In 1988, Gordon Wood described the growing influence of Leo Strauss’s students on the study of the American Founding and noted with surprise that, some fifteen years after Strauss’s death, “we have as yet no book about him” (“The Fundamentalists and the Constitution,” New York Review of Books, Feb. 18., 1988). Today, Wood could be surprised for a different reason. According to the Leo Strauss Foundation, we now have over ninety books on Strauss in English and over fifty books in other languages, all published since 1988. The authors and editors of these many books offer analyses and assessments of what Strauss said both to his anonymous readers and to his private correspondents. In Leo Strauss on Plato’s “Euthyphro”: The 1948 Notebook with Lectures and Critical Writings, Hannes Kerber and Svetozar Minkov offer something new: what Strauss said, not to others, but to himself—what he said in notes to himself about the Platonic Socrates’understanding of piety, a subject that bears directly on two distinctive features of Strauss’s career: his attempt to recover and to defend Socrates’ understanding of philosophy and the philosophic life, and what Strauss repeatedly called “the theme” (his emphasis) of all his investigations, namely, “the theological-political problem.”
Kerber and Minkov begin with a puzzle (1–2). In view of the Euthyphro’s relevance to both a leading intention (restoration of the Socratic) and the principal theme of Strauss’s career (the theological-political problem), why no extended discussion of the dialogue in Strauss’s major publications? Why also the paucity of reference to the Euthyphro in the archived transcriptions of Strauss’s courses? Strauss taught but one seminar on the Euthyphro, in 1948, his final year at New York’s New School for Social Research. In 1952 he delivered a lecture on the dialogue at St. John’s College in Maryland. He gave a lecture on the Euthyphro in 1950, about which no information beyond archived notes survives. The St. John’s lecture has survived, and though Strauss once planned to publish it, its publication came after his death. Why, then, this placement back stage of a dialogue that should occupy center stage?
In the book here reviewed, Kerber and Minkov have collected material that amounts to the extended discussion of the Euthyphro that is missing from Strauss’s publications. The “1948 Notebook” to which the book’s subtitle refers is a spiral notebook in the Strauss papers archived at the University of Chicago. This notebook contains Strauss’s line-by-line commentaries on Plato’s Euthyphro and Crito, notes that Strauss prepared for his 1948 seminar on the Euthyphro. The Kerber-Minkov volume reprints the contents of this notebook (the Notebook), Strauss’s 1952 lecture on the Euthyphro, additional archived notes by Strauss, and interpretative essays by Kerber, Minkov, and Wayne Ambler. Kerber and Minkov coauthor an introductory essay. Kerber authors an essay on the Euthyphro portion of the Notebook. Minkov writes on the Crito part of the Notebook. And Ambler analyzes Strauss’s 1952 lecture on the Euthyphro. Strauss’s lecture is a masterclass on how to interpret a Platonic dialogue, and the essays by Kerber, Minkov, and Ambler are models of analyzing Strauss’s writings and doing so in a manner that leaves the reader thinking, a manner that serves the life of “autonomous thought” that Strauss distinguished from the theme of the Euthyphro itself, namely, a life of “pious submission” to mythical or scriptural authority. Kerber and Minkov conclude their collection with Seth Benardete’s interlinear English translation of the Greek text of the Euthyphro.
The writings in this collection, taken together, show how the question of piety—what it is and if and when it should count as a virtue—directly involves central issues of Plato’s philosophy, like the truth of his “theory of ideas”; the nature and the possibility of knowledge; the implications of this possibility for the meaning of justice; the nature of the soul and what its existence might evince about reality; the question of the best life; and how the philosophic life is best related to civic life. But the Kerber-Minkov book focuses on Strauss, not Plato, and specifically on Strauss’s understanding of Socratic piety. Hence the book’s opening question: Why, in view of Strauss’s central concerns, did he say as little as he did about the Euthyphro?
Several possibilities will occur to readers of the Kerber-Minkov collection. A possibility more important than the brief treatment it receives involves the editor of a university press or his board of directors (see 7–8) who were less sensitive than they should have been to the distinction between philosophy as a body of doctrine and philosophy as a self-critical quest for knowledge, Strauss’s commitment to awakening capable individuals to the latter (see 75, 85), and how this commitment affected Strauss’s style of writing and the formats of his books. Another answer centers on the Euthyphro itself. This dialogue conveys a layered teaching about piety. Strauss seems to have agreed with the deeper teaching, and this teaching is “too radical” for center stage—too radical for aught but those few readers who share Socrates’ understanding of philosophizing as an activity, its motivation, its social and personal risks and rewards, and its socially responsible conduct (see 8–9, 88, 92).
What makes the Euthyphro’s message radical is a set of Platonic displacements that occur in the course of Socrates’ conversation with Euthyphro. An aspiration precedes this conversation, the aspiration to replace opinion with knowledge. This aspiration defines Socratic philosophy and assumes the possibility of final, objective knowledge in the form of the true cosmology, that is, the true articulation of the different kinds of beings and states of being of the cosmos and in the cosmos (Leo Strauss, “On the Interpretation of Genesis,” L’Homme, Jan.–Mar. 1981, 7–8, 15–16). In the Euthyphro itself, a “philosophic theology” implicitly displaces conventional or orthodox theology, and this displacement ends in denying the conceptual possibility of providential gods (Kerber and Minkov, 8, 15 n42, 36, 39–40, 87–88, 92, 149, 150–52). The Euthyphro shifts ontological and moral primacy from the gods of Athens (inventions of the poets) to the Platonic “ideas” (27, 30, 46, 87–88, 148–49). And the Euthyphro implies that the Socratic quest for knowledge, especially knowledge of justice, involves fidelity to a rationally defensible understanding of divine things (ideas like justice itself) and displaces conventional piety (prayer, ritual observance, obedience to clerical authority, trust in scriptural hearsay, etc.).
Apparently, however, only individuals like Socrates can fully appreciate why philosophy displaces conventional piety. Individuals like Euthyphro and Crito lack the strengths of intellect and desire of a Socrates, and so a true understanding of the gods and the right attitude toward them implies nothing about how Euthyphro and Crito should live. They would live best by living in obedience to the law and ritual prayer and sacrifice to the gods who support the laws, notwithstanding the “absurdities” of the latter (89, 91, 118, 129). Thus, Strauss calls special attention to the manner in which the Euthyphro departs from the usual pattern of the action in Plato’s dialogues (55–56). The movement of most Platonic dialogues is from the errors of common opinions upward toward the truth. In the Euthyphro, Socrates nudges Euthyphro downward, from a half truth (piety is imitating the gods or the most just of the gods) to a belief that is both false and, on examination, incoherent, i.e., piety as obedience either to warring gods or to arbitrary (“mysterious”) gods. The absurdities of these gods notwithstanding, widespread belief that they sanction disobedience to the law is essential to civic life, and Euthyphro and Crito (and nearly everyone else) will disobey the law if they think they can escape punishment, human and divine.
But if philosophy displaces conventional piety, and if Socrates’s action in the Euthyphro exemplifies philosophy in action, the latter is a case of true piety, or so Strauss says (56). This is an important conclusion, and one wonders what theory best explains it. Does Strauss ultimately hold that “really pious” conduct is action in the service of justice for the city as a whole and its individual members, here a matter of persuading Euthyphro to orthodox beliefs under which he will do least harm to himself and his community? Or, in view of the philosopher’s own need for civic order, does Strauss hold that true piety serves the gods of those communities that tolerate philosophy’s quest for the true meaning of justice and other ideas? Could Strauss believe that truly pious conduct restores Euthyphro and nonphilosophers generally to conventional piety? This last explanation would reduce true piety to conventional piety, a mere civic virtue, obedience to those particular gods who sanctioned the laws of one’s particular community. Practices and attitudes denominated holy might remain for powerful persons or forces to establish and historians to describe, but no real or true piety could exist for philosophic theologians to discover. This last position would implicitly reject a theory of transhistorical ideas like justice itself and a corresponding understanding of divinity as immanently just. Ambler suggests that Strauss entertains this possibility.
Strauss is clear in one respect. “Ultimately,” he says, “there exists only this alternative: doctrine of ideas or absurdities of mythology,” tenets of conventional theology that reason cannot affirm. This is Strauss, talking to himself, in archived notes (118; see also 30, 152). Ambler says that Strauss’s Notebook “casts a skeptical glance not only at Euthyphro’s gods but also at the ‘ideas,’ which Socrates seems to champion” (182). Ambler supports this suggestion by observing that in the Notebook Strauss repeatedly refers to Plato’s theory as a mere “doctrine” and wonders how Plato could be “so certain that there are ideas” (182, citing 33, 35–36; see also 55–56, 141). And we have seen that Strauss ultimately adjudges Socrates truly pious not for seeking some truth or any truth, but for talking Euthyphro down from a truer-than-conventional view to the conventional view of piety, that is, from imitating the gods to obeying the gods (55–56).
In any case, Kerber, Minkov, and Ambler unravel a big question and leave its resolution to their readers, as do Strauss and Plato.
