It was Robert Goldwin, then Dean of St. John’s at Annapolis, who found the means to bring Leo Strauss to Annapolis as Scott Buchanan Distinguished Scholar in Residence in 1969. Goldwin was also responsible for organizing the remarkable talks,which have been printed as “A Giving of Accounts: Jacob Klein and Leo Strauss.”1 Strauss had been lecturing and answering questions at St. John’s once almost every year for quite a few years. He did not have to go out of his way to make what he was trying to do understandable and appreciated. Furthermore, a good number of his better students had come to him from St. John’s, and a small number of his former students were now teaching there. He sensed that it was a place where he could feel at home. One very important reason for that was that his old and very close friend, Jacob Klein, was at St. John’s.
Strauss’s residence at St. John’s reraised for some students of both men the question of their differences. Eva Brann has put it as follows:
Those of us who had not studied with Mr. Strauss were under the impression, which I am pretty sure but not absolutely certain came from Mr. Klein himself, that these two old friends, who in many ways stood together, differed in deep and significant ways. The gist of the difference was as follows: Mr Strauss believed that the central inquiry was political philosophy; he believed that modernity was grounded in a revolution in political theory and in a confrontation with questions of divinity; he had an increasing and by no means merely critical interest in religion. Mr Klein, on the other hand, regarded philosophy, that is, the inquiry into being, as the most fundamental human activity; he focused on mathematical physics as the determining feature of modernity, and his relation to religious studies was remote. I do know that it was a direct consequence of Mr. Strauss’s sojourn here that the questions of Socrates’s ultimate intention became a problem to some of us not in the Ciceronian version according to which Socrates brought philosophy down from heaven to earth, but in the way in which the Republic induces the question whether contemplation is for the sake of the city or the converse, whether philosophy grounds politics or the opposite, whether the good is primarily a principle of being or of action.
It is also my impression that this was pretty much the way Jacob Klein saw the question: it is consistent with what he said in “A Giving of Accounts . . .” and in his Memorial Address for Strauss.2 Many people share that view, and, I believe, Strauss is partly complicit in its being widespread; nevertheless, I think it is fundamentally mistaken. It is, however, close to, and easily taken for what I will try to articulate as the correct view of Strauss’s position. As far as I understand it, there was no difference between Strauss and Klein about “philosophy, that is, the inquiry into being, as the most fundamental human activity.” Natural Right and History, pp. 123-126, one place among a number of others, is a good place to begin:
Let us then see what is implied by Socrates’ turning to the study of human things. His study of human things consisted in raising the question “What is?” in regard to those things . . . But it was not limited to raising the question “What is?” in regard to specific human things, such as the various virtues. Socrates was forced to raise the question as to what the human things as such are, or what the ratio rerum humanarum is. But it is impossible to grasp the distinctive character of human things as such without grasping the essential difference between human things and the things which are not human, i.e., the divine or natural things.This, in turn, presupposes some understanding of the divine or natural things as such. Socrates’ study of the human things was then based on the comprehensive study of “all things.” Like every other philosopher, he identified wisdom, or the goal of philosophy, with the science of all the beings: he never ceased considering “what each of the beings is.”
. . . Socrates’ turn to the study of human things was based, not upon disregard of the divine or natural things, but upon a new approach to the understanding of all things. That approach was indeed of such a character that it permitted, and favored, the study of the human things as such, i.e., of the human things in so far as they are not reducible to the divine or natural things.3 Socrates deviated from his predecessors by identifying the science of the whole, or of everything that is, with the understanding of “what each of the beings is.” For “to be” means “to be something” and hence to be different. from things which are “something else”; “to be” means therefore “to be a part.” Hence the whole cannot “be” in the same sense in which everything that is “something” “is”; the whole must be “beyond being.” And yet the whole is the totality of the parts. To understand the whole then means to understand all the parts of the whole or the articulation of the whole. If “to be” is “to be something,” the being of a thing, or the nature of a thing, is primarily its What, its “shape” or “form” or “character,” as distinguished in particular from that out of which it has come into being. The thing itself, the completed thing, cannot be understood as a product of the process leading up to it, but, on the contrary, the process cannot be understood except in the light of the completed thing or of the end of the process.
This paragraph is based, it seems to me, primarily on what one might learn from Xenophon’s Memorabilia, and Plato’s Sophist and Parmenides with some help from Alfarabi. The next paragraph (NRH, 123) focuses on eidos. It is, I believe, Strauss’s interpretation of the meaning of Socrates’s “second sailing,” Phaedo, 98 ff. and the theoretical parts of the Republic, as is also the end of the previous paragraph.
According to this understanding of being, each of the major parts, the major kinds of being, possesses, or is constituted by, an inner intelligible articulation of its own. They can then be studied best to begin with by attending directly to their own inner and articulable principles, rather than by trying to deduce them from (or to reduce them to) the alleged “metaphysical” or “scientific” principles out of which (e.g., “Matter in Motion”) they could be said to have come into being. It is easy then from this point of view to come to think that one’s own special field of interest stands separately by itself without connection to any broader understanding of being. As a Professor of Political Science Strauss had many good students with a keen natural interest in things political and little interest in more speculative questions. By liberating such students from methodological dogmas parading as science, he allowed them to follow up their own natural interests, to study political things in their own natural articulation, in their own terms, as political practitioners understand them. It is not difficult, and not particularly damaging, for such students to look away from the philosophic considerations that they sense are not within their own field of competence. Furthermore, if the reigning generally accepted opinions among scientific and philosophic authorities should be thought to be deleterious to sound morality and political life, there would be an additional reason for encouraging belief in the relatively independent status of different kinds of subject matters, especially in the field of “the human things.” Aristotle would seem to have encouraged belief in this kind of “special relativity,” more than Plato. Plato never allows one to forget the “general relativity” that they both share—the notion of being implicit in the “What is?” question—by never presenting any serious discussion apart from the presence of philosophy, or a philosopher.
The final paragraph of Strauss’s “Restatement,” his answer to Kojève’s “Tyranny and Wisdom,” (which is missing from the 1963 English version of On Tyranny, translated in the French version, and translated from the French in the revised English version of 1991) provides another way of seeing Strauss’s agreement with what Eva Brann describes as Klein’s view of “the most fundamental human activity.”
The utmost I can hope to have shown in taking issue with Kojève’s thesis regarding the relation of tyranny and wisdom is that Xenophon’s thesis regarding that grave subject is not only compatible with the idea of philosophy but required by it.This is very little. For the question arises immediately whether the idea of philosophy is not itself in need of legitimation. Philosophy in the strict and classical sense is quest for the eternal order or for the eternal cause or causes of all things. It presupposes then that there is an eternal and unchangeable order within which History takes place and which is not in any way affected by History. It presupposes in other words that any “realm of freedom” is not more than a dependent province within “the realm of necessity.” It presupposes, in the words of Kojève, that “Being is essentially immutable in itself and eternally identical with itself.”This presupposition is not self-evident. Kojève rejects it in favor of the view that “Being creates itself in the course of History,” or that the highest being is Society and History, or that eternity is nothing but the totality of historical, i.e., finite time. On the basis of the classical presupposition, a radical distinction must be made between the conditions of understanding and the sources of understanding, between the conditions of the existence and perpetuation of philosophy (societies of a certain kind, and so on) and the sources of philosophic insight. On the basis of Kojève’s presupposition, that distinction loses its crucial significance: social change or fate affects being, if it is not identical with Being, and hence affects truth. On the basis of Kojève’s presuppositions, unqualified attachment to human concerns becomes the source of philosophic understanding: man must be absolutely at home on earth, he must be absolutely a citizen of the earth, if not a citizen of a part of the inhabitable earth. On the basis of the classical presupposition, philosophy requires a radical detachment from human concerns: man must not be absolutely at home on earth, he must be a citizen of the whole. In our discussion, the conflict between the two opposed basic presuppositions has barely been mentioned. But we have always been mindful of it. For we both apparently turned away from Being to Tyranny because we have seen that those who lacked the courage to face the issue of Tyranny, who therefore et humiliter serviebant et superbe dominabantur, were forced to evade the issue of Being as well, precisely because they did nothing but talk of Being.4
Both Klein and Strauss, I have argued, chose to pursue philosophy in the classical sense as described above, each for himself. Strauss did not seriously study modern natural science, but did not minimize its importance. In his last years during a Plato’s Laws course he was giving at St. John’s a student asked him, “If you could speak now to Plato and Aristotle, what would you ask them?” Strauss paused to gather his thoughts and then said, “I think I would ask them whether the development from Galileo and Newton would cause them in any way to modify their teaching about the forms.” He evidently did not think it would be a reasonable expenditure of his powers and time to pursue that subject in detail. He did study very carefully what Klein had written on the subject. There was no principled difference with Klein on that matter. Their different stances toward the study of religion, however, do, I believe, point to interesting and serious differences.
For Strauss, as the quotation from the “Restatement” indicates, the idea of philosophy is in need of legitimation. Philosophy, its origin, and its choice as a way of life, were philosophic problems for Strauss, the highest themes, perhaps, for that part of philosophy called political philosophy. For readers of his books they are known as the question of “The Origin of the Idea of Natural Right,” or the question of the discovery of nature. Klein was interested in a related problem, but from a different angle, especially in connection with modern science, the problem of “sedimentation,” 5 but his problem was not thought of in any special connection with religion.
Very early in a review of a book by Julius Ebbinghaus Strauss refers to Socrates’s remark that knowing that one does not know is the beginning of philosophy. He connects it up with the image of the cave in Plato’s Republic: We find ourselves “in a second, much deeper cave than the lucky ignorant ones with whom Socrates had to deal.” Our faith in the superiority of modern thought keeps us from even recognizing that we are in a cave, keeps us from seeing the universality, the permanence, of the problem that the image of the cave points to: “the actual not-knowing of present day philosophizing is not at all the natural not-knowing with which philosophizing must begin; . . . it requires a long detour, a great effort to come back. . . . to the state of natural ignorance.”6 If we do not adequately understand that from which our philosophizing begins or departs, we may, while we think that we are philosophizing, find ourselves unwittingly following principles serving ends very different from philosophic ends.
Philosophy is the ascent from what is first for us to what is first by nature. This ascent requires that what is first for us be understood as adequately as possible in the manner in which it comes to sight prior to the ascent. . . . the city as it primarily understood itself [is] distinguished from the manner in which it was exhibited by classical political philosophy: the holy city in contradistinction to the natural city. . . . what is ‘first for us’ is not the philosophic understanding of the city but that understanding which is inherent in the city as such, in the prephilosophic city, according to which the city sees itself as subject and subservient to the divine in the ordinary understanding of the divine or looks up to it.7
If religion, especially since it is an intellectual as well as an emotional power, is one of the major powers constituting the prephilosophic “world,” it becomes a major problem for that discipline, i.e., political philosophy, that studies the relations between the prephilosophic and the philosophic “worlds.”That problem was deepened as a philosophic problem for Strauss by what he presents as the mutual irrefutability of reason and revelation.
Every Wednesday from 3:30 to 5:30 Strauss would conduct a class that would usually study one book per semester, or in the case of a large book like Plato’s Laws, one book for the whole year. The classes were well-attended by students and, occasionally, Tutors.8 They were much like classes I had attended at the University of Chicago, except that Strauss would occasionally mention that since he was at St. John’s he did not need to present his usual apology for, or justification of, the study of old books.9 He would usually speak for ten, fifteen or twenty minutes and then stop for questions and reasonably free-floating discussions. If my memory serves, there were classes on Thucydides, Xenophon, Plato’s Laws, and Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil.
Different members of the faculty sought opportunities to chat with him. I saw him for at least a couple of hours almost every week. His relation to Klein was rather touching. They both seemed to enjoy and admire each other very much. Klein was something like a big brother to the somewhat more tempestuous Strauss, whose health was also going into a drastic decline during this time. It is difficult for anyone who did not experience it to fathom how impractical Strauss was in everything that did not pertain to his scholarly and academic pursuits. My wife and I were very moved when we learned from both Mrs. Strauss and Mrs. Klein how, when Strauss learned about the birth of our daughter, he decided that he himself would have to go to purchase an appropriate gift! Any old friend, or attendant, of Strauss knows that he was hardly capable of going by himself to buy anything. But this was an important matter, he was not going to ask just anyone to accompany him.This was a matter that called for Jacob Klein! So the two philosophers went on an expedition to Annapolis’s baby clothes store and after, I assume, much deliberation bought a nicely wrapped, pretty, little, pink and white baby outfit, complete with beret. (Strauss usually wore a beret.)
On a number of occasions Strauss attended Friday night formal lectures at St. John’s. I gave one once on Aristotle’s Politics, entitled “Rational Animal-Political Animal.” I felt a little funny about wasting his time, since I thought that just about everything I had to say on the subject had been learned in his classes or from his books. So, after the lecture as we walked to the Conversation Room for the customary question period, I said to him, “Well, this is all pretty old stuff for you.” I was pleased to hear him reply, “No, no, I had never made the connection to On Interpretation.”
In his last year his health and strength were almost gone; he would drag himself into the room for his classes on the arm of and strongly supported by his assistant and helper Ted A. Blanton, then a junior at St. John’s.10 He would collapse into his chair and be slumped together there silently for a few seconds, then we would hear something soft like “Thucydides says . . . “ and then marvelously his voice would fill out, he would sit up, and for the next two hours we would be caught up by his usual fascinating discourse and conversation. After two hours he would announce the assignment for next time, then collapse again into his chair and be slowly taken away by Blanton. It is difficult to find words adequate to praise Blanton for the gracious way he served Strauss till the very end.That service was joined to a rather beautiful friendship. Some of Blanton’s words at the St. John’s Memorial Meeting for Strauss may be a fitting end for this essay:
When I would leave his home he always took my hand and thanked me for everything I had done. But truly I was the one who owed the thanks. Upon leaving his home I was both restful and restless: restful because of the calmness and the sheer delight of his words to me and restless because he instilled in me an eagerness to think and to learn. Friendship appeared to me in a fuller light: friendship is not that relationship where all is relaxed but the relationship where one’s highest faculties are poised for graceful movement. I believe that in those moments I was more fully human than at any other time.
First published in The College, (Annapolis: St. John’s College, April 1970), pp. 1-5. Reprinted in Leo Strauss, Jeurish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought, (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), edited by Kenneth Hart Green, pp. 457-466.
The Memorial Meeting for Leo Strauss at St John’s was held on October 31, 1973.The speakers were Jacob Klein, the Rev. J. Winfree Smith,Ted A. Blanton and Laurence Berns. The speeches were printed in The College, (Annapolis: St. John’s College, January, 1974), pp. 1-5.
Emphasis added.
This, Strauss’s own original English version, is taken from a copy of a typescript entitled RESTATEMENT (1950) given to me by Leo Strauss before the essay was printed.This paragraph has been printed in op.cit., editor K. H. Green, note 1 above, pp. 471-473.
See Jacob Klein: Lectures and Essays, R. B. Williamson and E. Zuckerman, editors, (Annapolis: St John’s College Press, 1985), pp. 72-78.
Deutsche Literaturzeitung, December 27,1931, Heft 52, pp. 2451-2453.Translation from the German by L. Berns. Cf. Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1952), pp. 154-58.
Leo Strauss, The City and Man, (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964), pp. 240-241. Emphasis supplied.
“Tutor” is the sole faculty rank at St. John’s College.
I had mixed feelings about this compliment to St. John’s. Strauss’s “apologies” for reading old books usually involved very interesting critiques and analyses of modern philosophy and thought, pointing to why classical studies were needed for a more adequate understanding. We were missing those analyses.
Theodore A. Blanton is presently a Judge of the District Court in Salisbury, North Carolina.