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Morality, Nature, and Esotericism in Leo Strauss's Persecution and the Art of Writing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Michael S. Kochin
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Extract

Strauss's historical investigation of the use of exoteric writing in Farabi, Maimonides, Halevi, and Spinoza, is in fact his history of the philosophers' exoteric accommodations to the permanent difference in human natures, the difference between the many who require a categorical moral teaching and the few who are capable of ordering their own lives in the face of the hypothetical status of all moral commands. The men of the Enlightenment aspired to render the moral law superfluous for all by constructing a machinery of government powerful enough to compel all to live justly. Strauss critiques this aspiration by leading his reader to face the permanency of the difference between the few and the many. Strauss uses historical scholarship to force the reader to rethink the possibility of contemplation of the eternal or permanent, the possibility that the Enlightenment's historicist epigones have sought to foreclose.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 64 , Issue 2 , Spring 2002 , pp. 261 - 284
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2002

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References

1. Strauss, Leo, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1952; Reprinted Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 35Google Scholar (henceforth PAW); see also pp. 111 n. 45,187; Steve Lenzner, “A Literary Exercise in Self-Knowledge: Strauss's Interpretation of Maimonides” (Department of Government, Harvard University, typescript).

2. Strauss, Leo, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis, trans. Sinclair, Elsa M. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984; originally published Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), p. 143Google Scholar.

3. See “A Giving of Accounts” in Strauss, Leo, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought, ed. Green, Kenneth Hart (Albany, NY:State University of New York Press, 1997), p. 462;Google Scholar“Preface to the English Translation” in Spinoza's Critique of Religion, trans. Sinclair, E. M. (New York: Schocken, 1965), p. 31Google Scholar. Strauss first presents his defense of the old rationalism of classical political philosophy through the mediation of the medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophers in Philosophie und Gesetz. He then publishes a critique of Hobbes in the light of the old rationalism in The Political Philosophy of Hobbes. Finally, in “The Spirit of Sparta or the Taste of Xenophon” (Social Research 6[1939]:502–536)Google Scholar, Strauss gives his first unmediated account of the classical teaching. From this point, it is the direct teaching of the ancients that comes to dominate Strauss's work, though he continued to publish on medieval and modern writers until the end of his life.

4. Available as Appendix 1 of Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, pp. 467–70Google Scholar.

5. Ibid., p. 467.

6. “Literary Character” is a very difficult essay when compared with Strauss's earlier, more straightforward, writings on Maimonides such as Philosophie und Gesetz, but is a marvel of clarity compared with Strauss's later notorious introduction to Pines's translation of the Guide, “How to Begin to Study The Guide of the Perplexed.”

7. One of the books discussed in Persecution and the Art of Writing is itself a work divided into five parts, namely, Judah Halevi's Kuzari. There is an old legend that the philosopher, whose only personal appearance is in the first part of the Kuzari, is Abu Nasr Alfarabi, whose only thematic appearance is in the first part of Strauss's book.

8. Cf. Strauss, , “How Fārābī read Plato's Laws,” in What Is Political Philosophy? (Glencoe, IL:The Free Press, 1959), pp. 153–54Google Scholar.

9. See Aristophanes, , Knights and Wasps;Google ScholarStrauss, Barry, Fathers and Sons in Athens: Ideology and Society in the Era of the Peloponnesian War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993);CrossRefGoogle ScholarOber, Josiah, “The Debate over Civic Education in Democratic Athens,” lecture at Tel Aviv University, 31 05 2000Google Scholar.

10. Farabi, , The Philosophy of Plato,Google Scholar sec. 36, in Alfarabi's Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, trans. Mahdi, Muhsin, rev. ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969);Google Scholar see also Lampert's, Lawrence discussion of Strauss's Thrasymachus in Leo Strauss and Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 146–59Google Scholar.

11. PAW, p. 36Google Scholar. The political crystallization of this teaching is a religious law, yet, as Strauss explains, the philosopher is not a lawgiver, since the law represents a practical, unphilosophic compromise of the rule of wisdom, the only truly legitimate form of rule. The law itself is thus a fossil artifact of philosophic rule.

12. See Parens, Joshua, Metaphysics as Rhetoric: Alfarabi's Summary of Plato's “Laws” (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

13. Strauss follows Farabi and the Farabian tradition (including most notably Maimonides) in equating what we might think of as the cosmology offered by Timaeus, which Farabi even calls the “science of the essence of every being,” with metaphysics as first philosophy in Aristotle's sense. This produces a highly controversial account of the relation between metaphysics understood in the medieval sense as “divine science,” on the one hand, and ancient metaphysics as evidenced in Aristotle's writing called by that name, or in Plato's doctrine of ideas, on the other hand. In the case of Plato, Strauss draws the connection between the Republic's teaching regarding the ideas and its teaching regarding divine causality in The City and Man (pp. 120–21)Google Scholar; see Lampert, , Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, p. 48 n. 15Google Scholar. For defenses of Strauss's account of the fundamental identity between the philosopher's ontology and their theology see Parens, , Metaphysics as Rhetoric;Google ScholarBolotin, David, An Approach to Aristotle's Physics with Particular Attention to the Role of His Manner of Writing (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998), esp. pp. 5–7Google Scholar. The strengths and weaknesses of Strauss's account are clarified by comparison with Martin Heidegger's discussion of the vicissitudes of the term “metaphysics” in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. McNeill, William and Walker, Nicholas (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), sees. 11–14, pp. 37–55Google Scholar.

14. See Plato, Laws 766aGoogle Scholar; Adkins, Arthur W. H., From the Many to the One: A Study of Personality and Views of Human Nature in the Context of Ancient Greek Society, Values, and Beliefs (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), pp. 82–3, 158, 171 n. 1;Google ScholarWinkler, John J., The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 64–70Google Scholar. Quintilian makes heavy use of the natural differences among human beings in describing the modification of the rhetorical education to suit each natural type (Institutio Oratoria 2. viii)Google Scholar.

15. Strauss, Leo, Socrates and Aristophanes (New York: Basic Books, 1966; reprinted Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 49Google Scholar. See also Strauss's discussion of the superiority of Lucretius to his master Epicurus in terms of “a deep understanding of the feelings which obstruct the acceptance of the true doctrine by most men—an understanding which the master did not necessarily possess” (“Notes on Lucretius,” in Liberalism Ancient and Modern [New York: Basic Books 1968; reprinted University of Chicago Press, 1995], p. 92Google Scholar). In Falaquera's “Epistle of the Debate,” the wise man persuades the jurist to take up the study of nature, that is, philosophy, by pointing to the natural difference between the many who are satisfied with mouthing dogmas and the few who wish to understand the legally prescribed beliefs; Falaquera, Shem Tob ibn, The Epistle of the Debate, in Steven Harvey, Falaquera's Epistle of the Debate: An Introduction to Jewish Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press for the Center for Jewish Studies, 1987), pp. 63–65Google Scholar.

The differences among human types recognized by the ancients are quite distinct from the individuality valorized by the moderns. As Strauss writes, “the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns concerns eventually, and perhaps even from the beginning, the status of ‘individuality’” (Natural Right and History, p. 323Google Scholar; cf. Strauss, Leo, “Perspectives on the Good Society,” in Liberalism, Ancient and Modern, p. 261)Google Scholar. In “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil,” in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983)Google Scholar, Strauss moves from an indication of Nietzsche's “ipsissimosity” to an elucidation of “the nature of the individual”—that is, the natural type within “the order of the rank of the natures” to which the individual belongs. Strauss acknowledges that in Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche” ‘platonizes’ as regards the ‘form’ more than anywhere else (ibid, p. 175). The question is whether the platonized or typological Nietzsche of Beyond Good and Evil represents the whole of Nietzsche's teaching in the face of the modern, or rather, Christian and post-Christian, revaluation of the value of individuality. Lampert's Leo Strauss and Nietzsche unfortunately fails to come to terms with this question. One wonders if Lampert can characterize Strauss as an insufficiently prudent Nietzschean because Lampert's Nietzsche is the Platonizing philosopher of the origin of human species (plural, of course) rather than “Mr. Nietzsche” in all his particularized perplexities.

16. Spinoza, for his part, affirms the essential presupposition of the Socratic paradox at Theological-Political Treatise, trans. Yaffe, Martin (University of North Texas, Department of Philosophy and Religion Studies, typescript)Google Scholar: “For it is a universal law of human nature that no one neglects what he judges to be good, unless in the hope of a greater good, or from the fear of a greater harm. Nor would he prefer some evil, unless to avoid a greater one, or in the hope of a greater good: That is, everyone chooses which of two goods he judges to be the greater, and which of two evils seems to be the lesser” (chapter 16). On the account of choice, the only source of error is the chooser's misestimation of the relative good and evil in each alternative. Compare Plato, Protagoras 351b–358dGoogle Scholar; Descartes, , Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditation 4Google Scholar, cited by Caton, Hiram, “Analytic History of Philosophy: The Case of Descartes,” The Philosophical Forum 12, no. 4 (1981): 274Google Scholar.

17. See Strauss, , “A Giving of Accounts,” pp. 464–65Google Scholar.

18. In Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. D'Alembert on the Theatre, trans. Bloom, Allan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), Appendix, p. 146Google Scholar. Rousseau, it should be noted, defends the concealing of subversive opinions in the “Letter to D'Alembert” (p. 11)Google Scholar; Rousseau's opposition to the Enlightenment aspiration to bring science to the many is expounded by Strauss in “On the Intention of Rousseau,” Social Research 14 (1947): 455–87, esp. 484 ffGoogle Scholar.

19. PAW, p. 58Google Scholar; Strauss, Leo, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 198–99 n. 43Google Scholar.

20. The Jew of Malta, prologue, line 15Google Scholar; Strauss, , Natural Right and History, p. 177Google Scholar.

21. Natural Right and History, pp. 182–83Google Scholar.

22. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, Ernst and Falk: Conversations for the FreemasonsGoogle Scholar, first conversation in fin., trans. Zwiebel, William L. in Nathan the Wise, Minna von Barnheim, and Other Plays and Writings, ed. Demetz, Peter (New York: Continuum, 1991), p. 283Google Scholar; Strauss, , “Exoteric Teaching,” in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss, ed. Pangle, Thomas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 64–65Google Scholar. Compare also Kant, , Perpetual Peace, 366Google Scholar; Strauss, , Natural Right and History, pp. 193–94Google Scholar; Strauss, , “The Three Waves of Modernity,” in An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays by Leo Strauss, ed. Gildin, Hilail (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1989), p. 87Google Scholar. For a contemporary vision of a just society whose justice consists in its rendering personal acts of justice and charity superfluous, see Nagel, Thomas, Equality and Partiality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

23. Habermas, Jürgen, Theory and Practice, trans. Viertel, John (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), p. 43Google Scholar; cited by Drury, Shadia B., The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988), p. 138CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24. See in addition to the Tractatus Politicus, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, preface, and chapter 16.

25. “Some Remarks on the Political Science of Maimonides and Farabi”, trans. Bartlett, Robert, Interpretation 18 (1990): 3–30, p. 16Google Scholar. From the point of view of the philosophers, that law cannot itself be regarded as a product of science. As Strauss has already put it in discussing Farabi, the philosopher is a king but he is not, qua philosopher, a legislator. The product of the “art and science of Timaeus” is a seemingly dogmatic metaphysical teaching addressed not to the many but to the few who are dissatisfied with the beliefs of the many. This teaching keeps these few politically docile while they learn its failings, thereby ascending from dogmatism to skepticism in its original sense. See my “Weeds: Cultivating the Imagination in Medieval Arabic Political Philosophy” journal of the History of Ideas 60 (1999): 399–416CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26. Maimonides, , Guide of the Perplexed, 2.25Google Scholar; cf. Kuzari, 1.67Google Scholar.

27. Spinoza's, Critique of Religion, pp. 157–58Google Scholar.

28. See PAW, p. 76;Google Scholar“A Giving of Accounts,” p. 465Google Scholar; and On Tyranny, expanded edition, ed. Gourevitch, Victor and Roth, Michael S. (New York: The Free Press, 1991; original edition 1948), p. 113, n. 23Google Scholar.

29. Halevi's (or Halevi's scholar's) defense of morality itself is primarily a defense against the ascetics, the heretics and the idolaters, not against the philosophers (see inter alia Kuzari, 2.45–50, 2.60, 3.1–9, 3.11Google Scholar; and cf. PAW, pp. 122–26Google Scholar). What these sects have in common with the philosophers is that all seek to derive man's duties toward the divine by reasoning, instead of accepting the laws of the Torah on the basis of tradition (Kuzari, 1.97–99, 2.26, 2.60, 3.22–23, 3.36–38, 3.49–50, 3.65, 4.1, 4.11, 4.14–17, 5.1–2, 5.14 in fin., 5.16, 5.21 in fin.). The ascetics also share with the Epicureans, supposedly the most anti-religious of the philosophers, the view that man's only relation to God is that of fear (see Kuzari 2. 45–50, 5.25Google Scholar; Strauss, , Spinoza's Critique of Religion, chap. 1Google Scholar). Yet Halevi's critique shares with the philosophers the claim that the ceremonial laws are secondary to the rational and civil laws that bear directly on the survival of the community (2.48). In place of the ascetic drive to conquer the passions, which is doomed to fail, Halevi's scholar calls for a politique governance of the passions (3.1–5). This turn from asceticism to politics has manifest Messianic implications.

30. Strauss here anticipates Thomas Kuhn's emphasis on the replacement of the study of “scientific classics” by the study of textbooks as among the characteristic aspects of contemporary science; Kuhn, Thomas, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970)Google Scholar.

31. Strauss, Leo, “On Collingwood's Philosophy of History,” Review of Metaphysics 5 (1952): 586Google Scholar.

32. Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, chap. 15; PAW, pp. 172, 184Google Scholar; also Spinoza's Critique of Religion, pp. 115–16Google Scholar; “Maimonides' Statement on Political Science” in What Is Political Philosophy?, pp. 166–67Google Scholar. Cf. “How Fārābī read Plato's Laws”, p. 145Google Scholar: Strauss writes that according to Farabi, “Plato had discussed the question as to whether a man who knows nothing except the laws and does nothing except what the laws demand is virtuous or not, and as regards this question ‘there is still grave disagreement among men.’”

33. Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, chap. 2; translation altered slightly from Martin Yaffe.

34. “On a Forgotten Kind of Writing” in What Is Political Philosophy?, p. 227Google Scholar. The emphasis is mine.

35. One could also say that the success, so far, of such a project constitutes the inner or political vindication of modernity. Bruno Latour points the way beyond the inevitable Janus-faced character of pronouncements on modernity in his philosophy of scientific practice; see Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; and more explicitly We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Porter, Catherine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

36. See Rawls, John, “Justice as Fairness, Political Not Metaphysical,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 14 (1985): 223–52;Google Scholar now in Collected Papers, ed. Freeman, Samuel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

37. Strauss gave his own assessment of what one could call “the inner greatness of National Socialism”, that is to say, the revulsion it embodied against the low and bestial but universal project of the Enlightened modem state, in a lecture on “German Nihilism,” given 26 02 1941Google Scholar. This lecture was recently edited and published by Janssens, David and Tanguay, Daniel in Interpretation 28 (1999): 353–78Google Scholar.

38. Strauss, takes his stand on a point of honor in replying to a questioner at a lecture in Chicago in 1962 (Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, p. 329):Google Scholar “Questioner: The title of the lecture, ‘Why Do We Remain Jews?’—am I correct that your answer is that we have no choice? Strauss: As honorable men, surely not.”

39. On Tyranny, exp. ed., p. 98Google Scholar.

40. I have modified Elwes's, R. H. M. translation of this letter (Works of Spinoza, 2:417–18 [London: George Bell and Sons, 1883; reprint New York: Dover, 1951])Google Scholar by reference to the Latin texts in Opera Spinoza, ed. Gebhardt, Carl (Heidelberg: Carl Winters Universitaetsbuchhandlung, 1926), 4: 321–22Google Scholar.

41. See “Preface to the American Edition” in 1952 and subsequent editions of The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, p. xvi;Google Scholar“Preface” in Spinoza's Critique of Religion, p. 30Google Scholar. For an expression of moral outrage at the philosophers′ mode see Patterson's, Annabel anti-Straussian treatment of exoteric writing, Reading between the Lines (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), p. 8Google Scholar. One should add that for Strauss the convulsive assertion of atheistic probity belongs only to the “polemical approach” that Nietzsche adopts and not to the teaching itself—this probity is therefore at no time, including ours, a fundamental characteristic of the greatest thinkers; Letter to Löwith, Karl, 23 06 1935Google Scholar, in Löwith, Karl and Strauss, Leo, “Correspondence,” Independent Journal of Philosophy 5/6 (1988): 183Google Scholar.

42. Spinoza's Critique of Religion, pp. 139–40Google Scholar.

43 Lampert's, Lawrence certainty with regard to the second question (Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, p. 173)Google Scholar is untempered by reflection on the fate of those wretched peoples who lack a fatherland. What Hannah Arendt wrote more than fifty years ago has only been confirmed by all subsequent experience: “The restoration of human rights, as the recent example of the State of Israel proves, has been achieved so far only through the restoration or the establishment of national rights” (The Origins of Totalitarianism [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973], p. 299)Google Scholar. The securing of national rights is no guarantee of human rights, especially when accompanied by the denial of national rights to those foreign to the nation in question, but it remains a practically necessary precondition of the securing of human rights. Note also that this “pragmatic sanction” of nationalism does not extend to a defense of remaining Jewish in any modern state, nor even in the state of Israel.

44. An earlier version of this paper was presented at a conference on “Haifa and Athens: The Leo Strauss Centenary” at Haifa University, 23 12 1999Google Scholar, and appeared in Hebrew, in Iyyun: The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly 50, no. 4 (2001)Google Scholar. I would like to thank Ehud Luz, Cliff Bates, Steve Lenzner, Daniel Doneson, Eva Schorr, and members of the audience in Haifa, as well as Walter Nicgorski, and the anonymous readers for The Review of Politics, for their comments and suggestions.