6 - On Strauss on Rousseau

Summary

Leo Strauss orients his thinking by what he calls the natural understanding, the first-for-us commonsense understanding of social reality as one knows it in actual life and the world as men have always known it since there have been civil societies. He attends primarily to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's reflections about the sciences, theoretical inquiry or philosophy. Strauss reads them as confirming the basic truth, that there is a natural antagonism between science and society, or between science and virtue, insofar as virtue is political virtue. Strauss's metaphysically neutral modern natural science reading of the Second Discourse rests on his interpretation of the pure state of nature as fact and of almost unlimited perfectibility. The First Discourse and Rousseau's writings in defense of it state the case for the classical understanding of philosophy and of the philosopher who alone leads the truly free, essentially trans-social life.