CHAPTER 9

Strauss on Individuality and Poetry

I

In the concluding paragraph of Natural Right and History, Leo Strauss claims that “the quarrel of the ancients and the modern concerns eventually, and perhaps even from the beginning, the status of ‘individuality.’”¹ This utterance strikes one as surprising, not to say delphic, since individuality has not apparently figured as the point at issue in the preceding treatment of the ancient and modern accounts of natural right and natural law. “Individuality” does not appear to be what the modern founders have in view as the desideratum of their moral-political revolution. On the classical side, it seems beyond question that classical thought gives the individual or particular a lower status than the universal, and yet Strauss’s statement suggests that the classics could at least contemplate giving it a different status. His assertion thus implies that these first appearances must be revisited.

I wish to relate this question to one about another central philosophical claim of Strauss, namely, that the modern revolution brings about a break with “the primary or natural understanding of the whole.”² It is well known that the heart of his endeavor is to recover the natural understanding by means of historical inquiries, in order to restore to modern awareness the “fundamental problems and the fundamental alternatives regarding their solution.”³ Is the “status of individuality” one of these problems? Let us grant for the moment the existence of a permanent problem of individuality. How could a solution thereof—the modern solution—that “breaks with the natural understanding” be one of the “fundamental alternatives which are, in principle, coeval with human thought”?⁴ As a willful rupture with nature, would not the modern account of human life—and thus its account of individuality—be only a historical particular? In that case, the “quarrel of the ancients and the moderns” would be a dispute wherein only one of the parties is natural and permanent. Would it not seem odd that something so basic and important for Strauss’s thought—not to mention its importance for many other human beings—as the core of the revolution of modern thought cannot belong to the enduring human possibilities contemplated by philosophy?

On the other hand, would it indeed be odd, after all, if one or more of the fundamental possibilities is only—at least to our knowledge—a historical particular? Or if perhaps all solutions, no matter how long enduring and great, are only prudential negotiations of the basic tensions—solutions available to human beings under the circumstances that fate or fortune grants them?⁵ In this case it would be difficult, if not impossible, to claim that the solutions are in some sense “coeval with human thought.” The following remarks try to shed some light on these puzzles.

II

Let us start with the primary theme of the thought of Leo Strauss: “the city and man,” the dualism that expresses the fundamental human condition. Strauss claims that classical political philosophy holds that “the individual is capable of a perfection of which the city is not capable.”⁶ “According to Plato and Aristotle, to the extent to which the human problem cannot be solved by political means it can be solved only by philosophy, by and through the philosophic way of life.”⁷ The city forbids an appeal beyond its laws with their divine sanctions, but philosophy appeals to nature, making a radical break with the laws in a way of life sustainable by only a few, remarkably self-reliant inquirers. Not obedience to law but free inquiry is the basis of true human perfection and happiness. “The transpolitical life is higher in dignity than the political life.”⁸ But far from removing all difficulties, this claim of the philosophers introduces a new set of problems relating to the tension between the philosophic individuals and the law-revering multitude. The first philosophers experienced this tension, but Socrates is the first philosopher to make it the central reflection of philosophy. With him the political things become “of decisive importance for understanding nature as a whole.”⁹ This is not because the political is the highest concern. Political life as the most urgent concern is the indispensable condition for the appearance of what is highest, “the form in which the highest principles first come to sight.” The political things are “the link between the highest and the lowest” and as such “the clue to all things, to the whole of nature.”¹⁰ The understanding of this link proves elusive, and both theoretically and practically the relations of philosophy and the city remain problematic. The dualism of “the city and man” expresses the permanent human condition in the form of an insoluble problem. To the extent there is a solution, it is found in the way of life devoted to articulating the problem.¹¹

According to Strauss, this Socratic or classical view of the tension between political life and philosophy constitutes “the primary or natural understanding of the whole” with which modern philosophy makes a radical break.¹² The break consists in the modern confidence that the tension can be definitively resolved as philosophy and politics unite forces in a common project, that of using philosophy and science to master nature for “the relief of man’s estate.” The success of this fusion or harmonization on a material plane obscures the sense that philosophic individuals, as pursuing the natural light of truth, inevitably experience dissatisfaction with life in the cave of opinion. The project creates a new “cave beneath the cave” from which a fundamental meaning of “individuality,” its most adequate meaning, has disappeared. It is replaced by “individuality” as the universal emancipation of human beings on a subphilosophic plane. The modern accounts of nature that ground this emancipation are in rebellion against the natural understanding of the whole, but precisely for that reason they presuppose that understanding.¹³ Subsequent generations of dwellers in the modern cave are increasingly remote from its foundations, as they regard the modern premises as the self-evident basis for the progress of civilization. The study of the founders of modern philosophy—Machiavelli, Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, and Spinoza—can bring to light the motives and arguments for the break with the natural understanding. Only the philosophers make the break with full consciousness of it. Although political life is transformed so that the city’s natural suspicion of philosophy and science is replaced by cooperation if not warm affection, on the popular level this means only a change of habit or attitude—not of understanding—brought about by philosophical reforms. What then compels the philosophers knowingly to break with nature? Is this a free choice, or something compelled by stepmotherly nature? According to Strauss, Aristotle was already aware of nature’s stepmotherly character and did not consider the project of mastering her to be a fitting response.¹⁴ By turning philosophy into the project of mastery, the moderns accept with full consciousness the “politicization” of philosophy.¹⁵ They consciously make political life the ceiling above which the philosophic life will not rise as regards its ultimate ends.¹⁶

Strauss describes the modern revolution as “the secular movement which tries to guarantee the actualization of the ideal, or to prove the necessary coincidence of the rational and the real, or to get rid of that which transcends every possible human reality.”¹⁷ The movement begins with Machiavelli’s judgment that “traditional political philosophy aimed too high” and that the grounds of political life must be placed in motives that are always effective: the primary natural urges or passions.¹⁸ But in Strauss’s account the modern intent is not just to aim at lower political results. Rather by such lowering it strives to actualize “the ideal” or the high—indeed to make its actualization necessary. In other terms, the project is to provide for the first time an adequate defense of philosophy by reconceiving it as a “humanitarian” activity, one that not incidentally frees humanity from the bonds of dogma and superstition. Again one asks: how is this project concerned with “individuality”? Liberation of individuality appears to be an outcome, or a means, in the project of actualization, but not its immediate object.

Let us note some passages where Strauss speaks of a direct link between modern “actualization” and a new account of individuality. In one passage he writes of Hobbes’s transformation of ancient Epicureanism.¹⁹ According to Epicurean doctrine the individual is by nature free of social bonds, since the natural good is identical with the pleasant, and law requires the restraint or denial of pleasure. Hobbes goes further to liberate the individual from natural ends as such; the good life is only a pattern devised by the will, it is not a natural pattern apprehended before it is willed. Hobbes’s aim of constructing an “island of intelligibility” exempt from chance and superseding the question of the cosmic support of the human entails this liberation from teleology.²⁰ Again liberated individuality seems to be the effect, not the object, of the transformation. In Strauss’s view, Locke continued Hobbes’s project and “through the shift of emphasis from natural duties or obligations to natural rights, the individual, the ego, had become the center and origin of the moral world.” Indeed Locke went even further than Hobbes in his doctrine of property, wherein “the work of man and not the gift of nature, is the origin of almost everything valuable.”²¹ The emancipation of the individual’s productive acquisitiveness replaces restraint of appetite as the source of social bonds. In Rousseau’s even more radical account of the original natural state, its complete indeterminacy makes it the “ideal vehicle of freedom,” and freedom is understood as “a freedom from society which is not a freedom for something.” Rousseau makes an appeal from society to “an ultimate sanctity of the individual as individual, unredeemed or unjustified.”²²

These philosophers present three versions of the modern effort to “get rid of that which transcends every possible human reality,” efforts that liberate the individual from putative social and natural bonds transcending the individual’s will. But individuality is liberated as the result of basing the human order on what human life makes for itself, without dependence on the transcendent. That dependence is the evil to be avoided; individuality is not the good to be attained. At least before Rousseau the life of the original, free individual is not good or desirable in itself. The natural state, being harsh, is only a negative telos. The treatment of free, original individuality as inherently good seems to be Rousseau’s invention. But the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns concerning individuality cannot be limited to a quarrel between the ancients and Rousseau or the Rousseauians. What is more, Rousseau’s “sanctification” of the individual is the result of his effort to remove difficulties he sees present in the earlier modern positions and so is not intelligible apart from his critique of early modern philosophy. It is thus a result, not a starting point.

It has to be observed that in all the modern philosophers, according to Strauss, the project of emancipation of the human from the superhuman is effected by means of a new account of knowledge that regards the intelligible as the object of human making. (In passing I note that Strauss’s characterization here is much overstated, at least with regard to major moderns other than Hobbes, such as Bacon and Descartes, to say nothing of Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, et al.) This innovation is bound up with new conceptions of “method” as that which secures dogmatic certainty on the basis of prior skepticism about the appearances as given. Hobbes and the moderns depart from premodern nominalism, which “had faith in the natural working of the human mind,” that is, belief in the natural origin of universals.²³ Rejection of that belief is an indispensable condition for replacing order grounded in the unreliability of stepmotherly nature with reliable man-made order. Strauss’s reference to pre-modern nominalism points to his awareness of an earlier thinking in which the individual, not the universal, is the primary locus of the real. But such nominalism is defective for the moderns because it does not ground the possibility of scientific knowledge of beings, and scientific certainty (secured through a new account of “laws of nature”) is required for “actualization” as the extension of human power and the overcoming of chance.²⁴ The modern sense of individuality arises from, and does not precede, that requirement.

III

But now I shall suddenly reverse myself and propose that a close look at Strauss’s account shows that a certain reflection on the individual does indeed precede and condition the related modern demands for actualization, mastery of nature or chance, and the founding of new sciences. One must go back to the “presupposition” of the natural understanding of a natural tension between the individual and the political. This “presupposition” implies that moral and political life suffers from inherent defects, and these defects can be overcome only by a movement toward the “transpolitical.” Perhaps the “politicization” of philosophy in modernity is then actually not a glorification of the political as the highest end, but a new response to its deficiency. A passage from the lectures entitled The Problem of Socrates can help with this. Observing that “political life derives its dignity from something which transcends political life,” Strauss notes that “the essential limitation of the political can be understood in three ways”:²⁵ the Socratic view that the transpolitical to which the political owes its dignity is philosophy (theoria), accessible only to good natures; the teaching of revelation that the transpolitical is accessible through faith, which depends on divine grace; and liberalism, according to which the transpolitical consists in something that every human being as such possesses, regardless of natural gifts or divine grace. According to the third way, political society exists for the sake of protecting the rights of man.²⁶ However, these remarks force one to raise the question: What is the nature of the limitation of the political, such that it needs a supplement beyond itself? It will be important to note that Strauss stresses that this limitation is not experienced only by philosophers.

I want to make another observation before pursuing that question. In the course of his account of the transpolitical in the lectures mentioned, Strauss tacitly replaces the third way of liberalism with another way, that of the poets, whereby he indicates that classical thought on the highest level (Aristophanes) proposes another way of thinking about the limitation, a way, Strauss claims, Plato regards as the most serious challenge to the philosophic way. I suggest—and this is now only a hypothesis—that he thereby indicates a (but perhaps not the only) natural root of liberalism, i.e., of the modern approach to individuality. The modern philosophers who sought to emancipate the political from the superhuman recognized that the political points to the transpolitical and does so in diverse and competing ways. In seeking the final reconciliation of philosophy with politics, they introduced the modern notion of the individual as defined by freedom rather than by natural teleology. Individuals so understood are the citizens of the liberal state, which does not rest on the superhuman. Such citizens are the grateful recipients of a new philosophy that aims not at knowledge of the superhuman but at ministering to universal human needs.

Here is my hypothesis: From the classical standpoint, this dual transformation of philosophy and political life, redirecting the human away from what superhumanly transcends political life, is indeed an extreme project. But there is an insight granted by the poets—the poetic account of eros—that provides a basis for viewing the individual as possessing a form of the transpolitical that is neither the life of theoria nor faith in revelation. What the poets show is that all human beings possess through certain merely human experiences some awareness of the limitation of the political, that is to say, of law. The modern project has a natural basis: it grounds political life in a universal awareness of the transpolitical (or subpolitical) in the human, which allows politics to be independent of the transpolitical as superhuman (the cosmic or divine grounds). There may be something apparently paradoxical in the claim that philosophers make poetic accounts of human existence the preferred point of departure. All the same, it is a starting point with warrant from nature and experience. When Strauss asserts that the famous “quarrel” concerns “eventually, and perhaps even from the beginning, the status of individuality,” he indicates that the modern notion of individuality emerges most clearly in the thought of later modernity. But it is in later modernity that philosophy turns explicitly to poetry to remedy the defects of rationalist philosophy, a development already evident in Rousseau and Burke.²⁷ Still “perhaps even from the beginning” the moderns, in some less manifest fashion, perform the turn to poetry as they introduce the modern notion of individuality.²⁸

IV

Before turning to the thematic treatment of poetry in the lectures on Socrates, I look briefly at the lectures entitled Progress or Return? which contain pregnant formulations on the limitation of the political. Here Strauss analyzes the problem of modern rationalism in terms of the opposition of Greek philosophy and biblical revelation, and in the course of the analysis poetry receives a short but significant discussion. Strauss presents an account of the recent crisis of rationalism in terms of a general collapse of the belief in the necessary parallelism between social and intellectual progress.²⁹ He claims that it is now widely admitted that progress in material (economic, technological, etc.) terms does not guarantee progress in virtue and wisdom. Also, confidence in the authoritative status of scientific knowledge, the ground and engine of progress, has been shaken by the awareness of science’s merely hypothetical character. (For this latter point Strauss provides no argument but defers to Nietzsche’s judgment.)³⁰ The shattering of the fundamental tenets of modern rationalism forces us to reconsider the roots of the tradition.³¹ The lectures are notable for arguing that the modern belief in progress—thus modern rationalism itself—can be understood as a hybrid of Greek philosophy and biblical revelation. The Greeks supposed that human beings have made progress from imperfect beginnings through arts and sciences, and even allowed for unlimited progress in some arts, but not in legislation, since the requirements of social life and intellectual life are radically different. Human progress is periodically undone by natural catastrophes in Greek thought, while biblical revelation offers the guarantee of an infinite future through a covenant with God, that is, divine grace. Revelation regards as proud and sinful the belief that the beginnings are less than perfect and that human art improves on them. To compress Strauss’s account to its essential points: Modern rationalism offers the assurance of infinite progress based wholly on human advances in the arts and sciences (thus replacing the revealed guarantee) and understands progress as unlimited in both the intellectual and the moral realms (thus denying the Greek views on the difference between these realms, as well as on periodic catastrophes). The result is biblical morality without revelation and philosophy as practical mastery of nature without contemplation.³²

Strauss offers here no account of how this hybrid, the modern doctrine of progress, was formed, but only asserts that it was formed by philosophical argument that consciously employed biblical elements, and not by an unconscious process called “secularization.” He offers, however, some insight into how such a hybrid was thinkable in the first place. While commenting on the radical difference between Greek philosophy and the Bible on the “one thing needful” (autonomous understanding vs. loving obedience to the law), he also notes that “the disagreement presupposes some agreement” and spells out two fundamental agreements of the two sources: morality consists in justice as obedience to law supported by divine sanctions, and morality is insufficient and in need of completion.³³ The two sources differ on what transcends and completes justice or morality, although both sources regard justice as problematic in light of the “difficulty created by the misery of the just and the prosperity of the wicked.” The problem of justice is actually the problem of divine justice, since the primary sense of justice is observance of the divinely sanctioned law. The problem might be restated as the question of how the individual good relates to the common good, or how the individual relates to the universal or the whole.

Strauss regards both sources as able to formulate objections to the authority of law, and in that regard both allow for a fundamental exercise of reason in exposing its problem. But the two sources solve the problem “in a diametrically opposed manner.”³⁴ The Greek philosophic solution regards law grounded in ancestral custom as inherently inferior to law based on rational inquiry; in sum, it discovers the idea of universal nature as standard and exposes the accidental character of laws of particular societies. But the authority to which it ascends, nature, is an impersonal necessity that replaces the personal gods.³⁵ Strauss notes, however, that the Bible differs from all “myth”—and so is akin to philosophy—in its awareness of the problem caused by the variety of divine laws. How is the whole to be conceived if only one particular tribe possesses the one true divine law? This surely raises the question of divine justice, of whether the divine will is just in its punishing and rewarding of the particular. The biblical solution grounds the particular and contingent law in a divine will that is wholly just, but to human reason wholly inscrutable, and it regards the quest for knowledge of the grounds of the law as a rebellion against God.³⁶ Yet both sources see the need to ascend from the moral and political to the transmoral and transpolitical, and thus can engage in a continuing argument that is the “secret of the vitality of Western civilization.”³⁷

It follows that any synthesis or “system” that later thought attempts to make with the two sources also addresses the problem of justice, and therefore acknowledges the need for the transpolitical. The modern fusion, however, offers an approach (the rights of man) that obfuscates the two original transpolitical alternatives. Strikingly central to Strauss’s analysis is the claim that awareness of the problem of justice is not the preserve of philosophy alone. Indeed he discusses prephilosophic forms of that awareness not only in the Bible but in Greek thought, using texts of Aristotle: the magnanimous man of the Nicomachean Ethics and the account of tragic poetry in the Poetics. The magnanimous man is not humbly obedient to the law but habitually claims great honors for himself. By regarding magnanimity as one of two foci of moral virtue (the other being justice), Aristotle presupposes that “man is capable of being virtuous thanks to his own efforts.”³⁸ The identification of virtue with obedience to law receives a yet greater challenge from tragic poetry, for the tragedians (at least as Aristotle reads them) are concerned with the arousal and purgation of the passions that “seem to be the root of religion”: fear and pity, which are related to guilt, the feeling of disobedience to divine law. Tragic art seeks to liberate the better type of man from all morbidity so that he can dedicate himself to noble action, whereby it prepares for philosophy by pointing to an account of the divine as not concerned with human goodness.³⁹ In these remarks on Aristotle, Strauss acknowledges sotto voce that the Western tradition contains another source of thinking about the problem of justice, which differs from both philosophy and revealed truth, and hence that there is another great “quarrel” in the tradition: between philosophy and poetry. By pointing to a way of thinking about the problem of justice—the relation of the individual to the whole—that is natural and yet not philosophic, he points to a possible natural root of what he expressly calls the “third” approach to the transpolitical (liberalism).

Two brief but important addenda on these lectures: Strauss notes that the meaning of philosophy is obscured above all by the identification of philosophy with “the completed philosophic system” already in the Middle Ages and “certainly with Hegel in modern times.”⁴⁰ Such philosophy “is one very special form of philosophy; it is not the primary and necessary form.” In the latter form (knowledge of ignorance) Socrates wondered whether “by saying that the whole is not intelligible we do not admit to having some understanding of the whole.”⁴¹ The Socratic philosophic life, in articulating that insight, “cannot possibly lead up to the insight that another way of life is the right one.”⁴² These remarks make clear that Strauss regards the modern syntheses or “systems” as still philosophic, albeit imperfectly, and that he does not leave the argument between reason and revelation at an impasse for both parties.⁴³

V

A primary theme of the lecture series The Problem of Socrates is “the secular contest between poetry and philosophy of which Plato speaks at the beginning of the tenth book of the Republic,” and the Platonic view that this quarrel is the decisive context for understanding the meaning of Socratic political philosophy.⁴⁴ “One could venture to say that the alternative to philosophy, to Platonic philosophy, is not any other philosophy . . . ; the alternative is poetry.”⁴⁵ Strauss, as in the Progress or Return? lectures, states that the contemporary collapse of rationalism requires us to consider the origins of rationalism. “For a number of reasons this question can be identified with the problem of Socrates, or the problem of classical political philosophy in general.” In these lectures, however, the problem for philosophy is not the challenge from revelation. The problem that classical political philosophy tried to solve and the obstacle it tried to overcome “appeared clearly in Aristophanes’s presentation of Socrates.”⁴⁶ Aristophanes’s The Clouds “is the most important statement of the case for poetry” against philosophy.⁴⁷ The title The Problem of Socrates carries unmistakable overtones of the thought of Nietzsche. In the introduction to his book on Socrates and Aristophanes, Strauss makes that connection explicit. Nietzsche’s attack on Socrates or Plato is the culmination of the radical questioning of the tradition that compels a return to the tradition’s origins.⁴⁸ Nietzsche revives the Aristophanic critique of the young Socrates, which he uses “as if it had been meant as a critique of the Platonic Socrates.”⁴⁹ Strauss implies that the Platonic Socrates, who defends justice and piety unlike the young Socrates of The Clouds, provides a response to both Aristophanes and Nietzsche. The examination of Plato’s account of the quarrel between poetry and philosophy is a crucial element therefore in the response to Nietzsche’s attack on rationalism (an attack that Strauss argues was initiated by Rousseau).⁵⁰ It discloses an “erotic” Socrates and an “erotic” Plato who are in crucial ways closer to the poets than later thinkers—including Nietzsche—had seen.

Aristophanes’s poetry, although informed by philosophic thought, sees philosophy as a problem for civic life. His poetry is informed by the philosophic idea of nature, for it presents an account of the natural life as the enjoyment of the private and retired pleasures of family life, in tension with the just and the noble that are only conventional.⁵¹ The family is more natural than the city. Yet Aristophanes launches a defense of noble convention rooted in the ancestral against philosophy, since human life cannot dispense with convention, which has a precarious middle status between the body and the mind. Socrates in the Aristophanic satire cannot grasp the requirements of civic life and lacks self-knowledge about his problematic relation to convention; he is amusical and apolitical.⁵² But Aristophanes’s defense of nomos is itself novel, and his restoration of sound, prephilosophic politics is incompatible with the ancestral polity.⁵³ The comic poet gives expression to the fundamental tension between the individual good and nomos and at the same time portrays the folly of not recognizing the limits of rational efforts to liberate human beings from convention. Xenophon and Plato in their defenses of Socrates present him as regarding politics and human things as worthy of serious study and show him aware of the limits of reason and especially of the limits of the philosopher’s ability to persuade the multitude.⁵⁴ Indeed Socrates was the first philosopher to grasp that understanding political life is decisive for knowledge of the whole.⁵⁵ His reflection on the spirited aspect of the soul, or thumos, as providing the link between the higher and the lower, between mind and body, and as that which gives man unity, is central to this inquiry.⁵⁶ Spiritedness appears to be the characteristically human passion; in any case it is the political passion. In the Republic it is radically distinguished from eros.⁵⁷

In practical terms Socrates sees the need of philosophy to enlist the thumotic rhetoric of Thrasymachus if the philosopher is to have any hope of founding and governing a city. Theoretically Socrates has full awareness the tension between reason’s search for the universal and the inherently particular and exclusive character of society.⁵⁸ Thumos seems capable of resolving the tension. The construction in speech of the best city in the Republic rests on the thumotic demand for the parallel between the individual and the city: that the justice of the city (each part performing well one and only one task for the sake of the whole) and that of the individual are the same. The parallel breaks down, since when each part of the individual’s soul performs its task well the individual attains a higher justice than the city’s: a perfection that is possible in any city, and desirable for its own sake.⁵⁹ The spirited identification of the individual and the city can be carried out only through a radical suppression of the body and eros. Spiritedness indeed has a questionable relation to the human good; in its indeterminacy it is obedient to any end, whether of the mind or the body. The laws that thumos enforces (and without thumos there could be no law) have no necessary relation to the mind or the good. The standpoint of spiritedness and law is abstraction from the individual case; wisdom that does reflect on the individual case must transcend the standpoint of law and have a flexibility that law lacks. The problem faced by wise individuals is to translate their judgment into a form effective with the multitude. “The unlimited rule of undiluted wisdom must be replaced by the rule of wisdom diluted by consent,” i.e., indirect rule by means of laws “on the making of which the wise have had some influence.”⁶⁰

Spiritedness for the most part, except when under the control of the wise, is the opponent of the highest human good; it produces spurious human unity. But spiritedness belongs inescapably to the context of human life and thus to that of philosophy as well; philosophic eros cannot ignore it, and not solely for practical reasons. Indeed the Socratic turn to political philosophy is centrally a recognition that being is heterogeneous, articulated into knowable classes or kinds; this awareness of “noetic heterogeneity” is above all the recognition of the distinctiveness of the political.⁶¹ The political is a realm between body and mind, partaking of both; its heterogeneity from the rest of nature depends on the source of its precarious unity: thumos. The Socratic turn to the ideas is first of all a turn to the significance of thumos as the ground of a decisive heterogeneity in being. The intrinsic relation between eidos and thumos, in other terms, consists in the fact that the core of Socrates’s philosophic revolution is the uncovering of the distinctiveness of the political as an eidos or class.⁶² How then could thumos be only an obstacle to philosophic understanding? On the contrary, political life with its spirited foundation is necessarily the first way that human unity comes to sight, or necessarily the first way that the higher becomes visible in and to the lower.⁶³ Morality or law is the primary way in which 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.”⁶⁴ Political life is the chief way that the individual rises above and beyond himself, dedicating himself to a whole beyond himself: “All nobility consists in such rising above and beyond oneself.” Politics is the clue not only to a fundamental heterogeneity but also to the possible unification of the heterogeneous. The unity precariously achieved by morality points to a more genuine unity.

In what way is the turn to political philosophy an answer to the poetic critique? To address this one needs an account of what the poet regards as his distinctive wisdom. It happens to be quite close to the Socratic-Platonic philosophy just described. Strauss goes so far as to say that subject matter and treatment are “fundamentally of the same character” in both poetry and philosophy.⁶⁵ The Platonic dialogue and poetry both have as subject matter the variety of souls or human types (the heterogeneity of being), and both proceed by imitation.⁶⁶ “Poetry does justice to the two sides of life by splitting itself, as it were, into comedy and tragedy, and precisely Plato says that the true poet is both a tragic and a comic poet.”⁶⁷ Yet the dramatic poet’s need to imitate many kinds of people makes his art questionable from the standpoint of the legislation of the best city, which requires complete dedication of the citizen to one job.⁶⁸ Plato’s own procedure is of course to imitate many types and to produce a work of poetry that speaks with many voices. Philosophy and poetry are alike in bringing to light what the law forbids, a range of experiences and thoughts at odds with the demands of conventional or demotic justice. Poetic imitation creates the illusion of presenting real beings as wholes; in fact it heightens something essential by disregarding something essential.⁶⁹ It thereby uncovers the essential in various states of soul or characters, but thus raises the question of whether there is a unity behind this multiplicity. It exposes the problem of the unity of human life, a problem that it is the business of spiritedness to suppress or solve by force. Poetry is more closely related to the pleasant and erotic than to the noble, even if (or because) thumos and the noble are indispensable themes of poetry (as in the tradition founded by Homer).⁷⁰ Furthermore poetic imitation, unlike a treatise, treats human beings as moved by passions and not as pure intellects; poetic imitation is the appropriate vehicle for presenting philosophy as a way of life.⁷¹ Strauss writes that “what undergoes various kinds of fate in treatises is not human beings, but logoi,” and “Plato refers frequently to this life and fate of the logoi, most clearly perhaps in the Phaedo. . . . Yet the primary theme of the Phaedo is not the death of Socrates’ logoi but the death of Socrates himself.”⁷²

The difference between poetry and philosophy in Strauss’s presentation comes down to one point: the poets show only inferior ways of life, those that fail to solve the problems of life in a satisfactory way. Autonomous poetry presents nonphilosophic life as autonomous, and so remains drastically incomplete. “Yet by articulating the cardinal problem of human life as it comes to sight within the nonphilosophic life, poetry prepares for the philosophic life.”⁷³ Legitimate poetry is ministerial to the life of understanding.

VI

I conclude with a few remarks on the meaning of the apparent disregard of poetry in Strauss’s account of the sources of liberalism. Poetry’s openness to the problematic character of life shows it to be more akin to philosophy’s eros than to law and ancestral piety. Plato’s presentation of a musical Socrates, aware of the complexity of the human passions and thus possessing an essential ingredient of prudence, counters the charge of the poets that philosophy is unerotic. Poetry has its source in a universal human capacity to experience the complexity of the passions and the limitations of law on a prephilosophic level. In the hands of capable poets, poetic imitation articulates this experience to disclose the structure of primary human tensions and problems. Poetry’s failure consists in not making available by argument or example the thinker and the life of thought as the most satisfactory way of life, as neither tragic nor comic. In this way it prefigures the liberal account of the human in terms of freedom: the human capacity to pursue a variety of ends, without the judgment of a natural hierarchy of ends. In later modern philosophy, this becomes the celebration of diversity, or the preference for the local and particular over the universal.⁷⁴ Strauss indicates that Nietzsche’s preference for the tragic life over the theoretical life is related to his adoption of the “fundamental premise of the historical school,” namely, not the belief in necessary progress but “the belief in the supreme value of diversity or uniqueness.”⁷⁵ Strauss’s presentation of the origins and development of modernity as an artificial, willful project seems to commit a deliberate abstraction from this poetic element, which has its counterpart, if not its source, in ancient poetry. He thus enlarges the gulf between ancient and modern, even as, in a countervailing movement, he distances Socrates in his provocative reading from traditional rationalism and uncovers a Plato who can converse with Nietzsche and Heidegger to show philosophic respect for human particularity as only poetry can disclose it. His procedure, however, might be considered a Platonic abstraction: Just as the Republic’s “three waves” of founding first inspire enthusiasm, then lead to disappointment about the prospects for political idealism, so Strauss’s account of modernity—banishing the poets with as much irony as Socrates—detaches the better natures from modern political hopes and awakens the philosophic need to return to the beginnings.