Parabasis

To work out the question of Being adequately, we must make an entity—the inquirer—transparent in his own Being. The very asking of this question is an entity’s mode of Being; and as such it gets its essential character from what is asked about—namely, Being.

MARTIN HEIDEGGER, Being and Time

Now questioning has priority over answering. God does not ask, but he answers. Questioning is more characteristic of the human intellect than answering. There is no answer without questioning, but there is indeed questioning without answer.

LEO STRAUSS, “Religiöse Lage der Gegenwart”

I

“The crisis of our time may have the accidental advantage of enabling us to understand in an untraditional or fresh manner what was hitherto understood only in a traditional or derivative manner.”¹ The time of crisis and of questioning tradition that was the twentieth century saw a number of leading thinkers seeking to reach new insight concerning the roots, the meaning, and the fate of Western rationalism. Of the figures engaged in this inquiry, Martin Heidegger and Leo Strauss were the two to develop the most searching analyses of the philosophical tradition as originating in radical questioning and as undergoing forgetting.² The close linking of these thinkers will doubtless provoke resistance in many readers. Heidegger’s followers are unlikely to think of Strauss as a comparably penetrating and fundamental thinker. Should they think of Strauss as having any connection with Heidegger, it is as the critic of the latter’s “radical historicism” and therefore as a hostile voice, not as a sympathetic reader open to the challenge of Heidegger’s questioning of the metaphysical tradition. Strauss’s followers commonly view Heidegger as an early stimulus to Strauss, which he left behind quickly for a more salutary philosophic endeavor, as Heidegger’s philosophy expresses the ultimate decline of the tradition into extreme relativism and nihilism, whose political manifestation was Heidegger’s participation in the National Socialist movement. Strauss’s mature thought, accordingly, took notice of Heidegger only for critical and cautionary ends, while his own concern with recovery of the beginnings of the tradition bears only a superficial resemblance to Heidegger’s effort of Destruktion of the tradition. Contrary to such opinions, it will be maintained here that Strauss’s reflection on the basic philosophic questions has a radicality comparable to Heidegger’s, and that he was to the end of his life engaged with Heidegger as the one contemporary thinker with whom his thought was in essential dialogue.

In one of his last publications Strauss considers the place of political philosophy in three great figures of recent philosophy who helped to shape the direction of his thinking: Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger.³ The essay contains this statement: “As far as I can see, [Heidegger] is of the opinion that none of his critics and none of his followers has understood him adequately. I believe that he is right, for is not the same true, more or less, of all outstanding thinkers?”⁴ The insertion of the personal note (“I believe that he is right”) strengthens the suspicion that Strauss applies the general claim about outstanding thinkers to himself as well as Heidegger. He speaks “from experience.” If this is indeed one of Strauss’s rare self-referential asides, the context is striking and suggests the question of whether Strauss means that the inadequate understanding of Heidegger is related to the inadequate understanding of himself. It is not a question that many readers of Strauss have asked. Although Strauss privately in letters from his early years onward and publicly in lectures and writings of his later years spoke of Heidegger’s supreme importance as thinker—“the only great thinker in our time is Heidegger”—only recently have the two figures been linked in a theoretically substantial way.⁵ The best-known writing of Strauss, Natural Right and History, is now easily seen as directed at Heidegger, but at the time of its publication (1953) Heidegger was unread in the English-speaking world.⁶ Yet since Heidegger’s star has risen in that world those who study Heidegger and those who study Strauss have been mostly disjunct groups.⁷ Even so, Strauss may well have meant with his seemingly casual aside that his work—and Heidegger’s as well—would not be adequately understood until his readers had learned to study how his thought relates to Heidegger’s.

This claim may strike many as improbable. Strauss’s work does not seem to be much concerned with metaphysical questions, and Heidegger’s thought lacks close attention to political matters, although notoriously at certain junctures it is politically engaged. Part of the difficulty is that Strauss’s work is too often viewed through that of his students (first and second generation) who were on the whole disinclined to undertake study of metaphysical texts and thinkers, and perhaps especially not those of late modernity. Strauss’s own writing encourages a certain reserve (albeit solemn and awestruck) before “first philosophy,” with his refrain that philosophy begins with reflecting on “the surface” of things, the human experience of the political and moral phenomena.⁸ For Strauss, however, the surface of things is the home of problems, not of absolute principles and solutions. In its ambiguity it points beyond itself. His claim that “the problem inherent in the surface of things, and only in the surface of things, is the heart of things” is his summation of the Socratic pursuit of philosophy. But it is also clearly related to the turn in phenomenology “to the things themselves,” begun by Husserl and continued by Heidegger, involving the suspension of given theoretical constructions and the dismantling of “sedimentations” of traditional concepts in practical life as well as theoretical inquiry. In other terms, the phenomenological program is to show the genesis of science out of the prescientific understanding.⁹

Classical political philosophy, as founded by Socrates, did not have to undertake the dismantling of a prior tradition and could investigate the prephilosophic understanding of political phenomena without the aid of historical studies.¹⁰ Strauss underlines that modern students of political philosophy need such studies to uncover what the classical philosophers could grasp directly from experience. But Strauss’s phenomenology is not only descriptive; as Socratic it is also dialectical, exposing the fissures and perplexities in the prephilosophic understanding, whereby it follows the Socratic example of seeking to find the clue to the “first things” in the “human things.”¹¹ The spirit of such Socratic inquiry is at the same time aporetic. “Socrates was so far from being committed to a specific cosmology that his knowledge was knowledge of ignorance. . . . Socrates, then, viewed man in the light of the mysterious character of the whole.” The foundation of classical political philosophy is the “understanding of the situation of man which includes . . . the quest for cosmology rather than a solution to the cosmological problem.”¹² Strauss attempted to show that the metaphysical questions come to light, in their properly aporetic formulation, only through the ascent from the political.¹³ Yet his numerous autobiographical comments on his philosophical encounters with Husserl and Heidegger—suggesting the parallel of Socrates’s story of his early enthusiasm for Anaxagoras—press one to ask the question: How does Strauss’s account of the ascent from the political relate to these roots of his thought?

I start with an indispensable but insufficient formulation. Heidegger and Strauss are linked by the perception each had in his formative years that the Western rationalist tradition had collapsed, an event for which the political catastrophe of their generation, the First World War, gave compelling evidence. More fundamentally, the brilliant arguments of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche had exposed the failure of the civilization of the European Enlightenment.¹⁴ Heidegger and Strauss saw the urgent need to attempt a new beginning through the reconsideration of the origins of the tradition, that is, the most elementary premises on which rationalism is grounded. The possibility of philosophy had to be considered anew in the wake of the self-destructive process that Nietzsche, above all others, had diagnosed and fulfilled.¹⁵ Thus Strauss writes to Hans-Georg Gadamer: “it is necessary to reflect on the situation that demands the new hermeneutics, i.e. on our situation; this reflection will necessarily bring to light a radical crisis, an unprecedented crisis and this is what Heidegger means by the world night.”¹⁶ Strauss defends this view of the present age against Gadamer’s criticism of Heidegger’s account of the “complete forgetfulness of Being” in the present. Similarly he disputes Karl Löwith’s charge that Heidegger fails to grasp Nietzsche’s true intention, characterizing Heidegger as Nietzsche’s genuine successor in thinking through the implications of Nietzsche’s account of the present age as nihilistic.¹⁷ All the same, this common ground of Heidegger and Strauss is partly obscured by the appearance, promoted by Strauss himself, that the true issue between the two is the problem of relativism, which Strauss would address by the assertion of absolute norms. As I shall argue, the deeper issue for Strauss is whether Heidegger has remained faithful to his own reopening of the aporia of Being, i.e., the implications of the crisis of philosophy, and whether Socratic skepticism provides (as Strauss argues) the more rigorous and consistent response to the crisis. Although Strauss affirms the superiority of the Socratic way, the novel terms of his rethinking that way are still decisively indebted to Heidegger.

II

For a number of years I have been reading Heidegger with Strauss in mind and Strauss with Heidegger in mind, and the outcome is this study. I am far from considering the thoughts here definitive. I hope to offer some mutual illumination of the two thinkers, but this is exposed to an obvious difficulty: Strauss frequently, if one includes private utterances, declared his intense engagement with Heidegger’s thought, but there is no report known to me of any attention paid by Heidegger to Strauss. Thus of the two thinkers only the thought of one of them is significantly formed in response to the thought of the other. The consideration of the relation of Heidegger and Strauss necessarily offers, at least initially, more illumination of Strauss’s intentions than of Heidegger’s. I believe, however, that the understanding of Heidegger’s thought is advanced by viewing it in the light of Strauss’s effort to renew “political philosophy.” It will not come as much of a surprise to anyone that Heidegger’s thought has been provocative for the thinking of another figure, of whatever rank. By contrast, something must be said to justify the claim that Strauss is a figure worth considering comparatively and critically together with Heidegger. I underline that my ultimate goal is not to offer an external comparison of two authors, nor is it to weigh influences. It is to enter into the shared matter of thinking of the two philosophers and to discover what can be learned from their converging while disparate ways of thinking about that matter.

My book is not concerned with the details of intellectual biography. The basic facts of Strauss’s studies with Husserl and Heidegger in the early 1920s are well known. After a short exposure to Heidegger’s lectures Strauss did not remain in the circle of Heidegger’s students, but he maintained lifelong contacts with some who did, and with them he continued to discuss Heidegger’s thought.¹⁸ Strauss gives the following account of his attendance at Heidegger’s lectures at the University of Freiburg in summer 1922:

One of the unknown young men in Husserl’s entourage was Heidegger. I attended his lecture course from time to time without understanding a word, but sensed that he dealt with something of the utmost importance to man as man. I understood something on one occasion: when he interpreted the beginning of the Metaphysics. I had never heard nor seen such a thing—such a thorough and intensive interpretation of a philosophic text. On my way home I visited Rosenzweig and said to him that compared to Heidegger, Max Weber, till then regarded by me as the incarnation of the spirit of science and scholarship, was an orphan child.¹⁹

As Strauss then explains, it was not simply Heidegger’s interpretive powers that impressed him. Both he and Jacob Klein were deeply affected by the intent and the result of Heidegger’s interpretation of Greek philosophy.

Heidegger’s work required and included what he called Destruktion of the tradition. . . . He intended to uproot Greek philosophy, especially Aristotle, but this presupposed the laying bare of its roots, the laying bare of it as it was in itself and not as it had come to appear in the light of the tradition and of modern philosophy.²⁰

The statement might give the impression that Heidegger laid bare the roots of the tradition only for the sake of rejecting them, but in another passage Strauss corrects that interpretation. Noting that “certainly no one questioned the premise of philosophy as radically as Heidegger,” Strauss proceeds:

Klein alone saw why Heidegger is truly important: by uprooting and not simply rejecting the tradition of philosophy, he made it possible for the first time after many centuries—one hesitates to say how many—to see the roots of the tradition as they are and thus perhaps to know, what so many merely believe, that those roots are the only natural and healthy roots. . . . Above all, his intention was to uproot Aristotle: he thus was compelled to disinter the roots, to bring them to light, to look at them with wonder.²¹

One might think that Klein and Strauss understood Heidegger’s significance in the following way: he persuaded them of the inadequacy of the traditional accounts of the Greek roots, but his own new readings, while brilliant, were misguided and thus forced them to develop counterreadings that uncover the true roots. It surely is the case that neither Klein nor Strauss was a follower of Heidegger’s own philosophy of existence. “Klein was more attracted by the Aristotle brought to light and life by Heidegger than by Heidegger’s own philosophy.”²² But the distinction made by this sentence means that Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle contained something true and of enduring worth, enabling one “to see the roots of the tradition as they are.” Furthermore, Heidegger was able to expose this only through questioning the tradition more radically than anyone else, so that what he exposed was an object of wonder to Heidegger and his listeners. In other words, he made possible a radically untraditional approach to the Greek roots and therewith of the whole tradition of philosophy, one that had intrinsic merit. Through this wonderful disclosure he opened “the possibility of a genuine return to classical philosophy, to the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, a return with open eyes and in full clarity about the infinite difficulties which it entails.”²³ Strauss says this possibility “Heidegger had opened without intending it,” for his concern was to go behind Plato and Aristotle to a more primordial thinking on which the thought of these philosophers rested and which at the same time was forgotten and obscured by their thought. Yet in some sense Heidegger’s readings of Plato and Aristotle provided the basis for the return to them, for by showing the “infinite difficulties” of the return he paradoxically made the return possible. He showed that the true Plato and Aristotle were unfamiliar and so remote from traditional conceptions of them that one had to relearn completely how to read them. The traditional conceptions had lost all power, and the emergence of strange, unfamiliar conceptions held the promise of grounding a living way of philosophizing.

One can conclude that Strauss saw in Heidegger’s thought an insight to which Heidegger’s own philosophy proved to be inadequate. It is in this sense that one can read what Strauss says about Heidegger’s thought in another work: “It compels us at the same time to realize the need for an unbiased reconsideration of the most elementary premises whose validity is presupposed by philosophy.”²⁴ If one takes this statement the way many readers of Strauss take it, as asserting that Heidegger’s “radical historicism” exposes the nihilistic consequences of the modern tradition and so requires a return to ancient philosophy, it gives Heidegger no credit at all for uncovering problems in the roots of the tradition and raising genuine difficulties about the possibility of philosophy, including ancient philosophy.²⁵ The sentence would then be at odds with the autobiographical passages cited, which establish that Heidegger had shown that a simple return to ancient philosophy from modern philosophy was impossible and that one had to rethink what the Greeks understood by philosophy without presupposing that philosophy in any form is possible. The questions that Heidegger raised about the elementary premises of philosophy had to be addressed and could not be dismissed as sophistical. Indeed Strauss does not rule out the possibility that the required “reconsideration” of the premises may leave at least some of Heidegger’s questions intact. This result would be compatible with seeing the need for some correction or improvement in Heidegger’s thought.

Without a blink of an eye, one can of course counter that Strauss’s inquiry about the recovery of classical political philosophy, especially of the Socratics, is wholly distinct from Heidegger’s recovery of the question of Being as raised by the early Greeks and then forgotten by the whole tradition that follows. A closer look at Strauss’s statements shows there cannot be such an absolute disjunction. In the first place, Strauss avers that the question of Being is central to Plato and Aristotle. “Heidegger agreed with Plato and Aristotle not only as to this—that the question of what is to be is the fundamental question; he also agreed with Plato and Aristotle as to this—that the fundamental question must be addressed to that being which is in the most emphatic or the most authoritative way.”²⁶ In the passage containing the previously cited statement about the “most elementary premises,” Strauss expressly states that the recovery of classical political philosophy (and the problem of natural right) requires the reexamination of the possibility of philosophy as such. Clearly for Plato and Aristotle, the principal classical political philosophers, the possibility of philosophy entails the truth of certain premises about Being. Accordingly Strauss cannot be indifferent to what these philosophers think about such premises. In fact several crucial statements of Strauss assert that the founding of political philosophy by Socrates is inseparable from the discovery of a new way of approaching the questions about Being and the whole. “Contrary to appearances, Socrates’ turn to the study of the human things was based, not upon disregard of the divine or natural things, but upon a new approach to the understanding of all things.”²⁷ “In its original form political philosophy broadly understood is the core of philosophy or rather ‘the first philosophy.’”²⁸ “We have learned from Socrates that the political things, or the human things, are the key to the understanding of all things.”²⁹

This understanding of Socratic philosophy, which Strauss developed over several decades and which emerged fully formed only after the Second World War, is a response to Heidegger’s rethinking of the possibility of philosophy, with which it shares the character of being a radically antitraditional account of philosophy and of the philosophic tradition. It is therefore not just a reinstatement of classical philosophy against Heidegger’s rejection of it, since Strauss’s own radical antitraditionalism has sources in Heidegger’s questioning of the tradition. In light of Strauss’s claim about the comprehensive philosophic character of the Socratic turn to the human (political) things, one can propose that Strauss’s Socratism is an engagement with the fundamental question of Being through the examination of the human way of being as political. As such it belongs in the succession to Heidegger’s approach to the question of Being through the analysis of the human way of being in the world, i.e., the exposure of the fundamental structure of that entity (Dasein) for whom the question of Being is constitutive.

Certainly it is often maintained with suave assurance that Strauss was basically uninterested in metaphysical matters, that his thought makes no pretense of having comprehensiveness, even that his writings reveal only an unconnected collection of themes and questions garnered from texts that were the object of Strauss’s devoted scholarly commentary.³⁰ A locus classicus for those who want to claim that Strauss turned away from the question of Being to “the primacy of the political,” and that he held it was “Heidegger’s concern for Being, rather than beings, that led to his indifference to tyranny,”³¹ is the conclusion of Strauss’s “Restatement on Xenophon’s Hiero,” addressed to Alexandre Kojève. The passage, which clearly refers to Heidegger, reads as follows:

For we [Strauss and Kojève] both apparently turned away from Being to Tyranny because we have seen that those who lack 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.³²

Far from denying that Strauss is concerned with Being, the statement contains an ironic affirmation that Strauss and Kojève are both concerned with the question of Being and indeed pursue it more adequately than Heidegger, insofar as they do not limit their speaking and writing (talk) to Being alone, for such limitation evades the issue of Being. Indeed Strauss affirms “the primacy of the political” as the necessary beginning point for philosophic inquiry, but this is not his final or complete thought. In the same passage, immediately before the concluding sentences, he writes that “on the basis of the classical presupposition, philosophy requires a radical detachment from human concerns: man must not be absolutely at home on the earth, he must be a citizen of the whole.” Kojève’s account of philosophy, by contrast, calls for enduring attachment to the political (“man must be absolutely at home on earth, he must be a citizen of the earth”). The implied position of Strauss is that adequately addressing the issue of Being requires reflection on the problem of the relation of philosophy to politics (ignored by Heidegger, pursued by Strauss and Kojève) but without losing sight of the ultimate superiority of the theoretical life to the political life, and thus without conceiving philosophy as fulfilled in the realm of practice (contra Kojève). In the end, as one gathers from other sources, Strauss’s objection to Heidegger comes close to this criticism of Kojève (suggesting further irony in the passage) insofar as Heidegger’s thinking on Being rests on a conflation of such thinking with the historical existence of man as poetic-religious, even if (or because) Heidegger does not for the most part discuss the latter in political terms. The flaw in his philosophy is not the concern with Being but an exclusive concern with Being, which precludes the distinctive features of political life from shining forth. (Again, if concern with Being were a philosophic flaw, then Plato and Aristotle would merit a good scolding from Strauss.) The passage surely points to an intrinsic connection between the manner in which Heidegger pursues his question and his failure to face the problem of tyranny.

III

The present book treats Heidegger and Strauss from the standpoint of philosophical relations between them and takes up politics to the extent it bears on their approaches to philosophy. For some readers it will be disappointing that the book is not more about politics in the narrow sense. I do not delve into the details of Heidegger’s involvement in National Socialism or dwell on Strauss’s comments on that involvement. Certainly the book takes up the philosophical problem of how Heidegger’s philosophy could allow, or rather predispose, Heidegger to engage with National Socialism, and it discusses Strauss’s analysis of that problem. It should be observed, though, that Strauss’s remarks on Heidegger’s philosophy far outweigh in quantity and detail his remarks on Heidegger’s political deeds and misdeeds, both in his public writings and in the correspondence. Strauss states that the facts of Heidegger’s political engagement “afford too small a basis for the proper understanding of his thought.”³³ One can easily construct a facile syllogism: (P1) As political philosopher Strauss is most of all interested in a thinker’s political thoughts and actions; (P2) Heidegger’s only significant political thoughts and actions relate to his support of National Socialism; (C) What Strauss finds most interesting in Heidegger is the latter’s support of National Socialism. Both premises are defective: Strauss understands political philosophy not solely as the theory of politics, or the philosophic treatment of politics, but also as the political treatment of philosophy, which leads the student or interlocutor toward grasping the superiority of the philosophic life among ways of life or the preeminence of philosophic virtue among the meanings of virtue.³⁴ Its “highest theme” is the tension between the claims of politics and those of philosophy. As to Heidegger’s political actions and thoughts, Strauss is ultimately more concerned with the premises, mostly unstated, in Heidegger’s philosophic thought about the relation of philosophy to politics than with the overt political choices of Heidegger, although these cannot be separated from those premises. Heidegger’s failure to see the problematic relations between philosophy and politics is the heart of Strauss’s criticism. It is a subtle point that this criticism applies both to Heidegger’s early thought, which is more obviously politically engaged, and to his later thought which has withdrawn from direct political engagement. Insofar as Heidegger’s thought is throughout characterized by a fusion of philosophy with the religious-political realm that is “eschatological,” it has no “room for political philosophy” in Strauss’s sense. Precisely by not reflecting on the relation of philosophy and politics Heidegger’s thought is politicized, being shaped by unexamined assumptions about that relation which Heidegger takes over chiefly from the tradition of German Idealism and to some extent from Nietzsche.

Since I am disavowing some common approaches to these thinkers, I shall also mention that my study distances itself from the widespread tendency of writers on Strauss to dwell on clarification, often combined with justification, of his relation to American politics and political science. I believe this was not of ultimate concern to Strauss. He of course engaged in some famous polemics with contemporary American political scientists over the “value-neutrality” of social science, but these debates are peripheral to the core of his thought, or they are only an appendix to his more central critique of Max Weber. About American political thought and events he made very few pronouncements. And it is a related point to say that Strauss’s nearly universal reputation as a major “conservative” political thinker is essentially misleading about the nature of his thought. The center of Strauss’s reflection is the extraordinary nature of philosophical questioning, whose radicality he contrasted with the moderation required by political action. “The virtue of the philosopher’s thought is a certain kind of mania, while the virtue of the philosopher’s public speech is sophrosune.”³⁵ A combination of theoretical traditionalism and political extremism (on the right) is commonly ascribed to Strauss, but it is just the opposite of the truth.³⁶ In other words, Strauss’s thought does not belong to the mainstream Anglo-American conservative tradition for which the burning issue is the moderation or rejection of “rationalism in politics,” although Strauss is a strong critic of the transformative and revolutionary approaches to politics that emerged in the modern Enlightenment. He is a critic of the Enlightenment ultimately more for its subordination of philosophy to practice, for obscuring the fundamental unsolved problems under the veil of alleged “progress,” than for its possible harmful consequences for political life. As Strauss’s critical reading of Burke shows, he regards the post-Burke tradition of conservatism as committing another form of the subordination of philosophy to practice or history. It is important to add that for Strauss theoretical radicality and political moderation are not merely juxtaposed parts of the philosopher’s thought but essentially connected. To recognize that philosophical questioning has a radicality inherently at odds with custom and law is to acknowledge a difference in human life that cannot be overcome. The philosopher’s political moderation is a manifestation of a prudence that has theoretical grounding. Strauss faults Heidegger for failing to appreciate this decisive meaning of difference.

To grasp the peculiar sense of “political philosophy” in Strauss one must examine further why he encouraged the close attention to concrete analysis of political life or, more to the point given our situation, the close study of authors who engage in this analysis. Strauss focused on such study in order to uncover the problems or tensions that are inherent in political life, which he placed under the heading of the “theological-political problem.” This expression is frequently and mistakenly identified solely with the dispute between philosophic reason and piety or revelation. However, Strauss, following classic authors, noted the unending debate within political life concerning notions of justice, of law, and of the good. “The meaning of the common good is essentially controversial.”³⁷ Political life is a realm of enduring tensions, one of which is the tension between the authority of divinely sanctioned law and human statesmanship’s need for autonomous flexibility in practical judgment, which prefigures the dispute between piety and philosophy.³⁸ “The ambiguity of the political goal is due to its comprehensive character.”³⁹ Reflection on the ultimate goal of political knowledge or art gives rise to controversies that do not occur about the ultimate goals of other arts (pastoral, military, culinary, etc.). The political, as a kind of whole, discloses the structure of the cosmos of problems considered by philosophy.⁴⁰ Strauss’s approach to politics as the way into the philosophic problems by no means implies that the political life is the highest life or that reflection on politics constitutes the whole substance of philosophic thought. It is rather that this reflection is the introduction to the problem of the best life, the core question of Socratic philosophy.

As a political being the human is “open to the whole,”⁴¹ or transcends itself toward some completion, albeit ambiguously, as it transcends itself toward the whole of the particular political community and toward the “whole as such,” which is variously conceived by all human beings. Strauss asserts that the whole as such is “mysterious,” as the ultimate grounds and causes of the whole of things are removed from human understanding. The question of Being must remain, in the decisive respect, a question, on which point Strauss is in basic accord with Heidegger. All of human life is conducted in the light of this mystery and cannot be conceived without reference to it. For Strauss as for Heidegger, the human is that being whose existence is a question for itself. Both thinkers also reflect on the human tendency to conceal or “forget” this questionableness, although only Strauss puts this in political terms: the attachment to symbols, rituals, and doctrines of the “cave,” grounded in sacred law, which partially limits and closes off reflection on the whole of problems. The two thinkers agree that philosophy is the intransigent facing of the questionableness of Being, of a sort that few human beings can undertake, much less sustain, in its purity. For both of them Nietzsche is the great exemplar of such philosophic intransigence in recent history.⁴²

Both are indebted to Nietzsche, as well, in their conceptions of the history of philosophy (more broadly, of the West) as a decline from lofty beginnings, as a growing oblivion of the Greek way of articulating the fundamental questions, with its unparalleled clarity and openness to the phenomena. There is some kinship, too, in the characterization of the form this oblivion takes in the modern age: for Heidegger it is the dominance of technological thinking, for Strauss the project of mastering nature, which he conceives as a political project embracing a new role for technology. In this regard both thinkers carry forward, with important modifications and criticisms, Nietzsche’s attack on the Enlightenment and its utilitarian spirit. The “forgetting of Being” (Being as the disclosedness of beings) is for Heidegger a historical fate, a withdrawal of Being inherent in Being that begins already among the Greeks, most notably in Plato, after the great age of early thinking, and culminates in the occlusion of Being in the “technological world night” in which man is wholly drawn into the control and calculation of beings. This darkness may be the prelude to another beginning.⁴³ Strauss locates the high point of Greek philosophy in Socrates and his immediate pupils, and his historical scheme of the loss of authentic philosophy after the Socratics is more differentiated than Heidegger’s “history of Being.” The spirit of Socratic philosophy recovers some vitality in the medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophers, as philosophy emerges from the massive oblivion induced by the eruption of revelation into the world of philosophy. A decisive shift occurs in the founding of modern philosophy by Machiavelli, Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, and their successors, which is not a historical fate but a conscious human decision to reject the previous tradition and start anew. All the same, it is a crucial aspect of Strauss’s dialectical mode of arguing that he at times overstates the philosophic decline inherent in the modern turn. Indeed, Strauss understands the modern founding to be another effort, albeit flawed, to save philosophy from oblivion. More generally, Strauss’s sharpening of theoretical antitheses is central to his strategy of provoking awareness of fundamental problems. I shall say more about this later.

IV

This familiar account of history in Strauss rests on an underlying theme concerning a tension intrinsic to the condition of philosophy, present from its beginning, and to which modern philosophy is a novel response. “Philosophy is the attempt to replace opinion by knowledge; but opinion is the element of the city, hence philosophy is subversive, hence the philosopher must write in such a way that he will improve rather than subvert the city.”⁴⁴ The protective and “exoteric” stratagems of philosophic self-presentation necessarily involve public dilution of the philosopher’s radical thinking. In light of the difficulty of attaining definitive results in the quest for knowledge of ultimate matters, the need for such dilution may threaten to corrupt the substance of thinking itself, by exposing philosophy to “the charm of competence” (i.e., of the apodictically demonstrable) or the socially useful. This enduring problem for philosophy was made incalculably more complex by the confrontation of philosophy with revealed religions based on sacred scriptures claiming authoritative insight in ultimate matters.⁴⁵ Philosophy was threatened by permanent subservience to theological orthodoxy. The modern philosophers, to recover something of the original natural freedom of philosophic questioning, resorted to the effective means of securing protected freedom by redefining philosophy’s goal as universally practical—above all, in practical opposition to theological authority. The gulf between philosophy and the city was bridged by identifying the ends of the philosopher and the nonphilosopher, placing inquiry in the service of the relief of man’s estate or “science for the sake of power.”⁴⁶ Rather paradoxically, the gains for philosophy in greater freedom and for society in diffusion of science and its material benefits (Enlightenment and “progress”) were necessarily made at the price of lowering philosophy’s sights, as “unqualified attachment to human concerns becomes the source of philosophic understanding.”⁴⁷

I can only mention now⁴⁸ the suggestion that in Strauss’s account the tendency toward a certain forgetting of Socratic philosophy by the later philosophic tradition, arising from philosophy’s conflict with the requirements of political life (and especially its pious core), is rooted in what one can describe as metaphysical or cosmic ambiguity. In this regard there is a crucial difference and similarity between Heidegger and Strauss on the sources of “falling away” or forgetting. An initial approach to the difference is to say that Heidegger’s account of oblivion is historical, since oblivion is grounded in the self-withdrawal of Being as historical, whereas Strauss finds the sources of oblivion in enduring, transhistorical traits of human nature. But this is misleading insofar as Strauss does not present a doctrine of human nature in the sense of an anthropology that is intelligible apart from the human relation to Being or the whole, and he is in accord with Heidegger on the necessary defects of such anthropology. Rather Strauss seeks to understand the human situation in the light of a fundamental ambiguity that one can describe as metaphysical or cosmological, with the crucial proviso that the metaphysical or cosmological inquiry in question is hypothetical or aporetic. He points to the nature of this inquiry—as both directed toward the whole, not just a part thereof, and also hypothetical—in this pregnant passage of Natural Right and History:

The unfinishable character of the quest for adequate articulation of the whole does not entitle one, however, to limit philosophy to the understanding of a part, however important. For the meaning of a part depends on the meaning of the whole. In particular, such interpretation of a part as is based on fundamental experiences alone, without recourse to hypothetical assumptions about the whole, is ultimately not superior to other interpretations of that part which are frankly based on such hypothetical assumptions.⁴⁹

“Interpretation . . . based on fundamental experiences alone” would seem to refer to Heidegger’s effort in Being and Time to approach the question of Being solely on the basis of the fundamental experience of Angst or care (Sorge) as the human-existential structure of being-in-the-world that underlies that experience.⁵⁰ Strauss knew at this time, as he was becoming aware of Heidegger’s later writing, that Heidegger himself became dissatisfied with that approach, and indeed as I show in the second chapter, Strauss acknowledged and investigated an affinity between his own thinking and Heidegger’s later path of thinking. A difference, however, remains: Strauss maintained against Heidegger the inevitability of considering hypothetical cosmological principles as illuminating the existence of the human—specifically, the duality of the human as political and transpolitical.⁵¹

One can approach this issue by reflecting on Strauss’s understanding of the problem of nature. Nature (phusis) is a Greek discovery, already announced in poets before philosophers, according to which the natural first things are distinguished from the merely humanly made things or conventions (including muthoi) and from things known merely through hearsay as contrasted with direct seeing. Nature is “implied in the idea of philosophy,” as the idea of an unchanging order discernible by human reason, independent of human willing or making and in principle universally accessible. As such it is an order distinguished from the multiplicity and diversity of human conventions or “caves.” After inquiry turns to the question of what is good by nature, the idea of natural right emerges, as the idea of a right that is knowable by reason universally.⁵² The search for it entails rejection of the prephilosophic identification of the good with the ancestral. Yet Strauss states that his own inquiry seeks to restore knowledge of “the problem of natural right” or, as he also says, “the idea of natural right.” To say natural right is an “idea” is to say it is a “fundamental problem.”⁵³ “Political life in all its forms necessarily points to natural right as an inevitable problem.”⁵⁴ As Strauss notes, not all philosophers who search for the natural principles endorse the notion of natural right or natural justice. Thus pre-Socratic and Epicurean philosophers distinguish the pleasant as the natural good from the entire realm of the political and moral as conventional. And in Strauss’s reading the Socratic answer to the question “What is good by nature?” is contrasted with all political conceptions of justice, i.e., justice understood as serving the ends of the city. Still it is the case that for Socrates the structure of the city reveals something essential about the natural structure of the soul, including its essentially political passion, spiritedness or thumos. Both thumos and eros occupy a place of importance in Socratic philosophic self-understanding but are missing in classical hedonism.⁵⁵ But all of this points to nature as a problem rather than as the subject of doctrinaire teaching, and as a problem that is accessible only by starting with political life as a realm of problems centering on the question “What is the best way of life?” Contrary to what is often thought, Strauss does not investigate the prephilosophic “cave” in order to find there sound intuitions or common sense about morality and political practice, on which to base universally evident precepts of the natural law. For him the entire history of thinking about natural right and natural law exposes the fundamental problem of nature. Historicist thought is wrong not in finding nature problematic but in substituting for doctrinaire accounts of nature its own doctrinaire principle of history.⁵⁶ There is no question-begging assumption of a natural life-world on Strauss’s part, contrary to some prominent critiques.⁵⁷

Accordingly Strauss’s criticisms of social science positivism and cultural relativism focus not on skeptical consequences of these positions but on dogmatic ones: these positions render the question of the good life meaningless as a question. As to the relation of this critique to Heidegger, the situation is complicated by Heidegger’s sharing much common ground with Strauss in the rejection of social science positivism, natural-scientific accounts of the human,⁵⁸ and standard cultural relativism on the grounds that they render unintelligible the capacity of the human to raise the question about Being. Yet the question of the good is notably missing from Heidegger’s profound account of questioning. Even so, or precisely for this reason, Heidegger’s “radical historicism,” which through a radical critique of theoretical understanding attains the “highest self-consciousness” of modern philosophy,⁵⁹ poses the most severe challenge in all modernity (and perhaps in all philosophy) to the Socratic account of philosophy that Strauss revives.

V

In the chapters that follow I seek to expose and clarify the meaning of “original forgetting” found in these two figures. I argue that the central reflection of each is on the forgetting of radical questioning as an experience inseparable from human openness to the inherently enigmatic whole, and on highly provisional and experimental efforts to recover such questioning. Understood correctly, such forgetting is not something that has happened only in modernity, for it is in the nature of thinking that original insight will be replaced by doctrine and tradition. I argue also that each thinker pursues a primary ambiguity or duality to which a secondary one is attached, wherein an oscillation is set up. For Heidegger the primary duality is that of Being and beings (Sein and Seienden). Being is that which enables beings to be disclosed, thereby concealing itself in favor of what it discloses yet revealing itself at the same time as that which grounds through withdrawing, i.e., that which is thought-worthy as the “nothing.” This sets up the secondary ambiguity. In his later thought Heidegger meditates on a new way of being at home in Being through attentiveness to Being as that which withdraws—being at home in homelessness—and this can be understood as Heidegger’s attempt to resolve the tension between radical philosophic questioning and human attachments to people, place, language, poetry, and gods, or to the origins of these. Heidegger is not unaware of the tension between philosophic life and nonphilosophic modes of life, yet he never truly articulates these as human alternatives, since he longs and hopes for a transformation that overcomes their difference. This stance implies that the difference has only a historical character. Yet there is persisting ambiguity evident in Heidegger’s later accounts of freedom, in which freedom appears both as radical questioning that transcends the historically given and as receptivity to the call of the historical event of Being as a particular way of dwelling. This ambiguity relates to the complex way Heidegger’s rejection of Nietzsche’s project of overcoming modernity through an assertion of will is combined with a continuing sympathy for Nietzsche as prophetic figure pointing toward a new founding of human dwelling.⁶⁰

For Strauss the primary duality is that of the city and man, or man’s dual way of transcending: toward the political whole and toward the natural whole or “whole as such.” That this duality is the source of tensions that are the permanent hinge on which human life turns is the theme of Strauss’s writing. He sees the conscious project of overcoming them as the hallmark of modernity, of which Heidegger is the final and consummate thinker. Modern philosophy seeks to fuse itself with practical life and thus to become wholly at home in the world of human affairs, but “the attempt to make man absolutely at home in this world ended in man’s becoming absolutely homeless.”⁶¹ But Strauss’s thought has its secondary ambiguity, pertaining to how the essentially radical essence of philosophy gets realized in its modern form as practical, which in Strauss’s view constitutes a break with the premodern account of philosophy as theoretical. How is the “break” compatible with the transhistorical character of philosophy as openness to the “permanent problems”? If the modern revolution constitutes a new kind of philosophy, is not philosophy subject to historical transformation? But if, on the other hand, this revolution is in reality a falling away from genuine philosophy, can one then say that the “quarrel between the ancients and the moderns” is a philosophical one? Furthermore, if genuine (Socratic) philosophy falls or declines into something less than philosophy, how does such a process occur? Strauss offers a powerful account of the practical dangers and perplexities that philosophy always confronts, and his view of the modern approach to philosophy’s difficulties, as a well-considered strategy of its founders, offers an illuminating tale of genesis that is absent from Heidegger’s seinsgeschichtlich scheme of decline as historical fate. But if the modern founders have such clarity about their intent, would it not be the case that they retain the essential freedom of philosophic thought, wherein they do not simply fuse philosophy with practical ends? Strauss suggests that such freedom is still evident in Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Nietzsche and seems equivocal about whether it can be found in other major figures like Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Kant, and Hegel. But if one allows that philosophic autonomy exists in the modern era, is there in fact such a drastic falling away from the Socratic beginning of political philosophy, in the decisive respect?

Both Heidegger and Strauss attempt to uncover or renew forms of thinking that lie beyond the modern standpoint. Heidegger would move beyond the modern stance of the will, the Nietzschean type of founding that legislates for humanity a new end or a higher freedom, but in his hope for a new era of “thinking” he retains the modern hope for a fusion of philosophy and practical life. Strauss would disclose the defect of modern philosophy as the creation of “conscious constructs” that limit the vision not only of nonphilosophers but of the philosophers themselves, as “enhancing the status of man and his ‘world’ by making him oblivious of the whole and eternity.”⁶² This suggests a view of the modern philosophers as both able and unable to see beyond their self-limiting constructs.⁶³ In my reading of Strauss, this ambiguity is deliberate, since due consideration of his work shows that he regards modern philosophy as a serious alternative to classical Greek philosophy and that indeed the recovery of Greek philosophy can take place only by means of the confrontation between its premises and the premises of modern philosophy. The latter have become as unknown as those of classical philosophy and are as worthy of archaeological research. The true object of inquiry is not to formulate an ancient doctrine to replace modern ones but to revive awareness of the “fundamental problems” shared by the philosophers. Thus Strauss, writing of the origins of his study of Hobbes, states, “I concluded that the case of the moderns against the ancients must be reopened, without any regard to cherished opinions or convictions, sine ira et studio.”⁶⁴ Strauss does not simply say, “I saw that the return to ancient philosophy was necessary.” Furthermore, if Heidegger’s thought is “the highest self-consciousness” of modern philosophy, then the confrontation between classical philosophy and Heidegger is indispensable for the recovery of original questioning. As I noted earlier, in Strauss’s view such recovery must take the form of the dialectical opposing of theses. In this regard one recalls his oft-quoted remark about the antagonism of revelation and philosophy: “It seems to me that this unresolved conflict is the secret of the vitality of Western civilization.”⁶⁵ Strauss’s readings of the great modern philosophers present them as profoundly aware of this conflict, and thus as sustaining the original questioning of philosophy, although the conventional forms of thought arising out of this modern tradition (“the second cave”) have indeed promoted oblivion of such questioning. It cannot be denied, however, that in Strauss’s estimation the two recent great figures in whom this conflict is still alive, Nietzsche and Heidegger, fell short in their grasp of its political basis and meaning.

For philosophical-pedagogical purposes Strauss engages at times in one-sided accounts of modern philosophy as “fallen.” In this he seems to be a student of Nietzsche insofar as his philosophical writing employs the creation of tensions through deliberate contradiction and exaggeration, or by proposing “simplifying horizons” (satisfying the “will to untruth”) from which the philosophical mind must make an effort to free itself and thereby learn the art of thinking.⁶⁶ Heidegger also practices a certain version of this art: his accounts of “forgetting of Being” as ever-deepening oblivion are countered by interpretations of Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Hölderlin, Schelling, and Nietzsche that ascribe to these thinkers levels of insight close to, if not quite equal to, that of the greatest ancient figures. One must distinguish between the prevailing consciousness of modernity and the thoughts that the highest minds of modernity were capable of thinking. For both Strauss and Heidegger philosophizing is incompatible with complacent reliance on historical schemata, even as such schemata must be used to provoke self-awareness that one’s “self-evident truths” are essentially questionable.

To sum up this line of argument: only because the modern philosophers still bear traces of the Socratic origin is Strauss able to philosophize in dialogue with them. Modern philosophy has, furthermore, not resulted only in obliviousness to everything beyond the political-practical horizon. Strauss admits this when he tells contemporary readers that in spite of their dwelling within a “cave beneath the cave,” they still are open to, and confronted with, the mysterious whole. To mention one important instance of how modern thought sustains an ancient problem (discussed in the final chapter): Strauss suggests that modern ideas of individuality have roots in the ancient poetic and philosophic accounts of tension between the city and the individual. Strauss comments that Hegel is “the profoundest student of Aristophanes in modern times,” citing the Phenomenology of the Mind: “The individual consciousness having become conscious of itself presents itself as the absolute power.” This is a revealing parabasis.⁶⁷ Indeed, what is apparently a mere aside points to the neglected crux of the history of Western thought: the peripheral emerges as central. The comic poet Aristophanes, who in histories of philosophy is never treated as a major player (although Hegel’s remark on the “triumph of subjectivity” in Aristophanes begins to correct this absence), is according to Strauss the thinker who above all others displays to Plato the poetic alternative to philosophy—as the only genuine alternative to philosophy. This is not because poetic thought comprehends only the unquestioning obedience of piety before the law, but because in its highest form it reflects on the fundamental tension between eros and the law in a compelling fashion opposed to philosophy. According to the poetic account, individuals necessarily seek beyond the law a completion that they cannot find, and the authority of sacred law (perhaps as made by poets who in their lawgiving role find satisfaction) must remain the limit for human life, since what lies beyond that limit admits no satisfactory, noncomic and nontragic, definition.⁶⁸ This is a stance that Socrates rejects, holding that philosophy transcends the law without comic or tragic failure by uncovering a sustainable way of life based on knowledge of ignorance. The poetic awareness of the problem of the individual’s transcending of law (of “the city and man”) is the key to the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns, in that the modern philosophers revive the poetic view against the Socratic, with philosophic consciousness of their effort, such that “the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns concerns eventually, and perhaps even from the start, the status of ‘individuality.’”⁶⁹

Strauss’s treatment of Aristophanes is accordingly his response to Heidegger’s turn to the pre-Socratic philosophers, as it shows that the poetic reflection on the problem of the individual and law is the context from which philosophy emerges, in striking affinity with Heidegger’s claim that “poetic thinking” must be renewed if we are to grasp how philosophy arose and also how it went astray. But Strauss’s poetic thinking, unlike Heidegger’s, discloses the structure of the “cave” and its law as political, which is to say, as inherently problematic, as the comic-tragic realm in which philosophy is never wholly at home. While in accord with Heidegger’s insight that philosophy cannot be understood except in relation to the world of poetry and gods that precedes it, and that genuine philosophical thought cannot be sustained except by remaining in dialogue with that world, Strauss restates the problem at issue for both poetry and philosophy. Through that restatement Socratic philosophy comes forward as mindful of the poetic-erotic experience that Heidegger claims it forgot, and at the same time as able to offer a coherent alternative to the comictragic vision of human life.

VI

I conclude with an observation to prepare for all that follows. For both thinkers the central theme of philosophy is Being or the whole, which is manifest and intelligible only as a question or problem for a being that is part of the whole. Such a being is the human, as the part of the whole that is also open to the whole: “the being that is in the most emphatic or the most authoritative way.” Thus the human ambiguously transcends toward “its own” (the part that it is) and toward what is beyond its own, toward Being or the whole. This dual manner of transcending conceals itself and forgets itself: the human has openness for the whole beyond itself but only as a relatively self-contained part that must have concern for itself. All questioning must start from, and in some way remain conditioned by, “closed horizons” of thought. Philosophy—the attempt to know the whole—is possible only because such closed horizons are questionable. Strauss sought to advance on Heidegger’s formulation of ontological difference or ambiguity by arguing that the human “part” or starting point is inherently political (the “cave” that is both open and closed to the whole), whereby he attempted to show that Socratic thought does justice to the Heideggerian insight and at the same time roots it in permanent necessities of political life. This also clarifies the central place of the gods or revelation in Strauss’s reflection, since the divine is the primary indicator of the dyadic character of the human as both of the city and transcending the city: the primary indicator of the tension in the soul between law and eros. The human has access to the whole, what is most universal, only by passing through the experience of what is particular and local, the laws of the city with their divine sanctioning. For Strauss the ancient question “What is god?” relates to the wonder that the highest human possibility, the effort to understand the whole, is crucially conditioned in its starting points by a singularity that has questionable grounding in the natural whole, the life of humans in cities under laws. Clearly this reflection is at least thematically linked to Heidegger’s thinking about the divine and the gift of the disclosedness of Being. I can only indicate the substance of the affinities and the differences between these ways of thinking by a few words on the structure of this book’s discussion:

Part I, “Repetition of Antiquity at the Peak of Modernity,” takes up three principal topics: (1) The turnings in Nietzsche and Heidegger to the Greek beginnings of philosophy in efforts to overcome the crisis of European civilization as grounded in its forgetting of primordial questioning. Here it is important to note that for both thinkers the tasks of overcoming and revival have a providential and redemptive character, relating to the concern of the entire German tradition with the justification of evil. (2) Strauss’s project of “repetition of antiquity at the peak of modernity” as discussed in letters with students of Heidegger in the period 1930–73 and other writings that disclose how the accounts of original forgetting in Strauss’s German predecessors fundamentally frame his thinking. Central to these discussions is the ambiguity of the exposure of modernity’s “unradicality,” its foundational “certainties,” by Nietzsche and Heidegger, since the latter still adhere to some modern (or Christian) notions of progress. (3) An account of Strauss’s mature Socratism, his late modern renewal of Socratic political philosophy, which centers on the duality of the human as political and transpolitical and responds to the critiques of Western rationalism in Nietzsche and Heidegger. Strauss’s sympathetic stance toward Heidegger’s critical reading of Nietzsche and toward the questions Heidegger poses about causality, God, and Being comes to the fore. For both Heidegger and Strauss, philosophy begins with articulating human openness to Being or the whole under a radical suspension of traditional metaphysical premises. At the same time, Strauss seeks to recover, in opposition to Heidegger and with more support from Nietzsche, a classical understanding of philosophy as “cosmic” and transmoral. In this regard Strauss breaks from his German predecessors whose thinking reveals a fusion of religious and philosophic concerns.

Part II, “Exigencies of Freedom and Politics,” takes up the political implications of the different versions of overcoming modernity through recovery of antiquity in Heidegger and Strauss. Heidegger’s approach to the relation of philosophy to politics and practical life is crucially indebted to accounts of freedom in Kant, Schelling, and Nietzsche, as Heidegger refashions these in an effort to move beyond the oblivion of Being and to arrive at a new beginning. Strauss criticizes Heidegger’s view of that relation, as assuming that philosophic freedom can be at one with, and at home with, political life. Central to this criticism is the underlying “eschatological” assumption that persists in Heidegger’s later thinking after he “learned the lesson of 1933.” In Strauss’s conception Heidegger obscures the “tension between philosophy and the polis, i.e., the highest theme of political philosophy.” Heidegger’s recovery of antiquity and his politics suffer from the forgetting of Socrates’s radical questioning of the authority of nomos, such that Heidegger’s thought on the tragic strife of phusis and techne does not point to the liberation of the philosophic mind from the mind of the age, the nation, and the Volk, or it points to it only tentatively and obscurely.

Part III, “Construction of Modernity,” addresses three related topics: Strauss’s interpretation of modernity as it underpins his critique of Heidegger, the question of the nature of the break of modernity with antiquity according to Strauss, and suggestions in Strauss that his recovery of antiquity is informed in certain respects by the experiences of modernity and not least by the philosophy of late modernity. Strauss’s genealogical criticism of Heidegger’s historicism presents it as the most radical form of the modern “historical consciousness,” which itself is the outcome of the politicizing of philosophy in early modernity. Mostly forgotten in modernity, in Strauss’s view, are not doctrines of teleology and natural law but the duality of the human, the tension between law and eros, which entails the permanent “homelessness” of philosophy in human practical affairs. Yet Strauss’s account of modernity and its break with antiquity shows that modern philosophy harbors echoes of ancient themes of human duality in its treatments of individuality and poetry. In particular the late modern renewal of the “problem of Socrates” has allowed Strauss to recover the theme of duality in a heterodox way, i.e., without metaphysical premises of the post-Platonic tradition, through reviving the original quarrel of philosophy and poetry.