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Philosophy as a Way of Life: The Case of Leo Strauss

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 February 2009

Steven B. Smith
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Abstract

In this paper I consider Strauss's case for philosophy as a “way of life.” Strauss's case rests, I believe, on a view of philosophy first as a quest—an erotic aspiration—for knowledge of the whole and second as committed to a skeptical view of our ability ever to attain to such knowledge. Moreover, can the philosophic life defend itself against its most powerful alternative, namely, the case for revealed religion or does philosophy itself rest upon an act of faith of its own? I argue that philosophy has the resources to defend itself but only once it is understood as an open-ended (“zetetic”) search for truth. Only by returning to a conception of philosophy as “skeptic in the original sense of the term” can philosophy avoid the twin dogmatisms of faith and unbelief.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 71 , Issue 1 , Winter 2009 , pp. 37 - 53
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2009

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References

1 Burnyeat, Myles, “Sphinx Without a Secret,” New York Review of Books 32 (May 30, 1985), 32Google Scholar.

2 Strauss, Leo, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952)Google Scholar, 14: Strauss's understanding of the commentary as a genre of philosophical writing is highly influenced by his reading of the Arabic philosopher Alfarabi: for an excellent account, see Brague, Rémi, “Athens, Jerusalem, Mecca: Leo Strauss's ‘Muslim’ Understanding of Greek Philosophy,” Poetics Today 19 (1998): 235–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kraemer, Joel, “The Medieval Arabic Enlightenment,” The Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss, ed. Smith, Steven B. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)Google Scholar.

3 Hadot, Pierre, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Chase, Michael, ed. Davidson, Arnold I. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995)Google Scholar.

4 Nehamas, Alexander, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

5 Strauss, Leo, On Tyranny, Including the Strauss-Kojève Correspondence, rev. ed. Gourevitch, Victor and Roth, Michael S. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 196Google Scholar; see also Strauss, , “Progress or Return?” in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. Pangle, Thomas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 259–60Google Scholar.

6 For the emphasis on Strauss as a zetetic or skeptical thinker, see Tanguay, Daniel, Leo Strauss: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Nadon, Christopher (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; the language of “negative dialectics” belongs, of course, to Theodor Adorno.

7 Strauss, Leo, What Is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies (New York: Free Press, 1959), 11Google Scholar; see also Strauss, , Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 30–31Google Scholar.

8 Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy? 11.

9 Ibid., 40.

10 Strauss, On Tyranny, 197–98.

11 Ibid., 198.

12 Strauss, Natural Right and History, 7–8.

13 Ibid., 8.

14 Strauss, On Tyranny, 178.

15 Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy? 38.

16 Ibid., 93.

17 Ibid., 12.

18 Ibid., 75–76.

19 The idea that there remains some primordial prephilosophic ground of experience is indebted to Husserl, but is left undertheorized in Strauss; see Natural Right and History, 31–32; for some interesting comments on the problem, see Pippin, Robert, “The Unavailability of the Ordinary: Strauss on the Philosophic Fate of Modernity,” Political Theory 3 (2003): 335–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 For the philosophical importance of historical studies, see Strauss, “How to Study Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise,” in Persecution and the Art of Writing, 142–201, esp. 142–62; “On Collingwood's Philosophy of History,” Review of Metaphysics 5 (1952): 559–86.

21 For the “second cave” image, see Strauss, in Persecution and the Art of Writing, 155–56.

22 This is the central thesis of Persecution and the Art of Writing, 22–37; see also Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy? 221–22.

23 Strauss, On Tyranny, 22.

24 For some of the commentary on this debate, see Gourevitch, Victor, “Philosophy and Politics, I and II,” Review of Metaphysics 22 (1968): 58–84, 281–328Google Scholar; Chiaromonte, Nicola, “On Modern Tyranny: A Critique of Western Intellectuals,” Dissent 16 (1969): 137–50Google Scholar; Pippin, Robert, “Being, Time, and Politics: The Strauss-Kojève Debate,” History and Theory 22 (1993): 138–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Smith, Steven B., “Tyranny Ancient and Modern,” in Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 131–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 See Strauss, On Tyranny, 162–63.

26 Ibid., 203.

27 Ibid., 194–95.

28 Ibid., 195.

29 Ibid., emphasis added.

30 Ibid., 196.

31 Ibid., 199.

32 Ibid., 205.

33 Ibid., 205–6.

34 Ibid., 200.

35 Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, 110.

36 Strauss regards society's hostility to philosophy as a danger “coeval with philosophy.” See Persecution and the Art of Writing, 21.

37 Strauss, On Tyranny, 192; see also Strauss, Natural Right and History, 130.

38 Strauss, On Tyranny, 200.

39 For Strauss's treatment of this theme, see “Progress or Return?” 227–70; “Preface to Spinoza's Critique of Religion,” in Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 224–59; “Jerusalem and Athens: Some Preliminary Reflections,” in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, ed. T. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 147–73; “Reason and Revelation,” in Meier, Heinrich, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 141–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 The claim that the entire Straussian project rests upon a Nietzschean “will to power” has been argued provocatively by Rosen, Stanley, Hermeneutics as Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 107–23Google Scholar; see also Lampert, Laurence, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)Google Scholar who treats Strauss as a weak Nietzschean.

41 Strauss, Natural Right and History, 74.

42 Ibid., 74–75; the term “one thing needful” is from Luke 10:42.

43 See Walter Sobchak from the Coen Brothers' movie The Big Lebowski: “Three thousand years of beautiful tradition from Moses to Sandy Koufax, you're damn right I'm living in the past.” The chronology may be slightly off, but the point is well-taken.

44 Strauss, “Progress or Return?” 261–62.

45 Ibid., 264. Strauss may well have been thinking about the miracle of the sun standing still in the heavens as reported in Joshua 10: 12–14; this was discussed at length by Spinoza, who offers his own “scientific” account of the alleged miracle in Theologico-Political Treatise, trans. Shirley, Samuel (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 26–27Google Scholar.

46 Strauss cites Deuteronomy 4:6 as evidence for the possibility of a rational orthodoxy; see “Preface to Spinoza's Critique of Religion,” 256.

47 Strauss, “Progress or Return,” 269.

48 For the theistic interpretation of Strauss's thought, see Green, Kenneth Hart, Jew and Philosopher: The Return to Maimonides in the Jewish Thought of Leo Strauss (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Orr, Susan, Jerusalem and Athens (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995)Google Scholar.

49 Strauss, Leo, “Preface to Hobbes Politische Wissenschaft,” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, ed. Green, Kenneth Hart (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), 453Google Scholar.

50 Strauss, “Preface to Spinoza's Critique of Religion,” 257.

51 For the provisional nature of Strauss's, project, see The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 11Google Scholar.

52 Strauss, “Preface to Hobbes Politische Wissenschaft,” 453.

53 Strauss, “Progress or Return?” 270; see also the following remark from Goethe cited by Strauss in Persecution and the Art of Writing, 107n35: “The actual, only and most profound theme of world and human history, the theme under which all others are subsumed, remains the conflict between unbelief and belief.”