CHAPTER 8

Is Modernity an Unnatural Construct?

I

In a 1952 retrospect on the genesis of his 1936 Hobbes study, Leo Strauss comments on one of the most controversial and least understood aspects of his thought. “I had seen that the modern mind had lost its self-confidence or its certainty of having made decisive progress beyond pre-modern thought, and I saw that it was turning to nihilism, or what is in practice the same thing, fanatical obscurantism.”¹ A German refugee living in 1930s England, he was hardly alone in noting the collapse of belief in the liberal-progressive Enlightenment. His response was not to take up a cause, either in defense or in criticism of the liberal democracies, but to reexamine the modern philosophical premises and arguments and to confront them with the premises and arguments they replaced. Strauss does not say here that he sought to revive ancient political practice (and it is hard to grasp what that could mean) or even to return to ancient political philosophy. “I concluded that the case of the moderns against the ancients must be reopened, without any regard to cherished opinions or convictions, sine ira et sine studio.” To reopen “the case of the moderns against the ancients” was the indispensable task for one seeking the truth about the current crisis, since all principles were now in question. It might or might not result in a new defense of the moderns. (It did result in a kind of defense, as I shall argue.) In the course of his examination Strauss arrived at something quite different from either simple defense or simple criticism of philosophical doctrines: at an unorthodox understanding of the term “political philosophy,” to elaborate which became his life’s labor. With this term Strauss did not mean a political program or even a theoretical doctrine about politics, but a way of beginning to philosophize. He pursued the question “How does one begin in philosophy?” through commentaries on a remarkable range of figures. He rejected the notion that philosophy can be a science since philosophy as activity and way of life is irreducible to any set of theses, arguments, and conclusions.

Strauss famously arrived at the conviction of a certain superiority of ancient philosophy, one due in large part to the accident of its historical position. The ancients, being unburdened by an existing philosophic tradition, could see the phenomena more directly.² Strauss said he learned from Husserl and Heidegger the need to question the inherited philosophic tradition in order to recover the original experiences of philosophizing that produced it. For Strauss this meant turning to the ancient authors above all, for with their aid one could disclose the “natural understanding”—the standpoint from which later thought, especially modern philosophy, made a break.³ That natural standpoint was not a doctrine or a set of prephilosophic opinions but a way of questioning that exposes “the fundamental problems and the fundamental alternatives regarding their solution.”⁴ This formulation causes difficulties for some of Strauss’s readers. If the later, especially modern, tradition breaks with the natural understanding, could Strauss say that the tradition as a whole treats fundamental problems and alternatives that are “in principle coeval with human thought”?⁵ Were the natural and enduring problems available and appreciated only during certain historical epochs? Are the moderns, in their break with nature, thinking in a merely artificial or historical fashion? Indeed it would seem that modern philosophers might be denied the right to the title “philosopher,” having lost contact with the primary issues. Strauss wrote of modern thought—the popularization of modern philosophy—as a “cave beneath the cave” from which one must free oneself by an archaeology of textual interpretation. Were the modern philosophers themselves only cave-dwellers? If so, was the cave paradoxically of their own making? If it was not of their own making, who made it, and why did they not leave it? Stanley Rosen and Robert Pippin have raised such questions about Strauss’ s thought in particularly incisive ways.

Strauss, however, suggested another side to the story. He affirmed that the moderns, including the builders of “systems,” such as Hegel, are philosophic, even if they do not practice “the primary and necessary form of philosophy.”⁶ Surely there can be no “quarrel” unless the parties share problems and questions, and in the present case those are philosophic. One suspects that Strauss’s seemingly unqualified preference for the ancients and his assessment of modern thought as unnatural involve some deliberate rhetorical overstatement, even bordering on self-contradiction, in order to induce perplexity and arouse the desire to grasp what is at stake in the “quarrel between the ancients and the moderns.” Strauss’s readers and students were (and are), after all, likely to begin with attachments to cherished modern projects and goals, and to be formed by the popularizations of modern philosophy, and it was necessary to create doubts about modernity as a whole and thereby a sense of urgency about a theoretical return to the beginnings. Indeed at one point Strauss was specific about a philosophic issue common to ancients and moderns and as such central to philosophy. Strauss once pronounced that the quarrel “concerns eventually, and perhaps even from the beginning, the status of ‘individuality.’”⁷

It could be the case, accordingly, that the modern philosophers maintained a grasp of some fundamental questions that we cannot easily see, and if we have a blindness perhaps this blindness is in good measure due, rather paradoxically, to the effectiveness of their thought. Strauss held that all philosophers as philosophers acknowledge the existence of a fundamental tension between the good of political life (or “the city”) and the good of the individual. Law and justice or morality understood as law-abidingness inevitably claim to be, and just as inevitably fail to be, the complete human good. Ancient and modern philosophers agree that “political life derives its dignity from something that transcends political life,”⁸ since the claim of the city’s laws to be the whole good is exposed to the problem of the disproportion between the general requirements of law and the good of individuals, or “the difficulty created by the misery of the just and the prosperity of the wicked.”⁹ The ancients stress that the individual attains a higher good in the perfection of the intellect, that “the individual is capable of a perfection of which the city is not capable.”¹⁰ The moderns, objecting to the supreme place accorded to philosophic virtue, found that “traditional political philosophy aimed too high,” and beginning with Machiavelli they grounded political life and human endeavor generally in passions that are always effective.¹¹ Yet in Strauss’s view the political success at which the modern philosophers were aiming was not merely convenience and efficiency but “the actualization of the ideal.” In other terms, they purported to establish something that was considered desirable but unattainable by earlier philosophy, the adequate political defense of philosophy against its natural enemies.¹² In this regard the ancients had lower expectations from politics, while aiming at higher forms of philosophic, transpolitical excellence. The modern approach required a transformation of the meaning and goal of philosophy, wherein the ends of politics and philosophy are fused.

Thus the moderns reformulated philosophy’s purpose as humanitarian, the “relief of man’s estate,” and inaugurated the project of freeing humanity from servitude to stepmotherly nature.¹³ Yet this can be understood as radicalizing the ancient insight into the deficiency of law and politics, insofar as the new project universalizes the individual’s transcendence of law. In place of theoria or philosophic virtue as the basis for that transcendence, one now stresses something that every human possesses regardless of natural gifts or virtue, the rights of man.¹⁴ The political emancipation of the individual is based on the philosophic liberation of the human from natural teleology and from all ways of thinking that measure the human by some superhuman standard.¹⁵ It is hoped that this liberation will secure general peace (the end of civil and sectarian conflicts about the ultimate good) and the gratitude of ordinary citizens for the new kind of philosophy, which no longer strives for knowledge of the superhuman but instead ministers to universal human needs. At first glance Strauss’s account seems to characterize this modern project (or Enlightenment) as radically antinatural. Indeed he argued that Hobbes in pursuit of human liberation from natural ends conceived the human good as something grounded solely in a constructive will. Positing that nature in itself is unintelligible, Hobbes placed all intelligibility in what man makes and saw the political order as a man-made “island of intelligibility” within the cosmic darkness. Strauss surely overstated the case that for the moderns in general “we know only what we make.”¹⁶ All the same, the problem that the modern philosophers try to solve is natural—the natural tension between desire and justice, it could be called, with allowance for both subpolitical and suprapolitical forms of desire or eros.

II

Here I insert a general observation about a deep and common misreading of Strauss. Contrary to the judgment of many of his readers (this includes many of his students), Strauss did not claim that this tension was hidden from all eyes until the philosophers brought it to light. It is the primary theme of the poets, in his account, and they differ from the philosophers in supposing that the human conflict admits of only comic and tragic—that is, imperfect—solutions, whereas philosophy arrives at a solution transcending both comedy and tragedy. “Yet by articulating the cardinal problem of human life as it comes to sight within the nonphilosophic life, poetry prepares for the philosophic life.”¹⁷ Hence Plato’s Socrates should not be read literally when in the Republic he takes the side of the laws, which suppress the erotic, against the poets. Strauss did not hold that the poets should or could be only prophets or spokesmen for the gods and the laws, and he claimed that for Plato the alternative to “Platonic philosophy is not any other philosophy, be it that of the pre-Socratics or Aristotle . . . the alternative is poetry,” especially the profoundly innovative, and hardly pious, poetry of Aristophanes.¹⁸ Strauss pointed to the significance of Nietzsche’s revival of the Aristophanic criticism of Socrates, and a subterranean theme in Strauss (one developed superbly by his student Seth Benardete) is what one could call the poetic discovery of nature.¹⁹

Such reflections, if carried further, allow one to see that Strauss was far from supposing that liberal politics, and modernity more widely, are only unnatural constructs. As I suggest, he pointed to their having roots in a poetic wisdom that exposes the complexity of human life while resisting lofty but specious solutions to life’s enduring conflicts. Thus Strauss wrote of “the poetry underlying modern prose” with reference to Montesquieu, and he stressed the importance of the comic-poetic element in Machiavelli’s vision.²⁰ Indeed from this natural basis modernity has derived its remarkable strength and resilience, it could be said. Strauss warmly endorsed liberal democracy’s defense of individual rights in its struggles with totalitarian enemies, not merely out of some self-regarding or even civic-minded prudence, but because the liberal-democratic regime permits the possibility of recalling how individual perfection transcends the political.

What is the problem with liberal modernity? It is precisely its success in reducing the tensions and therewith its tendency to undermine the higher forms of the transpolitical life. Liberalism, in other words, promotes forgetfulness of the problems that are the ground of its own goodness. The shift from natural duties and obligations to natural rights promotes an “individualism” of self-absorption wherein the “ego is the center and origin of the moral world.”²¹ One could affirm (perhaps more than Strauss did) that the founders of the liberal democratic order did not intend their principles to produce human beings indifferent to civic life and unaware of its conditions. Yet this type is an abundant result of the prosperity and security of the liberal regime. Strauss therefore regarded with some sympathy the philosophic critics of liberalism from Rousseau and Hegel to Nietzsche and Heidegger, who attempted in various ways to invoke superhuman standards and aspirations through the ideas of freedom as autonomy, the historical process, the creative will, and the disclosure of Being. But their projects failed since the fundamental tensions cannot be resolved in higher syntheses on the plane of politics and history. Later modernity, in spite of its classical inspirations, departed further from classical thought by raising the expectations for human transformation, whereas liberalism’s moderate approach is closer to the classical view of the permanence of the human problems.²² In this regard it should not have to be said, but all the same it must be said, that Strauss was far from supposing that philosophic rule could overcome the shortcomings of liberalism.

Strauss’s concern was with renewing philosophy within the liberal order, and such is the true meaning of his reflection on “political philosophy.” This was a kind of reenactment of Socrates’s turning to political life for the starting point for philosophy. For Socrates political life offered “the link between the highest and the lowest,” between mind and body, and therefore was “the clue to all things, to the whole of nature.” In Strauss’s provocative readings of Plato and Xenophon, the Socratic innovation of looking to speeches or “ideas” for uncovering the “noetic heterogeneity” of the beings was the same as the discovery of the cosmological significance of the political.²³ Socrates sought to unfold the complexities of the dual existence of the human as moral-political being—a being who is both bound to the city and its laws and open to the whole of Being. Strauss states that morality has “two radically different roots” and asks, “how can there be a unity of morality, how can there be a unity of man . . . ?” The human exists as the dualism of “being a part of the whole while open to the whole, and therefore in a sense being the whole itself.” It is only as this dual or in-between being that the human can philosophize, and thus the account of how philosophy is possible must begin with investigating how human beings attempt, by means of the laws and morality, to address the problem of the unity of man.²⁴ Strauss saw in this approach to philosophy’s starting point a response to the leading modern critics of the rationalist tradition. Here, too, there is evidence of a favorable approach to modernity, insofar as Strauss avowed a debt to the most thorough and searching version of that criticism, Heidegger’s “radical historicism,” since “it compels us . . . to realize the need for unbiased reconsideration of the most elementary premises whose validity is presupposed by philosophy.”²⁵

III

I conclude with some comments on the importance of this Heideggerian moment, and also return to my starting point of the ambiguity of Strauss’s account of nature and history. It is tempting to understand the significance of Heidegger for Strauss as only negative, such that Heidegger’s thought, as the “highest self-consciousness” of modern philosophy, is simply the extreme point of unnaturalness in the antinatural project of modernity, or the necessary self-destructive result of modernity’s arbitrary starting point.²⁶ That Strauss was far from viewing Heidegger’s thought as merely nihilistic is evident from the assertion that “by uprooting and not merely 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.”²⁷ Thus Strauss made the remarkable claim that after a certain historical development a kind of thinking was not possible until the appearance of Heidegger, and he thereby points to a philosophic dependence on Heidegger, the appearance of whom constitutes something akin to the absolute moment in history, a theme that Strauss took up in accounts of Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche.²⁸ (Strauss wrote of the theoretical advantage of the “crisis of our time,” in which the “shaking of traditions” enables one to understand things “in an untraditional or fresh manner.”)²⁹ On one level, the most superficial, this means that Heidegger undertook a Destruktion of modern thought that allowed one to see the defectiveness of the modern philosophic tradition’s understanding of classical philosophy. But more deeply, Heidegger sought to uncover the Greek philosophic beginnings as free of the traditional Aristotelian interpretation of those beginnings, an effort Strauss avowed was crucial for his own thinking.³⁰

For both Heidegger (more so the early Heidegger) and Strauss, Aristotle instituted the account of philosophy in which metaphysics and cosmology are sciences independent of the primary experiences of the whole or Being for man as practical or concernful being. Strauss understood that the primary experience is political and saw Heidegger’s neglect of politics as the great lacuna in his thinking, relating to (or being the same as) his lack of practical moderation.³¹ Yet the common thought of the two thinkers—a thought Strauss thought he saw in the Socrates of Xenophon and Plato and, with due regard to differences, in certain Greek poets and historians—is that without the human openness or striving toward the whole (which Strauss viewed as the erotic striving beyond law or nomos), there would be no articulation of Being, and for that reason “the whole is not a whole without man.”³² The only possible account of the whole or Being is through the human as finite, incomplete, erotic, and thus as confronting the tensions of political life. In Strauss’s reading, Aristotle departed from this insight insofar as he founded political science as an independent discipline (“one discipline, and by no means the most fundamental or the highest discipline, among a number of disciplines”). Thus in contrast to Plato’s cosmology, Aristotle’s cosmology is “unqualifiedly separable from the quest for the best political order,” from which one might be tempted to conclude that for Aristotle the whole is still a whole without man. “Aristotelian philosophizing has no longer to the same degree and in the same way as Socratic philosophizing the character of ascent.”³³

As Strauss was led to his interpretation of the Socratics through Heidegger, he was led to it through modernity. The experience of modernity proves to be a necessary condition not for the original Socratic thought, of course, but for its recovery in a form more reserved than the original, even disillusioned, and as such no longer preparing the ground for the later traditions, classical and modern (and one might add Christian) that emerged from it. Strauss indicated that his Socratism is essentially a reversal of the philosophic tradition by his paradoxical and polemical use of the post-Platonic term “political philosophy” to designate the true first philosophy of pre-Aristotelian Socratism. Therefore Strauss departed even from Plato, insofar as his presentation of the core Platonic thought departs from Plato’s presentation, which gave birth to a metaphysical tradition. In reopening the “case of the moderns against the ancients” Strauss was not simply seeking a return to the ancients but radicalizing the critique of the classical metaphysical (Platonic-Aristotelian) tradition with the intent of rethinking the roots of ancient philosophy. This was a bold venture, undertaken with the assumption that derivative forms of rationalism—both the classical metaphysical forms and modern antimetaphysical forms—could not, after this refounding of philosophy, be viewed as the true fulfillment of those roots. (Hence a revival of the classical origins without a repetition of the history that followed is possible—with no call for Nietzsche’s willing of “eternal recurrence”!)

I shall attempt a brief, certainly inadequate, summary of Strauss’s relation to history in the light of these last remarks. The modern philosophic tradition is a combination of the natural and the unnatural or contranatural. In an effort to solve definitively the natural problem of the city and the individual, modern philosophy has recourse to artificial constructs that, however, ultimately obscure their natural starting point. Only by removing this obstruction, i.e., the modern solutions of the natural problem, can one recover the problem. The shaking of traditions, undertaken by Heidegger, was crucial to removing the obstruction. What is more, something was learned from the modern experience leading to Heidegger. Strauss indicated that one must employ for philosophic ends the modern constructs much as Socrates used a poetic construct—the idea of a perfect city—to lead his interlocutors out of the cave. The natural was not immediately available to them, as it is not to us. The modern “cave” has unique features, acquired in the unique history of Western thought, since this “cave,” unlike any other, was (in part) conceived in philosophic liberty and dedicated to philosophic propositions. Hence Strauss used the Republic’s figure of the “three waves” to describe the phases of the self-dismantling of the modern ideal city. In this way history has provided not just a poetic speech but a realized philosophic poem—a poem retold by Strauss with certain Platonic distortions—as an indispensable vehicle for the disclosure of nature. Furthermore, this realized poem of modernity, as refashioned by Strauss, provides the philosophers of the future with a perspective on nature not vouchsafed by the poetic speeches of the ancient philosophers. For just as the cave from which one emerges at the end of modernity is not identical with the Socratic version, so the world beyond the cave now bears a different—indeed less exalted, more sobering—shape and aspect (eidos).