CHAPTER 2

“The Unradicality of Modern Philosophy”: Thinking in Correspondence

I

The questions that moved the young Heidegger and the young Strauss were surely different, but they have significant affinities. For Heidegger it was the question of Being that has been overlooked by the metaphysical tradition as it has concentrated on the characterization of beings (their “ontical” properties and causal grounds) rather than on Being as the ground of disclosure of beings. The young Heidegger’s critical and hermeneutical investigations of the sources of this neglect, which were initially motivated by dissatisfaction with the medieval Scholastic treatment of Aristotle, took him on dual paths: on the one hand uncovering a more authentic reading of Aristotle and the Greek beginnings of the philosophic tradition, and on the other reexamining Christian accounts (the Gospels, Paul, Luther, et al.) of the experience of life emphasizing temporality and the “factic” human encounter with mortality. Both paths were pursued with the aid of Husserl’s phenomenological method, but the early concern with “life-experience” as the horizon for the interpretation of Being gave Heidegger’s phenomenology a more practical orientation than Husserl’s. Indeed in its early stage a defense of religious experience against the rational claims of philosophy seemed to be its core, although the atheistic bearing of Heidegger’s inquiry in Being and Time (1927) was unmistakable. As Strauss saw and appreciated, Heidegger’s thought after the 1920s grew into a more Greek, less biblical, effort to rethink the central question of philosophy.¹

The problem of revelation engaged Strauss at the start as well. He was a committed Zionist in the 1920s but troubled by the attempts to fuse Jewish orthodoxy with rationalism in the Jewish Enlightenment and in its romantic-nationalist successor, Zionism. Strauss became convinced that the modern rationalist critique of biblical orthodoxy, as espoused by its greatest exponent, Spinoza, rested on a merely asserted and unproven superiority of reason to revealed truth. His early studies of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Moses Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Spinoza, focusing on the problematic foundations of the Enlightenment, related to a widespread criticism of rationalism that found expression in “new thinking” about the sources of religious tradition (Karl Barth, Franz Rosenzweig).² But Strauss’s dialectical manner of thought remained open to rationalist claims, as indicated by his sympathy for Lessing, whose exposure of false compromises in modern rationalist theology provided Strauss with a model for posing questions in terms of stark alternatives.³

In the 1965 American preface to his first book, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (completed in 1928), Strauss speaks of a “change of orientation” in his thought following the publication of this work. Strauss states that he saw the danger in a critique of rationalism that could justify any orthodoxy or induce a romantic longing without content. This and “other observations and experiences confirmed the suspicion that it would be unwise to say farewell to reason.” Strauss began “to wonder whether the self-destruction of reason was not the inevitable outcome of modern rationalism as distinguished from pre-modern rationalism,” and thus he reconsidered the premise on which his Spinoza study was based: “the premise, sanctioned by powerful prejudice, that a return to pre-modern philosophy is impossible.”⁴ In the deepening of his critique of modern rationalism, Strauss exposed the modern criticism of revelation in terms of “prejudice” (Vorurteil); in such criticism, reason is implicated in a fusion (Verquickung) with revelation through its very attempt to free itself from the power of its opponent.⁵ The modern efforts to replace prejudice with a new rational doctrine produced new forms of prejudice and gave rise to repeated efforts to establish a final doctrine achieving definitive “progress” over all past doctrines. The modern engagement in a massive transforming of opinion (the battle against prejudice) had to be distinguished from the premodern striving of philosophic individuals to free themselves from opinion. Strauss saw in the new approach to opinion as prejudice the core of the argument between ancient and modern philosophy, whereby the changed political stance of philosophy became the key to understanding the entire tradition. After 1930, Strauss’s correspondence discloses how this conception of the tradition enabled him to place the radical critiques of tradition in Nietzsche and Heidegger within the broad movement of modern philosophy. In other words, Strauss’s own radical reflection on the tradition had the effect of diminishing the apparent radicality of the two thinkers who above all others had led the revolt against rationalism.

In the period 1930–37 Strauss studied the major figures of medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophy for their accounts of the relation of philosophy to revelation, wherein the latter is understood in terms of law, and teachings on providence and divine law are considered part of political science. The medieval philosophers thus maintain the Platonic view of piety as belonging to the realm of opinion or the “cave,” a view they convey by means of “esoteric” writing outwardly respectful of the divine law.⁶ This approach enabled them to attain a genuine freedom of spirit, whereas the attack on prejudice entangled the modern philosophers in the project, both destructive and creative, of forming a new “second cave.” The world-transforming appearance of revealed religions grounded in authoritative texts complicated the ascent from opinion, adding a “historical difficulty” to the “natural difficulties” of the ascent. But the medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophers found means for addressing the new difficulty that preserved intellectual independence. Strauss, following their example, sought to renew the premodern view of the natural situation of the philosopher as confronting the unalterable reality of the theological-political order, such that the enduring alternative to philosophic freedom of mind is the “law” in the sense of the comprehensive nexus of religious, moral, and political authority. Reflection on law is the necessary starting point for the philosopher insofar as the philosopher understands himself as gaining freedom from its authority even as he must at the same time attempt to justify his life before that authority. Strauss saw the problem of law and philosophy as thus essential to the grounding of the possibility of philosophy, and reflection on it as central to philosophic self-knowledge. In the preface to the German edition of his Hobbes study Strauss noted that “the theological-political problem has remained the theme of all my investigations.”⁷

Although Strauss was silent on Heidegger in his writings throughout the 1930s, that thinker was a forceful presence in his thought, as Strauss’s correspondence shows. As Strauss made his discovery of premodern rationalism and moved toward affirming the possibility of its rebirth, he saw that Heidegger’s criticism of the rationalism of the entire tradition had to be weighed in the balance, as his account of the defects of modern rationalism had undeniable power. How might Heidegger’s interpretation of ancient philosophy affect the recovery of the premodern account of the theoretical life’s claim to supremacy, which Strauss saw as grounded on its raising of the Socratic question “What is the best life?” Strauss’s letters are extremely helpful for exposing the complexity of his thinking on this issue.

II

I preface my comments on the letters with the observation that Strauss’s dialectical approach to questions must be kept in mind when evaluating positions he adopts or appears to adopt in the course of his inquiry, some of which he stresses in his public presentations of his thought. His criticism of Heidegger is accordingly far better known—as publicly more prominent—than his avowed kinship with Heidegger, which is compatible with that criticism although understated relative to it. From the early 1930s onward he is, with varying emphasis, clear about that kinship in letters. For example, writing to Jacob Klein about Hans Jonas in 1934, Strauss remarks “that [Jonas] also strives, if perhaps not as clearly, in the same direction as we do beyond or behind Heidegger.”⁸ This “direction,” as both inspired by Heidegger and yet deviating from him, pertains to the critique of modernity, as Strauss states in a letter to Gerhard Krüger of 1932, wherein he writes of “the unradicality of modern philosophy” as consisting in its belief that “it can presuppose the fundamental questions as already answered, and that it therefore can ‘progress.’”⁹ Dogmatism, not skepticism, is the hallmark of modern thinking, and it is evident in two forms of failure: “the neglect [Versäumnis] of ontology, which Heidegger has uncovered, and the neglect of the Socratic question, which Nietzsche denounced.” The same letter contains a criticism of Heidegger: “Modern philosophy from its beginning and including Heidegger understood itself as progress and as progressing,” a stance based on its “struggle against the tradition since the seventeenth century,” which has as its “genuine meaning the restoration of the Greek freedom of philosophizing; it was genuinely a Renaissance movement.” In all of its “foundations” of philosophic and historical thought, modern philosophy has one striving: “the reclaiming of an original natural basis” for philosophy. The root of this dual evaluation of Heidegger can be found in Strauss’s relation to the critical and destructive thought of Nietzsche and Heidegger, who both argue that modernity has come to an end even as they remain entangled in modernity. “To me modern philosophy appears to have come to its end, to lead to the point at which Socrates begins. Modern philosophy thus shows itself to be a violent ‘destruction of tradition,’ and not ‘progress.’”¹⁰ Completing this destructive process, Nietzsche and Heidegger make possible a postmodern rebirth of Socratism without reaching it themselves.

What prevents these thinkers from achieving full release from the modern dogma of progress? It is the same factor in Western thought that results in the modern foundations and their new account of nature: Christianity. “Of modern philosophy this holds: without biblical belief one did not and does not enter it, and with biblical belief one cannot stay in it. . . . Modern philosophy is possible only so long as biblical belief is not shaken from the ground up, as it has been since and through Nietzsche. In Nietzsche, too, there is a Christian heritage.” The evidence of this heritage is Nietzsche’s “probity” (Redlichkeit) of conscience, a secularized version of Christian virtue, which in Nietzsche’s own judgment is “necessary for so long, and is indeed possible only as long, as there is a Christianity that must be fought.”¹¹ Nietzsche was ultimately in pursuit of an ideal of natural philosophy, with which Strauss is in principle in accord. In this regard Nietzsche comes closer to the postmodern renewal of Socratism than Heidegger, whose renewal of the ontological question, in itself profound and necessary, is more bound up with Christian categories. “In Heidegger’s Dasein-interpretation, a truly adequate atheistic interpretation of the Bible can, for the first time, be possible.”¹² Heidegger’s thought belongs in the long line of modern critics of religion, far outstripping in depth such predecessors as Feuerbach, and his thought marks the victory of the Enlightenment even as it would overcome the Enlightenment. Heidegger endorses the progressivist claim of Christianity on which the modern Enlightenment builds as it attacks Christianity, namely, its discovery of a new depth unknown to antiquity, thereby making possible an appreciation of the “historicity” of man.¹³ Heidegger claims that “the philosophy that becomes for the first time possible after the destruction of Christianity preserves the ‘true’ in Christianity; this philosophy is therefore deeper and more radical than ancient philosophy.”¹⁴

With such statements Strauss makes clear that his critique of the Enlightenment attack on religion is not a defense of religious orthodoxy but an effort to gain genuine freedom from it. Yet this is a freedom that does not rest on willing alone; it can be acquired only through theoretical analysis. For this purpose Strauss thinks one must question the principle of “historicity” in the light of a nondoctrinaire, Socratically inspired quest for nature. Strauss confesses to Krüger: “Our difference has its ground in this, that I cannot believe, that I must search for a possibility where I can live without belief. There are two possibilities of this kind: the ancient, i.e., the Socratic-Platonic, and the modern, that is, the Enlightenment,” of which the chief figures are Hobbes and Kant. “It must be asked: Who is right, the ancients or the moderns? The querelle des anciens et des modernes must be repeated.”¹⁵ Yet one would think that the question has been answered if modernity has come to an end in a self-destructive process—unless self-destructive thinking could be somehow philosophically superior. And indeed Nietzsche and Heidegger provide powerful evidence of modernity’s philosophical vitality in a final, paradoxical form. Given their dependence on revelation, Strauss’s question implies that he can consider the possible truth of Christianity’s claim to uncover a depth unknown to antiquity. This cannot surprise very much, in light of Christian Rome’s indebtedness to Jerusalem. The problem of Christianity and modernity pertains to the way in which Athens and Jerusalem have combined in them.¹⁶ By saying he is open to renewing the quarrel of the ancient and the moderns, Strauss is open to considering the opposing claims of “pure” philosophy and of the fusion of philosophy and revelation. It may be the case that Nietzsche and Heidegger achieved the deepest versions of the fusion. Yet Strauss declares that he cannot believe, and if that is so, can any version of the fusion be philosophically plausible for him?

In letters to Krüger, Strauss applies the phrase “the second cave,” meaning the “cave beneath the original cave,” not only to recent modernity or even modernity as a whole, but also to Christianity.¹⁷ “The problem of the ‘second cave’ is the problem of historicism [Historismus]. The ‘substantial and historical core’ of historicism is, as you say correctly, ‘the factual rule of Christ over post-antique humanity.’ What results from this for one who does not believe, who thus denies the justice, that is, the divine justice, of this rule?”¹⁸ He remarks that the Heideggerian conclusion (that post-Christian philosophy is deeper than ancient) “is perhaps correct—it must in any case be proven to be correct. But this is possible only through a direct confrontation of modern with ancient philosophy.” This is the legitimation for Strauss’s setting up a direct confrontation of Hobbes with Plato, through which Strauss confronts the “starting question [Ausgangsfrage] of the moderns and the Greeks” and “analyzes their presuppositions.” In other words, modernity as derivative from Christianity may rest on a depth that is accessible to a nonbeliever, but it must pass the test of philosophic scrutiny. Also at issue, Strauss says, is the fact of the “second cave”: “My thesis concerning the ‘second cave’—which without proof is a pure aperçu—could be false.” Thus are the modern philosophers in fact limited in their thinking by a set of presuppositions they have not examined?

The claim of superiority made by modern philosophy, that of progress over antiquity indebted to Christianity, is questionable but not self-evidently false. The crisis of modernity does not constitute a self-refutation, and the radical questioning of Nietzsche and Heidegger may expose a new depth of thought that is owing to revelation but whose authority or truth-claim does not rest on belief. Strauss considers two related questions: Why did the modern philosophers, in seeking to free themselves from tradition for a truly natural philosophizing, not return to the Socratic way of philosophizing? Why did the most radical thinkers of the modern era, Nietzsche and Heidegger, not reach the renewal of antiquity to which their thought points? The first two months of 1933 offered crucial insight. Strauss states that his studies of Spinoza and Hobbes have shed light on what Nietzsche and Heidegger have undertaken. “I believe, in the end, that I understand the genuine aporia of Nietzsche.”¹⁹ Nietzsche discovered “the good [das Gute] whose opposite is the bad [das Schlechte], in a countermove to good-evil [Gut-Böse], that is, the moral conception. This discovery was a rediscovery of the original ideal of humanity,” which was denied and forgotten through “the common work of Socrates-Plato and Christianity.” Yet Nietzsche failed to overthrow the powers he struggled against, his difficulty lying in his opposing knowing (Wissen) to manly valor (Tapferkeit) and the corresponding character of his philosophizing as “philosophizing with the hammer.” By this means Nietzsche could never overcome the spirit (Geist) that overthrew valor, as it “always falls behind his back. Therefore one must ask: whether one must stay with the antithesis valor-knowing.”

Strauss’s acquaintance with Plato’s Laws had shown him that this antithesis is not required. Indeed from Plato he had learned he could “pose Nietzsche’s questions, thus our questions, in a simpler, clearer, and more original way.” Certain observations about medieval philosophy had led him to see that an experiment (Versuch) with Plato was advisable.²⁰ Strauss also says that his Hobbes interpretation was crucial to his correction of Nietzsche. In a double paradox, Nietzsche’s manly spirit of philosophizing has a hidden kinship with Hobbes’s fearful spirit, and Nietzsche’s deepest intent is better fulfilled by Plato, his antipode, than by Nietzsche himself. Put another way, Nietzsche’s discovery of the transmoral meaning of philosophy was, without his realizing it, a rediscovery of the Platonic view, and his attack on Platonism-Christianity rested on modern, Hobbesian assumptions indebted to Christian morality.

III

In correspondence with Karl Löwith, who wrote important works on both Nietzsche and Heidegger, Strauss’s reflections on the two thinkers and their relation grow in subtlety and penetration. Writing of Nietzsche, Strauss confides that between the ages of twenty-two and thirty “I believed literally every word I understood in him” and says of Löwith’s formula for Nietzsche’s work (“the repetition of antiquity at the peak of modernity”) that it “speaks to my soul.”²¹ He gives now an account of Nietzsche’s project as having two phases: a polemical introduction attacking the tradition from the stance of “probity,” followed by recovery of the ancient ideal. What should have been mere introduction, the polemic, dominates Nietzsche’s thought and ties him to modernity. Thus Nietzsche presents the ancient doctrine of the eternal recurrence as an object to be willed for the future, and in stressing the will he remains trapped in modern assumptions.²² Strauss, however, notes a parallel between Nietzsche’s two-phase project and his own, since he must begin with an overcoming of the present time. “We are natural beings who live and think under unnatural conditions—we must reflect on our natural essence in order to transcend in thought the unnatural conditions.” This natural reflection, which is “neither progress nor a resignedly accepted fate,” is “an unavoidable means for overcoming modernity. One can overcome modernity not with modern means, but rather, only insofar as we are natural beings with natural understanding.”²³ But then a doubt is introduced about whether this naturalness is available to Strauss and his contemporaries. “The means of thinking by the natural understanding are lost to us,” and they cannot be recovered by our own efforts. “We attempt to learn them from the ancients.” Strauss adds a sharp sally at Heidegger, in whose historicity “nature is brought fully to disappearance.” But one confronts the difficulty that the “second cave” is not self-evidently false, and since that is so, the putative naturalness transcending it is also not self-evident. It would seem to be an act of faith, or at least a bold experimental hypothesis, to suppose that by studying the ancients one will recover the naturalness that has been lost.

The obstacle facing modern men who would try to recover ancient nature was overcome by Swift and Lessing, “the greatest exponents of the ancient side of the querelle,” who saw that modern philosophy shares something essential with Christianity (Strauss mentions Machiavelli). Indeed they “knew that the genuine theme of the quarrel is antiquity and Christianity.” Somehow these exceptional figures maintained their natural understanding and had “no doubt that the ancient, that is, the genuine philosophy, is an eternal possibility.”²⁴ Strauss briefly refers to “the sentimental nineteenth century” and so provides an echo of an earlier letter to Krüger:

Do you recall the first page of Schiller’s “Naive and Sentimental Poetry”? The naive human is nature—for the sentimental human, naturalness is only a demand. We moderns are necessarily “sentimental.” That means however: that we must in a “sentimental” manner—thus in recollection, historically—investigate what the Greeks “naively” investigated; more precisely: we must through “recollection” bring ourselves into the dimension in which we, understanding the Greeks, can investigate “naively” with them.²⁵

Strauss goes on to say that the “achievement” of modern historical understanding is not “a more radical dimension, such as a more radical cure of human illness or at least a more radical diagnosis, but the modern medicine for a modern illness.” Asserting that he holds just as strongly as Krüger “the impossibility of ‘naive’ philosophy in our world,” he says that what separates him from Krüger is the fact that he, Strauss, “does not in this impossibility see progress in any sense.” Similarly Strauss writes elsewhere: “We need a propaedeutic the Greeks did not need, precisely that of book learning.” “The historical consciousness is linked to a certain historical situation. Today we have to be historians because we do not have the means at our disposal to answer the real questions properly: ‘second cave.’”²⁶ One more statement on Christianity as the second cave is particularly revealing. To Krüger Strauss writes that the need for historical studies “is an external fact to philosophy” that arises from “the nonsensical interweaving of a nomos tradition with a philosophical tradition, that is, biblical revelation with Greek philosophy, a tradition of obedience with a ‘tradition’ of questioning, and the consequent struggle in modernity against the revelation tradition,” which has maneuvered modern men into a second cave so that today they “no longer have the means for natural philosophizing.”²⁷

Taking these statements together, one is faced with a certain ambiguity in the meaning and status of the “second cave.” One side of the ambiguity is a very radical thesis. The second cave is not only the historical tradition created by Christianity and modern philosophy, which makes it difficult for contemporary men—the late modern inheritors of a well-developed tradition—to begin to philosophize in a natural way. More fundamentally the second cave is the (“nonsensical”) Christian tradition of the fusion of revelation and philosophy, which prevented the founders of modern philosophy from attaining the natural philosophizing they sought, conditioning their thought in a way that limited their vision, drawing them into a conflict in which they imitated the fusing of philosophy and nomos in Christianity in a bid to overthrow it. The modern philosophers were historically conditioned and unable to criticize the fundamental presupposition of their thinking. Already conditioned by Christianity to conceive philosophy as devoted to practical conquest of the world by doctrine, they were satisfied to regard their practical victory over Christianity as a definitive answer to the fundamental questions. They lacked the radicality of genuine philosophy, which questions its most basic presuppositions. One wonders whether the term “philosophy” is then fitting for their thinking. Yet Strauss affirms that as philosophers they undertook the “reclaiming of an original natural basis” of philosophizing—an affirmation hard to reconcile with the radical thesis of modern philosophy’s unradicality and conditionedness.

The radical thesis is also hard to reconcile with Strauss’s modest assertions about his own inquiry, to the effect that the philosophic inferiority of modern philosophy is not self-evident, that to renew the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns is to consider the parties with equal seriousness, to look for proof of philosophic failure and not to assume it. But to characterize modern philosophy as incapable of self-examination concerning its basic dependence on Christianity is already to place it in a position of philosophic inferiority. By means of one stroke Strauss purports to undermine the foundation of all modernity and thus make progress beyond it.

This stance seems to be the essence of the modern philosophic attitude he opposes! (It recalls the description of modern philosophy as reclaiming nature through a polemical attack on earlier tradition as well as Strauss’s avowal that he shares with Nietzsche a structure of philosophizing with a polemical first phase.) But Strauss also says that the natural reflection he undertakes is not a form of progress—of building on foundational certitudes. This would have to mean, consistently, that there is no foundational certainty about the failure or collapse of modern philosophy. The ambiguity can be restated in terms of the need for historical studies. More modestly this would mean that only through historical study can we rediscover the forgotten questions animating the whole tradition of philosophy, embracing the distinction between ancient and modern. Strauss speaks this way when he says that by confronting Hobbes and Plato he exposes their presuppositions and analyzes them, uncovering the arguments between them. The attempt to recover these arguments is an experiment, a probing of the possibility of the rejected way of ancient philosophy without presuming that one has adequately understood either way, ancient or modern. On the other hand the need for historical study can mean, less modestly, that one starts from the insight or assumption of the “unnaturalness” of the whole tradition after pagan antiquity and endeavors with the necessary help of books to free oneself from the blighted condition that includes both Christianity and modern philosophy. For it is somehow evident to us “natural beings” that only the ancients pursued the natural mode of philosophizing. Strauss speaks of how Nietzsche awoke him to the possibility of a transmoral ideal of natural philosophizing, but also of how Nietzsche with his “probity” remains indebted to Christianity. This duality in Nietzsche seems to be crucial to the ambiguity in Strauss. For insofar as Nietzsche, the rediscoverer of ancient natural philosophizing, also remains in the thrall of biblical revelation, he shows that the modern fusion is both terribly flawed (through his critique of it) and remarkably powerful (through his exemplifying it).

Indeed it can strike one that there is something almost hasty and ill considered in Strauss’s expression “nonsensical interweaving” of traditions. Of course he would not say that the great thinkers who continue that interweaving, Nietzsche not the least of them, are thinking mere nonsense. For that matter, when he discovers Plato’s exoteric practice of legislating and teaching new forms of piety, he discloses a certain form of that interweaving. Insofar as Plato created a new form of nomos decisively shaped by philosophy, did he introduce something “nonsensical”? The difference, one can surmise Strauss would claim, is that Plato’s thought is not itself in any way governed by the pious doctrines of virtue and the soul that he invents, whereas both Christian and modern thinkers are, by his account, blinded to the genuine freedom of philosophizing through the determining place revelation has in their self-understanding. The Enlightenment as a practical engagement against revelation, and the subordinate role given to theoretical reason with respect to the practical, are adduced as definite evidence of the unfreedom of the modern philosopher’s thought. Yet is the evidence so clear? Could not the modern philosopher’s primary self-presentation as a practical benefactor be an exoteric means through which the philosopher finds his way to “original natural freedom”?

Another way to approach Strauss’s thought is to return to an earlier point: the supremacy of the sacred text, of the book, in the traditions of revelation that Strauss treats as antithetical to philosophic “nature.” “The fact that a tradition based on revelation has come into the world of philosophy has increased the natural difficulties of philosophy by adding the historical difficulty.”²⁸ The natural difficulties of philosophy are presented poetically in the Platonic image of the cave. The historical difficulty can be illustrated by saying: “There is now yet another cave beneath the cave.” “The turn from admitted ignorance to book learning is not natural.”²⁹ Sacred writings—books—changed nomos so powerfully that philosophers had to begin, in their pursuit of the natural starting points, with the authority of the book, thereby losing sight of the true natural starting points. Yet some philosophers living in a world governed by the book, notably Muslim and Jewish medieval philosophers, discovered again the natural way, which involves the reinterpretation of revelation in terms of politics: the sacred law is political. But the modern philosophers replaced the books of revelation with the powerful rhetoric of new books—the polemical and politically revolutionary writings of Enlightenment. Paradoxically, postmodern philosophers must turn to the book—to historical studies—to discredit the authority of books and to uncover the Greek natural way of philosophizing in terms of the political and its law. And Strauss’s manner of pursuing the philosophical questions is through a close reading of books that has often been called “Talmudic,” with its search for the intricate hidden structure of the argument. Is this a philosophizing that can see its way toward, or transform itself into, a freedom from the book?

IV

After the Second World War, Strauss took up the reading of Heidegger with renewed interest. This was indeed in spite of Heidegger’s well-known sympathies for the National Socialist regime. But Heidegger’s philosophical work during the entire Nazi era had been unknown to the outside world (in fact he published very little in this period) until writings began to emerge in the late 1940s. Strauss turned back to Heidegger while investigating the problem of history and also reading Wilhelm Dilthey and Ernst Troeltsch. These reflections resulted in the lectures, and later the book, Natural Right and History. In a letter to Jacob Klein Strauss writes: “much has become clear to me which I actually no longer knew—above all, Heidegger, whose deinotes really far surpasses everything done in our time.”³⁰ He notes that “it seems to me that the problem of causality lies at the ground of this whole matter, which Heidegger indicates through the relation to ex nihilo nihil fit, but conceals through the ‘mood-based’-metaphysical interpretation of the nihil.”³¹ The matter (Angelegenheit) in question is evidently that of history. Noting that the basis of this causal problem is “Kant, or the unsolved Humean problem,” Strauss says that “the insight into the absurdity of Heidegger’s solution does not help in the decisive respect.” This statement, rather than being a simple dismissal of Heidegger, implies that Heidegger has exposed a genuine problem to which his approach (interpreting the absence of metaphysical insight into the causal ground of Being in terms of Dasein’s mood of anxiety) provides no solution. For Strauss it remains the case that the lack of a proof of ex nihilo nihil fit is a stumbling block for rationalist metaphysics, and in this sense he is a post-Kantian thinker for whom the “whole is mysterious.” Therewith the engagement in Nietzsche and Heidegger with revelation—at the limit of rational argument and explanation—remains for Strauss a philosophic stance worthy of respect. The issue for him, one can surmise, is whether one can acknowledge this limit of rationalism while not taking the turn toward biblical thinking in an “interweaving” of philosophy and revelation that results in the historical understanding of human thought.

After this date Strauss’s correspondence and his published statements on Heidegger of the period 1950–73 disclose two phases of Strauss’s thinking on Heidegger, shaped by two major publications: the collection of essays called Holzwege of 1950 and the lectures on Nietzsche delivered in 1936–41 and published as Nietzsche in 1961.³² These writings made Strauss aware of a new direction in Heidegger’s thought, which turned from the analysis in Being and Time of the temporal horizon of human existence (Dasein) as the access to the question of Being, toward Being itself as disclosing itself to the human in a relation of mutual dependence that grounds history through dispensations or “fates” that determine the human way of interpreting Being. Löwith in a letter to Strauss stressed the Hegelian aspect of this change: “‘Being’ is certainly a super-Hegelian ‘absolute’ and at the same time it absorbs the historicity of Dasein and renders it metaphysical. It is an ‘overcoming’ of historicism (in the usual sense) and at the same time the most radical historicism (in the Straussian sense).”³³ Löwith here refers to Strauss’s extension of the term “historicism” beyond its prevalent designation of nineteenth-century historical thought (the historical school, Troeltsch, Dilthey, etc.), which claimed in various ways to achieve a science of history, to apply as well to Nietzsche and Heidegger, for whom history (and therewith all human thought) has an inexplicable ground. Löwith adds that “Heidegger’s effort is a religious one.”

In reply Strauss writes that Heidegger is religious only in the sense that all moderns are. Yet Heidegger’s sharp turning from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche after Being and Time, which Strauss says “strongly speaks to me,” shows “where Heidegger wants to go.”³⁴ In this letter Strauss acknowledges the power of Heidegger’s critique of the tradition, although a doubt is expressed, and then essentially dismissed, about whether Heidegger is a philosopher. “I don’t know whether a true philosopher must have a good will, but in the end it comes down to the quality of his arguments.” Heidegger has “definitely refuted all that was and is in our century.” The central issue for Strauss is “whether he is right in his critique of Plato.” This concerns “whether the subordination of the question of Being to the question of the highest being is legitimate or, as Heidegger maintains, illegitimate.” Strauss concludes with noting that “the darkest point” in Heidegger’s thought is his assertion that “there are beings without Being,” that is, “Being, not beings, exists only insofar as Dasein exists.” This assertion is also mentioned in Natural Right and History as an apparent objection to Heidegger, who is there unnamed.³⁵

Somewhat later Strauss credits an article of Löwith with “helping to strengthen a newly awakened sympathy for Heidegger; for the Heidegger who is true to himself insofar as he makes no concessions to belief.”³⁶ All the same on the question of belief Strauss finds Heidegger “flat and insufficient” compared with the “now completely Christianized and forgotten Nietzsche.” Yet he sees both as striving in the direction beyond modernity (with its enduring Christian origins). “In Heidegger’s thought modernity comes to an end, and his thinking is thus important to us for that reason and only that reason, because we ourselves cannot be free of modernity when we do not understand it.”³⁷ For this aim it is especially important to be clear about the later Heidegger’s thought, which, however, maintains the primary motivation of Being and Time and does not question its fundamental historicist premise. A critical note is again sounded about Heidegger’s “absurd” claim that “there are beings—and not Being (Sein)—when there is no Dasein.” The recurrence of this issue shows that it weighs heavily on Strauss; he seems to brush Heidegger’s view aside, and yet it comes back to perplex him. In any case Strauss credits Heidegger, in making the movement from Existenz in Being and Time to Sein in the later writings, with achieving a “remarkable maturity” that leaves behind the “German youth-movement aura” of the earlier work.

Löwith’s account of the Nietzsche lectures, nearly ten years later, elicits from Strauss his strongest expressions of admiration. “I myself feel now more strongly than ever the attraction exercised by Heidegger.”³⁸ At this point there is a remarkable change of tone and stance toward Heidegger’s perplexing thought. Strauss speaks, against Löwith and on Heidegger’s behalf, on “Sein needing man.”

I believe that Heidegger’s view is supported by the difficulties to which the alternative is exposed: the self-sufficient God as ens perfectissimum, which necessarily leads to the radical degradation and devaluation of man. Differently stated, if Heidegger were wrong, man would be an accident, there would be no essential harmony between thinking and being, the hopeless difficulty of Kant’s thing-in-itself would arise.

If Being needs man, the implication is that without man there will be beings but not Being, or at least that Being cannot be fully Being without man. (This is not to say that man and Being are identical.) The thought Strauss earlier called absurd he now finds well supported. It is admittedly speculative to go further and suggest that Strauss, in accordance with this change, would now side with Heidegger’s criticism of Platonism, although Strauss more sharply than Heidegger distinguishes between Plato and Platonism. In his own radical readings of Platonic dialogues, Strauss maintains that the idea of the Good is not Plato’s final word and that the genuine Platonic account of the ideas is indicated in the deliberately abortive and playful presentations of descent from the Good or the One (the completion of dialectic in the move from higher ideas to lower through division or diairesis of kinds), which fail to achieve knowledge of determinate kinds. Only philosophy as love of wisdom, and not wisdom, is available to humans since the problem of the organization and structure of the realm of ideas must remain unsolved.³⁹ While noting some convergence between Strauss and Heidegger, one also has to observe the difference between them, which relates to Strauss’s uncovering of exoteric devices—and therewith his taking seriously the comic elements—in the Platonic art of writing dialogues, an approach to reading Plato not taken by Heidegger.⁴⁰

The remaining exchanges with Löwith on Heidegger focus chiefly on Löwith’s charge that Heidegger has misread Nietzsche’s intent and on Strauss’s defense of Heidegger. Strauss says he is reading the Nietzsche volumes, which have just appeared, while preparing a seminar on Beyond Good and Evil, and remarks that in spite of Heidegger’s questionable reading of what Nietzsche intended, “one may of course raise the question whether Nietzsche achieved what he intended and whether the difficulty which obstructed his return to ‘nature’ does not justify Heidegger’s own philosophic attempt and therewith also Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche. . . . What makes difficult Nietzsche’s return to phusis is of course ‘history,’ and it is history which is the starting point and the theme of Heidegger.”⁴¹ One can relate this point to Strauss’s observation in the 1930s that Nietzsche’s recovery of antiquity is obstructed by his modern account of freedom. Heidegger, while deeply indebted to Nietzsche, “is naturally concerned with avoiding the pitfalls into which Nietzsche fell.” Heidegger learned from Nietzsche and only from him that “There is no Without,” or “there can be no ‘objectivity’ in the last analysis. From this point of view ‘nature’ is no longer possible except as postulated in the critical moment.” Accordingly Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal return is “nature qua being through being postulated.” Strauss concludes that when one concentrates on Nietzsche’s radical historicism “there is no possibility known to me superior to Heidegger’s philosophic doctrine of which his interpretation of Nietzsche forms an integral part.”

This claim of Heidegger’s superiority could be read as referring only to Heidegger as the best Nietzsche interpreter or as the most consequential thinker on the basis of Nietzschean premises. Yet Strauss credits Heidegger, as has been shown, with insights on causality, God, and the relation of Being to man. These indications of agreement come close to suggesting that Strauss holds a version of the view that “There is no Without.” Indeed Löwith seems rather alarmed by what he calls Strauss’s “concession” to Heidegger, and he wonders whether Strauss finds something resonant in Heidegger’s “history of Being,” which Löwith finds to be only a “hypothetical construction.”⁴² Strauss replies, “I do not make ‘concessions’ to Heidegger,” which surely does not rule out agreement with Heidegger, since agreement is not concession.⁴³ Reminding Löwith of the contradiction between eternal return and freedom, he asks if Löwith did not himself assert that “the repetition of antiquity at the peak of modernity (as distinguished from unqualified return to the principles of antiquity) constitutes an insoluble difficulty? In other words you have to make a choice: Are the classical principles simply sound or is the modern criticism of these principles not partly justified?” Speaking of Heidegger’s history of Being (Seinsgeschichte), Strauss writes, “I do not understand the Seinsgeschichte, but many things he presents under this heading are intelligible to me, and some of them are in my opinion profound insights. Especially he has cleared up the relation between science, art, and will to power.” But a further remark makes clear that Heidegger is not a definitive interpreter of classical philosophy and that his criticisms of Plato miss the mark. “On the other hand I believe that what he says about the apriori in Plato and particularly on the idea of the good is simply wrong.” Although there is a rejoinder to Heidegger on Plato, it is unclear whether or to what extent it addresses the “insoluble difficulty” of “the repetition of antiquity.”

The penultimate letter to Löwith resumes the discussion of Heidegger.⁴⁴ Strauss complains that the account of nature that Löwith maintains against Heidegger’s historicism has no place for “the question of the pos bioteon,” the question of how one should live. Opposing both Löwith and Heidegger, Strauss asserts that the primary human concern is kata phusin zen, the concern with living rightly, living naturally. From this one can arrive at the answer of happiness as consisting in theoria, a way of life that is engaged with the world as a whole. But the question of the life according to nature is a question, the natural is not self-evident, and Heidegger is on surer ground than Löwith in this respect. Strauss does not endorse Heidegger’s view that “‘nature’ is only a specific interpretation of states of affairs that can be more fittingly designated by something like his ‘fourfold’ [Geviert],” but he asks, “Do the Japanese have a word for ‘nature’? The biblical Jews have none. The Hebrew word for ‘nature’ is a translation of [ancient Greek] charakter.” In another context Strauss makes the related point that Heidegger correctly grasps that the words for “thinking” in Western languages may offer only a limited basis for approaching what thinking is.⁴⁵ In other words, “nature” is a problem, one with which we in the West necessarily begin. The only position that can be superior to Heidegger’s is one that nondogmatically examines our most basic premises, and even in this regard Heidegger surpasses all his contemporaries. In any event, it is notable that in these exchanges with Löwith Strauss does not revert to his language of the “second cave” and seems not inclined to speak of the modern starting point as an unnatural condition for “natural beings.” Also absent is the earlier charge that Heidegger’s thought makes the unreflective assumption of “progress” over the Greeks on the basis of its appropriation of Christian categories. The later Heidegger cannot be set aside so easily.

In his final letter to Löwith, Strauss makes this comment on Heidegger: “For some time it has struck me that to my knowledge there is not a single place in Heidegger’s writings where the name of Jesus appears, not even ‘Christus’ (unless it happens in a Hölderlin interpretation that I do not know). That is indeed very remarkable.”⁴⁶ Although Heidegger’s thought is not in its later form specifically Christian, the question remains for Strauss (as other sources show)⁴⁷ whether Heidegger does not continue to develop an “interweaving” of philosophy and revelation in relation to his fundamental historicist premise.

V

These thoughts of later letters are usefully juxtaposed with a lecture given at St. John’s College in 1970, “The Problem of Socrates,” which contains one of Strauss’s most extended public statements on Heidegger.⁴⁸ For present purposes I focus on only certain remarks, and to begin with, the notable comment “in all important respects Heidegger does not make things obscurer than they are,” which takes direct issue with Georg Lukács and others who claim that Heidegger renders Being unintelligible. “Lukács only harmed himself by not learning from Heidegger,” whose “understanding of the contemporary world is more comprehensive and more profound than Marx’s.”⁴⁹ These comments immediately follow a paragraph in which Strauss remarks that Heidegger’s claim that the origin of man is a mystery is a “sensible result” of an argument, which Strauss summarizes: “(1) Sein [Being] cannot be explained by Seiendes [being or entity]—cf. causality cannot be explained causally—(2) Man is the being constituted by Sein—indissolubly linked with it > man participates in the inexplicability of Sein.”⁵⁰ In this context Strauss again refers to the problem of causality in Kant, “Kant found ‘nowhere even an attempt of a proof’ of ex nihilo nihil fit,” and notes that Kant’s transcendental legitimation of this principle as necessary for rendering possible any possible experience points to the primacy of practical reason. Then “in the same spirit” he quotes Heidegger in German: “Die Freiheit ist der Ursprung des Satzes vom Grunde (Freedom is the origin of the principle of sufficient reason).” One has to take Strauss as agreeing with Kant and Heidegger that there is no purely theoretical grounding of the principle of intelligible causality, i.e., the principle that Being is grounded only in causes available to human understanding. The origin of Being, therewith of man as open to Being, is a mystery. But there is no endorsement of Kant’s resolution, which is grounded in morality or practical reason, or of Heidegger’s interpretation of freedom as the ground of the principle.⁵¹ On the other hand the positions of Kant and Heidegger suggest that the absence of a theoretical proof poses a problem for morality or practical reason: morality, but perhaps not philosophy in the “purest,” Socratic sense, demands such proof or something that takes the place of such proof on a prephilosophic plane. The positions of Kant and Heidegger point to the interweaving of philosophy and moral or religious concerns in their thought—to the “primacy of the practical” characteristic of modern philosophy.⁵²

The lecture begins with “the problem of Socrates” as renewed by Nietzsche, who saw in Socrates the optimistic rationalist who held that “thinking can not only fully understand being but can even correct it; life can be guided by science.”⁵³ For Nietzsche the crisis of the entire rationalist tradition, with the exposure of the groundlessness of its ultimate fruit, “the belief in universal enlightenment and therewith in the earthly happiness of all within a universal society,” has made necessary the questioning of its origin. Nietzsche sees in Socrates “the single turning point and vortex of so-called world history,” and on the basis of insight into the essential limitations of science Nietzsche declares, “the time of Socratic man has gone.” Strauss brings forward Xenophon, not Plato, as a corrective to Nietzsche. Xenophon hints at but conceals Socrates’s radicality. He minimizes the difference between Socrates and the gentleman for whom “nothing is more characteristic than respect for the law.” It was the heart of Socrates’s theoretical activity to call into question the authority of the law, to expose its human origin, “for laws depend on the regime.” Yet Xenophon’s Socrates never raises the question ti esti nomos (What is law?).⁵⁴ In other words, Strauss suggests that Xenophon saw, but did not expose, something missed by the later tradition, after Plato and including Nietzsche and Heidegger, namely Socrates’s radical freedom from every sort of moralism and thereby from optimistic rationalism. Thus Xenophon’s silence (he “points to the core of Socrates’ life or thought but does not present it sufficiently or at all”) seems to speak eloquently of a radicality never fully described or presented in any of the other portrayals of Socrates, whether by friend or foe.

That the philosophies of Nietzsche and Heidegger remain restricted to the horizon of history is directly related, in Strauss’s judgment, to their failure to grasp this true radicality. Strauss adduces a metaphysical consideration at this point. Heidegger rightly stresses the mystery of the human origin, but for Strauss, in contrast with Heidegger, “it seems that one cannot avoid the question of what is responsible for the emergence of man and of Sein, or of what brings them out of nothing.” Granting that Sein “is the ground of all beings and especially of man” and that this “ground of grounds is coeval with man and therefore also not eternal or sempiternal,” there remains this consideration: “Sein cannot be the complete ground of man.” Sein is the essence of man, the what of man, but not of the emergence of man, the that of man.⁵⁵ To remain open to the question of the ground of the that is to remain open to a possible ground beyond Being, and therefore beyond history and time. This is not to say that an answer to this question is available to human reason. In other words, Strauss agrees with Heidegger that Being, as the ground of the openness to beings, is coeval with man and history. But something crucial to the human is not coeval with its history, namely, its coming into being, its prehistory. The need to bear in mind the question of the prehistorical origin seems connected to Strauss’s appreciation of Socratic philosophy as open to questions that transcend altogether the moral and the political realm, while being aware of the difficulties such questions cause for practical human life. In this way Socratic questioning exposes a duality in the human—as both belonging to the moral and political realm and transcending it. A philosophy that would overcome that duality by limiting reflection to the historical disclosures of Being is avowedly or unavowedly governed by political concerns, and this, in Strauss’s estimation, has been true of modern philosophy from its inception.