EPILOGUE

Dwelling and Exile

Only since the philosophy of German Idealism is there a history of philosophy wherein history itself becomes a path of absolute knowing to itself. History is now no longer the past that one has left behind oneself and is over with, but is rather the constant form of becoming of the spirit itself [Werdeform des Geistes selbst]. First in German Idealism is history grasped metaphysically. Until that time it is something unavoidable and unintelligible, a burden or a miracle, an error or a purposeful arrangement, a witch’s dance or the teacher of “life,” but in any case always something that one interprets directly on the basis of quotidian experience and its aims.

MARTIN HEIDEGGER, Schelling: Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit

The Greeks, and therewith in particular Socrates and Plato, lacked the awareness of history, the historical consciousness. . . . But perhaps History is a problematic interpretation of phenomena which could be interpreted differently, which were interpreted differently in former times and especially by Socrates and his descendants. I will illustrate the fact starting from a simple example. Xenophon, a pupil of Socrates, wrote a history called Hellenica, Greek history. This work begins abruptly with the expression “Thereafter.”. . . More importantly: the Hellenica also ends with Thereafter, what we call History is for Xenophon a sequence of Thereafters, in each of which tarache (confusion) rules.

LEO STRAUSS, “The Problem of Socrates”

I

History is a theme central to the thought of Heidegger and Strauss as late modern philosophers. Both see themselves as living in a time of exhaustion and collapse of the tradition, which calls for a new beginning, but their conceptions of history and of philosophy’s role in it are otherwise starkly different. It is as important for Strauss to reject the German metaphysical approach to history as a meaningful process as it is for Heidegger to endorse a version of it. This is not to say that Strauss simply returns to the Greek account of history as a “sequence of Thereafters,” since Strauss cannot claim that he is unaware of history in the modern sense or of the historical consciousness. For a late modern philosopher, the recovery of the nonmetaphysical approach requires a conscious effort of overcoming the inheritance of the historical consciousness. “The distinction between philosophic and historical cannot be avoided, but distinction is not total separation: one cannot study the philosophic problem without having made up one’s mind on the historical problem and one cannot study the historical problem without having made up one’s mind implicitly on the philosophical problem.”¹ The rejection of history as a meaningful or “metaphysical” process is based not on a comprehensive alternative metaphysical doctrine but rather on skepticism about the possibilities of the political sphere. That the latter can only be a “cave” of conflicting opinion and not a true whole is the experience from which Strauss begins. To begin there “implicitly” is not the same as possessing final knowledge about the problem of history. The structure of the relation of philosophy to the city is an indeterminate dyad: philosophy must distinguish itself from the city but it cannot exist apart from the city. Strauss ascribes the same structure to the relation of the problem of philosophy to the problem of history, for the modern cave has been formed by historical thinking. Like all opinion in the cave, historical thinking has proved to be characterized by internal contradiction. That merely negative insight, far from constituting wisdom, is sufficient to ground a Socratic inquiry that denies its subservience to (or unity with) history while all the same not leaving behind the reflection on history.

Reflection on history cannot be abandoned after one has had the insight that philosophic questioning is subject to deformation as it becomes a tradition or as it becomes “history” with a negative teleological sense (growing forgetfulness). With this problem of history in mind, Strauss and Jacob Klein recovered the original meaning of the Platonic criticism of writing as in reality the achievement of a new form of writing that remains “alive” through requiring readers to question the doctrinal distortions of philosophy that the same writing seems to present as the truth of its own dialectic. In other words, Platonic writing anticipates its own fall into error (the tradition of the “doctrine of ideas”), which it enables close readers to avoid.² Although Heidegger did not read Plato in this way, he provided insights that enabled others to find this way, for he showed that Greek philosophy from the beginnings through Aristotle is moved by the aporia of Being (the question “of ancient times, and the question now and the question always,” as Aristotle says), which specifically has the structure of tension between the apophantic disclosure of Being in logos and the attempt to give causal, genetic accounts of Being, which tend to occlude the original disclosure. In clear indebtedness to Heidegger, Jacob Klein took as the principal theme of his inquiries the twofold character of eidos as disclosure in logos (in stable intelligible structures) and as the causal-genetic ground of becoming. Klein wrote of “the one immense difficulty within ancient ontology, namely, to determine the relation between the ‘being’ of the object itself and the ‘being’ of the object in thought,” and argued that this difficulty laid the basis for the modern approach in mathematics and physical science in which the solution to the aporia of Being is found in “the symbolic understanding of the object intended,” or the identification of the actual object being studied (number, body) with the mere concept of the object (indeterminate magnitude, extension).³ Referring to Klein’s insights, Strauss argues that the new approach to knowledge as symbolic construction made possible the idea of progress, which “implies that the most elementary questions can be settled once and for all so that future generations can dispense with their further discussion, but can erect on the foundations once laid an ever-growing structure.”⁴ As the foundations were covered up by advances built upon them, philosophy, which requires lucidity about its proceeding, found it needed a special inquiry (the history of philosophy or science) “whose purpose it is to keep alive the recollection, and the problem, of the foundations hidden by progress.”⁵ Strauss, in accord with Heidegger and Klein, engages in such inquiry not in order to shore up the foundations but in order to expose the problem in them.

Heidegger made the ancient aporia accessible insofar as he showed that the question of Being begins with the prescientific disclosure of beings through human speaking and knowing as an engaged openness with the world, and made evident the presence of this understanding in ancient authors. Heidegger’s intent was not merely to identify openness to Being with the practical handling of things as equipment (the ready-to-hand) but to uncover the presupposed horizon of this engagement (“world”) as inherently elusive to discursive and causal accounts. At the same time he sought to show that the aporia of Being was under constant pressure of concealment by the tendencies toward “fallen” modes of discourse bound up with human existence, which is inauthentic and flees from genuine questioning, especially human “being-together” in anonymous, self-forgetting social life. It is an easy step from this analysis to the view that philosophizing is under constant threat from distortion in the form of tradition that arises from the social needs of teaching and communication. It is also not difficult to see that in spite of his vastly different appreciation of political life and philosophy’s relation to it, Strauss’s view of philosophy as radical openness to aporia that is in inherent tension with the requirements of law and political life was prepared by Heidegger’s analysis. In other terms, Strauss’s claim that the core of philosophy is political philosophy is equivalent to the claim that the primary theme of philosophic reflection is the forgetfulness of aporia, understood in nonhistoricist fashion.

II

Central to Strauss’s nonhistoricist account of the problem of history is the transformation of the cave by revealed religion, or the religion of the book, which made possible the permanent subordination of philosophy to a doctrine that claimed to be comprehensive truth. In Strauss’s account early modern philosophy attempted to reestablish the natural independence of philosophy from nomos but did so only through another subjection of philosophy to nomos: the practical, progressive, humanitarian project of Enlightenment that is grounded in universally accessible certainties. Philosophy lost its aporetic openness in order to secure civic freedom for itself and for all humanity, thereby becoming wholly at home in politics. Hobbes supplied the foundations of this project in the account of knowledge as construction, abstracting philosophy from ancient questions and controversies about causes. “The abandonment of the primacy of contemplation or theory in favor of the primacy of practice is the necessary consequence of the abandonment of the plane on which Platonism and Epicureanism have carried on their struggle. For the synthesis of Platonism and Epicureanism stands or falls with the view that to understand is to make.”⁶ The successors to the constructivism of Hobbes and Descartes are the various modern systems that claim to give a comprehensive structure of human knowledge that excludes the possibility of miracles and any revelation of a mysterious God. Of Spinoza Strauss writes: “There is therefore only one way of disposing of the possibility of revelation or miracles: one must prove that God is in no way mysterious, or that we have adequate knowledge of the essence of God. This step was taken by Spinoza.” According to Spinoza “any knowledge of God we can have must be as clear and as distinct as that which we can have of the triangle,” and his teaching “presents the most comprehensive, or the most ambitious, program of what modern science could be.”⁷ Although Strauss regards the contrast between ancient and modern philosophy on the question of the refutability of revelation as the key to their difference, his view on their positions is at times put cryptically. “A philosophy which believes that it can refute the possibility of revelation and a philosophy which does not believe that: this is the real meaning of la querelle des anciens et des modernes.”⁸ The ambiguity of the references in this sentence may be removed by recalling that Strauss expressly describes Spinoza as believing that he could refute the possibility of revelation. Since at least one major modern subscribes to refutability, it would seem to follow that the ancients have the more modest approach, although Strauss remarks on the “possibility of refutation implied in Platonic-Aristotelian philosophy. What their specific argument is, we cannot say before we have understood their whole teaching. Since I cannot claim to have achieved this, I must leave the issue open.”⁹

Upon careful consideration, one sees that Strauss’s view is that ancient philosophy as aporetic, as admitting that the whole is not intelligible, is in the stronger position for justifying its way of life as the most choiceworthy. But its strength does not depend on showing the refutability of revelation in a crucial sense, i.e., by offering a metaphysical account of the whole that establishes the impossibility of a mysterious, omnipotent first cause. He writes: “as far as I know, the present-day arguments in favor of revelation against philosophy are based on an inadequate understanding of classical philosophy,” for “classical philosophy is said to be based on the unwarranted belief that the whole is intelligible.” Countering this view, Strauss writes of Socrates as the philosopher “who knew that he knew nothing, who therewith admitted that the whole is not intelligible” although “he wondered whether by saying that the whole is not intelligible we do not admit to having some understanding of the whole.”¹⁰ In other words, Strauss thought that Socratic philosophy provides a sufficient grounding for the philosophic life that does not depend on knowing whether Plato and Aristotle had achieved refutations of the alternative of revealed truth. To be more precise, Socratic knowledge of ignorance provides a response to the claim of revelation to define the best life even if reason cannot prove the impossibility of a mysterious God. “The very insight into the limitations of philosophy is a victory of philosophy: because it is an insight.” ¹¹ This is a crucial point in Strauss (often misconstrued by interpreters), and it bears directly on Strauss’s response to Heidegger, who in Strauss’s estimation is quite “sensible” in avowing the mysteriousness of Being and of the origin of the human as bound up with Being. For Strauss the confrontation with that ultimate mystery leaves intact the possibility that reason has transhistorical knowledge of its limitations, or an insight that is not an Ereignis, a “gift of Being” or of some higher power, but derived from knowledge of the human dyadic openness and closedness of the “cave,” which determines the human relation to the whole. Whereas Heidegger still agrees with the modern philosophers that the appearance of biblical revelation in the world changed the character of philosophy, presumably permanently, Strauss regards the insight into human duality as providing philosophy with a crucial means of transcending this historical contingency.

To restate Strauss’s central insight: the knowledge of human dyadic openness to the whole, or the knowledge that access to the fundamental problems (including the problem that revelation claims to answer) is available only through an erotic ascent from the moral-political realm, is the root transhistorical insight. Hence “the political things and their corollaries are the form in which the highest principles first come to sight” and “they are the link between what is highest and lowest.” The political things are the key to all things since man as political is the microcosm.¹²

Strauss could at the same time express sympathy with certain moments in modern philosophy that in an ancient spirit distance themselves from the authority of revelation, aiming at neither refutation nor subservience. Thus he praises Montesquieu who “tried to recover for statesmanship a latitude which had been considerably restricted by the Thomistic teaching. What Montesquieu’s private thoughts were will always remain controversial. But it is safe to say that what he explicitly teaches, as a student of politics and as politically sound and right, is nearer to the spirit of the classics than to Thomas.”¹³ This statement makes evident that the “theologico-political problem” as Strauss sees it unfolds on the plane of politics insofar as reason has a claim to autonomy in practical matters, apart from the theoretical controversy between reason and revelation. Strauss evidently was confirmed in this view by the events of his own life. “The biggest event of 1933 would rather seem to have proved, if such proof was necessary, that man cannot abandon the question of the good society, and that he cannot free himself from the responsibility for answering it by deferring to History or to any other power different from his own reason.”¹⁴ Such statements call into question the view that Strauss regarded only philosophers as having a right to appeal to reason and that otherwise the lives of human beings are necessarily and properly guided only by revelation’s demands for obedience or by “political theology.”¹⁵

III

The focal thesis of the present study is that Strauss’s criticism of the historicism of Heidegger’s thought is not chiefly concerned with the skeptical and relativistic consequences of that thought, whereby Strauss would assert against it a set of moral absolutes, and that on the contrary, his judgment is that the appeal to History has the effect of concealing the skeptical and aporetic nature of philosophy as the critique of custom and law. This is the real meaning of Strauss’s claim that Heidegger’s thought has no room for political philosophy. Thus Heidegger is a profoundly paradoxical figure insofar as his questioning reopened the essential aporia of philosophy and at the same time it concealed from itself its own moral and political implications, distorting the nature of radical questioning by identifying it with the stance of grateful dwelling within worlds defined by particular languages and the poetic announcement of gods. But if Strauss’s true critique of Heidegger is commonly misunderstood, this has much to do with the paradoxical character of his own thought, since Strauss’s skeptical overcoming of historicism involves a radical particularism of a special sort. In correspondence with Hans-Georg Gadamer concerning the latter’s Wahrheit und Methode, Strauss writes: “Not only is my hermeneutical experience very limited . . . the experience I possess makes me doubtful whether a universal hermeneutics which is more than ‘formal’ or external is possible. I believe that the doubt arises irretrievably from the ‘occasional’ character of every worthwhile interpretation.”¹⁶ Strauss’s mode of philosophizing by means of commentaries seeks to illuminate the diverse approaches of the great philosophers to the fundamental problems by placing their thought in dialogue.¹⁷ It is not satisfied with an abstract and general account of those problems and their possible solutions, since the core of philosophy is the activity of addressing the tension between the theoretical life and its political-moral matrix. This entails a constant effort of ascent toward wisdom (knowledge of the whole) that is never completed, and every such ascent has unique features that are necessarily reflected in the individual philosopher’s manner of writing. The study of a given philosopher involves becoming acquainted with his peculiar mode of speaking differently to philosophers and nonphilosophers, according to rhetorical strategies that seem to him required by his situation. His mode of rhetoric is inseparable from the substance of his thought, for it directly relates to how he conceives the philosophic life and its relation to political life. The highest subject of philosophy is the philosophic life itself, which is always lived as a particular effort to attain an end that is radically universal: to be at home in the whole.¹⁸ The life and fate of logoi are thematic throughout the Platonic dialogues, “yet the primary theme of the Phaedo is not the death of Socrates’ logoi but the death of Socrates himself.”¹⁹ The consequences of the philosophic life for facing mortality cannot be summed up in a formula or a theory but can fully emerge only in the actuality of that life.

It must be avowed that this conception of philosophy in which the substance of thinking is inseparable from the manner in which the philosopher conducts his life in his particular nomos accords an enormous weight to “history” in some sense. Strauss himself puts great emphasis on how philosophic rhetoric and therefore philosophizing in the context of the Jewish and Islamic revelations were shaped profoundly by their situation. One recurs at this point to Strauss’s position that philosophy and history must be distinguished although they cannot be separated. What he means by “history” has no overall coherence or telos, is deficient in logos (as “cave”), yet is a necessary condition of philosophic logos. Philosophy necessarily begins with reflection on particulars that lead to awareness of the universal but are never wholly derivable from the universal.²⁰ No instance of the philosophic life is strictly speaking repeatable, given that it is always a particular life, engaged with particular circumstances, in erotic quest of the universal.²¹ Löwith’s formulation “repetition of antiquity at the peak of modernity” spoke to Strauss since it brings forward the essential novelty of what seems to be only a recurrence of the same. The boldness of repetition involves the daring of unorthodox readings. “Who can dare to say that Plato’s doctrine of ideas as he intimated it, or Aristotle’s doctrine of the nous that does nothing but think itself and is essentially related to the eternal visible universe, is the true teaching?”²²

In opposing his recovery of tradition to both the tradition and his contemporaries, Strauss appeals to no authority but only his own insight. Philosophy as he conceives it is not a destiny or fate sent by history or Being as historical. Philosophers have a permanent, natural fate as exiles operating in the midst of the political realm that provides them with their questions and problems—a fate that can be experienced only by individuals, not by epochs or cultures.