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On the Roots of Rationalism: Strauss's Natural Right and History as Response to Heidegger
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 May 2008
Abstract
The essay reconsiders the argument of Leo Strauss in Natural Right and History with “radical historicism” and above all its leading representative, Martin Heidegger. Strauss's critique of such historicism is not motivated by the need to recover a teleological natural philosophy for the grounding of natural right. Strauss's turn to “the fundamental problems coeval with human thought” is in accord with Heidegger's claim that the whole is mysterious. His reservation rather concerns Heidegger's attempt, both longing and hopeful, to show that radical questioning of rationalism can solve the problem of philosophy's homelessness in human affairs, thereby taking further modern efforts to make humans “absolutely at home on earth.” In Strauss's judgment Socratic knowledge of ignorance is more authentically open to the aporetic character of the human relation to Being.
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- Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2008
References
1 The following abbreviations are used for works of Leo Strauss:
- HPP
History of Political Philosophy, third edition
- IPP
Introduction to Political Philosophy, ed. H. Gildin
- JPCM
Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, ed. K.H. Green
- NRH
Natural Right and History
- OT
On Tyranny
- PPH
The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, second edition
- RCPR
The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. T. Pangle
- SCR
Spinoza's Critique of Religion
- SPPP
Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy
- TM
Thoughts on Machiavelli
- WIPP
What is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies
2 Moreover, “the whole galaxy of political philosophers from Plato to Hegel, and certainly all adherents of natural right, assumed that the fundamental political problem is susceptible of a final solution. This assumption ultimately rested on the Socratic answer to the question of how man ought to live” (35–36). As the reference to Hegel makes evident, there are political philosophers, both ancient and modern, who endorse the core idea of Socrates while not adhering to natural right. The central question of political philosophy, “the question of what the goal of wise action is,” need not be framed in terms of natural right.
3 Elsewhere Strauss states that historicism is “the serious antagonist of political philosophy” and that “positivism necessarily transforms itself into historicism” (WIPP, 25–26). In present-day social science, the appeal to history and the appeal to the distinction between facts and values (positivism) are the two grounds for rejecting natural right (NRH, 8).
4 Cf. M. Heidegger, Schelling: Vom Wesen der Menschlichen Freiheit (1809), Gesamtausgabe II, vol. 42 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1988), 83. In a significant pair of speeches given at the University of Freiburg in August 1934 (“Die Deutsche Universität”), which certainly served state-approved political aims, Heidegger speaks of the importance of German Romantic thought (Savigny is singled out for special praise) and its account of freedom as based in the Volk. Here Heidegger shows awareness of sources of his thought—and of current political realities—in the historical school. M. Heidegger, Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges, Gesamtausgabe I, vol. 16 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2000), 285–307 (esp. 289–97). All the same, Heidegger devotes little time to the sources of the modern historical consciousness in his teaching and writing.
5 A closely related point is made when Strauss notes that opposition to the doctrinaire early modern versions of natural right led to the stress on history in the effort to recover the distinction between theory and practice (13–16, 319–20). The point helps one to see why Strauss investigates not simply “natural right” but “the problem of natural right.”
6 M. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 12th ed. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1972), 15–19; Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, 3rd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1965), 28–39.
7 It is helpful to recall that the primary modern philosophic sources for the young Heidegger, apart from Husserl, were Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Dilthey. See Otto Poeggeler, Der Denkweg Martin Heideggers (Pfullingen: Neske, 1963), 17–36, and Jeffrey Barash, Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1988). For an important and revealing statement on Hegel, see Heidegger, Identität und Differenz (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957).
8 See Steven B. Smith, chap. 5, “Destruktion or Recovery? Leo Strauss's Critique of Heidegger,” in Reading Leo Strauss: Philosophy, Politics, Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) for an account of Strauss's judgment of Heidegger's political-moral failure. See also Catherine Zuckert, Postmodern Platos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), especially 164–73, and the author, “Heidegger, Strauss and National Socialism,” in Heidegger und der Nazionalsozialismus–Dokumente und Texte. Heidegger-Jahrbuch 4, ed. A. Denker and H. Zaborowski (Stuttgart: Verlag Karl Alber, forthcoming).
9 One could think of the entire historical mode of presenting this critique of historicism as having ironic features. Strauss's one book directly engaging German thought is his most “German” in form. The account of historical inevitability in the progression of modern thinkers is surely overstated so as to give less attention to the dissenting from modern progress by Rousseau and Nietzsche. Strauss's borrowing from Plato's Republic the “three waves” figure to describe the history of modern political philosophy (IPP, 81–98) also points to an intent both playful and serious: like Socrates' interlocutors, the reader must participate in the construction of the “ideal city” (in this case, Strauss's ideal construction of the modern development) in order to uncover the limitations of this account. And that construction itself exploits, in an inverted way, the modern belief in inevitable progress. See Heinrich Meier, Die Denkbewegung von Leo Strauss (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1996) for distortions inherent in Strauss's historical mode of argument.
10 See especially Einführung in die Metaphysik (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1953), 1–39; “Was ist Metaphysik?” in Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1967), 1–19.
11 It is not possible here to enter into the subject of Heidegger's indebtedness to Husserl's phenomenological inquiry for the formulation of the ontological problem. But surely Husserl's central concern with showing that reason's openness to a world of objects or its “intentionality” is not explicable through causal-genetic accounts was decisive for Heidegger. See SPPP, 31, 34–37; the author, “Edmund Husserl,” in HPP, 870–87. Strauss refers to Husserl (again without naming him) when he describes modern science as a “radical modification” of the natural understanding, rather than the “perfection” of it, and calls for an analysis of the natural understanding as the presupposition for an analysis of science, at 78–80. Jacob Klein was following both Husserl and Heidegger in his historical investigation of the origins of modern mathematics as “symbol-generating abstraction” and in his account of it as presupposing a natural understanding of number that the modern notion conceals. Strauss makes evident a debt to his work (78; PPH, 142, 163; JPCM, 449–52, 457–66). But Klein was most beholden to Heidegger for the latter's analyses of Platonic-Aristotelian eidos as disclosing the world or as “apophantic.” Heidegger stresses that the Greeks, and especially Aristotle, were the greatest of all phenomenologists in their thinking of truth (aletheia) as “the self-announcing of the phenomena . . . the unconcealment of what is present, its disclosure and self-showing.” M. Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1969), 87.
12 As Strauss puts it: “Sein cannot be explained by das Seiende, as causality cannot be explained causally” (RCPR, 44). On this see also “The Problem of Socrates,” a lecture delivered at St. John's College, Annapolis, in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, 22/3 (1995): 321–38.
13 Holzwege, 4th ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1963), 336–37 (“Der Spruch des Anaximander”).
14 The foundation of classical political philosophy was “the quest for cosmology rather than a solution to the cosmological problem” (WIPP, 39).
15 In the text Strauss asserts that according to Aristotle “the issue between the mechanical and the teleological conception of the universe is decided by the manner in which the problem of the heavens, the heavenly bodies, and their motions, is solved.” But the cited passages from the Physics (196a25ff., 199a3–5) argue that causality in the heavens is not “for the sake of an end” but necessary causation. Coming to be for the sake of an end is discovered from experience of terrestrial beings like ourselves, wherein chance is intermingled with final causation; the teleological nature of these beings is in no way deducible from the motion of the heavens.
16 “Since man must understand himself in the light of the whole or of the origin of the whole which is not human, or since man is the being that must try to transcend humanity, he must transcend humanity in the direction of the subhuman if he does not transcend it in the direction of the superhuman” (TM, 78).
17 “Briefe über den ‘Humanismus’” in Wegmarken, 145, 150–51, 161–62, 175–76.
18 With this one touches on the source of what Strauss calls the lack of “any charity as well as . . . any humanity” in Heidegger's philosophy (SCR, 9).
19 Wegmarken, 83–87 (“Vom Wesen der Wahrheit”); Nietzsche (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961) II, 193–99.
20 It is suggested in the note at 26 (Nietzsche's preference for the “tragic life” to the theoretical life) and the references to “divination” at 12 and 33 and the reference to “revelation” at 28.
21 See Richard Kennington, “Strauss's Natural Right and History,” The Review of Metaphysics 35, 1 (September 1981): 57–86, for a very insightful treatment of the theme of “metaphysical neutrality” in Strauss's account of modern philosophy. As Kennington points out, the emancipation of man from natural ends and from the whole is the root of the favoring of individuality, or of the individual becoming “the center and origin of the moral world” (NRH, 248).
22 I take this to be the most decisive point of Strauss's critique of modern philosophy, and it is more central than his objections to “the lowering of the goals” in modern democratic politics. Indeed Strauss's criticism applies in a way more certainly to post-Rousseauian idealistic versions of modern politics dedicated to raising the goals. On this I differ with the approach to Strauss of Robert Pippin, “The Modern World of Leo Strauss,” in Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 209–32.