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On a Forgotten Kind of Grounding: Strauss, Jacobi, and the Phenomenological Critique of Modern Rationalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 September 2014

Rodrigo Chacón
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Abstract

In opposing foundationalism to antifoundationalism, recent political theory betrays its blindness to a third alternative. As suggested by the most influential critics of Kant, the ground of meaning and normativity is neither the human mind—or autonomous constructions of reason—nor historically given forms of life, but the interaction between them, that is, the human openness to the intelligibility granted us by “the things themselves.” This paper articulates that ground in its historical genesis, as it arises in Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi's defense of a classical conception of reason against modern rationalism, and further developed by Edmund Husserl and the young Leo Strauss. I argue that critics and followers of Strauss have forgotten the phenomenological grounds of his thought in the “fundamental problems” arising from the structure of human experience.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 76 , Issue 4 , Fall 2014 , pp. 589 - 617
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2014 

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References

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19 Strauss, “Preface,” 156.

20 This is the controversial claim that Jacobi attributes to Lessing. See F. H. Jacobi, Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn, in The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel “Allwill,” ed. di Giovanni, George (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1994), 187Google Scholar. (Hereafter MPW).

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26 Ibid., 82.

27 Shell, “Taking Evil Seriously,” 183.

28 Strauss, “Preface,” 173.

29 On Strauss's understanding of historicism, see Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem, 55–56. For Strauss's critique of Jacobi's historicist turn, see his “Introduction to Morning Hours and To the Friends of Lessing,” 127; cf. the important qualification at 128 discussed below. See also Janssens, “Problem of the Enlightenment,” 626.

30 Strauss, Spinoza's Critique of Religion, 204.

31 In his translation of Strauss's writings on Mendelssohn, Martin Yaffe argues that, according to Strauss, Jacobi understood reason as an “instrument of the passions.” He thus misses—and omits from his translation—what Strauss means, namely, that in his early work Jacobi “understands ‘reason’ still entirely in the sense of the Enlightenment” (my emphasis). The crucial “still” (noch) pointing to Jacobi's fundamental distinction, introduced around 1800, between reason and understanding, is missing in the translation. On the late Jacobi's Platonic-Aristotelian understanding of reason see Strauss, EPJ, 242, and the section “Rational Intuition” below.

32 Strauss, “Introduction to Morning Hours,” 128.

33 Ibid., 77, 73.

34 MPW, 336.

35 This is because of the transcendental use of the category of causality which attributes causality to the thing-in-itself. For commentary and critique, see Franks, Paul, All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 156Google Scholar.

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39 See, e.g., MPW, 507; Beiser, The Fate of Reason, 82.

40 Cf. Gillespie, Nihilism, 66.

41 MPW, 502.

42 Ibid., 508.

43 Ibid., 505.

44 Cf. Beiser, The Fate of Reason, 82.

45 Di Giovanni, introduction to MPW, 79. See MPW, 193; Franks, All or Nothing, 170.

46 MPW, 220, quoting Spinoza, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, in Complete Works, ed. Shirley, Samuel and Morgan, Michael L. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2002), 21Google Scholar (trans. modified). I have rendered Jacobi's Latin quotation of Spinoza (“ens reale, hoc est, est omne esse, & praeter quod nullum datur esse”) in English following Franks, All or Nothing, 170.

47 This is arguably the foundational principle of Western metaphysics, which, according to Jacobi, Spinoza was the first to make explicit (di Giovanni, introduction, 74, 77).

48 MPW, 189.

49 Ibid., 189, 195, 352–53, 366, 519.

50 Zank, Michael, introduction to Leo Strauss: The Early Writings (1921–1932) (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002), 34Google Scholar.

51 Beiser, The Fate of Reason, 80.

52 Strauss, Natural Right and History, 49.

53 See Gunnel, “Strauss before Straussianism,” 72.

54 Strauss, “Introduction to Morning Hours,” 71.

55 EPJ, 255.

56 Windelband, Wilhelm, Geschichte der Philosophie (Tübingen: Mohr, 1900), 463Google Scholar.

57 EPJ, 252. On phenomenological description as an “epoch-making” discovery of the foundation of the human sciences (Dilthey), see Moran, Dermot, editor's introduction to The Shorter Logical Investigations, by Husserl, Edmund (London: Routledge, 2000), lxxviGoogle Scholar. See, e.g., Husserl, Edmund, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, vol. 1 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977), §74Google Scholar.

58 Ibid., 281. For a critical analysis of Jacobi's realism drawing on Strauss's dissertation, see Halbig, “The Philosopher as Polyphemus?,” esp. 274, 268–69.

59 EPJ, 281.

60 See Husserl, Ideen, §§ 97, 228.

61 Pippin, “The Modern World of Leo Strauss,” 457.

62 See Halbig, “The Philosopher as Polyphemus?,” 274.

63 EPJ, 251.

64 MPW, 253–54.

65 Through sensible and intellectual intuition. Ibid., 255. See Jacobi, MPW, 550–51.

66 EPJ, 255.

67 Ibid., 251; MPW, 324, 550–51.

68 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B1 (p. 136)Google Scholar; Cohen, Hermann, Logik der reinen Erkenntnis (Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1902), 67Google Scholar; Cassirer, Ernst, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 3, The Phenomenology of Knowledge, trans. Manheim, R. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 20Google Scholar.

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73 Ibid., 249.

74 Ibid., citing MPW, 500.

75 Ibid., 274. Strauss refers to Jacobi, Von den Göttlichen Dingen und ihrer Offenbarung, in Der Streit um die Göttlichen Dinge (1799–1812), ed. Jaeschke, Walter (Hamburg: Meiner, 1999), 177–79Google Scholar. On Strauss and Barth, see Lazier, Benjamin, God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 96Google Scholar.

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77 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A51/B75 (p. 193).

78 Cf. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 77. This claim is already at the core of Strauss's dissertation, as will be seen shortly. See, e.g., EPJ, 261–63.

79 Reinach, Adolf, “Concerning Phenomenology,” trans. Willard, Dallas, in The Phenomenology Reader, ed. Moran, Dermot and Mooney, Timothy (London: Routledge, 2002)Google Scholar. Cited in EPJ, 258.

80 Reinach, “Concerning Phenomenology,” 185.

81 Ibid., 183.

82 In this case, we explain the red given in sense perception in terms of the wavelength—“between 620 and 740 nanometers”—generated by the mind. Cf. EPJ, 258.

83 Reinach, “Concerning Phenomenology,” 183.

84 EPJ, 255. See also ibid., 247 and Janssens, “Problem of the Enlightenment,” 618.

85 Ibid., 256. For different interpretations of the “transcendence of irrationality” in Strauss's reading of Jacobi, cf. Altman, German Stranger, esp. 43; Lazier, God Interrupted, 94–99, esp. 99; Pelluchon, Leo Strauss, 41–44; and Moyn, “From Experience to Law,” 182.

86 EPJ, 257 (quoting Jacobi, “Über eine Weissagung Lichtenbergs,” in Der Streit um die Göttlichen Dinge, ed. Jaeschke, 172–73).

87 EPJ, 257.

88 Ibid., 263.

89 Ibid., 260.

90 Ibid., 261.

91 EPJ, 261.

92 Ibid.

93 MPW, 513 (translation modified); see also 230.

94 See Bowie, Andrew, “Rethinking the History of the Subject: Jacobi, Schelling, and Heidegger,” in Deconstructive Subjectivities, ed. Critchley, Simon and Dews, Peter (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), 110Google Scholar; see also Ankersmit, Frank, “Jacobi: Realist, Romanticist, and Beacon for our Time,” Common Knowledge 14, no. 2 (2008): 234CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

95 EPJ, 262. See Kisiel, Theodore, “Why Students of Heidegger Will Have to Read Emil Lask,” Man and World 28, no. 3 (1995): 197–240Google Scholar.

96 See Crowell, Steven, “Meaning and the Ontological Difference,” Tulane Studies in Philosophy, no. 32 (1984): 37–44Google Scholar.

97 Lask, Emil, Die Logik der Philosophie und die Kategorienlehre, in Gesammelte Schriften 2 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1923), 32Google Scholar.

98 Strauss, Natural Right and History, 77.

99 For recent scholarship confirming this appraisal, see Dahlstrom, Daniel O., “Jacobi and Kant,” in Philosophical Legacies: Essays on the Thought of Kant, Hegel, and Their Contemporaries (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 60Google Scholar; Franks, “All or Nothing,” 95–97.

100 Cf. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 123–24.

101 EPJ, 262–63. Strauss refers to MPW, 424, 451, 514. Cf. Heidegger, Martin, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie: 2. Phänomenologie und transzendentale Wertphilosophie, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 56/57 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1987), 73Google Scholar.

102 EPJ, 263.

103 Cf. ibid., 263.

104 See MPW, 264–65.

105 Strauss, “Introduction to Morning Hours,” 71.

106 MPW, 277.

107 Ibid., 265.

108 Ibid., 272.

109 EPJ, 267.

110 On the centrality of belief in Husserl, see Brainard, Marcus, Belief and Its Neutralization: Husserl's System of Phenomenology in “Ideas I” (Albany: Statue University of New York Press, 2002)Google Scholar. On Strauss's understanding of belief as implying knowledge of ignorance, and hence as an impulse to speculation, see his “Introduction to Morning Hours,” 127, as well as Janssens, “Problem of the Enlightenment,” 624.

111 EPJ, 264.

112 Ibid., 265. See David Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, section V, part I.

113 Hume, Enquiry, sect. V, pt. II.

114 EPJ, 265.

115 Notably by Cassirer. See his Das Erkenntnisproblem, 32–33, and Berlin, Isaiah, “Hume and the Sources of German Anti-Rationalism,” in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (New York: Viking, 1979)Google Scholar.

116 EPJ, 266.

117 Ibid., 267.

118 Ibid., 274 (Strauss's emphasis).

119 Ibid., 267.

120 Cf. ibid., 269. From a phenomenological standpoint, each of our perceptions is an act of belief (or faith) in that it affirms more than we strictly know. That is, we perceive parts of things (say, the front side of a house) but we intuit whole things.

121 EPJ, 275–76.

122 MPW, 541.

123 Franks, All or Nothing, 164.

124 MPW, 541.

125 Ibid.

126 Franks, All or Nothing, 165.

127 MPW, 544.

128 Ibid., 563.

129 Ibid.

130 Ibid., 540.

131 EPJ, 273–74.

132 Ibid., 274.

133 Ibid.

134 Ibid., 275–76.

135 Jacobi, Von den Göttlichen Dingen und ihrer Offenbarung, in Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi's Werke, ed. Roth, F. and Köppen, F. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980), 3:317Google Scholar. (Hereafter Werke.)

136 EPJ, 274.

137 Ibid., 274.

138 MPW, 493.

139 Jacobi, Werke, 4:1, 32–33.

140 EPJ, 275; Jacobi, Werke, 3:206.

141 EPJ, 275.

142 Against “religious materialism,” Jacobi claims that “true religion … can so little be attributed a particular and necessary shape (Gestalt) that it is part of its essence not to have such a shape” (Von den Göttlichen Dingen, in Der Streit, 182–83). The critique of religious materialism has been taken up recently by Mark Johnston, whose phenomenological articulation of “religion after idolatry” is remarkably close to the young Strauss's (due, no doubt, to common sources in phenomenology and the neo-orthodoxy of Barth and others). See his Saving God: Religion after Idolatry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

143 EPJ, 280. The term “logique du coeur” cannot be found in Pascal but it became common in the reception of his thought. See Coriando, Paola-Ludovica, Affektenlehre und Phänomenologie der Stimmungen: Wege einer Ontologie und Ethik des Emotionalen (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2002), 26n21Google Scholar. See Pascal, Blaise, Pensées, trans. Krailsheimer, A. J. (London: Penguin Books, 1966)Google Scholar, § 272 (127); 282 (28); 278 (127); 283 (94). The distinction between “reason” and “heart” in Jacobi is analytical, as Jacobi often uses the terms interchangeably.

144 EPJ, 295.

145 Ibid., 295–96.

146 Ibid., 279.

147 Ibid., 279. The quest for an ethics between “a naturalism, which aims only at sanctioning the savage and destructive instincts of ‘natural’ man,” and “a supernaturalism, which tends to become the basis of slave morality,” can be traced across Strauss's early writings. What he first seeks in Jacobi—an answer to a “fundamental problem” described in Nietzschean terms—he later finds in Farabi and, further back, in Socrates. This attests to the remarkable continuity of Strauss's quest for what in 1936 he calls a “truly critical philosophy.” Such a philosophy uproots traditional oppositions (in this case between naturalism and supernaturalism) by raising “a more fundamental problem,” namely, the Socratic problem of the essence of virtue (ti estin aretē). The ground of Strauss's thought thus appears to be from the beginning a questioning ground—a grounding in foundational problems. Cf. Strauss, Leo, “Some Remarks on the Political Science of Maimonides and Farabi” (1936), trans. Bartlett, Robert, Interpretation 18, no.1 (1990): 6Google Scholar.

148 EPJ, 279, 281.

149 Ibid., 278. See MPW, 563–64.

150 MPW, 517.

151 Ibid.

152 EPJ, 278.

153 Ibid., 278. Cf. the remarkably similar phrasing in Strauss, “Some Remarks,” 6.

154 Ibid., 278–79.

155 Jacobi, Werke, 3:321. Cited in EPJ, 279.

156 EPJ, 279.

157 Ibid.

158 Ibid., 280.

159 Jacobi, Werke, 6:140–41.

160 EPJ, 281.

161 Ibid.

162 Ibid.

163 Ibid. MPW, 570.

164 EPJ, 281.

165 Ibid.

166 Ibid., 281–82. For Strauss's critique of Jacobi's defense of heteronomy in these lines, see ibid. and Janssens, “Problem of the Enlightenment,” 619, 626.

167 See Halbig, “The Philosopher as Polyphemus?”

168 Strauss, Leo, “Progress or Return?,” in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. Pangle, Thomas L. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 243Google Scholar.

169 Pippin, “The Modern World of Leo Strauss,” 457.

170 See especially “On the Interpretation of Genesis,” in JPCM, 361.

171 Strauss, Leo, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 20Google Scholar.

172 See note 11.

173 Strauss, Leo, “What Is Political Philosophy?,” in What Is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 39Google Scholar.

174 Strauss, “Introduction to Morning Hours,” 71.

175 Cf. Strauss, “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 12.

176 Velkley, Strauss, Heidegger, 3. See also 41, 71–72.

177 For Strauss's critique of phenomenology as an “unqualified empiricism” linked to Franz Rosenzweig's “New Thinking,” see “Preface,” in JPCM, 152, 147. For his understanding of “common sense” as presupposing science, see also The City and Man, 11–12. For “common sense” as an obstacle to “knowledge of ignorance” and “speculation,” see note 110 above.

178 Strauss, “Preface,” 152.

179 See MPW, 570, and Halbig, “The Philosopher as Polyphemus?”

180 Weber, Max, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (London: Routledge, 2009), 143, 141Google Scholar.

181 Strauss, Natural Right and History, 124–26. On this point, see Velkley, Heidegger, Strauss, 15.

182 Natural Right and History, 32. Velkley, Heidegger, Strauss, 132.

183 Strauss, “Some Remarks,” 6.

184 Cf. Strauss, “Einleitung zu ‘Morgenstunden,’” 537.

185 See Cho, “Nihilism Before Nietzsche.”

186 MPW, 256, 324, 551.

187 Jacobi, “Something Lessing Said,” 209.

188 Höhn, “F. H. Jacobi et G. W. Hegel,” 146.

189 On the genealogy of the problem of “facticity,” see Kisiel, Theodore, The Genesis of Heidegger's “Being and Time” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 27Google Scholar. On the “status of individuality,” see Strauss, Natural Right and History, 323; cf. 5, 46.