich Meier’s Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem and Daniel Tanguay’s detailed and impressive Leo Strauss: An Intellectual Biography, provide the important service of placing front and center what Strauss himself thought to be at the center of his own thought: the question of God and politics. Strauss repeatedly emphasized that “the question quid sit deus” is “coeval with philosophy.” Paradoxically, Strauss at the same time went out of his way to emphasize that the classical political philosophers did “not frequently pronounce” this “all-important question.” Unlike their modern counterparts, the classical political philosophers tended to approach the question cautiously, raising it only indirectly through dialectical inquiries into the “roots” of the city’s alleged authoritative divine law. Strauss, in other words, appreciated that the question quid sit deus is as much a moral and political question as it is theological or philosophical one. As he succinctly put it, “The fundamental question, therefore, is whether men can acquire knowledge of the good without which they cannot guide their lives individually or collectively by the unaided effort of their natural powers, or whether they are dependent for that knowledge on Divine Revelation. No alternative is more fundamental than this: human guidance or divine guidance.” It is not surprising then that Strauss identified the theologico-political problem as the overarching theme of his studies.

Strauss did not formulate his understanding of the nature and scope of the theologico-political problem all at once. Rather, it took form gradually and was deepened by his sustained investigations into the ways in which that problem was articulated and debated by modern, medieval, and classical political philosophers. Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (1930) contains Strauss’s first sustained treatment of the theologico-political problem. That work examined the role that Spinoza’s bold treatment of the essential relation of philosophy, religion, and politics played in modernity’s original argument in favor of liberal democracy. Looking back at his argument in that work some thirty-two years later, Strauss concluded that he “understood Spinoza too literally because I did not read him literally enough.” In part because Strauss had yet to discover esoteric writing and thus to think through the various implications of that “peculiar technique of writing,” he had not broken free from the characteristically late modern “premise, sanctioned by powerful prejudice, that a return to premoderns philosophy” or for that matter to traditional biblical faith is impossible.

The premise that ostensibly precluded any return to premoderns thought had its roots in and was “expressed … in its simplest and strongest form, in Descartes’ resolve to doubt everything in order to free himself once and for all from all prejudice.” Allegedly “erected on foundations” that were “absolutely certain,” modern rationalism asserted that it “no longer left any place for doubt.” It claimed to be able to liberate reason and mankind from the realm of opinion and darkness that resulted from man’s prescientific adherence to the moral and doctrinal tenets of biblical faith. Spinoza himself proclaimed in the preface to the Theologico-Political Treatise that his overarching aim in that work was to overcome the “obstacle to others who would philosophize more freely if this one thing did not stand in their way; they deem that reason has to serve as handmaiden to theology.” Because it did not dialectically question but rather radically doubted the claims of common opinion, modern rationalism, in contrast to premoderns or Socratic philosophy, dared to conceive of “philosophy … as [a] completed system.” According to its proponents, the possession of such a system and the inevitability of consequent scientific progress would show that modern rationalism, not the God of the Bible, was the true benefactor of man.

From the beginning, Strauss understood modern rationalism to be “caused, or at least facilitated, by anti-theological ire.” In his view, modern philosophy was essentially Epicurean in its intention. However whereas ancient Epicureanism sought to liberate individual men of “good natures” from the tyranny of the gods and religion, modern Epicureanism expressly sought to free men and political societies from revealed religion and its fearful and tyrannical invocation of what Hobbes rather bluntly called “powers invisible.” Beginning with Machiavelli, early modern philosophers labored to bring into existence a new form of rationalism and republicanism. To this end, they advanced rationalistic critiques of biblical faith and formulated arguments that were designed to show that modern reason could provide the truth grounds of civil society. As Strauss pointed out, “political atheism is a distinctively modern phenomenon.”

But Strauss gradually came to see that the purported solution that modern rationalism offered in place of “theology” was equally opposed to the claims of Socratic philosophy. To begin with, like biblical faith, Socratic philosophy emphasized the indispensability and non-constructed nature of morality in general and justice in particular. Moreover, each affirmed that morality must be tethered to a transcendent order that supplements and grounds morality. Lastly and most importantly for Strauss, both the Bible and Socratic philosophy, in their own ways, claim that man is incapable of comprehending the whole. Modern rationalism’s attack on biblical faith was therefore equally an attack on the foundations of Socratic philosophy. To the extent that it was successful in discrediting the grounds of biblical faith, it was also successful in discrediting the foundations – and therewith the very possibility – of Socratic philosophy.

Strauss consequently began to see that the only way in which an authentic “return” to orthodoxy, and by extension to Socratic philosophy, could be justified was to show that, contrary to its claims, modern philosophy had not proven that “the world and human life are perfectly intelligible without the assumption of a mysterious God.” At the very least, this argument required one to show that modern rationalism and science were not in possession of a complete and coherent philosophic system. Put somewhat differently, Strauss recognized that a return to the shared ground of either orthodoxy or Socratic philosophy was truly impossible only if modern philosophy had in fact succeeded in its effort to formulate “a philosophic system [in which] man has to show himself theoretically and practically as the master of the world and the master of life; the merely given world must be replaced by the world created by man theoretically and practically. Absent a systematic – i.e., a complete rationalistic account of the universe – modern rationalism’s alleged victory over orthodoxy was unwarranted on its own terms.

Strauss understood Spinoza to be the modern philosopher who made the grandest attempt to articulate a philosophical system that would definitively disprove the notion of revelation and therewith the existence of the biblical God. Yet his attempt to formulate “a clear and distinct account of everything,” Strauss concluded, ultimately rested on premises that remained “fundamentally hypothetical.” The “cognitive status” of the philosophic system he constructed remained in the decisive respect no different from the theoretical grounds of the orthodox position it originally set out to overcome. Strauss understood each to be grounded in “an act of the will.” Despite its efforts first to argue and later to “mock” orthodoxy out of existence, modern rationalism and modern science could not “legitimately deny the possibility of revelation.” Strauss concluded from this that the modern “antagonism” between Spinoza and Judaism, “between unbelief and belief, is ultimately not theoretical but moral.”

At the same time, Strauss also recognized that modern rationalism “still had a highly consequential and positive result.” “The quarrel between Enlightenment and Orthodoxy made clearer and better known that the presuppositions of Orthodoxy (the reality of Creation, Miracles, and Revelation) are not known (philosophically or historically) but are only believed and thus lack the peculiarly obligatory character of the known.”

Having shed light on the basic presuppositions of the life of biblical faith, modern rationalism’s polemical attack and attempted refutation of orthodoxy eventually paved the way – through the progressive radicalization of the modern desire for certainty in philosophers like Kant and Hegel – for the emergence of what Strauss calls “the atheism from intellectual probity.” This form of atheism represented the ultimate consequence of modern rationalism’s critique of revealed religion and biblical faith. Unlike the early modern critique, it did not attempt polemically to disprove the possibility of divine revelation. Rather, on the grounds of “intellectual honesty,” it limited itself to assuming that the proof of such things as miracles and God’s revelation finally could not be scientifically established according to criteria that would be acceptable to the “positive mind.”

Strauss, however, also rejected the argument from intellectual probity. It represented neither the vindication of modern rationalism nor that of Jewish orthodoxy, since it reduced the cognitive grounds of every revealed religion indeed every particular claim of truth finally to a matter of willful belief. That reduction not only relativizes the claims made by any form of orthodoxy but in grounding all claims to truth in the act of “probity” or intellectual honesty it also finally proves “fatal to any philosophy.” Strauss argued that when the founding premises of modern rationalism were followed to their logical conclusions – as they ultimately were in Nietzsche’s intransigent insistence on the requirements of “probity” and his teaching on the “will to power” – they resulted in the self-destruction of reason. Strauss’s studies in the early modern attempts to resolve the theologico-political problem led him to conclude that “’irrationalism’ is only a variety of modern rationalism.” In its dogged pursuit of absolute certainty and ruthless efforts to overcome the very grounds of biblical faith, modern rationalism sowed the theoretical seeds for the self-destruction of reason and the eventual emergence of radical historicism or nihilism. Put somewhat differently, Strauss concluded that modern rationalism – and not rationalism or Socratic philosophy per se – provided the moral and intellectual foundations of the present-day “crisis of the West.”

Strauss’s study of the early modern political philosophers led him to discover that the modern Enlightenment had been preceded by a medieval Enlightenment, what he in Philosophy and Law provisionally called the “Enlightenment of Maimonides.” Unlike its modern counterpart, that Enlightenment was not rooted in a fatally exaggerated conception of the limitless powers of reason. Nor did it believe in the inevitability of moral, political, and scientific progress. And yet it was simultaneously more daring in its thought and more sober in its expectations than the modern Enlightenment. Medieval rationalism neither dogmatically truncated the scope of philosophic inquiry nor imprudently lost sight of the fact that philosophy necessarily poses a “grave danger” to the political order. Resting on “classical (Aristotelian and Platonic) foundations, it did not seek to re-create the whole of social and political life along the lines of philosophic knowledge. Over and against the modern Enlightenment’s insistence on the public dissemination of knowledge, it emphasized the “duty to keep rationally recognized truths secret from the unchosen many.”

Contrary to many of his contemporaries who interpreted medieval thought to be chiefly concerned with reconciling biblical revelation with the now allegedly discredited natural science and cosmology of Aristotle, Strauss recognized that that conventional approach wittingly or unwittingly preceded from the prior assumption that philosophy was a legitimate activity for the man of biblical faith. Taking the thought of medieval Islamic and Jewish thinkers on its own terms, he questioned the validity of that assumption. Strauss thus viewed the subject of divine Law – a revealed law that spoke directly to all aspects of man’s religious, moral, and political life – to provide the necessary point of departure for medieval rationalism.

Through its emphasis on the centrality of Law, medieval rationalism represented “the first, and certainly the first adequate, discussion … between the way of life based on faith and obedience and a way of life based on free insight, on human wisdom, alone.” Most immediately, that discussion required philosophy to justify itself before the tribunal of an all-encompassing, perfect Law. Whereas modern rationalism took the legitimacy, indeed the practical necessity, of philosophy for granted, medieval Islamic and Jewish thinkers recognized that faced with an authoritative divine Law philosophy necessarily had to justify its own legitimacy. Medieval Jewish thinkers such as Maimonides and Halevi – to say nothing of Islamic thinkers like Al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes – “took it for granted being a Jew and being a philosopher are mutually exclusive.” For this reason, Strauss understood the “issue of traditional Judaism versus philosophy [to be] identical with the issue of Jerusalem and Athens.”

Medieval Islam and Judaism typically viewed philosophy differently than Christianity traditionally did. Religion for the Christian, unlike the Jew or Muslim, is primarily “a faith formulated in dogmas.” Given the nature of Christian revelation, the religion eventually came to see philosophy as a legitimate science that could be used to clarify and defend the revealed teachings of the faith. The Jew and the Muslim, on the other hand, principally encountered revelation and hence religion as a matter of Law, that is, as a divinely revealed “code” that regulated all aspects of human life, individually and collectively. The divine Law was distinguished from human laws inasmuch as it aimed not merely as the well-being of the body but “above all at the well-being of the soul.” There was or appeared to be no need for philosophy in this scheme and many saw it as unjustified in that light.

The precarious state of philosophy in Islam and Judaism, however, was not altogether detrimental to philosophy, according to Strauss. Christianity traditionally cast philosophy, according to Strauss. Christianity traditionally cast philosophy in the role of theology’s handmaiden. Such an official arrangement required philosophy to be under the watchful eye of ecclesial supervision. Conversely, the suspicion with which philosophy was viewed in medieval Islam and Judaism guaranteed it a greater degree of “inner freedom.” Philosophy’ status “in the Islamic-Jewish world” therefore resembled “its status in classical Greece.” For in Strauss’s view, the “guiding idea upon which the Greeks and the Jews agree is precisely the idea of the divine law as a single and total law which is at the same time religious law, civil, law, and moral law.” Strauss in fact suggests that it finally was the appearance of the “new Testament” that “brought about the break with ancient thought” on this matter.

The central role of Law in Judaism and Islam brought into sharper focus for Strauss the importance of medieval rationalism’s subtle treatment of prophecy. The philosophical understanding of Law meant that the Jew or the Muslim necessarily had to elucidate the nature of “prophecy out of the nature of man.” Practitioners of medieval rationalism such as Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Averroes, and Maimonides typically interpreted the prophet as a man who was “perfect in philosophy” but who surpassed the man who was merely a philosopher in the perfection of his imaginative faculty. The true or perfect prophet is the “founder of the perfect political community.” Prophecy and Law were here viewed as emphatically political subjects, as themes that were treated by these “philosophers” as a part of political science. But Strauss came to see that medieval Islamic and Jewish thinkers characteristically cast their treatment of Law and prophecy in a decisively more Platonic than Aristotelian light. By so doing, these thinkers reflected an awareness of the precarious position that the philosopher necessarily occupies in a political community. Their situation was analogous to Socrates’ in Athens. Illustrative of this fact, as Strauss repeatedly emphasized – most notably in the epigraph to his The Argument and Action of Plato’s Laws, was Avicenna’s observation that “the treatment of prophecy and the Divine law is contained in … the Laws.”

Indeed, Plato’s Laws develops a line of inquiry that has no exact parallel in Aristotle’s works. In that dialogue, Plato has the Athenian stranger dialectically investigate the origins of human and divine law as well as the origins of the revelation or prophecy by which these laws are communicated to men. Strauss accordingly understood the Laws to be Plato’s most pious and political work. He also emphasized the intimate connection between the Laws and the Apology: the former is the only Platonic work that begins with the word “god,” the latter is the only dialogue that ends with that word. Strauss saw thematic significance in this apparent unremarkable fact. Indeed, he took it to help one understand why “in the Laws the Athenian stranger devises a law against impiety which would have been more favorable to Socrates than the corresponding Athenian law.”

Strauss did not think that the Platonizing approach that medieval Jewish and Islamic thinkers took to the question of the relation of religion, philosophy, and morality simply represented a mere appeal to Platonic political philosophy to supply what was outwardly lacking in Aristotle’s political works. Rather, it signified their awareness of the inherent tension between the moral and theoretical claims of philosophy and those of the Law as well as their recognition of the dangers that threaten the philosopher within a community ruled by divine Law. Simply put, the Platonic character of medieval rationalism finally explained why a thinker like Al-Farabi chose to present “the whole of philosophy within a political framework, or why his most comprehensive writings are ‘political books.’” By presenting their teaching on the nature and way to human happiness “politically,” men like Al-Farabi or Maimonides neither unnecessarily disturbed the settled opinions of their respective religious and political communities nor unnecessarily drew unwanted attention to themselves.

Within medieval Islamic and Jewish thought, the prophet-founder-legislator was seen as a man skilled in philosophy and the royal art. Given his political role, the prophet had to speak in a way that was less exact than the speech employed by the man who was simply a philosopher. To this end, he invoked images and locations when speaking about God that were intended to sway the souls of the nonphilosophic citizenry to uphold the moral, religious, and political demands of the Law. Such a legal form of persuasion was used in the first place to moderate and educate citizens’ passions and thereby to secure the grounds of moral and political life. At the same time, the Law did more than secure the necessary conditions of the social order; it also sought to protect and to educate the potential philosophers living within the religious community. According to Al-Farabi and Maimonides, the Law spoke differently to different men. To the vast majority of men, the Law promulgated a morally and politically useful code of conduct that should serve as the basis of any decent human society. But to a select few, it articulated the requisite moral claims that the philosopher must adhere to within a religious society which, if left on its own, was naturally hostile to philosophy.

The practitioners of Islamic and Jewish rationalism thus rightly recognized that philosophy presupposes social life. Moreover, this realization led them to seek to have a humanizing effect on social and political life by shedding light on and expanding the political community’s imperfect understand of the demands of justice and morality. Yet, in different ways, they also subtly pointed out that “the philosopher has no attachment to society: his soul is elsewhere.” His ultimate attachment is to an activity that is “essentially private and trans-political: philosophy.” Accordingly, the rules that govern his conduct do not extend past “the minimum moral requirements of living together.”

Strauss jarringly concluded that in its rawest form medieval rationalism held that the philosophers live as it were on the fringes of the religious community, viewing morality and moral virtue not as ends in themselves, but simply as “means to an end, the ultimate end being contemplation.” For thinkers like Maimonides, “morality, as distinguished from the divine law, is not of capital importance.” The philosopher and the adherent of the Law agreed on the indispensability of morality within human social and political life, but they did so for fundamentally different reasons. Al-Farabi, Maimonides, and the philosopher in the Kuzari, ultimately viewed morality as instrumental to the transpolitical ends of philosophy. Conversely, the adherent of the Law has “a passioned interest in genuine morality.” Viewed from this perspective, the “moral man as such” is seen to be “the potential believer.”

As Strauss understood it, medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophers had internalized Plato’s lesson about the need for philosophy to combine “the way of Socrates with the way of Thrasymachus.” Esoteric writing provided just such a way. It allowed an author to engage in the kind of intransigent questioning that is appropriate when addressing other philosophers. At the same time, it communicated in a manner that was “more and less exacting than the former,” and therefore appropriate for the philosopher’s “dealings with the vulgar.” By speaking in this way, the philosopher could show the requisite care for both the political community and the community or sect of actual or potential philosophers.

The practitioners of medieval rationalism therefore in the decisive respect did not – nor did they claim to – solve the theologico-political problem. On the contrary, Strauss believed that they shoed how one could live a life of Socratic inquiry within a political community that took its bearings from an allegedly all-encompassing Divine Law. Strauss undoubtedly appreciated their salutary if cautious respect for the moral and religious teachings that form the indispensable foundations of any decent political society. At the same time, Strauss admired their unflinching Platonic affirmation of the ultimate superiority of the “life of contemplation” to the life of religious faith and moral virtue. For both these reasons, the medieval Enlightenment of Islamic and Jewish rationalism stood in sharp contrast to the modern Enlightenment.

But what is it about the life of Socratic inquiry that puts it so at odds with the demands of both the life of faith and the life of moral and political virtue, according to Strauss? According to a tradition dating back to Cicero, Socrates is said to have been the first person to call philosophy down from heaven and force it to make investigations into the human things. By so doing, he became the founder of political philosophy. But as Strauss periodically observes, Xenophon and Plato, not to mention Aristophanes, hint that Socrates was not always a political philosopher. Prior to his “second sailing,” Socrates, like all the early philosophers, initially was preoccupied with the divine and heavenly things, a preoccupation that, according to Xenophon and Plato, Socrates never simply abandoned. Socrates’ turn to the human things marked a new way of studying the whole.

In contrast to what can paradoxically be called his earlier, pre-Socratic approach, his new method of philosophizing attempted to discover “what each of the beings is.” It appreciated that “to be” means to be “something” and that most fundamentally this means to be different from “something else.” Socrates accordingly began to inquire into the various heterogeneous parts of the whole. This “new approach to the understanding of all things,” according to Strauss, had the two-fold benefit of not reducing the human things to the divine things as well as hopefully uncovering the unity “that is revealed in the manifest articulation of the completed whole.” The change in orientation can be seen most clearly in what Socrates now took as his point of departure. Whereas pre-Socratic philosophers routinely began by investigating what is first in itself, Socrates’ turn to the human things marked philosophy’s move away from the world of theoretical abstractions and its return to the world of common sense.

In keeping with his return to the common-sense perspective, Socrates now began by examining the most reasonable, authoritative opinions about the most important things. The diversity of opinions gives rise to the recognition that one has to sift through the variety of opinions in the hope that this will unearth the truth. One becomes aware of the need to engage in “dialectics” or the “art … of friendly dispute.” For opinions about things are only practically true; they contain only “fragments of the truth.” Yet precisely because the opinions are partly true, they must be taken seriously. As Strauss repeatedly emphasizes, Socrates recognized that the absence of the whole truth need not occasion universal doubt, as the proponents of modern skepticism wrongly believed, but rather points to the need for the dialectical ascent from opinion to truth. Socratic dialects accordingly is characterized by the effort to transcend the combination of truth and falsehood that is emblematic of opinion.

Socratic dialectics brought to light the actual grounds of classical political philosophy’s teaching on natural right. It was the original form of theologico-political investigation. Prior to the discovery of natural right, “prephilosophic life is characterized by the primeval identification of the good with the ancestral.” The identification of the good with the ancestral is based on the view that “the right way was established by gods or sons of gods or pupils of gods: the right way must be a divine law.”

In his effort to inquire into the moral and political claims of the city’s divine law and to counter the powerful arguments leveled against the citizen’s view of morality by classical hedonism, Socrates became a phenomenologist of the human soul. Socrates’ dialectical examination of the soul aimed to reveal its inherent natural desires or essential “wants.” These “wants” do not represent a mere collection of indistinguishable urges or impulses. Rather they possess a “natural order” that reflects the hierarchical “natural constitution” of the soul. As regards human beings, their natural constitution finds its distinctiveness in the ability to speak and reason.

Socrates understood that to live well, to live in accordance with their nature, human beings have to live within society. For “man is by nature a social being.” Human rationality, the ability to speak and to communicate with others, makes human beings social in the most radical way imaginable. Every human act, every act involving reason and speech, is directed toward another and is therefore in some sense a social act. Following this line of thought, Strauss goes so far as to say that “humanity itself is sociality” and observes that human sociality has natural goods attached to it such as “love, affection, friendship, and pity.” Socratic philosophy accordingly discovers that it is sociality, a characteristic shared by human beings as human beings, which supplies the basis for natural right “in the narrow or strict sense of right.” This means that the rules that govern human social relations at the very least must recognize that human beings are not free to act in any way they see fit. While human reason obviously allows for an elevated, increased form of freedom, it is also “accompanied by a sacred awe, by a kind of divination that not everything is permitted.” In the final analysis, nature imposes discernable limits on man’s freedom that make life in society both possible and elevated.

Socratic political philosophy consequently recognizes the need for political rulers who are entrusted with a “serious concern for the perfection of the community.” Such human beings possess a greater degree of virtue than ordinary citizens and are motivated by a deep appreciation of the demands of justice and nobility. They are the guardians and the caretakers of the body politic. Unlike modern social science, Socratic philosophy squarely opposes “crypto-materialistic” accounts of statesmanship which seek to explain political action on merely “hedonistic or utilitarian grounds.” The actions of the true statesman are guided by a genuine concern for the common good and cannot be reduced to the mere calculation of self-interest. Viewed on its own terms, political life seems to culminate in the observation that “the full actualization of humanity would then seem to consist, not in some sort of passive membership in civil society, but in the properly directed activity of the statesman, the legislator, or the founder.”

But as Strauss repeatedly emphasizes, Socrates ultimately did not limit his analysis of human excellence simply to the moral and political horizon. In so doing, Socrates subtly but radically changed the terms on which the life of virtue was based and thus raised formidable questions about the adequacy of the religious, moral, and political horizon tout court. Socrates ultimately judged the right ordering of the soul not on the basis of justice and nobility but on the grounds of man’s perfection as a rational being. As a result of this shift of emphasis, Socratic political philosophy eventually replaces the prudent statesman with the wise philosopher as the highest human type.

As Socrates made clear in the Republic, the question of who should rule is to some extent identical to the question of the best regime. That question necessarily requires one to recognize that individual human beings have different natural capacities, most notably and decisively in their capacity to reason. Only a few rare souls are blessed with a first-rate intellect and the means to cultivate it. Justice – and nature itself – would seem to demand that those who are superior in wisdom rule those who are inferior in wisdom. As a specialist in the soul, the philosopher knows best what is needed for the perfection of each human being and therefore can best judge what is due to each human being. As Plato’s Socrates strikingly argues in the Republic, the regime according to nature, the best regime, would require the rule of the wise.

Yet as Strauss further points out, although the rule of the wise is theoretically the best of regimes, it is a practical impossibility. As Strauss forcefully puts it,

The wise do not desire to rule; they must be compelled because their whole life is devoted to the pursuit of something which is absolutely higher in dignity than any human thing – the unchangeable truth … If striving for knowledge of the eternal truth is the ultimate end of man, justice and moral virtue in general can be fully legitimated only by the fact that they are required for the sake of that ultimate end or that they are conditions of the philosophic life. From this point of view the man who is merely just or moral without being a philosopher appears as a mutilated human being. It thus becomes a question … whether what Aristotle calls moral virtue is not, in fact, vulgar virtue … whether by transforming opinion about morality into knowledge of morality, one does not transcend the dimension of morality in the politically relevant sense of the term.

The Socratic philosopher radically transcends the moral and political opinions of the city and thus “the dimension of divine codes altogether.” By appealing to and taking its bearings from an essentially transpolitical good, the Socratic way of life reveals the incompleteness of the moral-political horizon. More pointedly, it argues that that horizon is incoherent; it falsely believes that the just and noble things are desirable for their own sake. Socratic philosophy, on the other hand, affirms that the moral life is only capable of being rendered coherent when it is seen as being ordered to and in the service of the transcendent ends of philosophy.

The dual senses in which morality can be viewed are reflected in Strauss’s two related yet distinct descriptions of political philosophy. One takes politics as its subject and offers a philosophic reflection on political life. Political philosophy in this sense remains in genuine dialogue with civil society and attempts to moderate it by informing human action with human wisdom. It distinguishes between good and bad actions and articulates the various virtues and vices as well as the political facts that are constitutive of political life. Political philosophy here is marked by Aristotelian sobriety and as a result discusses political life “on its own terms … refus[ing] to be drawn into the dialectical whirlpool that carries us far beyond justice in the ordinary sense of the term toward the philosophic life.” In this presentation, the political philosopher is the “umpire” who humanizes the political order by mediating between the various political parties and goods that inevitably come into conflict in political life.

But Strauss also describes political philosophy as primarily being a politic presentation of philosophy. Political philosophy thus understood retains a greater distance form actual political life. The political philosopher is still concerned with the human things, but no longer as the umpire much less artisan of the political community. His studies of the distinctively human things are instrumental to his supra-political concerns. Political philosophy here represents the politically responsible presentation of philosophy “as quest for wisdom … the attempt to replace opinions about the whole by knowledge of the whole.” The political philosopher turns to the city’s authoritative opinions because they provide him with the greatest access to the divine or the eternal things, to the nature of the whole. The particularities that come to light in political life serve as a means of access to the universals. On the other hand, the turn to the human things allows the political philosopher to point out the tensions inherent in the moral-political horizon and thus to alert others with “good natures” of the ultimate superiority of the philosophic life. In this sense, a work of political philosophy is a “speech caused by love” intended to benefit the “puppies” of the philosophic race.

It is undoubtedly tempting to view these different descriptions as finally offering two opposing accounts of political philosophy. But if we look at what Strauss does and not merely at what he says, one can argue that the relations between political philosophy and political philosophy is more dialectical than would appear at first glance. Strauss noted that Machiavelli’s explicit teaching finally could not account for the public spiritedness that animated Machiavelli as a political philosopher. A similar claim can be made about Strauss. For while he published many works that seem to have little connection to any immediately recognizable political concern, Strauss also wrote many things whose concern with moral and political matters cannot simply be reduced to mere veiled pleas for the superiority of the philosophic life. For Strauss, then, political philosophy arguably means something more than either the philosophic reflection on politics or the politic presentation of philosophy. In his practice, political philosophy combined both of these elements in a way whose theoretical coherence somehow denies any straightforward presentation.

Strauss’s most extended and comprehensive treatment of the “conflict between” biblical faith and Socratic philosophy occurs in his three-part essay “Progress or Return?” According to Strauss, that conflict revolves around the question of what way of life is most natural to man, about what way of life is best able to bring about genuine human happiness or wholeness. Because it is based on ultimately irreconcilable principles, it is therefore a “necessary conflict.” It is a conflict between the two great “alternatives” for the human soul over the true grounds of “the right way of life” for human beings.

The antagonism between the biblical and the Socratic way of life does not rule out a prior “implicit” agreement, an important agreement that unites both parties in their “opposition” to the reductionist “elements of modernity.” The Bible and Socratic philosophy agree “regarding the importance of morality, regarding the content of morality, and regarding its ultimate insufficiency.” The antagonism between the two has to do with the “X” that each sees as completing and grounding morality. Socratic philosophy views “autonomous understanding” as this “X,” whereas the Bible claims that morality is supplemented by man’s “obedient love” of God. Confronted with the mystery of the whole, the Socratic life begins in wonder. In a state “above fear and trembling as well as above hope,” the Socratic philosopher seeks to come to know the whole through his own efforts. On the other hand, the biblical way of life begins in the fear of the Lord. The man of biblical faith lives in a state of “fear and trembling as well as in hope” and therefore rejects the proud and vain notion that man can know the whole or can find adequate guidance apart from God’s revelation.

Strauss repeatedly emphasizes that the God of the Bible is not like the gods of ancient Greece. Contrary to the gods of Greek poetry, the Biblical God is a personal God who creates the world and exercises providence over His creation. Moreover, unlike the impersonal necessity recognized by classical philosophy, the God of the bible has an absolute concern with man. The “one particular divine law” revealed by this God is believed to be the only divine Law precisely because, in contrast to the gods of the poets, the biblical God is said to be “omnipotent, not controlled and not controllable.” The implication of this omnipotence, according to Strauss, is that the “absolutely free” God of the Bible is unknowable apart from His act of self-revelation. Inasmuch as the biblical God and the way of life that He ordains for man represents “the one thing needful,” the life of biblical faith overcomes the problem posed by an absolutely free, omnipotent, personal God through the establishment of the covenant. The biblical notion of the covenant, established by God and resting on man’s faith in His promise, responds directly to the problems of the one true God singling out “one particular, and therefore contingent, law of one particular, contingent tribe.”

The inscrutability and omnipotence of the biblical God means that man is in the end totally dependent on divine revelation for knowledge of the one thing needful. In Strauss’s reading, the author of Genesis insists that man is not created to be a theoretical or contemplative being; in fact, it forbids his efforts at “free inquiry.” For Strauss, this fact is “fundamental” to the life of biblical faith, in both its Jewish and Christian presentations. Man is meant to live righteously in loving childlike obedience to God. Only if it begins in God’s revelation and is dedicated to His service is the pursuit of knowledge “necessary” and thus “good.” Without that dedication, the pursuit of theoretical knowledge represents a “rebellion,” a proud calling into question of the authority and completeness of God’s revelation. “Man was given understanding in order to understand God’s commands.” Understanding is thus not something man can or should arrive at on his own. Nor is it something pursued for its own sake. On the contrary, God gives man understanding so that he can be freely obedient to God’s revealed commands.

The Socratic way of life, in turn, is animated by an erotic desire for knowledge about the whole. Incapable of coming into possession of complete wisdom, Socratic philosophy remains aware “that the problems are always more evident than the solutions.” Lacking complete knowledge of the whole, man necessarily remains ignorant of the most important things and thus lacks definitive knowledge of how he should live. Faced with such ignorance, the life of philosophic inquiry is a reasonable and justifiable response. Through such investigations, the Socratic philosopher attempts to gains some, albeit partial and therefore incomplete, knowledge of the whole and therewith knowledge about the right way of life. The elusive character of the whole, according to Strauss, provides the first – indeed the final – justification of the philosophic way of life.

But what is the Socratic philosopher’s response when confronted with the Bible’s claim to the authoritative and comprehensive account of the whole? Despite his many remarks about the distinctive challenge Biblical revelation poses to philosophy, Strauss nonetheless thinks that the philosopher’s response is essentially the same as the one that Socrates gave to Athens’ theos nomos. The difference between the gods of the poets and the God of the bible – a difference that Strauss often outwardly stressed and clarified – finally a difference of degree, not kind. Confronted with an allegedly authoritative divine revelation, the Socratic philosopher can say that revelation is “nothing but a factum brutum, and in addition an uncertain one.” The Socratic philosopher necessarily “suspends judgment.” He is and always remains a philosophic agnostic.

The philosopher that Strauss describes is not primarily concerned with the content of any particular divine revelation. To him the substantial differences between the various revealed religions are finally of secondary importance. What ultimately matters is that they all have their “roots” in man’s obedience to divine Law. Biblical revelation in general and Christian revelation in particular does not, in other words, change or alter Socratic philosophy’s original formulation of the theologico-political problem. This helps explain why Strauss pays so little attention to Christianity’s claim about the integrity and intelligibility of the created natural order or why, despite his admittance of the fact, he does not emphasize Christianity’s teaching on the transpolitical end of man. Rather, what is essential for Strauss is the phenomenon of divine revelation. According to Strauss, revelation remains an unproven “possibility,” a hypothetical whose cognitive status Plato satisfactorily showed, before the emergence of biblical revelation, was ultimately rooted in belief and in certain of the soul’s longings. Implicit in Strauss’s position is the breathtaking claim that Socratic philosophy, or at least Plato’s presentation of it, revealed all of the possibilities that are open to man within the natural world. Socratic philosophy is not able to refute the possibility of revelation but it is able to show that the arguments in favor of divine revelation are circular and not rationally compelling since they are grounded in faith.

Strauss occasionally suggests that Socratic philosophy’s inability to disprove the very possibility of revelation means that philosophy would seem to be “based on faith.” Such claims could suggest that Strauss finally accepted the partially Nietzschean inspired argument for atheism for intellectual probity. But that conclusion would be incorrect. Strauss’s statements about philosophy resting on an “unevident, arbitrary, or blind decision” all occur when he addresses the relation of reason and revelation from the perspective of contemporary social science or philosophy. Within the framework of “present-day philosophizing,” every choice is viewed as a commitment, as a groundless act of will. That framework reductively views biblical faith and philosophy only formally, as two equally arbitrary and thus equally defensible (or indefensible) sets of propositions.

Conversely, Socratic philosophy proceeds from the recognition that the right way of life cannot be positively established, that is, irrefutably demonstrated, apart from the possession of a demonstrable metaphysics that renders the whole fully intelligible. Absent that completed metaphysics, which for Strauss is not possessed by either modern philosophy or biblical revelation, “the quest for knowledge of the most important things” is seen to be the “most important things for us.” Socratic or zetetic philosophy is therefore presently possible even though modern science has seemed to discredit the various ancient cosmologies including Aristotle’s. In short, given the permanently elusive character of the whole, philosophy is “evidently the right way of life.” A final justification of the philosophic life that Strauss cited was Socrates’ consistent claim that he found “his happiness in acquiring the highest possible degree of clarity which he can acquire.” The Socratic way of life is the most natural life for man since it, Strauss maintains, best satisfies man’s natural, that is, erotic desire for happiness.

Strauss’s account of the lives of Biblical faith and Socratic philosophy is in many respects similar to the views he attributed to medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophers like Al-Farabi and Maimonides. Like them, Strauss affirms that political life necessarily relies upon a religiously based morality that the Platonic philosopher must outwardly respect and seek to humanize. What is more, he also affirms a deep and ultimately unbridgeable chasm to exist between the biblical and the Socratic ways of life. Lastly, Strauss also finally privileges the life of unfettered Socratic inquiry to the life of lawful obedience to a personal God.

At the same time, one cannot help but notice that Strauss chooses to make explicit what Al-Farabi and Maimonides chose to veil, namely, the “fundamental tension” between the lives of faith and philosophy. In the concluding paragraph of “Progress or Return?” Strauss explicitly gives one reason as to why he would do this. By bringing to the fore the conflict between biblical faith and philosophy, Strauss claims to expose the enduring “vitality of Western civilization.” While initially disconcerting, the recognition of the conflict between the two “roots” of Western civilization is also “reassuring and comforting.” For that recognition carries with it the further realization that there is no inherent reason why Western civilization should give up on itself. The exposure of the conflict that forms the nerve of the West is thus in some sense a high-minded political act, a prudent calling of attention to the fact that Western civilization has within itself the means to overcome late modernity’s disenchantment with the world.

Strauss also intimates that by exposing this conflict one glimpses the nerve of “Western intellectual history, Western spirituality.” That exposure paves the way for late modern human beings to transcend the intellectual and spiritual limitations of their age. It also allows them to see that philosophy, in its original Socratic sense, remains possible. At the least, by making the conflict that lies at the heart of the theologico-political problem explicit, Strauss contributes to a recovery of what he elsewhere described as “a nonhistoricist understanding of nonhistoricist philosophy.”

Guerra, Marc D. "The Recovery of the Theologico-Political Problem." The Political Science Reviewer 36 (2007): 47-80.

What Was Political Philosophy? Or: The Straussian Philosopher and His Other

Leo Strauss: An Introduction to His Thought and Intellectual Legacy by Thomas L. Pangle (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). (LS)
The Truth About Leo Strauss by Catherine and Michael Zuckert (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). (TLS)

Cited Works of Leo Strauss:

The City and Man (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964). (CM)
Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968). (LAM)
Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953). (NRH)
Philosophy and Law (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1955). (PL)
The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952). (PPH)
The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). (RCPR)

Do you remember when awareness and suspicion of “Straussians” were confined to the few political scientists or, perhaps, historians or classicists who had an interest in limiting the influence of Strauss’s teachings in their academic departments, when we who respect Strauss’s writings would never expect a person with no stake in these academic squabbles even to recognize his name, much less have any reason to look askew at a possible “disciple”? Those days seem long ago now, as the question of Strauss’s dark designs has been linked in a certain educated public’s mind with that of the fearsome “neoconservatives,” and through them, more specifically, to the present Bush administration and its foreign policy. Perhaps this political phase of the Straussian controversy will soon pass, and we alleged “Straussian” will be able to return to losing nobly in our familiar academic turf wars. Or perhaps the question of Strauss’s political influence will last as long as the questions surrounding the Iraq war; perhaps future generations will revive it as we revive debates about Vietnam, or, say, the causes of World War I.

In the meantime, the public flare-up of the “Straussian” question has at least helped, I presume, to create a market for books on Strauss’s thought, and to ensure that these books address the practical implications of his idea of “philosophy.” And if we take at all seriously the “political” in the term “political philosophy,” then that might not be all bad. Here I will consider two very worthy examples among the recent books on Leo Strauss with a view particularly to scrutinizing the relationship between philosophy and political things.



The Zuckerts’ Exoteric Strauss
Given that the public stir over Leo Strauss’s influence has often traded on simplistic ideological caricatures of Strauss’s thought, when it did not descend into pure nonsense, it is understandable that Catherine and Michael Zuckert, in their very expert, timely, and readable The Truth About Leo Strauss, are eager to point out that Strauss “said and wrote very little about American politics,” but that, on the contrary, his “chief concerns lay elsewhere, with the question of the character and fate of philosophy.” (TLS, 30) Strauss’s “philosophical project” consisted essentially, they argue, in an effort to recover classical philosophy (Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, etc.) and through this recovery to reconceive “the entire philosophic tradition.” (TLS, 31) And they emphasize that Strauss “wanted to revive ancient political philosophy, not ancient politics.” On attending further to the Zuckerts’ presentation of Strauss’s project, however, it proves harder than may first appear to separate what is “philosophical” in this project from what is “political.”

In a formulation of Strauss’s intention that may seem to transcend or to be prior to the distinction between the “philosophical” and the “political,” the Zuckerts aver that “Strauss wanted to revive a truly noble form of human existence.” Such a revival was necessary because “modern philosophy’s act of rebellion against classical philosophy and biblical religion” had led to a flattening relativism and finally to a radical historicism, the denial of “any permanent realities whatever” that is equivalent to nihilism. Strauss may be said to share this aim of reviving nobility with his youthful hero Nietzsche; but Strauss broke with Nietzsche as he came to see that the latter’s project failed to liberate itself from modernity’s polemical attempt to “refute orthodoxy,” that is, to dispose once and for all of the biblical teaching concerning an unfathomable God. (TLS, 33) Nietzsche, despite his noble desires, thus remained in the grip of the very modern project that had denied the reality of the noble and so had, “via an almost inexorable dialectic,” reduced the “crisis of our times.” (TLS, 36)

The essential mistake of the moderns, on the Zuckerts’ telling of Strauss’s story, lay in a transformation of the relationship between philosophy and politics, or between “theory and practice.” (TLS, 48) The moderns directed theory or science towards the satisfaction of bodily desires and thus “dropped the distinction between living and living well,” whether “living well” is understood in terms of the moral virtue of citizens or in terms of the good of philosophizing itself. They “lost sight of that form of human life that is truly satisfying and did not sufficiently take account of their own activity as philosophers.” (TLS, 48-9) Thus whereas “the premoderns identified apolitical ways to transcend the bounds of the ordinary, everyday life: the ways of philosophy or religion,” the moderns make transcendence “a public matter.” They convert the human interest in transcendence into a “demand for actualization” and thus an impulse to transform the common, political world. (TLS, 70) Under the guidance of modern philosophy, humanity invests its transcendent impulses in the project of a public and general mastery or actualization, and thus loses the capacity to articulate and orient itself towards a reality that transcends human power.

Our only hope for a recovery of the noble, which, in the Zuckerts’ account, would seem to be equivalent to an orientation of human existence towards that which transcends the human power of actualization, Strauss concluded, lay in a return to “ancient political philosophy,” a return made possible for Strauss by the indications of the great medievals Maimonides and Farabi. But just how is ancient philosophy supposed to provide an alternative to the modern liquidation of nobility? The answer, the Zuckerts point out, lies not at all in some settled metaphysical or cosmological doctrine, but rather in the Socratic practice of philosophy itself. Philosophy as “the search for wisdom … constituted a fully satisfying form of human existence that could be enjoyed by private individuals in less-than-perfect regimes.” (TLS, 38) This affirmation of the supreme happiness of the life of “zetetic,” that is, skeptical or “seeking” philosophy, is clearly central to Strauss’s response to the modern crisis. The satisfaction inherent in the philosopher’s sense of “making progress” in the search for truth is held to be enough to ground the claim that philosophy is “the only truly satisfying and happy way of life” (TLS, 84), and thus to provide an alternative to the modern reduction of reason to the service of common human needs and desires.

We notice, though, that the question of nobility/transcendence has somehow been answered in terms of happiness or satisfaction, the happiness or satisfaction of philosophers. What, if anything, is the connection? The Zuckerts are eager to affirm, in answering certain reckless and moralistic critics of Strauss, that the philosopher is no “hedonist.” “[T]he Socratic formula for genuine virtue is: virtue is knowledge.’ In seeking knowledge, the philosopher cannot help, therefore, but seek to become virtuous as well.” (TLS, 52) But his nice formula, I suggest, will remain hardly more than wordplay unless the relationship between the two ideas can be satisfactorily specified. Without such a clarification, we do not know, for example, whether the substantive meaning of the equation involves transferring to the term “virtue” the meaning we already commonly attribute to “knowledge,” or perhaps the reverse.

In fact the Zuckerts seem to show that for Strauss the formula “virtue is knowledge” is to be taken in the first sense: true virtue or human excellence is not what it is commonly taken to be (justice understood as a positive interest in the common good, for example), but is, rather, knowledge, or more precisely, the knowledge of ignorance possessed by the rare Socratic philosopher. We moralists may be consoled, however, by the fact that the philosopher is nonetheless virtuous in the common sense of the term, that is, “just,” in that his devotion to progress in knowledge of ignorance is perfectly compatible with the minimal definition of justice as “not harming others.” (TLS, 53) The good news, then, is that the interests of “knowledge” and the interests of “virtue” in the non-philosophic sense are happily aligned. Thus the Zuckerts describe Strauss as seeking to revive, on the one hand, as we have seen, a Socratic understanding of philosophy, and, on the other, an Aristotelian understanding of politics. Philosophy and political science, theory and practice, are essentially distinct; Socratic skepticism regarding cosmology does not undermine the observable evidence that there are “ends toward which man is by nature inclined and of which he has by nature some awareness.” Prudence or practical wisdom governs its own self-sufficient sphere, and does not need a further theoretical basis. Philosophy is not needed to found the moral-political realm, but it is there to lend a hand, “primarily in clearing away false theories” (TLS, 56), that is, reductionist theories that would subvert a prudent confidence in the naturalness of man’s higher ends.

Thus the Zuckerts describe what is essentially a “good fences make good neighbors” settlement between philosophy and the moral-political realm in Strauss’s thought: these neighbors, Socratic philosophy and Aristotelian politics, get along because each minds its own business, though the superior neighbor is happy to lend the inferior a hand in the storm. And so, in answer to Strauss’s moral and political critics, the Zuckerts are able to report that his teaching in fact amounts to good news on every front: “He strove not only to support and defend the regime he thought was the best possible under modern circumstances, but also and more generally to remind his readers of the importance and dignity of politics, not simply for the sake of philosophy or his fellow citizens or the people of the West, but more broadly for the sake of humanity as a whole.” (TLS, 57)

But surely things cannot be quite so simple; surely the goodness of philosophy and moral-political goodness cannot be at once quite so evident in themselves and so conveniently distinct from one another. To begin with, this fence between theory and practice seems to have some holes. The Zuckerts have already noticed philosophy’s service to politics in fending off “false doctrines,” but how different is this really from supplying a true doctrine? If man’s practical ends need to be protected from subversive understandings of the whole, then do they not in fact depend at least implicitly on a cosmology supportive of human purposes? Is there not, then something problematic on its face with this convenient combination of a “Socratic” philosophy with an “Aristotelian” politics, of unhindered skepticism with edifying affirmation?

A gap in the fence between theory and practice cannot, moreover, be open in only on direction. The philosopher’s skeptical and open-ended interest in “the whole” is not wholly insulted from the insights or judgments on the basis of which he defends the integrity of the moral-political realm. Socratic ignorance is not pure, but is “structured” and progressive (TLS, 85, 86); though the philosopher’s quest for knowledge of the whole is never completed, he finds satisfaction in his substantial if provisional attainments. Though he does not pretend to access the “roots” or “the cause” of the genesis of the whole, he accepts the evidence of “the manifest articulation of the completed whole,” the evidence that the mind is fundamentally “at home” in the world. And this grounding, this fit between the mind and the world, is said to attest at once the goodness of the world and the dignity or worth of the mind as evidence of the goodness of the whole and as the ground of the worth of humanity seem clearly at least to qualify the teachings of a clear distinction between “theoretical” and “practical” realms.

It is in a later chapter of the book (chapter 5), which defends Strauss against the charge that he is a “teacher of evil,” that the Zuckerts focus most closely on the question of the relation between philosophy and morality. Here they present Strauss’s “theory of the two sources of morality.” One source is philosophy itself: “Morality as practiced by the philosopher is cause, concomitant, and consequence of the philosophic life itself.” (TLS, 173) The philosopher is just in that the good of the rational soul orders and satisfies the whole soul and thus causes it to despise “the things for which the non-philosophers hotly contest.” (TLS, 171-172; CM, 1254) But there is also another, lower, source of morality: “the need of the city.” (TLS, 173) This lower “justice” is not by nature intrinsically good or satisfying for the individual; it is rather the product of a “habituation” that shapes conduct according to social utility but does not truly overcome natural human inclinations to “mastery, wealth, and sensual pleasures.” (TLS, 173) Only for the rare philosopher, it appears, can justice be said to be intrinsically good.

But this theory of morality’s two apparently radically different sources raises on obvious question, as the Zuckerts notice Strauss acknowledges: how can we call the phenomena arising from such “radically different roots” by the same name? And how do we account for the remarkable coincidence presented by the fact that these two moralities converge to produce “more or less the same moral code?” (TLS, 174) In a word, are we talking about a single phenomenon, that of morality, that is in some way shared by philosophers and non-philosophers alike, or does the term “morality” mask a fundamental difference that separates philosophers from the rest of humanity?

The Zuckerts, following Strauss, are at pains to defend both the unity of humanity and the radical difference of philosophy. Both unity and difference are articulated in terms of the problem of “the part” and “the whole.” Man is both a part and a whole; this condition names the unity of humanity, philosophers and non-philosophers alike. “Man is self-consciously or manifestly open to the whole and erotically driven towards that whole.” This openness to the whole is not the exclusive preserve of the philosopher but is revealed in the most distinctively human practices: “philosophy, religion, morality.” (TLS, 174).

Strauss differentiates between philosophers and non-philosophers in terms of the distinction between “the whole simply,” the object of the philosophical quest, and “society” which stands as the whole for non-philosophers. The Zuckerts further associates “society” with the body and with individuality, and “the whole” with the (presumably, in principle, non-individualized) intellect. This framing of the essential difference also makes possible an articulation of a fundamental commonality: “society and the whole simply have this in common, that they are both wholes which transcend the individual, inducing the individual to rise above and beyond himself. All nobility consists in such rising above and beyond oneself to something greater than oneself.” (TLS, 175; “Problem of Socrates,” 164)

Now if we ponder the meaning of this common nobility or “rising above” we will discover the fragility of the Zuckerts’ and, in many cases, Strauss’s radical distinction between philosophic transcendence and the religious and moral orientation of non-philosophers. The philosopher strives to identify himself with “pure intellect,” and from the standpoint of this claim is pleased to define the pre-philosophic life in terms of mere bodily need and the love of “one’s own.” From this point of view, the city reveals itself as a utilitarian function that subordinates individuals to its material necessities by the mechanism of a habituation that operates in large part through moral and religious delusions. But, at least one of the Zuckerts’ own reading of Strauss, this reduction is too simple, for moral men are “animated by the eros for everything beautiful and graceful;” their motives cannot be accounted for without reference to the noble. At the same time, it is admitted that “individual embodiment restrains all forms of transcendence, not only philosophy” (TLS, 175), that is to say, including philosophy. Note in this connection that the Zuckerts have granted that wisdom is inaccessible, and therefore that the virtue and the happiness of the philosopher must always remain imperfect. (TLS, 46) Since the object of the philosopher’s quest remains a “noble” intention and in no way a full possession, it seems clear that the philosopher remains animated by the same elusive notions of “the beautiful and graceful” that stirred his soul as a moral-religious citizen, partially clarified as these notions may be.

The “whole” that occupies the philosopher and the “whole” that governs citizens cannot, then, be as radically distinct as Strauss and the Zuckerts would have us believe. Philosophers never access the “whole simply,” which must therefore remain in some way and to some degree a projection from “the whole” that forms the horizons of the city. At the same time, the social whole is never determined wholly by material necessities, but is always shaped by a natural human need and human power. The idea of the social whole as simply the realm of bodily need is in fact an abstraction that appears from the standpoint of the philosophers’ noble pretensions to a transcendent nobility. “Society” is the other of “philosophy.” Both of the “two [distinct] sources of morality” are abstractions from the core phenomenon of morality or nobility, even moral abstractions, one might well say.

Consider now the implications of this reflection on the relation between the whole simply and the moral-political whole for our earlier discussion of the political-philosophical problem in terms of the relation between “Socratic” philosophy and “Aristotelian” political science. It now appears that not only is philosophy needed to defend the theoretical framework that shelters practical wisdom, but that philosophy itself depends upon insights or intimations that arise within the practical realm before they become the matter of theoretical speculation. In chapter three, devoted to Strauss “as a postmodern thinker,” the Zuckerts refer to “Socrates’ insight into the importance of recognizing that being is divided into essentially different kinds (or ideas).” (TLS, 112) But Jacques Derrida accepted Nietzsche’s view, they argue, that “there is nothing that fundamentally distinguishes human beings from other animals.” Thus, “[l]ike Heidegger, Derrida insisted that ‘ethics’ is a subordinate part of the ‘metaphysical’ understanding of the world.” The Zuckerts seem to hold, then, that the very noetic heterogeneity that is the fundamental correlate and condition of philosophical intelligibility seem to be grounded in, or perhaps coeval with, the deepest axiom of practical judgment, namely, that there are “observable differences between human and non-human.” (TLS, 56) And so the Zuckerts’ critique of Derrida seems to belie their earlier effort to maintain a “fence” between theory and practice, for it at least suggests a kind of priority of practice to theory. In defending the presuppositions of sound practice, theory is also defending the conditions of its own existence, not only the narrowly “political” conditions for the survival of philosophy, but the very root of the heterogeneity upon which intelligibility depends.

Let us now return to the Zuckerts’ most extensive sustained discussion of the meaning of “Socratic” philosophy in order to scrutinize further the relationship between theory and practice in Leo Strauss’s project. (TLS, 84-8) We now see that the claim that the “Socratic view of the whole as an order of essentially different kinds ‘makes possible the study of the human things as such’” can at least as plausibly be read in the opposite direction (TLS, 86; NRH, 123); the practical insights into the human difference makes possible and meaningful an inquiry into the natural kinds that make up the whole. Likewise, let us propose a reversal of Strauss’s eloquent statement that the dignity of the mind grounds the dignity of man, and that the world is man’s home because it is the home of the mind. Does not the mind’s being at home in the world presuppose a sense of meaning and order that precedes reflection? Or if not a simple reversal of these formulae, let us propose that man’s dignity and his awareness of being a special part of a meaningful whole might be considered prior to the dichotomy between theory and practice. Thus Strauss observes, as the Zuckerts report, that man’s distinctiveness may be said to lie in being “the beast with red cheeks,” that is, in his sense of shame. (TLS, 88) Now the Zuckerts (citing here a helpful discussion by Nasser Behnegar) quite reasonably wish to translate this capacity for shame into an argument for the primacy of “reason.” Shame presupposes morality, or an “awareness of how one ought to live,” and “this awareness cannot be clarified without the use of reason.” Now nothing could be further from my intention than to disparage the dignity of reason. My point is simply that reason can never fully “clarify” the very moral awareness with which its own dignity is bound up. I might even suggest that for “reason” again to recover its proper authority it is necessary to experiment with yet another reversal of Straussianism and consider the proposition that “the use of reason cannot be clarified without a moral awareness.”

This Straussian or post-Straussian reflection on the relation between theory and practice ought to allow us to reframe the vexed question of the meaning and standing of esotericism in Strauss’s writings. The Zuckerts offer a very interesting and bold thesis on this subject, as readily conveyed in the title of their fourth chapter: “The Man who Gave Away the Secrets.” They propose that, by exposing the ancient practice of esotericism to the broad daylight of modern scholarship, Strauss in fact abandoned esotericism, implicitly denying it was an appropriate or effective strategy in the circumstances of late modernity. The Zuckerts’ ingenious explanation of a counter-strategy, appropriate to a public atmosphere pervaded by the Enlightenment, is the following: “The only possible cure for the ills of Enlightenment was a new kind of enlightenment.” Conceding to the Enlightenment the dubiousness of “Platonic Ideas and Platonic immortality of the soul,” Strauss “shucks [these] off” as “mere exotericism” in order to reveal in broad daylight “the real stripped-down truth about philosophy.” The only truth that can now possibly “save us” is the truth about the perfect satisfactions of the imperfect search for truth. (TLS, 135)

Still, any Straussian worth his salt must immediately reply such a truth about the Socratic practice of philosophy might save “us ‘certified’ philosophers,” but surely it is not available for general consumption. In fact, must this zeteticism not threaten and therefore offend the masses, thus endangering the lofty and rare practice of philosophy? The Zuckerts have a ready answer, which returns us to the tidy “good fences” policy we observed above. Not only does Strauss’s strategy provide the inner truth of philosophy to the few, it also supplies a “new grounding for ‘values,’ … a doctrine of natural right to hold against the extreme relativism … characteristic [of] … our post-Enlightenment age.” (TLS, 134; my emphasis) Thus philosophy, as purely zetetic, is nicely insulated from the uncertainties and conflicts of practical life, while at the same time it is able to provide a doctrine [!] to refute relativism.

Surely the Zuckerts are aware that this convenient disposition of the relationship between philosophy and morality is too good, or too bad, to be true. Most obviously, nowhere does Strauss claim to provide a “doctrine” to counter relativism; rather, as the Zuckerts emphasize, he is all about “awareness of the problems.” At the same time, from the moment this very awareness of the permanent philosophical problems becomes satisfied with itself, the problems are no longer real, living problems, and so no longer really philosophical, and thus no longer satisfying. I conclude that the Zuckerts must be tipping their hand when, after seeming to have refuted any significant esotericism in Strauss, they hedge decisively as follows: “if there is [an esoteric doctrine in Strauss], it is buried so deep as to be irrelevant for all practical purposes.” (TLS, 137, my emphasis) Apparently the Zuckerts have their own “practical purposes,” purposes that require a widely available and unthreatening Leo Strauss.



Pangle’s Purgatory

Thomas Pangle’s Leo Strauss: An Introduction to His Thought and Intellectual Legacy is a compact, elegant, learned, often incisive, and, we gather, intentionally puzzling introduction to the master’s thought. Certainly it makes much more of Strauss’s esotericism than do the Zuckerts, and just as certainly strives more to emulate this art of writing than they do, at least on the surface. Pangle is clearly more impressed than they by the permanent risks associated with “the unhappily pervasive presence of tyranny in political life,” by the fact that “human aspirations to partake of the divine … are susceptible to terrible perversions.” (LS, 57) He thus is clearly less impressed than the Zuckerts by the freedoms we owe to the Enlightenment, and more alert to “deeply rooted, moral prejudices that pervade every time.” (LS, 60; my emphasis) Accordingly, he emphasizes even more than they the “complete … liberation” of philosophers from these prejudices and thus the “vast gulf in wisdom” that separates philosophers from the rest of us. (LS, 61, 64) Professor Pangle’s work overall, and this most recent book in particular, therefore provide us an eminent example of what I propose to call the “High Straussian” position, which we here intend begin to assess through a careful reading of key parts of the present volume.

The main or most general purpose of esotericism, according to Pangle, is to “avoid the danger of a mutual contamination and corruption of politics and philosophy.” His aim, it seems clear, is to build a much stronger fence between theory and practice than the Zuckerts’. And although esotericism and its fundamental intention are coeval with political philosophy, the need for this fence is particularly acute in our times, since we are in the midst of a crisis of the West that is essentially a result of just such a contamination. Modern rationalism deformed philosophy, or made it vulnerable to a deformation, by publicly advocating human power over nature as the purpose of philosophy. This advocacy issued eventually into “a kind of tyranny that surpassed the boldest imaginations of the most powerful thinkers of the past,” into “the appalling alternative that man, or human thought, must be collectivized either by one stroke and without mercy or else by slow and gentle processes ….” (LS, 74; quoting OT, 27) These “slow and gentle processes” are at work even or especially within “modern liberal republicanism,” which “by causing the purpose of the philosophers, or more generally the purpose which essentially transcends society, to collapse into the purpose of the non-philosophers,” thereby “causes the purpose of the gentlemen to collapse into the purpose of the non gentlemen,” which in turn portends the collapse of the idea of the intrinsic goodness of virtue into a pure instrumentalism. (LS, 79; quoting LAM, 19-21) Now, since Strauss (as reported by Pangle) avers that this modern “predicament … is the incentive to our whole concern with the classics” we are authorized to conclude that the whole intention of Pangle’s Strauss is to resist this collapse of meaning. (LS, 68; CM, 11) Moreover, Pangle is ever keen to insist upon the “‘tentative or experimental’ character of Strauss’s whole proposal” (LS, 97), and even admits on Strauss’s behalf that “the crucial claimed insights of radical historicism might be in a decisive sense sound.” (LS, 67) Strauss’s “Socratic” quest is, finally “a late-modern quest.” (LS, 31) One is therefore entitled, even practically compelled, to categorize the governing purpose of Pangle’s Strauss’s interest in the “purpose of the philosophers” as a practical, even a political purpose. Strauss is less sure of the idea of philosophy than of its practical, indeed historical purpose.

Let us nevertheless attend to the idea, or the notion of “philosophy.” What is the meaning of the “classical philosophy” to which Strauss invites a return? Somewhat surpisingly, Pangle’s most substantial, if also most discreet or elusive, account of the meaning of philosophy comes before chapter 2 on “The Revival of Classical Political Philosophy,” at the end of the first chapter, entitled “Relativism: The Crux of Our Liberal Culture.” Strauss argues here that relativism, or the belief that reason is impotent to ground any principles concerning what is right and good, is a direct and fundamental threat to “the liberal and democratic West” (LS, 8), since our civilization is based on reason’s claim to authority. Our publicly articulate goal, “‘the universal prosperous society of free and equal men and women’ – does not adequately capture what the West still experiences as morally sacred, as placing sacred limits on human striving, even on the striving for universal freedom and prosperity.” (LS, 12-13) In our struggle with communism we in the liberal West have been confronted with “a perverted or fanatic expression of this natural and inevitable civic concern for the sacred, which includes a sacrificial civic duty or call to identify and to fight, as evil, as devilish, that which always threatens the sacred …” (LS, 13) Thus we have been reminded (long before 9/11, I note), that “the sacred and its perversions” are ever a factor in human life.

Through a discussion of Isaiah Berlin (LS, 18-20), Pangle next illustrates the utter resourcelessness of liberalism in answering the challenge of relativism. But then, lest we should grow too eager to find a solution, he points up the “Danger Lurking in the Reaction Against Liberal Relativism,” the danger of “sectarianism” that can only be avoided, Pangle is ready now to suggest, by the Socratic idea of philosophy, according to which “philosophy as such is nothing but genuine awareness of the problems, i.e., of the fundamental and comprehensive problems.” (LS, 23-4; WIPP, 114) Pangle indeed spares no pains in lowering or at least unsettling our expectations in our quest for an alternative to relativism. If, in our search for an answer to relativism, we risk falling into fanaticism, it must be that there is something fearful in “the truth disclosed by reason. Precisely what is it about this truth, about the truth, that makes it so profoundly disconcerting? Is it really the truth that is bad and ugly?” (LS, 26) One is tempted to say that this invitation to philosophy might make one reconsider whether relativism was really so bad. Pangle’s tone is nothing if not (to use one of his favorite words) “intransigent”: “Strauss offers no certainty and no promise”; the outcome of our inquiries may be simply “to understand that and why [the crisis of relativism or radical historicism] cannot be overcome.” We must therefore at the outset be “resigned to the knowable limits of our powers … Our discoveries must chastise our wishes.” (LS, 28, 29) Even before we know what philosophy is, we must know not to connect it with our hopes. This, then, is Pangle’s propadeutic to Socratism: be afraid, be very afraid.

Oddly, it is here that Pangle interjects his only sustained treatment of the supposedly fundamental problem of reason and revelation. “To avoid misunderstandings,” he wishes to explain that this “most profound contradiction at the heart of the Great Tradition of the West” is not really a critical problem, but is something we can live with. (LS, 30) Indeed, living with this tension is what the West is all about. (The more “fundamental tension,” 54f., is in fact between philosophy and the city; “the sacred” is a necessary dimension of the city.) Moreover, “this conflict … is at the bottom of … modern philosophy.” (LS, 31)

To understand in what sense modern philosophy stems from the conflict between reason and revelation, we must attend to an inconspicuous parenthetical suggestion Pangle drops early in chapter 3 on modernity: “As for the deepest philosophic goal motivating this [modern] movement, see PL, Introd.” Ever attentive to deep philosophical goals, we refresh our memories on the introduction to Strauss’s early work, Philosophy and Law, and find that the secret Pangle would have us discover for ourselves (from Strauss) is that the Enlightenment was all about … atheism. More precisely, the fatal passion of the Enlightenment seems to be that “it wanted to refute … the tenets of orthodoxy,” whereas it should have remained content with the (presumably classical) strategy of “dismissing the tenets of orthodoxy as not known but merely believed.” The crucial error, the source of the compulsion to refute, seems to lie in the fact that the enlightened ones had “been impressed by the claim of these [biblical] tenets.” Thus, a theoretical refutation being impossible, they adopted the “Napoleonic” strategy of creating a new world and a new systematic science that would render religion irrelevant. The moderns were somehow “impressed” by the Bible in a way that compelled them to try to match it or outdo it, on its own turf, as it were, the turf, I infer, of human hopes. And thus was philosophy, eventually, prostituted to the propaganda of world mastery. To resist this prostitution and the attendant Crisis of the West, it will thus be necessary to remain, or to become, unimpressed by biblical hopes. This is the safe way to live the excruciating tension of “this titanic controversy” that defines the West.

The return to classical political philosophy or more precisely to “Socratic zetetic skepticism” is of course the key to resisting, or being purged of such hopes. (LS, 32) The first step in such a return consists in a recognition of certain “permanent characteristics of humanity,” especially “the distinction between noble and base, which are admitted by the thoughtful historicists.” Now, since there is no general agreement on the effective meaning of “noble” and “base,” these historicists (Heidegger, most notably, of course), find this rudimentary distinction to be too slight to provide a permanent basis on which to judge historical dispensations. Strauss, for his part, does not seem to deny the slightness of the permanent moral distinctions, but wants to show (in Natural Right and History, most notably) that the so-called “experience of history” that underlies historicism is itself merely an essentially accidental interpretation (stemming ultimately, we note, from the “impression” left by biblical hopes) – he wants, that is, to show the historical relativity of the sensibility underlying radical historicism itself.

Strauss intends this deconstruction of historicism, Pangle explains, to clear the way for a reconsideration of “philosophy in its original, Socratic sense,” “knowledge of ignorance,” an ignorance which is by no means empty but consists in “grasping” the “fundamental problems, such as the problem of justice,” problems that can be shown to be permanent. Now here the essentials of Strauss’s anti-historicist argument would seem to be in place, but Strauss, in a move Pangle describes as “enigmatic,” throws the question wide open again by acknowledging that “if political philosophy is limited to understanding the fundamental alternative [sing.], it is of no practical value,” since it would be “unable to answer the question of what the ultimate goal of wise action is.” Philosophy as theory (knowledge of ignorance) must somehow be translated into practice. That practice is just one step in the argument away, turns out, in “the Socratic answer to the question of how man ought to live: … by realizing that we are ignorant of the most important things, we realize at the same time that the most important thing for us, or the one thing needful, is quest for knowledge of the most important things or quest for wisdom.” This realization, moreover, not only answers the fundamental practical question for the philosopher, but is said to provide a “final solution” [!] to “the fundamental political problem.” (LS, 35; my emphasis)

Pangle has certainly whetted our appetite to know of this “final solution,” but from here on he declines (following Strauss’s own example) to provide any further link in the chain of argument, instead dropping a series of clues – along with the suggestion that we master all of Strauss’s writings, though we are allowed also to consult the writings of Christopher Bruell. (LS, 37) This is surely good advice (which I indeed am in the midst of taking), as there are doubtless many worse ways to spend one’s life. But for the benefit of any reader who may not be able to take it, I propose now to provide him the service of assembling these clues in the very pages that follow.

The first clue has already been dropped: the “fundamental question” has been rendered in the singular, inviting us to attend to the fundamental question. That would be the reason/revelation question, of course. The next clue is the mention of “the possibility that [Plato’s] Socrates was as much concerned with understanding what justice is, i.e., with understanding the whole complexity of the problem of justice, as with preaching justice.” (LS, 36; my emphasis) I trust there is no need, beyond my italicization, even for a readership that has not yet mastered the whole Straussian corpus, to point out the connection between the first two clues. (Consider that remark a shabby vestige of pedagogic esotericism.) Note, too, that we seem to have returned once again from practice to theory: the final practical solution is somehow an understanding of a problem.

In the next clue Pangle’s Strauss directly addresses the “perennial conflict between the Socratic and the anti-Socratic answer (to the question how man ought to live)” (LS, 37) via an engagement with Max Weber, who takes reason to be morally impotent because he believes that “all devotion to causes or ideals has its roots in religious faith.” (LS, 38) Weber cannot entertain the possibility of reason’s practical authority because he takes modern science and philosophy to be the perfection of reason. (And on the basis of the clue from a later chapter discussed above, that is, the account of modern atheism in the introduction to Philosophy and Law, we can say that the problem is that modernity converted reason into a faith, the faith in human world-transformation – in order to address certain “impressions” left over from the Bible.) The reason/revelation controversy appears to admit of no solution – but only as long as we accept Weber’s modern understanding of reason.

Next we are invited to penetrate through and see beyond the modern abstractions that confined Weber’s notion of “reason,” and thus to access the “pre-scientific world,” the “truly natural human world and consciousness.” (LS, 38) But since the world is not immediately available to us moderns, we must rely on classical philosophy’s report of its own origins, “supplemented by consideration of the most elementary premises of the Bible” (LS, 39; NRH, 80), premises which, as Strauss helpfully points out in passing, “are not of course the theme of the Bible.” These ancient sources bring us back to “the evidence of those simple experiences regarding right and wrong which are at the bottom of the philosophic contention that there is a natural right.” And so we find that Pangle’s Strauss seems to have led us back again to where we started, about seven of his pages ago, back to the “permanent characteristic of humanity” recognized even by “thoughtful historicists,” the universal human distinction between noble and base. But did not the historicists already blunt this strategy by pointing out the slightness and indeterminacy of this awareness of nobility, a point that Strauss seemed to admit? Is this not why we were then directed away from any attempt to ground philosophy on moral substance and towards a purely zetetic strategy, the “knowledge of ignorance”?

Mr. Pangle certainly seems to have returned us in some kind of circle back to where we started. No doubt this was necessary in order to prepare a re-launching of the argument, the reader now alert to the truly fundamental alternative between reason and revelation. We might otherwise have thought that the question concerned alternative understandings of justice or nobility, but now we have been prepared to see (though of course we have not been told directly, in a way that just anyone could understand) that the real question is between the life of pious obedience and the life of philosophic inquiry, or in other words, between the life that cares about being just (or “preaching” about it) and the life that cares about “understanding what justice is,” which itself, we have been cued to anticipate, resolves into “understanding the whole complexity of the problem of justice.”

The task before us, then, is the “painstaking clarification of what is implied in these ‘most elementary experiences … [of] the just and noble things.’” (LS, 39) Here, another clue: Pangle is at pains to point out that classical political philosophy does not begin “from specific assumptions about human nature.” Rather, it begins with opinions or speeches, from “what men say,” and from these “moves to, or issues in, an account of human nature.” “But ‘what men say’ is contradictory.”

This contradictory state of the evidence of the most elementary experiences would seem to land us in another impasse. And rather than clearly indicating a route out of this impasse, Professor Pangle chooses instead, somewhat surprisingly, to conclude this chapter with a tangle of clues, more than two full pages consisting almost entirely of a nearly continuous quotation from the last chapter of Strauss’s early The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, which Pangle describes as “Strauss’s first sustained adumbration of his decisive discovery concerning the nature of Socratic philosophy.” He praises these paragraphs as “one of the most illuminating statements in this regard that Strauss ever penned,” noting coyly as well that in it Strauss maintains his “meticulous sense of responsibility as a writer.” (LS, 138) This latter remark is of course a reminder that we are dealing with clues, not arguments.

Out of respect for the author, and because we have every reason to believe that Pangle has hidden the core of the argument, if there is one, in this extended quotation from Strauss’s Hobbes book, we have pursued the exercise, and will report briefly on the outcome. But before this report, let us just notice that the author has dropped one additional clue in this very footnote that introduces the mysteriously pivotal quotation: he directs us to and partially quotes a passage from Natural Right and History concerning justice. (LS, 148ff.) There we learn that justice “in the full sense … is identical with membership in … and devotion to … a society in which everyone does what he can do well and in which everyone has what he can use well” (Pangle’s italics). I gather we are supposed to note a tension at the heart of justice: to do what one does best is not likely to be identical with being devoted to a society where everyone can do so, especially when we note “the conclusion of the argument sketched in this paragraph” that Strauss draws (albeit, very responsibly, in a footnote), but that Pangle chooses not to share (meticulously protecting our piety, no doubt), namely that this definition implies “that there cannot be true justice if there is no divine rule or providence.” (LS, 150) Pangle then assists us a little further by looking up one of Strauss’s classical footnotes to reinforce the point that justice is all about “the utility of others,” and then mentioning, but not reporting on, another classical citation, the clues embedded in which I will now share with all who are able to receive:

(1) The magnificent ones despise merely human life; and
(2) The beautiful ought to be understood as the useful.

Armed with this expert esoteric reading of the key footnote to the key footnote to the curious extended quotation that stands in for the core of Pangle’s argument, the reader is perhaps now prepared to see the momentous point. The contradictions and hence enmities of pre-philosophic experience center around “the just, the beautiful, and the good.” So everything depends on the proper understanding and arrangement of these notions. The key to Pangle’s strategy is to liberate the good from the other transcendentals and to make it supreme. The good, demystified or stripped of entanglements with the just or the beautiful, is the only possible basis, we are told, of internal and external agreement. Now we may think that people disagree about the good, but this, Strauss thinks, is so only if we consider what people “conceive of as good” (wealth, honors, etc.) and not what they “say,” that is, or what they “mean.” People may disagree and fight in deed or “conception,” but they are in marvelous agreement in what they say, namely, “that the good is virtue and wisdom/insight.” Thus agreement can be achieved (and, I note, philosophy vindicated) for those who partake of this “true external transcendent good,” to attain which requires a “divinely inspired madness” and “a conversion of the whole soul.” (LS, 40-1; Pangle’s emphasis)

This, then, is the core of Pangle’s argument (expertly reconstructed from his very civically responsible clues) concerning the core of Strauss’s argument. Is it persuasive? Divinely mad or not, I suppose we must find some way to judge. And it is hard not to observe that there are leaps in the argument. Remember that the case for philosophy is supposed to rely, not on any a priori “account of human nature,” but to issue from a “clarification” of what ordinary people actually say (and “mean,” but not “conceive”). Now everyone indeed seems to agree that they want what is good – that seems reasonable enough. And people are known to say (or were known to say, before nature was hidden by modern abstractions) that “the good” is “virtue and wisdom.” But then we leap to the identification of virtue with this transcendentally purified and converted divine madness. Is this leap, this specific leap to Socratic zeteticism as the transcendent “insight,” really somehow inherent in what ordinary people say about “virtue and wisdom?” What authorizes us, for example, to conclude that virtue “is essentially wisdom/insight?”

On this we still need to consider Pangle’s last paragraph taken directly from Strauss’s Hobbes book. (LS, 41-2) Here the aim is precisely to examine “the antithesis … between true and apparent or pseudovirtue.” Everything, we are told, depends on focusing this comparison on the virtue of justice, and not on courage, “the lowest virtue,” and which Strauss here identifies, somewhat surprisingly, with self-assertion, or “man’s natural self-love, or man’s natural hedonism.” Justice, I interpret Pangle/Strauss to be saying, philosophy can deal with: once we see that justice is about the good of society, and the good of society only makes sense with reference to the good of the individual, or of the best individual, then we see clearly the subordination of justice to the good and hence to philosophy. The just can fairly straightforwardly be emancipated from the noble/beautiful and subordinated to the good. But courage is more problematic, since it “seems more brilliant, more worthy of reverence,” than any other virtue (my emphasis). Courage, or manly nobility, I infer, is more closely bound up with – harder to extricate from – the mystery of “the beautiful” than is justice. As Pangle himself notes in a later chapter, to kalon (the noble/beautiful), closely associated as it is “with self-respect, with dignity, as a rational and thus free being capable of dedication, devotion, and even sacrifice for the sake of causes perceived as just and as thereby partaking of transcendent or eternal value,” is “the spiritual core of the human as the political animal.” (LS, 93, 94) So, to isolate and purify philosophy as “the good,” courage must be demoted, identified with the most vulgar hedonism, despite the fact that it would seem to have a lot to do with sacrificing one’s own life for some “greater good,” such as one’s country.

Now a really subtle clue: in order to accomplish and seal this isolation of the good from the noble, Pangle simplifies Strauss’s argument by leaving out a crucial phrase. I here italicize this quite remarkable omission:

The reason [courage is the lowest virtue] comes to sight when one scrutinizes courage “not in its archaic form, in which its sense is, as it were, narrowed and limited to obedience to law, and in which, for that very reason, it is hidden wisdom,” but rather, “apart from this limitation, in itself.”18 (LS, 41; PPH, 146)

Courage – that is, “archaic,” or let us say, “primitive,” perhaps even “primary,” courage – is bound up with justice, transcendence, nobility, even wisdom. Humanity’s deepest longing, Pangle himself says elsewhere “is encased in, penetrated and molded by, a complex concatenation of more immediately felt physical and spiritual needs, personal as well as social.” (LS, 51) Our orientation towards transcendence is embedded in politically conditioned understandings of the noble. Now Pangle’s whole purpose is of course somehow to sort out all this penetrating and bolding and to isolate the true end of our longing, ostensibly found “only in the life of philosophy,” which requires that we be “intellectually and spiritually purified, or indeed purged.” (LS, 50) This statement is presented as a conclusion drawn from a long quotation of Strauss’s perhaps most famous and eloquent paean to philosophy. Therefore it is quite remarkable to note that in this very quotation, Strauss does not at all counsel a complete “purging” of courage, but rather, “the mating of courage and moderation,” a mating characterized by “highness and nobility.” This mating seems to consist in a sustaining of the “charm of competence” characteristic of mathematical “homogeneity” together with a respect for the ineliminable “heterogeneity” associated with distinctively human, that is political, purposes. The very life of philosophy would thus depend, contrary to Pangle’s argument or to his clues, not upon a radical purging of ordinary human and political reverence for the beauty of a good it cannot fully grasp, but on a respect for a pre-philosophic sense of the human difference upon which depends the appearance of the real itself, the manifestation of distinct beings or parts within a meaningful if elusive whole.

It is surely out of concern for this heterogeneity that Leo Strauss chose to emphasize the otherness, the “transcendence” and even externality of philosophy, choosing thus to risk misleading ambitious students such as Professor Pangle or his students. But to place this emphasis within the context of Strauss’s understanding of the political conditions of philosophy is to see the political character of this very claim to transcend the political. When Pangle assures us that “human nature as understood by the Socratics is animated by a profound, passionate longing for self-transcending union with the eternal or divine” he surely invites us to recall what he wrote earlier: that classical philosophy is not originally grounded in, but “moves to, or issues in, an account of human nature,” via, as we have seen, a rather venturesome “clarification” of what everyone says or means. (LS, 49; my emphasis) There is no immediate, intuitive, univocal evidence concerning the meaning of human longing. Political reflection can surely bring to our attention the ways in which these longings are entangled with practical necessities, a very great contribution to self knowledge, for which we are grateful – but no “clarification” can provide us with some utterly “transcendent” philosophy as a radical alternative to our practically embedded figures of transcendence. To say that the good exists “in speech” is to say that it is an interpretation – and therefore not final but eminently contestable, though no doubt worthy and well intentioned.

It is only from the standpoint of this honorable High Straussian interpretation, from the standpoint of “philosophy,” that it becomes clear that courage and concern for “honor” are of a piece with simple and vulgar hedonism, that what appears to be “reverence” is in fact mere “selfishness.” “The relation of virtue to human nature,” Strauss writes, “is comparable to that of act and potency, and … the potency [only] becomes known by looking back to it from the act.” (NRH, 145; my emphasis) The virtue of philosophy is this act, and “human nature,” including, most notably, not the distinction between but the distinct definitions of “vulgar” and “real” virtue, are its “looking back.” “The City” as the realm of necessity is the Other of philosophy.

Let us try to imagine for a moment that we who consider these weighty matters are not professors of Straussian “political philosophy” or their students, assigned by fate to sift through the tangled paradoxes of Mr. Strauss’s deliciously subtle writings, including his intriguing references to some primordial “common sense,” or pre-philosophic ground of human awareness. Instead, let us imagine that we are, say, phenomenologists somehow oblivious to the tissue of modern abstractions that separates us from our natures, attempting, directly to consult and “read off” human experience. Or even (if you will indulge a still more reckless speculation) let us see if we can pretend that we are actual human beings in the grip (as Strauss might say) of the challenge of being human.

If we attempt such an experiment, we might notice that to know that how one should live is the greatest question is always already to know that one exists under some obligation or law that is higher than oneself. One cannot dedicate oneself without self-deception to the life of “theory” or “philosophy” that might follow from a pursuit of that question without recognizing the authority of something above oneself, even if one cannot fully – perhaps can hardly begin – to articulate the nature of this authority. The structured ignorance of Socratic philosophy, understood as a serious and deeply meaningful way of life and not merely as the academic exercise of an esoteric sect, must have some content, however provisional; this ignorance is not pure, but partakes of an orientation towards and a gratitude for what is above and beyond the activity of questioning. The sweetness of the activity of questioning, which Strauss and his students have praised so magnificently, seems to me inseparable from such gratitude, from such “grace.” (WIPP, 40) IN this way, the most lucid or self-knowing “theory” and the most conscientious practice arise from the same ground. There is no pure, contentless starting point to the question of the just and noble, and there is no final answer to this question that is not an interpretation. (This is very far from saying that all interpretations are equal.) It follows that philosophy’s claim to a radical transcendence purged of all practical nobility is itself an expression of such nobility.

The deepest meaning of Strauss’s “political philosophy” was the political responsibility of philosophy – the responsibility of “philosophers” to represent, moderate, and direct the human longing for transcendence. If enough would-be philosophers could accept the notion of a non-religious or cosmological but somehow apodictically eternal and supremely satisfying good, Strauss seemed to hope, then without persuading masses of people of this good they might affect the orientation of the intellectual elite sufficiently to apply some brakes to the modern projection of transcendence upon the post-Christian hopes of human mastery, political and scientific. Unfortunately for Strauss’s noble project, however, even would-be philosophers have trouble believing in this absolutist form of zeteticism, and so they are compelled to “convert” more and more youth in order to confirm what they take to be their own conversions. (LS, 55) But this proves not very productive philosophically, and perhaps more importantly very annoying to people who actually find human beings and their concerns (as expressed in politics, religion, art) interesting, perhaps even loveable. And so, without for a moment forgetting our immense debt to Leo Strauss’s unsurpassed elucidation of the political-philosophical problem, we must forsake once and for all his “final solution,” and rediscover or find other ways to think the good of thinking together with the good of humanity.

Though Strauss’s thought will continue to bear rich fruit as long as people are concerned with the permanent questions, the practical project of the theoretical supremacy of “Political Philosophy” has spent itself and must die, or, which is the same thing, bore ever more deeply into its esoteric retreat, its cave that claims to be absolutely beyond, and which must therefore lie beneath, all real caves.

Ralph C. Hancock
Brigham Young University