CHAPTER 3

On Caves and Histories: Strauss’s Post-Nietzschean Socratism

I

In a public lecture delivered in Syracuse, New York, in 1940, Leo Strauss gives an account of the roots of his inquiries in the German situation of philosophy after the First World War.¹ It is a bold statement in that Strauss acknowledges that his greatest philosophic debt is to Nietzsche and Heidegger, two thinkers in different ways associated with the current German regime with which Strauss’s recently adopted homeland was gradually sliding into war. The significance Strauss accords to Nietzsche in the lecture can be summarized briefly. Nietzsche called into question more powerfully than any other figure the modern beliefs in the scientific solubility of human problems and in the progressive view of civilization as a meaningful process culminating in human perfection. His critique of modern civilization was made in the name of classical antiquity. While maintaining that all truth is historical, Nietzsche saw the problem in regarding the historicist premise as an objective theoretical premise, and accordingly he called for a historical consciousness whose sole basis is the promotion of life. Nietzsche carried forward a German tradition of criticism of science-based civilization—a tradition that began with Rousseau’s criticism of civilization on behalf of original nature, and that became in Kant and his heirs an idealistic critique on behalf of freedom. Whereas Hegel and others had appealed to history—the realm of rational freedom or Spirit, realized uniquely in the modern West—as the ground of human dignity and elevation above mere nature, Nietzsche made history problematic in light of his own account of nature or “life” (or “existence” as it became known in the existential movement), thereby questioning the prevailing assumption of the superiority of the modern West to all other civilizations. Through this critique Nietzsche’s philosophy “was the most powerful single factor in German postwar philosophy.”²

The opening paragraphs of the lecture are remarkable for their assessment of the German philosophic tradition and perhaps even more for the way in which Strauss situates his thought in relation to it. He begins with the statement that “both the intellectual glory and the political misery of Germans may be traced back to one and the same cause: German civilization is considerably younger than the civilization of the West.” The Germans on the one hand have had less experience of being citizens—free citizens—than their Western neighbors. On the other, their philosophic tradition has developed a criticism of civilization—of the very idea of civilization, but especially of the modern form. Strauss implies that this criticism, like the political inexperience, is made possible by the youthfulness of German civilization. He notes that this criticism is disastrous in the political field “but necessary in the philosophical, in the theoretical field.” These remarks reveal how experience of the situation of Germany granted Strauss insight into the conflicting requirements of politics and philosophy: political success and philosophic depth do not combine easily. But furthermore they show that Strauss sees himself in some sense as carrying forward the German critique, especially Nietzsche’s version of it, as philosophically necessary. For the “process of civilization means an increasing going away from the natural condition of man, and increasing forgetting of that situation,” and perhaps one needs an “acute recollection” of that situation if one is to understand “the natural, the basic problems of philosophy.” Strauss refers to Nietzsche’s description of German thought as a longing for the past and for origins, and most of all for building a bridge leading back from the modern world to the world of Greece. Implicitly Strauss allies himself with this tendency in two ways. He is in accord with this tradition insofar as it has seen a theoretical problem in the ideas of progress and science-based civilization central to the Western Enlightenment, and thus on a practical plane he cannot deny having profound misgivings about the modern democratic natural right tradition, which his adopted country is dedicated to defending. At the same time Strauss regards the practical attempts, i.e., German attempts, to reverse the modern development as having politically disastrous consequences, and he makes clear that such consequences cannot be separated from a theoretical critique of the German tradition. Strauss might be said to concur with Nietzsche’s dictum on the Germans if its meaning is restricted to philosophy and excludes a political sense: “They belong to the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow—as yet they have no today.”³ Does philosophy ever have a “today” politically? As Strauss sees in his own case the fate of genuine philosophy at all times is homelessness.

Strauss notes that Nietzsche changed the intellectual climate of Europe as Rousseau had about 120 years before, and that “the work of Nietzsche is as ambiguous as that of Rousseau.” In spite of Nietzsche’s enormous impact on politics, “if I understand him correctly, his deepest concern was with philosophy, not politics.”⁴ Nietzsche’s claim is that genuine philosophy is the concern of “natural men . . . men who do not need the shelter of the cave, of any cave.” He decried an artificial protection against the elementary problems not only in the premodern tradition (of providence) but likewise in the modern tradition. It was against “history,” against the belief that “history” can decide any question, that progress can ever make superfluous the discussion of the primary questions, against the belief that history, that indeed any human things, are the elementary subject of philosophy, that he reasserted hypothetically the doctrine of eternal return. Through this assertion he sought to “drive home that the elementary, the natural subject of philosophy still is, and always will be, as it had been for the Greeks: the kosmos, the world.”⁵ In the midst of this paragraph Strauss inserts parenthetically and in quotes “philosophy and the State are incompatible,” whereby he raises a primary theme of Nietzsche inseparable from the stress on the cosmic core of philosophy, and at the same time he points to the true meaning of his own concentration on “political philosophy.” The passage thus makes evident that Nietzsche led Strauss toward his reflection on the tension between philosophy and politics, or on the necessary duality in human ends, before Strauss took up examining it in the premodern authors.

For Strauss, modernity’s effort to reconcile philosophy and politics, in which the critique of orthodoxy and revelation (the Enlightenment’s replacement of “political theology” by rational theology and “culture”)⁶ was the crucial negative instrument, and whose high point is Hegel’s system, had been problematic from the standpoint of his early questions about the possibility for the renewal of Judaism under modern conditions.⁷ It became clear to Strauss that the modern philosophic critique of revelation rested not on an adequate refutation, grounded in a comprehensive account of nature as whole, but on the assertion of a human construct—the new political order of natural rights and of humanly constructed culture—intended to replace any consideration of the superhuman whole. Accordingly the will-based modern construction rests as much as revelation on an act of faith and can claim no theoretical superiority. The actualization of wisdom seemed to be realized in the new political order, through the creation of conditions supportive of the freedom to pursue philosophy. As founder of this political-philosophical reconciliation, Hobbes (or Machiavelli before Hobbes, as Strauss would claim later) had given political philosophy an unprecedented importance, whereby it achieves political results far exceeding the political expectations of the classics.⁸ But philosophy achieves the resolution of its tension with politics at the price of abandoning its genuine object, the reflection on the superhuman (and supramoral) whole. The autobiographical lecture indicates that Strauss turned from concentrating on the consequences of modern thought for Jewish questions and, in more Nietzschean (and ultimately classical) spirit, focused on its consequences for philosophy. The lecture makes clear that Strauss’s prime concern was not with politics as such.⁹

One could say that Nietzsche exposed an apparently tragic and insuperable problem: that the moral-political order that guarantees security and freedom to the highest human activity, the contemplation of the eternal and cosmic whole, also diminishes the goals and character of that activity, turning the philosophic life into a human-all-too-human dedication to the progress and welfare of mankind. This again is what Nietzsche rejected in modern philosophy, modern scholarship, and the educational system of the modern state: their self-imposed subservience to history and the “needs of the age.” Although Nietzsche exposed the problem of the modern historical consciousness and took the first steps toward transcending it, Strauss found that Nietzsche did not investigate the sources of that consciousness and understand how it had become necessary.¹⁰ The genetic account of the historical consciousness—an account that did not assume the truth of historicism, one seeking the adequate overcoming of “history” that Nietzsche had not achieved—became a central part of Strauss’s philosophical endeavor. In the 1940 lecture, Strauss mentions that he saw the first stirring of the historical consciousness in the seventeenth-century foundations of modernity¹¹ and he refers to Descartes’s methodical break with “natural knowledge” as a primary source.¹² Strauss concluded it was necessary to clarify this origin with “the eyes of pre-modern philosophy,” and Socrates offered the classic example of the philosopher who starts from the natural view of the world, the world as known prior to the scientific modification of it. But precisely on that point there was an immense theoretical obstacle, one posed by Nietzsche himself.

Nietzsche forcefully argued that Socrates is the thinker who initiates the flight from the elementary problems into the protection offered by an “optimistic” account of the power of reason to overcome the evils inherent in Being. Nietzsche asks: Did not Socrates turn philosophy away from the contemplation of the suprahuman and supramoral cosmos, the magnificent theme of his predecessors, and subordinate philosophy to moral and political concerns, shoring up this turn with arguments and myths about providential supports for the life of virtue? In later writings Strauss continues to credit Nietzsche with reviving the “problem of Socrates” and compelling admirers of the classical alternatives to modernity to return to the sources of our knowledge of Socrates for a careful reconsideration. Strauss noted the kinship between the Aristophanic and the Nietzschean critiques of Socrates, as both concern not only the young Socrates’s reckless disregard of pious and noble tradition but his failure to be an “erotic” thinker.¹³ The outcome of Strauss’s investigation of the Platonic and Xenophonic defenses of Socrates is not only to underscore the practical prudence and moderation of the mature Socrates but (since philosophic thought is inherently “manic”) to disclose Socrates’s awareness of the tension between erotic philosophizing and the requirements of political life.

The lecture’s remarks on the origins of Strauss’s critical genealogy of historicism in confrontation with Nietzsche show that it was animated not so much by the need to refute the relativism of values as by a desire to carry forward, beyond Nietzsche’s own historicism, the attack of Nietzsche on the modern unification of philosophy and history, which claimed to be the definitive solution to the human problems. The true issue is not skepticism but the dogmatism of alleged progress. Strauss was thus led to reconsider the classical reflection on the contrast between the “cave” of political life and the natural good of philosophy—not for the advantage of politics but for that of philosophy. All the same this renewed study was “both necessary and tentative or experimental,” since not only Nietzsche but all of modern philosophy spoke against the possibility of a return to classical philosophy in its original form.¹⁴ Strauss wondered whether the original Socrates did not philosophize in a way that is as “natural” and open to the problems, without the intellectual protection of the cave, as Nietzsche’s own example of genuine philosophizing. In his pursuit of this possibility, Strauss was assisted by other developments in the German situation besides Nietzsche, as the prestige of modern science (and hence modern philosophy) was under broad siege. Max Weber’s defense of the vocation of science revealed science in the modern sense as unable to justify the choice of itself as way of life or to offer any wisdom. Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology exposed the inadequate starting point of all modern philosophic and scientific explanation and called for a return to “things themselves” by careful description of the prescientific understanding of the world.¹⁵ Husserl proposed a new form of “rigorous science,” but the prevailing mood was to turn away from science in any form to other grounds of authority, above all revelation (Karl Barth and Franz Rosenzweig as leading versions of the “new thinking” in theology) and the absolute obligation to the state (Carl Schmitt). But most important for the philosophic critique of modern rationalism, as offering a new opening to premodern philosophy, was the thought of Husserl’s young student: Martin Heidegger.

Strauss remarks that Heidegger’s teaching, which he heard in Freiburg in summer 1922, “made perhaps the most profound impression which the younger generation experienced in Germany” in the postwar period, for under his guidance “people came to see that Aristotle and Plato had not been understood.”¹⁶ Modern philosophy came into being through a refutation of the Aristotelian philosophy, but Heidegger showed that the founders of modern philosophy had refuted only the Aristotelians of their time without understanding Aristotle himself. And a thinker “cannot have been refuted if he has not been understood.” Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle, “an achievement with which I cannot compare any other intellectual phenomenon” of the period, demonstrated the decisive role of interpretation in the recovery of lost philosophical questions. For Strauss a consequence of Heidegger’s “destruction” of the tradition was the insight that “la querelle des anciens et des modernes must be renewed” and staged with greater fairness and greater knowledge than in the original quarrel of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.¹⁷

II

It must be noted that this brief yet highly revealing remark on Heidegger’s significance with respect to classical philosophy was not Strauss’s last such statement. Indeed in the later years of his life Strauss was expansive on the subject,¹⁸ following a long period of reserve in public pronouncements, during which, however, there are numerous comments and references, often without naming Heidegger. Strauss wrote one of his most pregnant utterances on Heidegger in a prologue to a lecture in 1959 which was not delivered. Here he remarks that “no one has questioned the premise of philosophy as radically as Heidegger” and that “by uprooting and not simply rejecting the tradition of philosophy, [Heidegger] made it possible for the first time after many centuries . . . to see the roots of the tradition as they are.”¹⁹ Some eleven years later a public account of Heidegger’s importance, again linking his thought to classical philosophy, ends with this comment: “What distinguishes present-day philosophy in its highest form, in its Heideggerian form, from classical philosophy is its historical character; it presupposes the so-called historical consciousness.”²⁰ The statement implies the closeness of Heidegger’s thought to classical philosophy (one cannot imagine any sentence that would begin “What distinguishes logical positivism from classical philosophy . . .”) but also points expressly to what separates Heidegger’s thought from Strauss’s approach to classical philosophy through political philosophy: “I was confirmed in my concentration on the tension between philosophy and the polis, i.e. on the highest theme of political philosophy, by this consideration.” In compressed fashion, Strauss suggests that classical political philosophy as reflection on the “tension” provides the means to understand the genesis of the historical consciousness, since that consciousness results from modern philosophy’s effort, in a break with classical thought, to resolve the tension. Thus one must understand the historical consciousness as arising from the break with the ancient account of philosophy as essentially suprapolitical, or as transcending the cave in thought. “Politics and political philosophy is the matrix of the historical consciousness.” Heidegger did not uncover the roots of the historical consciousness, simply presupposing the validity thereof, whereas Strauss saw the grounds of that consciousness in questionable modern attempts to resolve the central problem of political philosophy as expounded by Socrates.²¹

Yet in other respects Strauss avows a close kinship between classical thought and Heidegger. Thus he notes in one passage from lectures of 1954–55 (where Heidegger is not mentioned) that historicism is “the serious antagonist of political philosophy” because of its superiority to positivism on the following: (1) It abandons the distinction between facts and values, since all understanding involves evaluation; (2) It denies the authoritative character of modern science, as only one form of human orientation in the world; (3) It refuses to regard the historical process as progressive and reasonable; (4) It denies that the evolutionist thesis makes intelligible the emergence of the human from the nonhuman.²² This restates essentially what Strauss in the 1940 lecture described as the fundamental questioning of modern premises by German thought in the early decades of the century, especially by Heidegger, which questioning offered a problematic and incomplete liberation from modern philosophy. While such passages confirm the view that a primary impulse to turn to classical philosophy came from Heidegger, it is also the case that Strauss was just as struck by alien elements in Heidegger’s pre-1933 thinking, beyond the persistence of historicism. (Strauss’s alienation was of course confirmed and strengthened by Heidegger’s endorsement of Nazism.)²³ The elements in question Strauss characterized as Heidegger’s effort in Being and Time (1927) to provide an atheistic interpretation of biblical experience or to give an account of human existence in Christian categories, together with the lack of any ethics in his thinking.²⁴

A renewed and deeper engagement with Heidegger occurred in the 1950s as Strauss acquired the publications of the later thought, whose character and direction were largely unknown to the world as it developed during the dark period 1933–45 when Heidegger published little.²⁵ Evidence of Strauss’s appreciation of the so-called “turn” in Heidegger’s thought²⁶ is found in a 1956 lecture giving a detailed account of Heidegger’s self-criticism.²⁷ Strauss notes that Heidegger pursued a deeper critique of the philosophic tradition as he sought to overcome the persisting elements of modern subjectivity in his earlier “existentialist” phase, culminating in Being and Time. No longer does Heidegger emphasize authentic resoluteness of will as the ground of projected ideals of existence—the response of the early Heidegger to the loss of all absolute grounds of authority, including the failure of scientific rationalism to authorize itself. Heidegger’s later thinking surely has continuity with the earlier as engagement with the question of Being, but it relates to the earlier thought in the way that Hegel’s philosophy (on Hegel’s own estimation) relates to Kant’s, as the deeper fulfillment of Kant’s intention. A return to something like metaphysics is necessary, although “the return to metaphysics is impossible. But what is needed is some repetition of what metaphysics intended on an entirely different plane.” Thus Heidegger develops a higher reflection on historicity as grounded in Being that surpasses (or comprehends without simply negating) the existential account of the temporality of human being-there (Dasein) as the horizon for interpreting Being.²⁸ Strauss too, it must be noted, undertakes a return to classical thought without a return to metaphysics as the tradition conceives it, and also in his way seeks to recover “what metaphysics intended,” wherewith he would transcend modernity. Strauss also observes that Heidegger had uncovered fundamental flaws in Nietzsche’s attempt to overcome modernity through his account of Being as will to power. Accordingly it was necessary to examine Heidegger’s claim to have achieved the standpoint of an overcoming that is no longer, as is Nietzsche’s thought, hobbled by internal contradiction.²⁹

There are many indications that Strauss considered it essential to test his own approach against this later direction of Heidegger (as in the statement cited above, “I was confirmed . . .”) and that a true transcending of modernity required coming to terms with his thinking.³⁰ We have seen a number of such statements in the correspondence, but they also occur in public utterances. Not merely did Heidegger question rationalism; he showed that all rationalism is genuinely questionable.³¹ Heidegger’s later thinking in particular raised the issue of whether he had revealed a true limitation in Platonic philosophy.³² Heidegger uncovered a possibility of thinking about Being that was not merely humanistic, while revealing that the human is “needed” by Being,³³ a way of thinking for which Strauss disclosed a certain sympathy. It seems that Heidegger pointed to inescapable difficulties for any attempt to understand the Good as a highest being or cause in the metaphysical sense, and yet his thinking is to be faulted for abandoning the question of the Good altogether.³⁴ At the heart of Strauss’s reconsideration of Socratic philosophy is the inquiry into whether the question of the Good can be accorded due centrality in philosophy, while acknowledging the metaphysical or cosmological problem uncovered by Heidegger.³⁵ Can the question of the Good be regarded as the opening to Being or the whole without implying a merely “humanistic” or anthropocentric account of the whole?³⁶ Strauss turned to the sources of Socratic philosophy to explore the possibility that such a way of thought is the core of the Socratic dialectic. In what follows I outline fundamental tenets of this Socratism as they appear chiefly in writings from the 1950s and early 1960s.

III

Strauss states that “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.”³⁷ “In its original form political philosophy broadly understood is the core of philosophy or rather ‘the first philosophy.’”³⁸ “We have learned from Socrates that the political things, or the human things, are the key to the understanding of all things.”³⁹ How can one justify giving the study of politics this privileged place in philosophy? Let us consider how Strauss characterizes the “new approach to the understanding all things.” Socrates identified the science of the whole with the understanding of what each of the beings is, that is, he understood being such that “to be” is “to be a part,” an intelligibly distinct or noetically heterogeneous part of the whole. The intelligible parts are the classes or kinds of things that first become known through their manifest shape or form and that cease to be intelligible if reduced to allegedly more primary elements, as was done by Socrates’s philosophic predecessors. The surface of things, or what is “first for us,” is the guide to the articulation of the whole. This new approach to the study of the whole favored the study of the human things.⁴⁰ The whole as such, however, is “beyond being,” and the roots of the whole from which it arises may not be accessible to human thought. Therefore the knowledge of parts is itself not perfect knowledge. “There is no knowledge of the whole but only knowledge of parts, hence only partial knowledge of parts, hence no unqualified transcending, even by the wisest man as such, of the sphere of opinion.”⁴¹ Thus Socratic philosophy is “knowledge that one does not know; that is to say, it is knowledge of what one does not know, or awareness of the fundamental problems and, therewith, of the fundamental alternatives regarding their solution that are coeval with human thought.”⁴² Such formulations do not make immediately evident, however, why the concentration on intelligible parts and the avowal of the elusiveness of the whole should lead to (or be the same as) the view that the political things, among all of the parts of the whole, are “the key to the understanding of all things.”

One must turn to more formulations on Socratic philosophy. “Knowledge of ignorance is not ignorance. It is knowledge of the elusive character of the truth, of the whole.” In light of the mysteriousness of the whole, philosophy articulates the more familiar “situation of man as man,” which does not entail leaving the question of the whole behind, since to articulate the human situation “means to articulate man’s openness to the whole.”⁴³ To articulate the human situation as including “the quest for cosmology rather than a solution to the cosmological problem” was “the foundation of classical political philosophy.” The crucial term is “openness to the whole,” which is the basis for the quest for cosmology. To articulate that openness is to acquire knowledge of “the fundamental and permanent problems,” which according to Strauss are “the unchangeable ideas.” Human openness to the whole is inherently problematic, and articulating the problems inherent in that openness is the same as articulating the structure of the human soul. Among all the parts of the whole, the human soul has a unique place. “The human soul is the only part of the whole which is open to the whole and therefore more akin to the whole than anything else.”⁴⁴ Owing to this kinship “the true knowledge of the souls, and hence of the soul, is the core of cosmology.”⁴⁵ But again one must underscore the problematic character of this knowledge: the true knowledge of the soul is knowledge of the problems inherent in human openness—problems that must be confronted by the quest for cosmology. There is no access to the whole or the cosmos that can bypass or ignore those problems. One could say the problems belong to the possibility of the access to the whole (they do not merely obscure it, much less prevent it). But where do the problems inherent in human openness have their most familiar forms, where are they most manifest or “writ large”? Socrates’s answer, according to Strauss: in the political realm.

One can regard this interpretation of the Socratic turn as Strauss’s way of taking the phenomenological turn to “things themselves” and to the “natural understanding” of which the scientific understanding is only a modification, but Strauss notes that Heidegger’s version of phenomenology had the advantage over Husserl’s of emphasizing the human practical engagement with things. “The natural world, the world we live in and act, is not the object or product of the theoretical attitude; it is a world not of mere objects at which we detachedly look but of ‘things’ or ‘affairs’ which we handle.”⁴⁶ The reference is to Heidegger’s analysis of human being-in-the-world as the concern with pragmata, which is undertaken not for its own sake but to disclose the temporal horizon for the interpretation of Being. The analysis is only preparatory to recovering the meaning of the ancient question “What is Being?” Similarly, Strauss understands the Socratic turn to the speeches and opinions that guide the analysis of the political things as conducted not in order to arrive at norms and dicta (or natural laws) based on commonsense beliefs, but to articulate the human openness to the whole. This is the Socratic path to the question of Being, a superior path to those followed in the phenomenological movement. The political-moral “surface” of life contains the fundamental problems, which do not adequately emerge if one focuses on such notions as concern with pragmata, the life-world, or “embodied experience.” Only when the problems inherent in moral-political life are allowed to unfold can one then uncover the starting points of philosophy. As Strauss puts it, the renewal of Socratic philosophy considers what is first for us for the sake of an “unbiased reconsideration of the most elementary premises whose validity is presupposed by philosophy.”⁴⁷ At the same time, the uncovering of the problems calls for a historical and “destructive” aspect, as we have seen, since the philosophic tradition has overlaid the surface of primary questions with a tradition of other concepts: historical inquiries are necessary to ascend from the “cave beneath the cave.”

To take the account a step further, the Socratic inquiry (which in Strauss’s renewal has to be assisted by historical investigations) turns to prephilosophic opinions about such things as the good, the just, and the noble that form the core of moral-political life, which itself is always a realm of debate and controversy. The examination of such opinions, guided by the philosopher’s quest for knowledge of the whole, leads to uncovering contradictions and obscurities in these opinions. This in turn leads to the thought that the conflicting opinions exist merely through being humanly held or that they are conventional, and then to the question of whether there may be some thoughts on such matters that are not merely humanly held or humanly made and that are “by nature.” The questions arise about “what is by nature” right, noble, and good, and a dialectical ascent is attempted from established law to nature. But thereby the authoritative opinions of the city, and preeminently the pious opinions about divinely grounded law, are put in doubt.⁴⁸

Strauss’s claim that this Socratic attempt is aporetic or “knowledge of ignorance” may occasion a misunderstanding, for this does not mean that the effort makes no progress in articulating the opinions and in arriving at cogent distinctions between fundamental notions (between the noble and the good, between merely moral virtue and philosophic virtue, etc.), and even in establishing a certain natural order or hierarchy of notions. But Socrates uncovers such distinctions ultimately to illuminate what is hidden, or presupposed, behind what is revealed. All prephilosophic opinions are implicitly opinions about the whole, about what is primary within it and what structures or governs it. “All knowledge, however limited or ‘scientific’ presupposes a horizon, a comprehensive view within which knowledge is possible,” or “all understanding presupposes a fundamental awareness of the whole,” which Plato describes metaphorically as “a vision of the ideas, a vision of the articulated whole.”⁴⁹ Knowledge of aporia or of ignorance arises in the attempt to uncover the intelligible composition and unity of the articulated opinions or “parts”—in attempting to move from the natures of parts to nature as whole. Indeed there could be no uncovering of a problem of the whole—the knowledge of the problem that is “knowledge of ignorance”—without making progress in the articulation of parts. This again is to say that the “fundamental problems” are essential to the access to the whole and do not merely obscure or obstruct it.

The problematic effort of dialectical ascent puts the philosopher at odds with the traditional laws and customs of the city, as noted. The ongoing questioning about ultimate matters not only results in suspension of belief in the traditional laws but also denies the philosopher the leisure needed for participation in the activities of citizenship. Even so, it is misleading to describe the philosophic life in terms of a “resolve to think freely” and to contrast that freedom to “obedience to the laws.”⁵⁰ This describes the philosopher’s quest in moral terms, as confrontation with the law and morality, without providing a motive for such confrontation. It abstracts from the content of philosophy, as knowledge of fundamental problems. Similarly the philosopher’s effort is not exhausted in attempts to “justify” his activity with respect to the claims of the laws. “To articulate the problem of cosmology means to answer the question of what philosophy is or what a philosopher is.”⁵¹ Even so, it is crucial to Strauss’s account of the Socratic approach that the tension between philosophic inquiry and authoritative custom is at the heart of the articulation of human openness to the whole. The tension occasions not only a practical problem of prudence but a theoretical problem. The reflection on this tension is at stake when Strauss claims that for Socrates the human things are “the clue to the whole.”⁵² In terms of the Socratic turn to the noetically heterogeneous parts, the Socratic philosopher grasps that “the political things are a class by themselves, that there is an essential difference between political things and things which are not political.” What is of most concern is the difference: “There is an essential difference between the common good and the private or sectional good.”

It is above all to reflect on that difference that Socrates examines the common opinions about the just, the noble, the good, and so on. To say “Socrates is the first philosopher to do justice to the claim of the political” is to say that he is the first to see the full import of the nonreducible difference between the political and the nonpolitical; it “means he also realized the limitations of that claim. Hence he distinguished between two ways of life, the political life, and one which transcends the political life and which is the highest.”⁵³ This “difference” proves to be the crucial articulation of parts that provides the “clue to the whole.” One is easily tempted to say that the articulation is only a matter of exposing the nullity of the claims of politics and morality, of discrediting the authoritative laws and beliefs so as to show that the true whole is correctly grasped by the philosopher as simply transpolitical and transmoral. Strauss’s own language at times could suggest this, as in the praise of Nietzsche’s attempt to recover the “natural” way of philosophy in the 1940 lecture. But this would be to overlook the subtle point Strauss makes about the access to the whole as an access through problems. It cannot be the case that the political-moral realm is grounded in mere illusion if there is an essential difference between the political and the nonpolitical, or a natural articulation of two competing claims on human life.

In doing justice to the claims of the political, Socrates notes its practical priority as the most “urgent.” The political realm, because it addresses the most urgent human concerns, may have its true dignity as the condition for what is higher, the life of inquiry. But as such it is not in itself simply cut off from what is higher. “The political things and their corollaries are the form in which the highest principles first come to sight.” Indeed through the political things the whole itself comes to sight “since they are the link between what is highest and what is lowest, or since man is a microcosm.”⁵⁴ That the political realm is not simply the “other” of the nonpolitical, and that it transcends itself by pointing beyond itself to the “difference” while not overcoming its own limitations, is what I take Strauss to mean by the “theological-political problem,” which he never expressly defines.⁵⁵ The problem is not simply the tension between philosophy and the political but the tension within the political itself, which is a tension within the human soul, making philosophy possible. Philosophy makes that tension explicit and thematic and thereby in a certain way achieves a coherent life that is not bound to the political and its internal rifts. The political is indeed paradoxical, insofar as it is essentially different from what transcends it and yet points beyond itself toward it. But that is the paradoxical quality of the human soul, which is both a part of the whole and yet open to the whole beyond itself and akin to it. The study of politics is the study that most reveals the nature of the soul; at the same time, it allows one to see how the soul is the adumbration of the whole. The togetherness of the inherently urgent or compelled and the inherently free or pleasant in this “part” of the whole raises a perplexity about the whole itself. “The whole is not one, nor homogeneous, but heterogeneous.” This peculiar class, the political things, with its difference from other classes, being internally differentiated, linking the high and the low, is the clue to cosmic difference.⁵⁶ And thus “the most important truth is the obvious truth, the truth of the surface.” The common view that noble things are not reducible simply to the pleasant is a clue to the character of the whole. But it can be such a clue only by way of philosophic reflection on the relation of the two as a problem. To describe Socrates as the “founder of political science” is to say he is the founder of the study of politics as offering philosophic access to the character of Being.

IV

Strauss characterizes this situation by employing the Platonic image of the cave. By his own account it is a problematic image involving a deliberate overstatement, in keeping with an abstractive feature of the Republic as whole, namely, its suppression of eros. The image shows this in two ways, by denying that the cave dwellers have any desire for what lies beyond the shadows they see, and by denying that philosophic souls who escape the cave have any eros for the political communities they leave behind. Both cave dwellers and philosophers must be compelled if they are to leave their congenial place and move toward the other place.⁵⁷ But such dramatic exaggerations in Plato have the effect of bringing forward truth. Strauss expresses it this way: “The city is both closed to the whole and open to the whole.” Political life is “life in the cave which is partly closed off by a wall from life in the light of the sun. The city is the only whole within the whole or the only part of the whole whose essence can be wholly known.”⁵⁸

Political life is not just a part but a whole, albeit one that seems to its residents more whole and complete than it is. Its way of seeming to be complete to itself is, one could say, its essence. Yet it may be an exaggeration on Strauss’s part, ironically reflecting the nature of political life, to say that this “essence can be wholly known.” The abstraction inherent in the character of political life is here reflected in the philosophic description of its character. But the purpose of such abstractions is to bring out their own limitations. “The city is completely intelligible because its limits can be made perfectly manifest.”⁵⁹ Certainly what can be made perfectly manifest is the tendency of human life to seek a kind of closure and shelter within the limits of laws and customs, although this effort is always precarious, never wholly successful. Strauss’s account of the argument of the Republic is that it makes manifest the limits of political life by offering a “city in speech” that shows how human life would appear if “perfect justice” were achieved. In such a city human life is deformed not only by the suppression of private life for the guardian class but by the artificial subordination of the philosophic life to the needs of the city. The natural desires, or eros, of both the guardians and the philosophers are suppressed. Socrates with the help of his interlocutors constructs this ideal city not seriously for practical actualization but for philosophic instruction as to the nature of the soul and of politics. By maximizing or absolutizing the claims of politics so as to produce a comic and grotesque result, Socrates uncovers a fundamental tension between those claims and the soul’s full range of possibilities.

Yet Strauss sees more than this in the Platonic account of how the city is both closed and open to the whole. Since political life, whose core is justice as defined by the law, forms a kind of whole whose limits can be experienced as limits, humans are capable of the questioning of law (the limits), which allows for the transcending of law. The whole or Being as problem or question can come into human view only because humans occupy a part of it that has an imperfect and ordinarily deceptive completeness. Political life’s way of offering images of wholeness that allure and detain the soul without truly satisfying it is the condition for the discovery of philosophy as the pursuit that truly satisfies. In this way politics is the “link” between high and low. Human beings are not fitted directly to encounter and grasp Being or the whole as such. Political life in the form of laws, customs, rituals, duties, and attachments offers various experiences of something whole, and a sense of shelter from the mystery of human existence, with its unknown origins and unknown destiny. It then provides a ground for some human beings to look for the “true whole,” although it has to be said that political life offers the metaphor or image of “the whole” guiding the philosophic quest, and the appropriateness of the language and idea of “the whole” itself may be questionable. One can restate this by saying that there could be no opening to the question of “What is?” or of Being without the difference (or limit) inherent in politics.⁶⁰ The fact that humans have a way in law-governed communities of “forgetting” the whole to which they are naturally open—a way that is relatively solid or “substantial” compared with the disorder of lawless forms of life—is indispensable for facing and sustaining the openness. Politics provides the foundation—as that which lies under or supports—for the possibility of transcending politics. This has a certain kinship with Heidegger’s account of how Being is disclosed only through “ontological difference,” and how the “forgetting” of Being is inseparable from standing in its disclosure. But for Strauss what Heidegger sees only in terms of the fall into “ontic” thinking, the concern with metaphysics as causal-substantial, is better illuminated by relating forgetfulness and difference to the political nature of the human. Attention to the “surface” of political life, for which Heidegger has little or no regard, shows an intrinsic connection between reflecting on the difference that conditions theoretical transcending, and “common sense” moderate practical approaches to the basic texture of political life, the warp and woof of law and desire.

Strauss characterizes the theme of difference in one more way: in terms of the two roots of morality. He asks, “how can there be a unity of man?”⁶¹ Morality has “two really different roots,” namely, the “moral requirements of society on the one hand and the moral requirements of the life of the mind on the other,” which two roots, while radically different, still agree “to a considerable extent.” What was said of the cave can be said of man as such: The unity of man consists in the fact that he is that part of the whole which is open to the whole, or, in Platonic language, that part of the whole which has seen the ideas of all things. Man’s concern with his openness to the whole is the life of the mind. The dualism of being a part while being open to the whole, and therefore in a sense being the whole itself, is man.

Starting from the notion of the individual human being, the difference now appears as that between two modes of transcending by the individual toward two wholes, “society and the whole simply.” Nobility consists in “dedicating oneself to something greater than oneself,” and thus nobility can take the form of dedication to the common good of political life or dedication to the pursuit of knowledge of the whole. But this duality of modes of transcending is a great perplexity and cause of wonder.

This wonder seems to be related to Socrates’s experience of disappointment as he sought in his early days as a student of nature to find a teleological account of the whole, especially through the guidance of Anaxagoras. What he sought was a causal knowledge of how the whole and each part of the whole are for the best, such that all parts are in harmony.⁶² But the kinds of causality available in the study of nature were two: genesis through material parts that could account for individual beings but not for universal properties, and noetic mathematical ideas that could account for universals but not for individual beings. No kind of cause was available to link these, until Socrates noted in a “second sailing” a certain togetherness of them in human speeches about beauty, goodness, and justice. The human concern with the just is a kind of cause in which universal notions are applied to individual cases, as when Socrates affirms the condemnation of the city of Athens by choosing to remain in prison when he has the chance to escape. Yet the judgment of the city itself was unjust, contrary to the natural good of philosophy. Accordingly the same action might be regarded as both just and unjust, as one looks to either the common good of the city or the private good of the philosophic life. The nature of justice is inherently controversial. Therefore the problem of the unity of the causes reappears in the sphere of human moral and political judgment, where, however, there is a certain unity within duality or agreement “to a considerable extent,” making human life possible. Socrates fastens intransigently on the wonder of that unity within duality, so as to espy whatever oblique clues it may offer about the nature of the whole.

But the aporia in first principles cannot be resolved. Strauss has another prominent statement on fundamental dualism, which needs to be related to the duality of man’s two modes of transcending. “The knowledge which we have is characterized by a fundamental dualism which has never been overcome,” the pole of mathematical homogeneity in arithmetic and productive arts and crafts, and the pole of heterogeneity, especially in knowledge of heterogeneous ends. The statesman has a knowledge of ends to make human life complete or whole, “but this knowledge—the political art in the highest sense—is not knowledge of the whole.”⁶³ Two kinds of knowledge must be combined, the heterogeneous and the homogeneous, “and this combination is not at our disposal.” The two poles seem to parallel the two wholes to which human life is open, the trans-political and the political. Socratic philosophy realized the true whole cannot be found through a simple transcending of the city and that the problem of the true whole is the same as the problem of the unity of man. That problem cannot come into view unless one starts with man as political. Strauss presents this as the fundamental cosmological problem in Platonic thought, and he refers to it again, apparently, when he refers to “the difficulty with which every teleological physics is beset.”⁶⁴ Philosophy is possible with this persisting aporia, for as knowledge of ignorance it does not require a “specific cosmology.”

Yet it could be said that Strauss goes beyond the Platonic presentation of Socratic philosophy by the bluntness with which he presents the human situation as a cave-dwelling that opens onto a mysterious whole. By asserting that the human belongs to both realms—thereby already thrusting the reader toward the mouth of the cave—and that the ascent from the cave issues not in the pure light of the sun or knowledge of the causes but only in “fundamental problems,” Strauss creates the doubt that the human is wholly at home anywhere. It is a doubt that can be resolved only through taking up the Socratic life of knowing one’s ignorance. The classical account of this life Strauss presents unadorned, without the consoling piety of the supersensible realm. Strauss’s writing is in this respect decidedly “late modern” writing. Coming after centuries of philosophic tradition, the political cave is for most readers no longer a secure, habitable place in the age of global technology—and Strauss ventures to say this to his readers who have undergone the instruction in Enlightenment and then passed beyond that instruction. The cave no longer has providential supports of any sort—whether from premodern belief in higher powers or from modern confidence in human mastery and scientific progress. Strauss addresses a post-Nietzschean world, as does Heidegger. What arises in this situation is a new clarity. The hope that history would render the human political habitation completely livable has collapsed, allowing a renewal of the classical reflection, in its original form, on unbridgeable dualism: the city and man. But philosophy’s self-awareness of homelessness proves to be its own justification, for “the very uncertainty of all solutions, the very ignorance regarding the most important things, makes quest for knowledge the most important thing, and therefore also a life devoted to it the right way of life.”⁶⁵