Strauss’s Nietzsche
Matthew Sharpe and Daniel Townsend
Introduction: the Strauss Controversy, Leo Strauss, and Nietzsche
Leo Strauss became nearly a household name in the first decade of the twenty-first century in the United States of America. This was due to the alleged role of Strauss’s students and admirers in the neoconservative Bush government (2000–8), a regime which historians will associate with the ‘war on terror’, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the United States’ flouting of the United Nations. Liberal critics led by Shadia Drury, Peter Levine, and Nicolas Xenos, charged that Strauss and his students were a sect of secret or ‘esoteric’ Nietzscheans whose Machiavellian politics, and dreams of a renewed aristocratic rule of the strong, were cloaked behind a veil of noble-sounding calls for a return to national virtue, religious piety, and a defence of Western values.
These charges of Nietzscheanism were especially embittering to Strauss’s students and followers, given that Strauss opposes the philosophical modernism represented by Nietzsche. In public lectures, Strauss claims that Nietzsche represents the ‘third wave’ of modern thought. This ‘wave’ is characterized by what Strauss denounces as radical ‘historicism’: the belief that all claims to excellence, virtue, or orienting normative value are entirely conditioned by the historical circumstances of their progenitors. For this reason, radical historicism means the end of philosophy as the search for transhistorical, transcultural Truth – the very type of classical philosophy Strauss writes of reviving. Notably, Strauss also damningly associates Nietzsche with the National Socialist disaster:
. . . [Nietzsche] used much of his unsurpassable and inexhaustible power of passionate and fascinating speech for making his readers loathe, not only socialism and communism, but conservatism, nationalism, and democracy as well. After having taken upon himself this great political responsibility he could not show his readers a way towards political responsibility . . . Nietzsche thus prepared a regime which, as long as it lasted, made discredited democracy again look like the golden age. (Strauss, 1988a, p. 57)
Yet Strauss’s attitude towards Nietzsche is far more ambivalent, and much more philosophically interesting than what the above passage might suggest. Late in life, Strauss recalled how he had, in his early years, secretly admired Nietzsche. In an important 1936 essay, Strauss explicitly frames his return to premodern philosophy as the search for a middle ground between the ‘master’ and ‘slave’ moralities Nietzsche identifies in the Genealogy of Morals (Strauss, 1990, p. 14). Furthermore, in his later texts Strauss would recur in his own name to Nietzsche’s strong dismissal of modern culture in Thus Spoke Zarathrustra as leading to a morass of conformist ‘last men’, understood as human beings unable to conceive of any higher goals than bourgeois comfort and base self-interest.1 Most of all, when compiling his last published work, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, Strauss chose to place an extended essay on Nietzsche’s work, ‘A Note on the Plan of Beyond Good and Evil’, as the numerically central eighth out of 15 chapters – a fact which Strauss’s own, famous hermeneutics (see below) would point to as implying a central importance.
It is this 17-page essay, ‘A Note on the Plan of Beyond Good and Evil’, (Strauss, 1983) which we shall now scrutinize. It is difficult not to admire this extraordinary essay, even if we do not agree with Laurence Lampert’s provocative assessment that it represents ‘the best Nietzsche yet, the one nearest to the still almost secret Nietzsche of Nietzsche’s great books’ (Lampert, 1996, p. 1). In this essay, Strauss’s earlier criticisms of Nietzsche’s philosophy are qualified, if not overturned. The reader of ‘A Note on the Plan’ could be forgiven for forgetting Strauss’s earlier dismissals of Nietzsche’s work due to the powerful and coherent reconstruction Strauss provides of Nietzsche’s elusive, most famous ideas: the will to power, the eternal recurrence, and the philosopher or overman as artist and legislator. She might also then recall that, although Strauss situates Nietzsche as the third wave of modern thought, in Plato’s Republic – from whence, via Homer’s Odyssey, Strauss’s metaphor of three waves comes – the third wave is the saving wave that positions philosophers as law-making kings (Republic 472a, 484a–c, 487e,489b, 497c–d, 499b–d; see BGE 203, 211). Thus does Strauss, at the very centre of his last major work, quietly admit his secret proximity to Nietzsche? To assess these perplexities, and also to understand the peculiar nature of Strauss’s writing style in ‘A Note on the Plan’, we must first explore some basic aspects of Strauss’s thought.
Philosophy and Esotericism
Leo Strauss was born in 1899 in Germany to an orthodox Jewish family. As a young man, Strauss was passionately engaged by the debates concerning Zionism and the fate of his people. Strauss also became a dedicated student of philosophy. A member of the remarkable generation of Jewish intellectuals who would be exiled by the Nazis, Strauss studied with Max Weber, Hermann Cohen, and Martin Heidegger.
Strauss’s research into medieval Jewish and Arabic philosophy in the 1930s led him to a controversial discovery that would shape his career. In certain medieval texts, such as Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed, Strauss rediscovered an avowed practice of esoteric writing. The premise of esoteric writing is that the author writes multi-layered texts. On the surface of an esoteric text are edifying teachings available to all readers who stumble upon the book, teachings which accommodate the author’s positions to the prejudices of their age. However, this exoteric layer serves to conceal the author’s true, and often heterodox, views. Esoteric teachings are intimated by a variety of literary devices, such as using fables, allegories, metaphors, ambiguous words, characters, dramatic settings, and staged dialogues; assigning particular significance to certain numbers; writing behind the mask of a commentator, historian, or scholar; contradicting oneself on key issues; hiding more radical opinions in the central position in lists, paragraphs, sections, or within numbered chapters, books, or essays (see Strauss, 1988b, pp. 22–38).
While many contemporaries reacted sharply to Strauss’s great study of esotericism, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Strauss, 1988b), there is overwhelming evidence attesting to the practice dating back as far as Plato. In the seventh Letter, for example, Plato frankly avows that he has never fully stated his true positions (341c–d; 342e–343a; see second Letter, 314c; Phaedrus 275c5–276; Strauss, 1964, pp. 52–5). Notably for us, Nietzsche too was aware of these unusual ancient writing practices; commenting on the ‘noble lie’ in Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche asserts that ‘Neither Manu nor Plato, neither Confucius nor the Jewish and Christian teachers, ever doubted their right to tell lies’ (TI ‘Improvers’ 5).2 Beyond Good and Evil 190 reflects on how Plato used Socrates ‘in the manner of a popular tune from the streets’, so his works are ‘prosthe Platon epithen te Platon messe te chimaira [Plato in front, Plato behind, in the middle a chimera]’ (BGE 190; see BGE 28).3 Most importantly for us – and as Strauss alerts us to in ‘A Note on the Plan’ – in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche shows himself to be aware of, if not an advocate of, the practice of esoteric writing. Nietzsche tells of
[t]he exoteric and the esoteric as philosophers formerly distinguished them, among the Indians as among the Greeks, Persians and Moslems, in short wherever one believed in an order of rank and not in equality and equal rights. (BGE 30. See BGE 40; also 7, 62, 198–203, 295; WS 71)
It is impossible to say whether Strauss’s discovery of philosophic esotericism in the mid-1930s was a by-product of his youthful encounter with Nietzsche’s texts. What is certain is that Nietzsche’s ‘deliberately enigmatic’ (#7),4 interrogative, tempting, even ‘feminine’ texts – not least Beyond Good and Evil – have many of the characteristics which Strauss uncovered in his readings of Plato, Xenophon, Farabi, Maimonides, and Machiavelli. But let us return to the surface. Strauss contends that Nietzsche was an esoteric writer and that esoteric writing begins with Plato. Does Strauss, then, consider Nietzsche an heir to Plato?
Nietzsche’s Platonizing: on the Plan of Strauss’s Beyond Good and Evil
Leo Strauss’s orienting contention in ‘A Note on the Plan of Beyond Good and Evil’ is reflected in his central placement of the essay in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy. It is to situate Nietzsche in the lineage of what Strauss terms ‘Platonic political philosophy’. Strauss of course recognizes that Nietzsche opposed ‘Platonism’ understood as the invention of the ‘pure mind’ and the otherworldly ideas headed by ‘the good in itself’ (#4). Yet, citing Nietzsche’s famous Preface of Beyond Good and Evil, Strauss argues that while Nietzsche explicitly ‘presents himself as the antagonist of Plato’ (#3), he also ranks Plato as ‘the most beautiful growth of antiquity’ (#22; see BGE 38, 190). What then are the dimensions of Nietzsche’s Platonism?
There are three registers to the Straussian claim concerning Nietzsche’s Platonism. The first six paragraphs of Strauss’s ‘Note on the Plan’ allow us to see the first register. These paragraphs concern what Strauss terms Nietzsche’s ‘platonizing’ regarding the ‘form’ or literary character of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (#3). Strauss means that Nietzsche has written BGE with all the subtlety with which Plato constructed his 35 dialogues. Strauss’s essay opens with the remarkable claim that Beyond Good and Evil, far from being an aleatory collection of aphorisms and apercus, is characterized by a ‘graceful subtlety as regards form, as regards intention, as regards the arts of silence’ (#2).
Strauss draws our particular attention to Beyond Good and Evil’s subtitle, ‘A Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future’ as indicating a key to its meaning, its hidden form, and its relation to Thus Spoke Zarathrustra, which Nietzsche called his ‘most profound’ book. Strauss says:
The book is meant to prepare, not indeed the philosophy of the future, the true philosophy, but a new kind of philosophy by liberating the mind from the ‘prejudices of the philosophers,’ i.e. of the philosophers of the past (and the present). At the same time, or by this very fact, the book is meant to be a specimen of the philosophy of the future. (#4)
This is why Beyond Good and Evil must open by identifying and attacking, as it duly does, ‘the prejudices of the philosophers’ and be followed by a second chapter on ‘the free mind’ or ‘free spirits’. These free spirits, Strauss suggests, are the privileged addressees of Nietzsche’s book, since they are the hoped-for ‘heralds and precursors’ of the philosophers of the future that Nietzsche’s task looks towards (#5; see BGE 44, 203).
These considerations about Nietzsche’s addressees lead to the second, substantive register to Strauss’s claim concerning Nietzsche’s platonizing. This is that Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, like Plato’s Republic, is first of all a book about philosophy (#5). One register of what the mature Strauss understood by ‘Platonic political philosophy’ is a reflection on philosophy as an activity or way of life, in relation to religion, morality, art or poetry, and other political phenomena. With this in mind, Strauss’s sixth paragraph gives a significant summary of the plan he perceives as structuring Beyond Good and Evil. The first three chapters, particularly Chapter III, Strauss claims, concern the relation of philosophy with (the) religion(s). The fourth chapter of BGE, ‘Sayings and Interludes’, divides this half of the book from the last five chapters (V–IX), which are devoted to philosophy in its relations to morals and politics. Philosophy alone occupies all of Beyond Good and Evil, albeit in different ways.
Thirdly, Strauss is aware in ‘Note on the Plan’ of the strange proximity between the elevated understanding of the rightful, governing political role of philosophy Nietzsche develops in BGE (38, 203, 211), and Plato’s politics in books like the Republic (see Strauss, 1989a, pp. 41–2; 1989b, p. 97). In Nietzsche’s thought, Strauss suggests, the will to power combines the roles Plato assigned to Eros (philosophical desire) and the pure mind. For Nietzsche, philosophy is the highest or ‘most spiritual’ manifestation of the will to power, as it was the highest species of Eros in Plato; this means that it consists in prescribing to nature what or how it ought to be (BGE 9) (#7; see Strauss, 1989b, p. 96). Above all else, like Plato’s philosopher-kings, Nietzsche’s philosopher of the future is, in Strauss’s reading, willing to take on political leadership:
The leaders who can counteract the degradation of man which has led to the autonomy of the herd can however not be merely men born to rule like Napoleon, Alcibiades or Caesar. They must be philosophers and commanders, the philosophers of the future. Mere Caesars, however great, will not suffice; for the new philosophers must teach man the future of man as his will. (#25)
Strauss’s Nietzsche’s Anti-Liberalism
For readers raised in a period of left-liberal and post-structuralist readings of Nietzsche, Strauss’s ‘Note on the Plan of Beyond Good and Evil’ can appear shocking, not only in its form, but also in Strauss’s substantive claims. Certainly, Strauss places greater emphasis on those parts of the Nietzschean oeuvre some are tempted to quarantine or pass over (for example: BGE 203, 211; see #25–7, 29–31). Unlike the ‘weakened’ Nietzsches that emerge in many post-modern readings, Strauss’s Nietzsche is very much the writer who once claimed that he was ‘dynamite’. Strauss’s Nietzsche is outspokenly hostile to modern liberalism, egalitarianism, democracy, and feminism:
The official high priests of democracy with their amiable reasonableness were not reasonable enough to prepare us for our present situation: the decline of Europe, the danger to the West, to the whole Western heritage, which is at least as great and even greater than that which threatened Mediterranean civilization around 300 of the Christian era. Nietzsche once described the change which has been effected in the second half of the nineteenth century in continental Europe . . . every day something new with no reminder of duty and exalted destiny . . . the specialisation compensated by sham universality, by the stimulation of all kinds of interests and curiosities without true passion; the danger of universal philistinism and creeping conformism. (Strauss, 1989a, p. 31)
Three of Strauss’s central paragraphs in ‘Note on the Plan’ (#23–5) address Beyond Good and Evil aphorisms 197–202, in which Nietzsche rails against the modern ‘morality stemming from timidity’, a ‘herd’ morality the very opposite of the new values Nietzsche would propound (#25). This ‘morality of the human herd’ (#23) was once the outgrowth of a ‘healthy’ instinct of the weak, to elevate what is of ‘utility to the herd’ as the standard of the Good (#24). However, unlike in earlier hierarchical societies, Strauss’s Nietzsche laments that this morality ‘has become simply predominant in contemporary Europe’, even in its greatest philosophers (#22, 24). The result is that, whereas in the past this herd morality still allowed for vital aggression towards external and internal enemies, the new herd morality of contemporary Europe
takes the side of the very criminals and becomes afraid of inflicting punishment: it is satisfied with making the criminals harmless; by abolishing the only remaining ground of fear, the morality of timidity would reach its completion and thus make itself superfluous. (#24; see BGE 73)
Strauss’s ‘Note on the Plan’ also pointedly raises – in a single, intriguing paragraph at the end of the seventh subsection (#36) – the subject of women and feminism which occupies the end of BGE’s own, seventh chapter. In these paragraphs, introduced by Nietzsche’s ungainly emphasis that they are ‘my truths’ (BGE 231), Nietzsche lambasts women (e.g. ‘Stupidity in the kitchen; woman as cook . . . ’; ‘Young: a cavern decked about. Old: a dragon sallies out’ (BGE 234; 237)). Strauss takes these paragraphs seriously enough to interrupt the apparent flow of his own exegesis. Moreover, he makes this interruption to highlight that when Nietzsche pillories feminism, he does so above all on grounds that it is hostile to what he calls ‘the natural hierarchy’ that exists between men and women (#36).
Nietzsche and Nature
The red thread that in fact runs through Strauss’s ‘Note on the Plan of Beyond Good and Evil’ is the claim that at the heart of Nietzsche’s thought is a new conception of nature. In contrast to Strauss’s earlier essays, Nietzsche is no longer presented as a moral and epistemological relativist who believes that there is, in the absence of Truth, only a multiplicity of perspectives on the world. Rather, Nietzsche seems a harbinger of a new, modern or post-modern doctrine of natural right. Strauss’s eighteenth paragraph in ‘Note on the Plan’ turns to Nietzsche’s central (fifth) chapter in Beyond Good and Evil, noting in typical Straussian fashion that this numerically central chapter in Nietzsche’s book bears the only chapter heading which refers to ‘nature’. Strauss’s Nietzsche is aware that while one can try to push nature away as with a hayfork – for instance by promoting ‘unnatural’ modern, democratic, and feminist ideas (see #18) – she always returns (see #22; BGE 264; 83; Strauss, 1953, pp. 201–2).
At the heart of Strauss’s Nietzsche’s concept of nature are the fundamental teachings of will to power and eternal recurrence. Together, they form what Strauss calls a new kind of ‘transmoral’ anthropocentrism (#7) whose nature is what the second half of ‘Note on the Plan’ is devoted to showing.
Invoking Nietzsche’s second Untimely Meditation, Strauss claims that for Nietzsche, contra figures like Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
the truth is not attractive, lovable, life-giving, but deadly, as is shown by the true doctrines of the sovereignty of Becoming, and the fluidity of all concepts, types and species, and of the lack of any cardinal difference between man and beast . . . It is shown most simply by the true doctrine that God is dead. (#7)
Yet for all that, and despite Nietzsche’s avowed perspectivism, Strauss claims that Nietzsche in no way denies that there is a fundamental, if deadly, truth. Rather than the relativization of all truths, we might say, Strauss’s Nietzsche elevates the unrelativizable Truth of relativism. Strauss makes two parries at clarifying this inconsistency. First, he distinguishes between truths and a meta-Truth, ‘the truth regarding all truths’: ‘in other words, by suggesting that the truth is human creation, [Nietzsche] suggests that this truth at any rate is not a human creation’ (#7; italics ours).
Second, Strauss enigmatically comments that Nietzsche considered the error of all previous philosophers was that they sought to ‘discover’ the truth, rather than to ‘invent’ it (loc cit.; see #11). If ‘some of his readers’ (#9) wish to know what Nietzsche means when he accepts that the will to power is one more interpretation or invention, Strauss contends, they ought to pay particular heed to Beyond Good and Evil 34, a central aphorism in that work’s second chapter. Here, the distinction is raised between the world as it appears to us (as fictions and interpretations), and the world as it is in itself (the text), which Nietzsche says is of no concern to us. Strauss argues that
what [Nietzsche] seems to aim at is the abolition of the fundamental distinction: the world as will to power is both the world of any concern to us and the world in itself. Precisely if all views of the world are interpretations, i.e. acts of the will to power, the doctrine of the will to power is at the same time an interpretation and the most fundamental fact, for, in contradistinction to all other interpretations, it is the necessary and sufficient condition for the possibility of any ‘categories’. (#8)
A sceptical reader of ‘Note on the Plan’ might be tempted to assert that ‘the problematic, tentative, tempting, hypothetical character’ of Strauss’s comments on the will to power here are fundamentally incoherent (#8). On the one hand, and as in previous philosophies, there is an invocation of some non- or supra-human Nature or Truth which would precede and make possible all interpretations, and their critical assessment: ‘the highest culture of the future must be in accordance with the natural order of rank among men which Nietzsche, in principle, understands along Platonic lines’ (Strauss, 1989b, p. 97).
On the other hand, the Truth seems to belong to a certain way of interpreting the world, even of actively prescribing to nature what it ought to be, if only that of the six or seven overmen at whom nature aims (#17; see #7, 25; BGE 126). This thought implies that at least some privileged human beings can recreate nature according to their will. The circle can be squared only by maintaining that this very act of willing, and the complementary men or philosophers of the future who undertake it, will themselves embody the Truth of will to power, as living syntheses of is and ought, nature and human creation. This is Strauss’s interpretation:
[T]he new philosophers must teach man the future of man as his will, as dependent upon human will . . . The subjugation of nature depends then decisively on men who possess a certain nature. Philosophy, we have heard, is the most spiritual will to power (aph. 9): the philosophers of the future must possess that will to a degree which was not even dreamed of by the philosophy of the past: they must possess that will in absolute form. The new philosophers are or act, we are tempted to say, to the highest degree according to nature. (#25; italics ours)
Eternal Recurrence: Nietzsche’s Religiosity
We can attempt to make Strauss’s elusive ideas concerning Nietzsche clearer by addressing another key, unusual element of his reading: on Nietzsche’s attitudes towards religion. In ‘A Note on the Plan’, Strauss singles out two key aphorisms (BGE 36 and 37) on Nietzsche and religion in Beyond Good and Evil, Chapter III (#8). Strauss is taken particularly by Nietzsche’s highly gnomic aphorism 37:
‘What? Does that, to speak vulgarly, not mean: God is refuted but the devil is not – ?’ On the contrary! On the contrary, my friends! And who the devil compels you to speak vulgarly!
As this playful jibe comes straight after a decisive aphorism (BGE 36) on the hypothesis of the will to power (#8), Strauss claims that ‘the doctrine of the will to power–the whole doctrine of Beyond Good and Evil–is in a manner a vindication of God (see 150 and 295, as well as Genealogy of Morals, Preface 7)’ (#8). The nature of this vindication is discovered by Strauss in BGE Chapter III (46–8; 52). Herein the Torah and pagan religions are admired for their ‘great style’ not because of the greatness of the holy God of which the former speaks, Strauss contests, but for the power of the human will such visions attest to (#10). Strauss’s Nietzsche’s ‘vindication of God’ is hence atheistic, in line with most other readings of Nietzsche (#11). Since the advent of Christianity and the triumph of slave morality, Nietzsche teaches elsewhere, God has died as a powerful or life-giving creation in the minds of the moderns (see BGE 53).
Yet Strauss notes that Nietzsche is careful to distinguish between this senescent, post-Christian God (see BGE 49–51) and what he terms ‘religiosity’ or the ‘god-forming instinct’ in human beings. The latter instinct Nietzsche sees as alive and well in the moderns. Only the old, life-denying God of what Nietzsche elsewhere calls ‘monotonotheism’ is refuted by the will to power. This leaves open the possibility of some new form of more life-affirming religiosity:
Could atheism belong to the free mind as Nietzsche conceives of it while a certain kind of non-atheism belongs to the philosopher of the future who will again worship the god Dionysus or will again be, as an Epicurean might say, a dionysokolax [actor/ worshipper or flatterer of Dionysus] (see 7)? (#11)
For Strauss, Nietzsche’s other great teaching, the eternal recurrence, is the heart of his alleged, new religious philosophizing. In a central subsection of Beyond Good and Evil, Chapter III (#55–56) – surrounded by the earlier fragments on older religions (47–54), and on religion per se (56–62) – Strauss notes that Nietzsche’s reflections ascend through three rungs of what he terms the ‘great ladder of religious cruelty’ (BGE 55). First, human beings were sacrificed to the Gods; then, ascetics would sacrifice their own instincts or nature to their God. In aphorism 56, Nietzsche looks forward now to a third stage: ‘ . . . the sacrificing from cruelty, i.e. from the will to power turning against itself, of God which prepares the worshipping of the stone, stupidity, heaviness (gravity), fate, the Nothing . . . ’ (#12). This sacrifice does not represent a world-denial or end in itself, for Nietzsche or his privileged addressees. Rather, Strauss’s Nietzsche’s ‘enigmatic desire’5 is that by plumbing the most extreme pessimism and world-denial, the way towards a new religiosity, one of the eternal recurrence, is opened:
The adoration of the Nothing proves to be the indispensable transition from every kind of world-denial to the most unbounded Yes: the eternal Yes-saying to everything that was and is. (#13)6
‘We’ Scholars
We are becoming clearer concerning Strauss’s Nietzsche’s remarkable views concerning the philosophers of the future. These extraordinary men will recognize the truth of all truths, concerning the will to power. This recognition, which looks like the most far-reaching pessimism about higher values, will lead them to a hitherto unheard-of religiosity, through the affirmation of the eternal recurrence of what was and is. It is not clear, to say the least, whether all men are capable of this elevated spirituality. More clear is that these philosophers of the future will also be dionysokolax, lovers of Dionysus, and perhaps ‘invisible spiritual rulers’ (#30; see BGE 61).
One obvious objection to such a vision runs like this: can even those who feel drawn to affirming that modernity is ‘a form assumed by man in decay’, possibly look towards new philosophers as the means of their redemption (BGE 207)? As Nietzsche’s Preface in Beyond Good and Evil sets out, are not philosophers the most incompetent of dogmatic blunderers when it comes to the ways of women and the world of power? Here we return to the question, mooted above, of Nietzsche’s addressees. For Strauss’s Nietzsche, we above all must not confuse the ‘sorry lot’ of men and women who pass for philosophers today for the type of philosopher Nietzsche means to elevate (#28). The academics who ‘do philosophy’ today, Strauss writes, are only ‘in rare cases scholars or scientists, i.e. competent and honest specialists who of right ought to be subservient to philosophy or handmaidens to philosophy’ (loc cit.).
Strauss’s Nietzschean philosopher (see #26), in contrast to such academics, is a decidedly untimely man. Contra Hegel, he knows the philosopher is not the son of his time. He is its step-son: ‘the philosopher as philosopher belongs to the future and was therefore at all times in contradiction to his Today: the philosophers were always the bad conscience of their time’ (#30). So elevated is Nietzsche’s conception of such philosophers that in their shadow thinkers of the rank of Hegel and Kant are only ‘philosophic labourers’ (loc cit.; BGE 211–12). True Nietzschean philosophers create values, rather than patiently mirroring what is; far from being disengaged from the ways of the world, they are going to affirm it in all its misery and its splendour, ‘ “to endure the weight of the responsibility for the future of man . . . ” (Gay Science 34)’ (#27).
Notably, it is in the paragraphs on ‘We Scholars’ from Strauss’s ‘Note on the Plan’ that Strauss seems to align himself most closely with the Nietzschean philosophy he is expounding. ‘Note on the Plan’, paragraph 28, highlights the fact that Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil Chapter VI has the only chapter heading containing the first person of the personal pronoun ‘we’. Provocatively, Strauss ends his paragraph devoted to this part of Nietzsche’s book with his own personal observation: ‘The things which we have observed in the twentieth century regarding the sciences of man confirm Nietzsche’s diagnosis’ (#28; italics ours; see #26).
Our Virtues: Retranslating History Back into Nature
As we have said, Strauss’s manifest appreciation for Nietzsche’s rival Platonism is a key charge in the controversy surrounding his philosophic or political legacy. One thing Strauss says of Nietzsche can also be said of Strauss: that his philosophic work is untimely, at least in the sense that Strauss very rarely commented in print on the events of the day. In Strauss’s ‘Note on the Plan of Beyond Good and Evil’, an article central to any left-liberal critique of Strauss, only a single paragraph, the thirty-seventh, raises Nietzsche’s political reflections in BGE, Chapter VIII, concerning a united confederacy of states of Europe (#37).7
Whatever sympathies Strauss may intimate between his views and Nietzsche’s in this essay, it has to be strongly stated that Strauss maintains Nietzsche’s association with nineteenth-century historicism in ‘Note on the Plan’: ‘ . . . the alleged realisation that truth is a function of time (historical epoch) or that every philosophy belongs to a definite time and place (country) . . . ’ (#29). Strauss seems to be underlining this proximity between Nietzsche and historicism by, strangely, citing Marx and Engels some three times in the ‘Note on the Plan’ (#12; #25; #32) – which is hardly a flattering gesture under Strauss’s pen. When Strauss turns to Beyond Good and Evil, Chapter VII, ‘Our Virtues’, in the seventh part of his own essay, he spends most time discussing Nietzsche’s embrace of the ‘historical sense’ of the nineteenth-century scholars, in order to overturn the nineteenth century’s drift towards democratic mediocrity. For Strauss’s Nietzsche, the free spirit must develop his historical sense or ‘probity’ to see the multiple different moralities human history exemplifies, up to the master morality of men like Caesar or Alcibiades (see #25; #31; BGE 186; 226–7). How though can this backward-looking probity be coupled with Nietzsche’s forward-looking to the philosopher of the future (#13)? As Strauss queries: ‘How indeed can the demand for something absolutely new, this intransigent farewell to the whole past, to all “history” be reconciled with the unbounded Yes to everything that was and is?’ (#27).
Strauss’s answer is that Nietzsche, however much his historicism might seem to push nature out with a hayfork (see #29), aspires to what BGE terms the ‘retranslation’ of ‘the terrible basic text homo natura’ – which would include human history – back into nature. Strauss’s interpretation of Nietzsche here is that the conscious willing of new values by the philosophers of the future represents the culmination of human history, as the classless society was supposed to be for Marx and Engels (see Strauss, 1989b, pp. 97–8). However, Strauss now adds to his earlier claims concerning the philosophers of the future the claim that for Nietzsche all human history was the necessary precondition for this new species of philosophy:
That is to say, the Vernaturlichung [naturalization] of man presupposes and brings to its conclusion the whole historical process–a completion which is by no means necessary but requires a free, creative act. Still, in this way history can be said to be integrated into nature. (#34; see also #35)
This is the most philosophic content that can be given to Strauss’s repetition of the Nietzschean claim that the complementary man or philosopher of the future is he ‘in whom not only man but the rest of existence is justified (see BGE 207)’ (#30; see #31). In the closing paragraphs to ‘Note on the Plan’, Strauss enumerates the untimely political aspects of this position. The complementary man knows, on the ground of his own individual nature, that ‘there is an order of rank of the natures; at the summit of the hierarchy is the complementary man’ (#35). Far from striving to eliminate suffering and inequality, Strauss’s Nietzsche realizes that these are ‘the prerequisites of human greatness (BGE 239 and 257)’ (#35).
However, whereas hitherto such suffering and inequality have been taken for granted as ‘given’ or imposed on man by nature, ‘[h]enceforth, they must be willed’ (loc cit.):
While paving the way for the complementary man, one must at the same time say an unbounded Yes to the fragments and cripples. Nature, the eternity of nature, owes its being to a postulation, to an act of will to power on the part of the highest nature. (#35)
Strauss’s Legacy: Stanley Rosen’s Nietzsche
It is interesting, and telling, in light of the charges that Strauss above all corrupted his youthful students, to examine how at least one of Strauss’s most renowned and brilliant students, Stanley Rosen, confirms that there are similarities between Strauss and Nietzsche. Strauss is ‘almost a Nietzschean, but not quite’, as Rosen says (Rosen, 1987, pp. 125–7, 180). Rosen’s own reading of Nietzsche, moreover, bears significant marks of Strauss’s influence, as we will now consider in closing. Stanley Rosen’s fascinating, at times confronting, contention concerning Nietzsche is that Nietzsche’s publication of the ‘deadly truths’ of will to power, nihilism, and perspectivism was rhetorical, as much as philosophical – a first, decisive sign of Strauss’ influence upon him. Far from a neutral or simply ‘scholarly’ author, Rosen’s Nietzsche was both anticipating and advocating for the philosophy of the future he preached: first of all by trying to ‘accelerate’ the destruction of Western society and modern values premised upon the dead, post-Christian God. This Nietzsche’s aim was indeed to actively overcome modernity through his books, in two ways, corresponding to the two levels of what Rosen calls his ‘double-rhetoric’ (Rosen, 1989a, p. 190).
On a first, exoteric level, Rosen’s Nietzsche thought to persuade ‘the mediocre, the foolish, and the mad’ to believe that they are the complementary men. This would encourage these lesser types to embrace a life-denying and destructive relativism, clearing the cultural state for the addresses of the second, esoteric level of his message. The second, other side of Nietzsche’s philosophical rhetoric, according to Rosen, involved the more elevated attempt to midwife the true ‘artist-warriors’, the ‘highest, most gifted human types’, who will actively shape the future by creating the new values necessary for human existence (Rosen, 1989a, pp. 189–191).
It is then easy to see in Rosen’s Nietzsche a reflection of Strauss’s earlier reclaiming of Nietzsche as a profoundly aristocratic thinker – yet one who was not for all that in any way ‘conservative’, due to the radical nature of his program (Rosen, 1989a, p. 19; see Strauss, 1989a, p. 40). Again, when we consider what type of society Rosen understands Nietzsche to envision as his goal, it is clear how Rosen, like Strauss (#25), points to those passages where Nietzsche speaks highly of conquering men and races such as the Romans, Arabians, the Renaissance city states and poleis of Homeric Greece (Rosen, 1989a, pp. 192–3, 196). Rosen’s Nietzsche’s use of historical paradigms is meant to indicate to the few, superior readers of the future the possibility of ‘fulfilment of human existence at its best’ (loc. cit.) and that such possibilities – again as in Strauss’s interpretation of Nietzsche – are from here on to be consciously willed. The values, or art, willed by the highest human types on this view will be of greater value than any previous ‘truth’ (WP 853 (IV)) on the basis that art ‘not merely enhances but produces life: art is the illusion by which we are inured, or rather charmed, into living a noble lie’ (Rosen, 1989a, p. 198; see Strauss, 1953, p. 26). However much this position reflects Strauss’ influence, it is fair to say that Strauss was never anything like so bold in the expression of his teachings (see Strauss, 1953, p. 26).
Notes
1In a lecture on Heideggerian existentialism, the mature Strauss intimated to his audience that he believed no one had written more nobly on what a philosopher is than Friedrich Nietzsche (Strauss, 1989a).
2Translations of TI here are from Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, trans. R.J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin, 1990.
3Except when quoting from Strauss’s text, translations of BGE here are from Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R.J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin, 1990.
4Following Lampert (1996), we will reference ‘A Note on the Plan of Beyond Good and Evil’ from here on via numbered paragraphs (#-).
5For, as Strauss notes, Nietzsche is far from categorical in his presentation of the eternal recurrence and its significance in Beyond Good and Evil. Like aphorism 37, aphorism 56 ends with a playful, theological question which entices readers without providing any clear answer: ‘And this [the eternal recurrence of what was and is] would not be circulus vitiosis deus [the vicious circle made God]?” ’ (BGE 56; #13).
6One further point concerning Strauss’s Nietzsche’s religiosity is concealed in Strauss’s passing, cited reference in paragraph 11 to how the new, religious philosophers of the eternal recurrence will again be ‘dionysokolax’ (#11). Following Strauss’s reference to BGE 7, we see that this term, which means ‘actors’, was used by the Epicureans to attack the Platonists for being ‘tyrants’ hangers on and lickspittles’–after Plato himself who famously tried to install himself as the invisible advisor-teacher of the Syracusan tyrant Dionysos (BGE 9). Strauss’s recurrence to this ‘venomous’ Epicurean criticism of Platonic political philosophy seems unusual in the context of his evocation of the experimental religiosity of the philosophers of the future. What it perhaps points us towards is the final section of BGE chapter III, which Strauss passes over, where Nietzsche remarkably states a variant of the old Platonic teaching concerning the political value of theology as a noble fiction or lie, viz: ‘For the strong and independent prepared and predestined for command in whom the art and reason of a ruling race is incarnated, religion is one more means of overcoming resistance so as to be able to rule; a bond that unites together ruler and ruled, that hands over to the former the conscience of the latter, all that is hidden and would like to exclude itself from obedience . . . (BGE 61)’.
7To this, we could add only one, earlier comment of Strauss’ own, on the concern of Nietzsche’s philosophers of the future to preserve the united states of the new Europe from the threat posed by Russia (#30).
Bibliography and Guide to Further Study
Strauss’s Nietzsche Interpretation
Strauss, Leo (1983), ‘Note on the Plan of Beyond Good and Evil’, in id., Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Strauss’s only dedicated mature piece on Nietzsche, and the indispensable statement of Strauss’s considered position on Nietzsche’s oeuvre.
— (1988a), ‘What Is Political Philosophy?’ in id., What Is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. This extended essay, written as a public lecture on the history of Western political philosophy, culminates in an account of Nietzsche.
— (1989a), ‘Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism’, in Thomas L. Pangle (ed.), Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fascinating, sweeping reading of Heidegger, including an intriguing central engagement with Nietzsche and Nietzsche’s critique of modernity.
— (1989b), ‘Three Waves of Modernity’, in Hilail Gildin (ed.), An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays by Leo Strauss. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Famous, accessible essay on the evolution of modern thought from Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke, via Rousseau, which culminates in Nietzsche as the ambiguous third wave of modernity.
— (1953), Natural Right and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
— (1964) The City and Man. University of Chicago Press: Chicago.
— (1988b), Persecution and the Art of Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press [1952].
— (1990), ‘Some Remarks on the Political Science of Maimonides and Farabi’, trans. Robert Bartlett, Interpretation, 18, (1), 3–30.
Works on Strauss’s Nietzsche
Lampert, Laurence (1996), Leo Strauss and Nietzsche. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Indispensable text on Strauss’s text on Nietzsche, centring around a paragraph-by-paragraph reading of ‘A Note on the Plan of Beyond Good and Evil’.
Drury, Shadia (1988), The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Chapter 8: ‘Post-modernity–Plato or Nietzsche?’ Drury’s book is a success de scandal in Strauss scholarship, universally reviled by his students, it includes a culminating chapter which argues that Strauss’s Platonism is a concealed Nietzschean political philosophy.
Levine, Peter (1995), ‘A “Right” Nietzschean: Leo Strauss and his Followers’, in id., Nietzsche and the Modern Crisis of the Humanities. Albany: SUNY Press. Controversial paper which tries to prosecute a case similar to that of Drury, 1988: that Strauss is an esoteric Nietzschean.
Waite, Geoffrey (1996), Nietzsche’s Corps/e: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy, or the Spectacular Technoculture of Everyday Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Contains sustained engagement with Strauss and his students’ ‘Right Nietzsche’, in particular the work of Stanley Rosen.
Works on Nietzsche by Students of Strauss
Lampert, Laurence (1986), Nietzsche’s Teaching: An Interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. New Haven: Yale University Press. Extended commentary on Thus Spoke Zarathrustra as Nietzsche’s ‘most profound’ work.
— (1993), Nietzsche and Modern Times: A Study of Bacon, Descartes, and Nietzsche. New Haven: Yale University Press. Intriguing study of early modern thought in the light of the Straussian esotericist hypothesis, which culminates in an engagement with Nietzsche as a distinctly modern thinker.
— (2001), Nietzsche’s Task: An Interpretation of Beyond Good and Evil. New Haven: Yale University Press. Detailed, section-by-section study of Beyond Good and Evil, in extended discussion with Strauss’s ‘A Note on the Plan of Beyond Good and Evil’.
Rosen, Stanley (1987), Hermeneutics as Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
— (1989a), The Ancients and the Moderns: Rethinking Modernity. Newhaven, CT: Yale University Press. Contains the important essay ‘Nietzsche’s Revolution’ in which Rosen announces many of the ideas concerning Nietzsche’s ‘double rhetoric’ and strategy to overcome modern nihilism he would develop in The Mask of Enlightenment (2004).
— (1989b), ‘Remarks on Nietzsche’s Platonism’, in Tom Darby, Béla Egyed, and Ben Jones (eds), Nietzsche and the Rhetoric of Nihilism: Essays on Interpretation, Language and Politics. Canada: Carleton University Press.
— (2002), ‘Wittgenstein, Strauss, and the possibility of Philosophy’, in id., The Elusiveness of the Ordinary. New Haven: Yale University Press.
— (2004), The Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 2nd edn. New Haven: Yale University Press. Definitive statement of Rosen’s radical, post-Straussian reading of Nietzsche’s philosophy and politics.
— (2009), ‘Nietzsche’s Double Rhetoric: Which Nihilism?’, in Jeffrey A. Metzger (ed.), Nietzsche, Nihilism, and the Philosophy of the Future. London and New York: Continuum. Shorter public statement of many of the positions in Rosen’s The Mask of Enlightenment.
Zuckert, Catherine (1996), Postmodern Platos. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Especially Chapter 1 (on Nietzsche) and Chapters 4–6 (on Strauss). Extended, clearly written engagement with Nietzsche as a respondent to Plato, and Strauss as a respondent to both Plato and Nietzsche.