CHAPTER 6

The Room for Political Philosophy: Strauss on Heidegger’s Political Thought

I

In the essay that is his final extended statement on Heidegger, Strauss defines political philosophy as the inquiry “concerned with the best or just political order which is by nature best or just everywhere and always” and observes that “in the last two generations political philosophy has lost its credibility.”¹ In a remarkable change this inquiry has “lost its credibility in proportion as politics itself has become more philosophic than ever in a sense” for “throughout its whole history political philosophy was universal while politics was particular.” Political events are now globally connected, such that unrest in an American city “has repercussions in Moscow, Peking, Johannesburg, Hanoi, London, and other far away places.” Politics has become universal, or at least it cannot be as wholly focused as in earlier times on “the being and well-being of this or that particular society (a polis, a nation, an empire).” Implicit in Strauss’s observation is the global transformation of politics in the modern era by political philosophy of Western origin with a universal purpose. Philosophy in the modern era became more active and charitable (and less contemplative and proud) as it undertook a universal practical project: “the relief of man’s estate” by science and technology, the promotion of prosperity and the rights of man, the creation of a league of free and equal nations.² Accordingly it thought that its highest philosophical ends could be adequately realized in the realm of practice. By contrast premodern political philosophy reflected on what is “by nature best” but accepted with resignation the unlikelihood of its achievement in any particular society. Politics as a practical art, although enlightened by philosophers, acknowledged this limitation and pursued the best possible as allowed by the local conditions and character of given societies.

The present situation contains a profound paradox insofar as universalist politics, the product of universalist political philosophy, is no longer supported by belief in the principles of modern political philosophy or indeed any political philosophy. Strauss characterizes this situation as the “crisis of the West,” which is above all a crisis of political philosophy.³ Political philosophy has been discredited by two powerful forms of thought, positivism and existentialism, according to which “the validation of sound value judgments” is impossible. Positivism holds that only scientific knowledge is genuine knowledge, and such knowledge is unable to validate or invalidate any value judgments. Existentialism holds that “all principles of understanding and of action are historical, i.e., have no other ground than groundless human decision or fateful dispensation.”⁴ According to existentialism, science has no claim to be more “than one form of viewing the world among many of viewing the world,” and what is more, its separation of fact from value is untenable. This however does not mean that existentialism provides a nonarbitrary grounding of values, since for existential thought any supposition of a universal value is a mere prejudice.

The opening paragraph of Strauss’s essay lays out in compressed fashion what is probably his best-known account of political philosophy and of the contemporary modes of thought opposing it. According to this account, political philosophy is an inquiry with a practical orientation or purpose (knowledge of the order of society that is by nature best), although in the classical version Strauss advocates, this inquiry has limited practical ambitions. It serves political life (and by extension morality) through uncovering absolute, universally valid notions of virtue, justice, and natural right, or by the “validation of sound value judgments.” Its principles, while universal in character (the object of scientia in the premodern sense), always have particular applications that cannot dispense with prudence. Positivism and existentialism oppose the possibility of such science with “relativistic” accounts of “values,” and accordingly the first task in the recovery of the possibility of classical political philosophy is to expose the fallacies of relativistic thought and to open the way at least for the discovery of absolute notions of virtue, justice, and right.

This foreground account of his intentions, which Strauss surely intends to be widely taken as the true account, is misleading about his ultimate theoretical concerns. (In the essay under consideration Strauss says that “all outstanding thinkers” are misunderstood by their critics and their followers.) For the latter one must look at Strauss’s account of Socrates’s turn to the study of the human things as the core of philosophy or the “first philosophy,” whereby “the political things, or the human things, are the key to understanding all things.”⁵ Political philosophy as Socrates founded it has a practically oriented side, giving counsel and beneficial teachings to statesman and politically ambitious young men, but at the highest level the inquiry into political matters is to lead to the philosophic life and specifically to a way of philosophizing in which those political matters reveal something fundamental about the nature of the whole. Political philosophy is not merely one discipline among a number of philosophic disciplines, as it appears to be for Aristotle and as it certainly is in the Christian Aristotelian tradition. In a striking reversal of this traditional approach, Strauss argues that through reflection on the prephilosophic experience of political life, which everywhere puts on exhibit the particulars of political life (as in the great political histories of Thucydides and Xenophon), human thought has its only access to the universals, and indeed only in the form of “fundamental problems.” Strauss, it must be said, has little hope of reversing the contemporary crisis of liberal political philosophy, and even credits Heidegger with exposing the failure of liberal rationalism. Through Heidegger “all rational liberal philosophic positions have lost their significance and power. One may deplore this, but I for one cannot bring myself to clinging to philosophic positions which have been shown to be inadequate.”⁶ Strauss all the same proposes an alternative to Heidegger’s philosophy, his account of Socratic political philosophy. This will not supply the absolute standards or principles needed to buttress Western democratic rationalism, but in some fashion it replies to “radical historicism.” Several questions press on the reader at this point. If there is a link, as Strauss asserts on several occasions, between that historicism and Heidegger’s support of Nazism, where is the guidance in Socratic thought toward a nontyrannical politics? What is the standard for political choices that replaces “history” if it is not knowledge of moral-political absolutes?

One can begin with an argument Strauss makes in the present essay and elsewhere, that historicist thought makes a comprehensive, transhistorical claim about all thought as conditioned by history. The claim cannot be saved as coherent unless it arises through an “absolute moment” in which the essential character of all thought becomes transparent, by an insight that no future changes of thought could render obsolete.⁷ There is a Hegelian version of the absolute moment, in which the solution to the fundamental problems is revealed through the completion of the experience of history as a rational process, and there is Heidegger’s version in which “the insoluble character of the fundamental riddles has become fully manifest.”⁸ It seems at first as though Strauss needs to refute the insolubility thesis in order to oppose historicism. “Historicism, however, stands or falls by the denial of the possibility of theoretical metaphysics and of philosophic ethics or natural right; it stands or falls by the denial of the solubility of the fundamental riddles.” And yet he swiftly changes the ground of attack and asserts: “But one might realize the insoluble character of the fundamental riddles and still continue to see in the understanding of these riddles the task of philosophy; one would thus merely replace a non-historicist and dogmatic philosophy by a non-historicist and skeptical philosophy.” Historicism goes beyond skepticism in regarding the “attempt to replace opinions about the whole by knowledge of the whole” as “not only incapable of reaching its goal but absurd,” because that attempt rests on dogmatic premises that are only historical and relative. The skeptic, on the other hand, regards philosophy as possible in that it can replace opinions about the fundamental problems with knowledge of them. It does so without a theoretical metaphysics, philosophic ethics, or philosophy of natural right. Contrary to the claims of historicism, classical philosophy is not “based on the unwarranted belief that the whole is intelligible,” for the “prototype of the philosopher in the classical sense was Socrates, who knew that he knew nothing, who therewith admitted that the whole is not intelligible, who merely wondered whether by saying that the whole is not intelligible we do not admit to having some understanding of the whole.” He adds that “man as man necessarily has some awareness of the whole.”⁹ I venture to restate this another way: Human thought can grasp that life in the political realm or the “cave” necessarily discloses itself as incomplete, as defective, and pointing beyond itself to the “whole” of which it is a part, and conversely it can understand that the only way knowledge of the whole can be pursued is by starting in the political realm and reflecting on its character. (In this sentence a crucial word, found twice, is “that.”) These insights constitute some understanding of the whole without the assumption that the whole is intelligible.

Heidegger’s position that all thought is dependent on fate or an unforeseeable dispensation of Being is attractive to contemporaries, Strauss notes, since it denies that history is a rational process.¹⁰ It is appealing for its seemingly nondogmatic character. All the same, it is a dogmatic thesis proposing a comprehensive account of the nature and limits of thought. Heidegger was aware of this difficulty, Strauss notes, and found it necessary to go beyond the early “existential” standpoint wherein all comprehensive views are projects or ideals grounded in resolute willing, in order to expound an account of the history of Being as offering an “eschatological prospect.” Thereby his thought acquired a structure recalling the accounts of history in Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche.¹¹ In a manner that can strike one as paradoxical, Strauss regards political philosophy as offering an antidote to the implicit dogmatism of these philosophies that variously call for a disclosure of a final truth in history. At the same time, it accepts as a comprehensive claim the thesis that the whole is not intelligible. Socratic political philosophy rests on the insight into a permanent rift in the human condition between philosophic eros and the requirements of political life that renders impossible a comprehensive account of thought as either limited to the disclosures of history or, alternatively, as wholly at home in the political realm. This insight, although it constitutes another comprehensive claim about a limitation of human thought, is not a self-refuting one, Strauss claims, for it articulates a permanent problem in the human approach to the whole without proposing an absolute thesis about the grounds that condition all thinking.

Strauss’s response to Heidegger combines a version of Heidegger’s claim that the whole is not intelligible with an exposure of his dogmatic premise concerning the historical character of any possible thought. This unwarranted premise is actually an unwarranted hope. Heidegger’s thought on history expresses the hope of full coincidence between the strivings of philosophic questioning and the site or place (the local habitation and time) of the philosophic questioner. To the contrary, Strauss asserts, philosophic questioning, as knowledge of ignorance, inevitably finds its own place and time questionable. It necessarily rejects the tyrannical claims of the present moment. It is Heidegger’s impossible hope that gives rise to the problem of relativism by its affirmation of the fate of the present merely because it is the fate of the present. Relativism is the symptom of the deeper philosophic error that is, at the same time, the ultimate source of his tendency toward extremist politics.

II

Strauss famously made numerous comments on Heidegger’s “radical historicism” as directly linked to his endorsement of National Socialism in 1933 as rector of the University of Freiburg. It should be clear by now, though, that his valuation of Heidegger is complex and by no means a mere reduction of his philosophy to a version of National Socialist ideology. Even on a practical and political plane Strauss shows guarded respect for Heidegger, insofar as Strauss indicates some sympathy for his criticism of modernity. Yet Strauss wholly rejects all extremist political responses to the problems of modernity.¹² Whereas philosophical inquiry by nature calls for radicality in questioning, politics (which includes the political actions of philosophers as teachers and writers) by its nature requires moderation and prudence.¹³ In his various statements on Heidegger, Strauss is centrally concerned with showing the connections in Heidegger’s thought between his radical historicism, his failure to grasp the nature of politics (or of the relation of philosophy to politics), and his leanings toward extremist and transformationist (or “visionary”) politics. Strauss also seeks to expose the roots of these tendencies in earlier modern thought, that is, in modern understandings of the relation of philosophy to politics (or “practice” more broadly). Thus, against Heidegger’s self-understanding, Strauss regards him as the heir and culmination of modern philosophy and believes that the comprehension of his thought, especially in its fully developed later form, is indispensable for any effort to free oneself from modernity.¹⁴ In this regard Strauss’s philosophic-historical inquiries can be seen as a continuation of Heidegger’s Destruktion that includes Heidegger in its critique, through uncovering the hidden roots of the modern historical consciousness whose validity Heidegger presupposes. Also in accord with the centrality of Heidegger for Strauss’s self-understanding, Heidegger could be seen as the greatest living example of the general problem of the relation of philosophy to practical life—of the inherent dangers posed by philosophy to practice and the recurrent seductions offered by practice to philosophy.

Strauss claims he found an unacceptable moral teaching in Heidegger in the 1920s, “despite his disclaimer he had such a teaching.” Heidegger called for “resoluteness without any indication of what are the proper objects of resoluteness. There is a straight line that leads from Heidegger’s resoluteness to his siding with the so-called Nazis in 1933.”¹⁵ Yet, as we have seen, Strauss also saw Heidegger more positively in a larger intellectual context, namely, the widespread dissatisfaction following the First World War with the Enlightenment and modern rationalism, and the “new thinking” that supported the renewal of faith and orthodoxy in opposition to the liberal critique of tradition. Yet Heidegger’s version of the critique of rationalism, in contrast to Rosenzweig’s, “led far away from any charity as well as any humanity.”¹⁶ Deeply engaged with the thought of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Heidegger revealed the inadequacy of the established academic positions, including the dominant Neo-Kantianism (Ernst Cassirer), and offered a sense of hopeful renewal amid the Spenglerian gloom of the time. Heidegger “gave expression to the prevailing unrest and dissatisfaction because he had clarity and certainty, if not about the whole way, at least about the first and decisive steps.”¹⁷ Yet the hopefulness he inspired was, Strauss claims, ungrounded in responsible reflection on the practical possibilities. It is in this sense that Strauss asserts that Heidegger was “intellectually the counterpart to what Hitler was politically.”¹⁸ To note a kinship of Heidegger’s thinking with the most radically antidemocratic and antimodern movement of the era is not to assert that Heidegger was committed to all the doctrines and programs (such as biological racism) of this movement. At the heart of the matter for Strauss is Heidegger’s combination of a call to action (authentically rejecting the political-cultural status quo) and a denial of the possibility of ethics owing to the “revolting disproportion between the idea of ethics and those phenomena that ethics pretended to articulate.”¹⁹ Heidegger’s doubts about the foundations of ethics were, in other words, not accompanied by a fitting skepticism about action. Indeed Heidegger longed for a sanctioning of action from a supra-ethical source, from “destiny.”

The thought of the early Heidegger, culminating philosophically in Being and Time (1927) and politically in Heidegger’s actions as rector, is quite interestingly not the primary focus of Strauss’s thoughts. His most extended statements on Heidegger’s political thought dwell on the significance of the later thinking of Heidegger after his disillusionment with the Nazi regime.²⁰ The theme of these treatments, stated very succinctly, is Heidegger’s replacement of philosophic reflection on politics and ethics with the fateful dispensation of Being or the gods. Thus the resolute and activist stance of the early Heidegger and the later stance of meditative awaiting of a new dispensation of Being are connected by the absence of political philosophy, as Strauss understands that term. “There is no room for political philosophy in Heidegger’s work, and this may well be due to the fact that the room in question is occupied by gods or the gods.”²¹ Strauss underlines this connection even as he avers that Heidegger’s thought grows in depth after 1933–34, and particularly during the seminars on Nietzsche in the period 1936–40.²² But although Strauss sees an “intimate connection between the core” of Heidegger’s philosophic thought and his early support and later (post-1945) praise of the “inner truth and greatness” of the National Socialist revolution, these facts “afford too small a basis for the proper understanding of his thought.”

As noted above, Strauss indicates that the core of Heidegger’s thought is not historicism simply but a particular eschatological version of historical thinking emerging fully in the mature account of the history of Being (Seinsgeschichte) and linked to the eschatological visions of Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. In Heidegger’s case the eschatological moment corresponds to the moment of the disclosure of the historicity of Being, or the mortality and transience of the grounds of human thought and existence. Strauss understands Heidegger’s account of the historicity of Being as akin to the responses to Hegel on the part of Marx and Nietzsche, who see in the Hegelian completion of history only the inhuman reconciliation with bourgeois life (Marx) or the end of humanity in the advent of the last man without nobility and greatness (Nietzsche). Strauss claims that Heidegger is much closer to Nietzsche than to Marx, in that “both thinkers regard as decisive the nihilism which according to them began in Plato (or before) . . . and whose ultimate consequence is the present decay.”²³ Both see the present age as an “infinitely dangerous moment” and at the same time the moment when philosophy can prepare the ground for a new kind of greatness, “danger and salvation belonging together.” Yet Heidegger after an initial attraction abjured Nietzsche’s call for a new nobility exercising planetary rule (travestied by Nazism), and thus the later Heidegger “severs the connection of the [eschatological] vision with politics more radically than either Marx or Nietzsche. One is inclined to say that Heidegger learned the lesson of 1933 more thoroughly than any other man. Surely he leaves no place whatever for political philosophy.”²⁴ Heidegger after 1933 denies that political action can overcome the flattening of the spirit in the technological world night and proposes instead that philosophy can prepare a novel kind of Bodenständigkeit (rootedness in a homeland) as the condition for human greatness, through initiating a dialogue between the most profound thinkers of the Occident and those of the Orient “accompanied or followed by a return of the gods.” Strauss’s statements do not imply that Heidegger on the plane of political action ever favored any movement other than National Socialism. Indeed Heidegger “never praised any other contemporary political effort.”²⁵ Nor do Strauss’s formulations imply that Heidegger’s turning way from politics and his learning “the lesson of 1933” establish that his later reflections constitute a worthy philosophic project. Even so, the phrase “the lesson of 1933” suggests a partial agreement with the later Heidegger, namely, the rejection of political projects of overcoming modernity. But in the case of Strauss that rejection retains a place for political philosophy—in the special sense that term has for Strauss—and does not substitute new gods for rational inquiry into politics.

Strauss develops a similar estimate of Heidegger in his 1956 lecture on existentialism, where he notes “the kinship in temper and direction between Heidegger’s thought and the Nazis,” citing “the contempt for reasonableness and the praise of resoluteness.” But this kinship does not provide grounds for dismissing Heidegger as philosopher. Indeed Strauss indicates some sympathy with Heidegger’s views on the shortcomings of democracy (in which there is “no reminder of man’s absolute duty and exalted destiny”) and even claims (as noted above) that through Heidegger’s critique of the tradition “all rational liberal philosophic positions have lost their significance and power.”²⁶ In this lecture Strauss more explicitly links Heidegger’s welcoming of Hitler’s rise in 1933 to “Nietzsche’s hope of a united Europe ruling the planet,” and relates Heidegger’s disappointment and withdrawal from active engagement in politics to the discovery that this hope “had proved to be a delusion.”²⁷ Yet by replacing political action with a reflection that prepares a new world religion uniting the deepest elements of the West and the East, Heidegger maintains with Nietzsche the conception that “the philosopher of the future, as distinct from the classical philosopher, will be concerned with the holy.” The new philosophic thinking, or the thinking that replaces philosophy, is essentially religious and is the heir of the Bible.²⁸ In undertaking the preparatory inquiry for a new world religion, Heidegger reveals himself as “the only man who has an inkling of the dimension of the problem of a world society.”²⁹ In spite of this praise Strauss regards Heidegger’s enterprise as involving “fantastic hopes, more to be expected from visionaries than philosophers.”³⁰

Strauss’s judgment on Heidegger is subtle and understated, offering only hints of the extent and nature of Strauss’s affinities and debts.³¹ But it is clear that the target of Strauss’s critique is only secondarily the moral and political consequences of Heidegger’s thought and is more centrally the conception of philosophy that results in those consequences. In that conception philosophy is synthesized with religion and takes on the largest responsibilities for human welfare. That synthesis, in turn, arises first in the early modern period, when “the gulf between philosophy and the city was bridged” by the twin innovations of identifying the ends of the philosopher and the nonphilosopher, “because philosophy is in the service of the relief of man’s estate, or ‘science for the sake of power,’” and of fulfilling this new function by diffusion of the results of philosophy among nonphilosophers.³² These innovations are the source, in Strauss’s analysis, of the modern historical consciousness, in which the highest object of philosophic reflection is human action and its products, with the ultimate outcome of obliviousness to the superhuman and eternal. Philosophy, abandoning the primacy of contemplation in seeking to make man wholly at home in the city, loses sight of the suprapolitical. At the same time political life becomes the site of philosophically based transformative projects that it cannot sustain.³³ Whereas in early modernity such projects take the form of the Enlightenment’s attack on faith and orthodoxy, in late modernity they become the effort to restore the nobility and metaphysical depth that were sacrificed on the altar of rational progress. Even when this effort loses any connection with direct action in politics, as it does in the thought of Heidegger after 1933, the distinctively modern conception of philosophy as inseparably fused with practical life is retained. The failures of the deepest and most ambitious versions of the ennobling effort, those of Nietzsche and Heidegger, confirmed in Strauss’s view the rightness of his “concentration on the tension between philosophy and the polis, i.e., on the highest theme of political philosophy.”³⁴