Welcome. The purpose of this blog is to discuss the growing scholarship and interest in Leo Strauss and why I think Strauss is rightly to be considered the most important teacher of our age.
If you have never heard of Leo Strauss, there is a semi-accurate Wikipedia entry on the right column (for more accuracy, read Hadley Arkes' and Jenny Clay Strauss's introductions). If you have heard of Strauss, it's more than likely slander. However, a basic investigation of Strauss's books and the scholarship produced by his greatest students would divest one of such myths. For the most complete coverage of how Strauss became associated with the Iraq War and the Bush administration (thanks to a cabal of journalists and political extremists) and how such associations have no foundation in fact, see Catherine & Michael Zuckert's The Truth About Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy & American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
To get a good sense of Strauss, it is important to understand his thought in the context of his times in Weimar Germany. Fortunately there is new scholarship in publication that explores this in depth. Eugene R. Sheppard's Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile: The Making of a Political Philosopher (New Hampshire: Brandeis University Press, 2007) concisely traces such a development in Strauss's early thought. This scholarship is much-needed. Greater minds read and understand Strauss better than me, but I have not yet seen a definitive, up-to-date website chronicling the latest scholarship on Strauss and this blog is intended to fill in that gap.
Why do I think Strauss is important? Because he has radical insights into the nature of philosophy that I admire; it is his exacting critiques of modernity, namely his undermining of historicism, relativism, and the fact-value distinction (still largely in the present-day); and his pioneering rediscovery of the classic texts which makes a life devoted to truth worth living.
There is another reason, and it has the most enduring importance for me: Strauss cuts to the immediacy and importance of philosophy itself in asking the question philosophy ought itself ask of every human being: What is the good life or, to be more exact: Quid sit deus? Is the 'good' life one devoted to faith in the commandments of God (and this question never goes away) or is it a life devoted to the love of wisdom? Which is the source of this goodness: man or God? Can man achieve his highest abilities through knowledge, that is, without God? Obversely: is a life devoted in pure faith without knowledge the best life for a man?
Such questions, Strauss maintains, are the heart and vitality of the West which is the theological-political problem presented us by the legacy of Western tradition. To be more exact, Strauss maintains that it is the friction of these two traditions Athens and Jerusalem which present to the world a force to be reckoned with. A careful reading of Strauss will show that this is also the heart and vitality of his own writings.
Critics often brand Straussians with the accusation of intellectual 'elitism.' While there may be good reasons for this, I can only add that it because they recognize that their world, or the modern world, is not the free and open (scientifically and technologically enlightened) world that expands to all ends of the earth in light and freedom and consciousness, but Swift's Lilliput of tiny people in comparison to the gigantesque and all-encompassing Brobdingnag of the ancients. Who in this modern age, after all, are capable of such a reverse Weltenschauung of perspective -- that the evolutionary notion that we are somehow superior to the ancients because of the impressive array our technological progress? This is an important philosophical question to ask: one can only reside in the realm of opinion until a more exacting investigation is made.
Thankfully, if the interested student is endowed with patience and with a phenomenological view that the philosophical texts are not only metaphorical (or pointing to some truth outside them), they can begin to appreciate that the secret the Straussians are famously trying to hide is staring us right in the face: the philosophical text itself.
Leo Strauss thus presents us with what is probably considered the most complicated aspect of philosophy, which is determining the author's intention. What is the philosophical content of a text to teach us? And is there a content to be taught, if at all? And here I illustrate the very process that makes Straussians caricatured by its critics, but which is the method that is available to all: careful reading. What is careful reading? Careful reading is reading slowly. And reading slowly begins from the assumption that the philosophers of the past have something to tell us, not just on one level, but on different levels and that what they have to say is partly expressed in the very form it is presented in. Hence, to read a philosophical text in the way that Strauss taught, we suspend our judgments and we ask questions every step of the way. We, in other words, obey the text by taking it seriously and by taking its author seriously. We do not assume we are superior to the past or that we could interject the text with our own biased, modernistic assumptions. Nor do we assume that the text is comprehensible or easy: we do not assume anything. After all, the great philosophers never lived in our age. The texts that the great philosophers passed down to us is our doorway to their minds. At the profanum, we lay our biases and become students in the primordial sense of the word.
What is the use of becoming a student of things we consider below us? Why waste my time assuming everything has a hidden meaning? How do I know that it is not going to lead me to a dead-end, and be completely useless? Of course one never knows. And neither does one know, if one is philosophically honest with oneself, whether one can know more than others. And here we learn, through Strauss, that the true student of life and existence begins radically with the Socratic credo: the only thing I know for sure is that I don't know. Not knowing, one can never be sure if they really do have the secrets to the universe. It is only in recognizing the communal, i.e. social, political (in other words) nature of philosophy.
According to Strauss (see The City and Man), Socrates, traditionally considered the founder of philosophy, brought philosophy from the wilderness assumptions (physics) of the pre-Socratics and into the city itself. Hence, philosophy as initiated by Socrates, is innately political (poly-tic, involving many), which is what Aristotle meant when he said that man is a political animal. Without a city, without even each other, man as man is nothing. The Socratic truth is that every human being has some glimpse of the Good, or how things ought to be. The Socratic method is in exploring just what that is. Political philosophy, hence, is not just the study of regimes, but the study, phenomenologically of what men consider is good for them. It is only in asking such questions that progress in any sort of political debate is to be made.
If a philosophy cannot address this socio-communal (i.e. political) aspect of our lives (i.e. matters of the city, which is the abode of man, and not the mountains, the abode of animals), it is not even philosophy or sub-philosophical. And this is the heart of the truly Socratic method that Strauss outlines. Central to Strauss's contributions also is the question of the city and the place of the city within philosophy's purview: in other words, political philosophy (as contradistinguished from political science). What is the importance of political philosopher over and above other forms of philosophy?
The question of the city's place is exactly where Strauss parted ways from the individualistic and existential philosophy of Heidegger: man is not an island. History is the witness to his fact: while Heidegger lived in the comfort of the university under the Third Reich (a regime he hoped would suit his cutting-edge philosophical views), Strauss was forced into exile. The experience, undoubtedly, was freshly political in nature and provided Strauss the truly existential fact of life: that no matter how mystical one's doctrine is, there is always the element of the political.
Strauss eventually found his home on the soil of American democracy where his legacy began to take off. Critics of Strauss, of course, often mention the sinister aspect of Strauss because he questioned as a political philosopher the limitations of a democracy. An in-depth review of Plato would reveal a similar sinister quality as well: he too explored the limitations of a democracy within his most famous dialogue The Republic. That Strauss is criticized by the uneducated (who have no time for Plato, of course) is just an indication of Strauss's very principle that too much philosophy is dangerous for society and that, while democracy is the most just regime for man (as it assumes man will make the best judgments in an election), it will never guarantee that such judgments stem from an educated or virtuous soul.
As can be witnessed by the growing scholarly output of Strauss's students, the slow and quiet pursuit of truth that is the hallmark of Strauss rapidly bore fruit. Not only had Strauss inspired many great students, but Strauss's legacy lives on in the lives he touched personally and who are at this very moment providing America's educational institutions with some of the best scholarship and translations of philosophical texts available (a list of available scholarship is forthcoming).
Now is the age to begin to appreciate Strauss as more than a mere antiquarian, or evil genius behind the Iraq War, but as the educator of our age in addressing problems which every honest philosopher of the future will have to ask. Inherent in every political question, in every scientific question, in every relativistic or historicist question, in every question related to the place of revelation and the possibilities and problems it presents to philosophy, Leo Strauss was there. He is our bridge from the obscurantist dead-ends of modern philosophy to the truly integral world of the ancients on whose shoulders this and and future ages will have no choice but to stand on whether glorious or rotten.
It is my view that if philosophy is to have life and embrace life and to have a future at all, it will have to take account of Leo Strauss and his careful study of the ancients which find their voice in our age through him. Because, perhaps the future is not after all 'our future' -- perhaps there is no future to speak of for a flat and jaded world of modernists. Perhaps our future as human beings, undeserving descendants of giants, is our past and rediscovering just how it was that humans lived lives of greatness and excellence. One has to wonder if the ancients, who addressed questions of technology (techne) before Christ fulfilled the commandments of the Jews, now look down upon us from the heights of Elysium with great laughter, that we who love technology so much with the dream of being its masters, are now its slaves -- slaving away not even in the cave that Plato spoke of, but in a cave below the cave.
No comments:
Post a Comment