Volume 51, Number 16 · October 21, 2004
Leo Strauss: The European
By Mark Lilla
I don't know what publication this review comes from, but I can track it
down. This review of several German books on Leo Strauss is most
interesting, esp. reading between the lines. I am immediately possessed by
a dislike of Strauss that
begins with that little whiff of Nietzscheanism and doubts about the
secularization induced by the Enlightenment.
So while some have asserted that Strauss is the best friend liberal
democracy ever had, and that Strauss shouldn't be blamed for his American
disciples who became neocons, my first impression is to disagree
fundamentally. I've not read one word of Strauss, but just from reading
summaries of his work, I smell a rat. Underneath all this folderol about
Socratic questioning and the rational life is the suppression of
sociological consciousness, yielding the metaphysics of the esoteric
intellectual and the mindless herd, but specifically the questioning
intellectual who suppresses the sociological understanding of his society
and his role in it. Of course all these smart clever boys became
neocons. They're just like the Randroids.
Moral of the story? Why Plato? Why Nietzsche? Why Heidegger? Why not
Marx? Huh, motherfucker, why not Marx?
> From the start, however, Strauss was aware that the life of philosophy
> could never be a simple matter for a thoughtful Jew aware of his
> peo-ple's history. Late in life he addressed this theme in a
> semi-autobiographical essay that became the preface to the English
> translation of his book on Spinoza. This extraordinary document is a
> phenomenology of the modern Jewish spirit, describing from within the
> intellectual steps by which German Jews had moved from orthodoxy to
> liberal assimilation in the nineteenth century, then to Zionism and the
> "new thinking" of Franz Rosenzweig and other messianic writers in the
> early decades of the twentieth.[2] This story had been told before from a
> purely historical standpoint as a struggle between orthodoxy and
> Enlightenment. Strauss saw in it instead what he called a
> "theological-political problem."
>Strauss often remarked that although politics can address finite problems
>it can never resolve the fundamental contradictions of life. Those
>contradictions have their source in the human need to answer the
>existential question "How should I live?," a supra-political question
>giving rise to stark alternatives. In the West, those alternatives were
>seen in philosophy and divine revelation, the lives of Socrates and Moses.
>The tension between them was, in Strauss's view, the hidden wellspring of
>our civilization's vitality. But the thinkers of the modern Enlightenment,
>horrified by religious war and frustrated by the other-worldliness of
>classical philosophy, tried to reduce that tension. They mocked religion,
>advocated toleration, and tried to redirect philosophy toward more
>practical pursuits, whether political, technological, or moral. They
>imagined a world of satisfied citizens and shopkeepers, and nearly
>succeeded in creating it.
>But as the nineteenth century progressed it became abundantly clear that
>one problem, the "Jewish question," could not be dissolved. Not because of
>Christian prejudice, which was real enough, or Jewish stubbornness, but
>because the existence of the Jews as a people constituted by di-vine
>revelation was a challenge to the Enlightenment's hope that politics could
>be isolated from supra-political claims. The principle leading to
>emancipationthat, to quote from the debate in the French National
>Assembly of 1789, "the Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but
>granted everything as individuals"proved untenable; the call of
>revelation could not be extinguished from thought or politics. And that,
>for Strauss, meant that philosophy needed to reconsider the original
>"theological-political problem" afresh.
I am struck by a number of lacunae as well as irritating presences such as
Rosenzweig. Treating the Enlightenment as a metaphysical phenomenon apart
from the social forces that generated it and its contradictions already
distorts the analytical framework. If one wants to read this sort of
literature, better to read Horkheimer and Adorno's DIALECTIC OF
ENLIGHTENMENT, which suffers from a similar methodology.
But most important is the absence of Marx from the picture, and historical
materialism from the method.
>Tanguay, who is French-Canadian but was trained in France, is particularly
>good at tracing Strauss's development in an accessible way. He begins with
>the Jewish question as a "theological-political" problem and Strauss's
>early conviction that one needs to find "a horizon beyond liberalism."
>That phrase, found in Strauss's youthful critique of the jurist (and later
>Nazi apologist) Carl Schmitt, is often quoted by critics who charge
>Strauss with being a partisan anti-liberal. Here the statement takes on
>its real significance, which is intellectual and existential. The problem
>with the Enlightenment's liberal aspiration to take religious issues
>entirely out of politics and thereby pacify human existence was, in
>Strauss's view, that it distorted our understanding of the human condition.
This, I suggest, is nonsense.
>In Plato's Republic Socrates likened that condition to our being in a cave
>transfixed by shadows projected on a wall, when we should be outside,
>gazing upon things themselves in the sunlight. The question human beings
>face in this cave is how to live: Do we remain shackled by convention,
>satisfied with the partial view of life endorsed by political and
>religious authority, or do we ascend to inquire into life under our own
>power? The answer provided in most societies in history has been one that
>mixes the theological and political: we are to obey the laws because they
>are sacred. The Socratic alternative to this obedience in the cave was the
>life of Socrates himself, a life of perpetual philosophical questioning
>beholden to no theological or political authority. Between these
>antagonistic ways of life, which Strauss sometimes called those of
>Jerusalem and Athens, there can be, he argued, no compromise; we must
>choose. Yet both share the assumption that the existential question can
>indeed be settled.
>What changes in the modern era, in Strauss's view, are both the
>understanding of this antagonism and the strategies for coping with it. In
>a powerful image he developed in one of his earliest writings and used
>repeatedly throughout his life, he posited the existence of a second cave
>created by modern Enlightenment, an "unnatural" one into which we have
>descended, distorting the natural condition of having to choose.
>Enlightenment thinkers were hostile to theological-political authority but
>failed to see that most people and societies need that authority; such
>thinkers as Voltaire and d'Alembert wanted to écraser l'infâme rather than
>simply distance themselves from it.
What is interesting here is the lack of sociological acumen, deducing
everything instead from metaphysics and psychology.
>In trying to reestablish societies on enlightened foundations, these
>thinkers blurred the distinction between the philosopher and the city and
>became ideological partisansof democracy or anti-democracy, of technology
>or anti-technology, and so on. The situation deteriorated even more in the
>nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when modern thought descended into
>relativism and nihilism, and the fundamental existential questions that
>dominated classical thought came to be seen as mere products of their
>times or cultures. This "historicism," as Strauss called it, is now so
>deeply rooted that it prevents an honest examination of those fundamental
>questions as if genuine answers were possible, the kind of examination
>Socrates taught. If the philosophical life of Socrates were to be pursued
>again, the very idea of it would first have to be recovered from
>historical oblivion. That was Strauss's most fundamental ambition: to
>prepare a return to Socratic philosophy by first beating a path up from
>the second cave through the critical study of the history of philosophy.
Silly stuff. No wonder Strauss' American disciples became fascists. Smart
boys lost in the sea of modern chaos looking for an anchor. Like Ayn Rand
cultists. Again, Nietzsche, no Marx.
>As Strauss characterized them, Alfarabi and Maimonides were zetetic
>philosophers in the Socratic tradition who found themselves faced with
>powerful conventions sanctioned by revealed religions unknown to the
>classical world. They saw that revelation and philosophy could never
>refute each other or be intellectually synthesized without abandoning one
>or the other. But they also understood that philosophy's skepticism could
>pose serious risks, whether to the philosopher himself (witness Socrates'
>fate) or to the moral-legal foundation of the city, which rests at some
>level on unquestioned beliefs ("we hold these truths to be self-evident").
>Philosophy lives with a permanently open horizon, leaving unsettled many
>basic questions regarding morality and mortality. Most people, and all
>societies, need settled answers to those questions. So how is the
>philosopher to behave responsibly in such a situation, while still
>remaining himself?
Bullshit through and through. Yeah, critical thinkers are rare: most
people conform and don't think. I discovered this by the time I was seven
years old. Now how does this relate to the specifics of social
conditioning, material life both in connection with nature and
social organization? Why Nietzsche, and why not Marx?
>According to Strauss's reading, Alfarabi and Maimonides wrote in such a
>way that the casual reader would take away the lesson that philosophy and
>revelation are compatible. This exoteric lesson is doubly beneficial. It
>permits the philosopher to live and teach free of suspicion from
>theological and political authorities; it also plants the idea publicly
>that those authorities must justify themselves before the tribunal of
>reason, thereby acting as a brake on superstition and tyranny. The
>attentive reader, however, will note that these texts are full of
>contradictions, lacunae, strange digressions, senseless repetitions, and
>silences. As the reader goes deeply into them he begins to learn a
>different, esoteric lesson, which is that philosophy and revelation are
>not at all compatible. This esoteric lesson is also doubly beneficial. It
>teaches the reader that genuine philosophy can and should be kept free
>from all theological and political conventions; it also teaches him by
>example how to establish relations that are both esoteric and exoteric
>with conventional authority and with potential students of philosophy. The
>achievement of Alfarabi was to have demonstrated how philosophy can be
>both free, if understood esoterically, and politically responsible.
This is actually rather shallow.
>This was what Tanguay calls the "Farabian turn" in Strauss's thought.
>After making the turn Strauss then worked back in time, developing an
>idealized picture of an "ancient" or "classical" philosophical tradition
>that was also esoteric. The ancients, he claimed, sought a rational
>account of nature while simultaneously recognizing the less than rational
>character of political life, which is dominated by opinion and passion. He
>then moved forward to show, or claimed to show, how this understanding of
>the philosophical life disappeared in the modern era.
Right, the select few living the higher life vs. the mindless herd. Taking
the intellectual elite at its own valuation of itself. Silly.
>His interpretations try to suggest that the truly radical nature of
>Socratic questioning had been domesticated and routinized by modern
>Enlightenment philosophy, and that this was a loss, not a gain. Through
>the new philosophy of the Enlightenment we have learned to master nature
>and partially master our political destinies, but in the process we have
>lost the genuine freedom of philosophy as a way of life. In the process of
>Enlightenment, we have forgotten ourselves.
A commonplace theme analyzed by countless intellectuals. But what is
singularly lacking here is any material reality underlying these
metaphysical abstractions. Sounds like the Nazi Heidegger's forgetting of
being. The question would be: why did the Enlightenment further the
scientific understanding of nature with the promise of control of nature
but the radical questioning of social organization did not progress beyond
what was necessary to break the authority of feudalism and establish
capitalism? Even John Dewey understood this dualism better than Strauss
apparently did.
>Talk of forgetfulness reminds one of Heidegger, and one does not distort
>Strauss by considering his entire oeuvre to be a long response to the
>challenge Heidegger laid down. Both were convinced that the history of
>philosophy makes up a coherent story that ends in the problem of nihilism
>stated by Nietzsche; both sought the "decisive" moment in that story when
>an earlier practice of philosophy was lost and the decay set in; both, if
>in different ways, tried to bring about the "destruction" of a mistaken
>philosophical tradition and the recovery of an earlier one. Countless
>questions can be posed about Strauss's efforts to accomplish these aims:
>about the "second cave" and the need to recover anything at all; about the
>Socratic ideal he advances; about the practice of esoteric reading; about
>the existence of a coherent "ancient" or "classical" philosophical
>tradition; about the "waves of modernity" that led from Enlightenment to
>nihilism; about the connection between the history of these ideas and
>concrete political history.
Damn straight, and this story is the story of fascism. Who cares if
Strauss admired Lincoln? His program is reactionary up and down the line.
This review is most interesting, as is part two in the following
issue of whatever magazine this was. What remains is to tie together the
loose ends. None of these
reviewers have managed it because they don't seem to have the wherewithal
to move on to the next level of generalization.
Again my bibliography:
Anti-Nietzsche Bibliography
http://www.autodidactproject.org/bib/nietzsche-bib1.html
Moral of the story: bourgeois thought is smoke and mirrors.
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