NOTES

PARABASIS

1. CM, 9. The terms “crisis” and “critique” designate not just moments or possible stances in the history of philosophy but the condition of philosophizing as such. Philosophic thinking cannot “hasten forward with sanguine expectations, as though the path which it has traversed leads directly to the goal, and as though the accepted premises could be so securely relied upon that there can be no need of constantly returning to them and considering whether we may not, perhaps in the course of inferences, discover defects” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A735/B763). In the forever-renewed search for beginnings, the center proves to be everywhere and the circumference nowhere. Interruption and crisis in the forward movement of thought are the distinctive signs of insight, therewith of “progress,” in philosophic thought. In the drama of dialectic, parabasis is necessarily the principal action and theme. For an account of philosophy as “critical science” whose task is to make distinctions visible (krinein) in such a way that it “always puts itself under the most radical critique,” see GA, 22: 7–11.

2. One should not overlook the great debt of both of these figures to Edmund Husserl precisely in the thematizing of “crisis” and in the phenomenological approach to its analysis. At the same time Heidegger and Strauss are more centrally concerned than Husserl with the uncovering of the origin of the tradition in the Greeks’ radical openness to questioning, and with the tradition as the historical obscuring of this origin, although Husserl took up a related inquiry in his late The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. See Hwa Yol Jung, “Two Critics of Scientism: Leo Strauss and Edmund Husserl,” Independent Journal of Philosophy 2 (1978): 81–88, and the author’s “Edmund Husserl,” in HPP.

3. “Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy,” SPPP, 29–37; first published in Interpretation 2, no. 1 (1971).

4. SPPP, 30. I am not concerned with whether Heidegger made such a statement or what he may have meant by it if he did make it. I am here concerned with Strauss’s statement and what it reveals about his own relation to Heidegger. Indeed Strauss’s authority for his view of Heidegger’s opinion is obscure and not clearly traceable to Heidegger’s express declaration (“As far as I can see . . .”).

5. “An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism,” lecture of 1956, RCPR, 29. A more authentic version of this lecture bearing Strauss’s original title “Existentialism” appears in Interpretation 22, no. 3 (1995): 303–20. In the same lecture Strauss says, “prior to Heidegger’s emergence the most outstanding German philosopher—I would say the only German philosopher—of the time was Edmund Husserl,” RCPR, 28. This should lay to rest the question of whether Strauss thought of Heidegger as a philosopher. For literature treating both Strauss and Heidegger, see relevant essays or parts of the following: L. Batnitzky, Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); S. Fleischacker, ed., Heidegger’s Jewish Followers (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2008); P. Kielmansegg, H. Mewes, and E. Glaser-Schmidt, Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); S. B. Smith, Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); C. Zuckert, Postmodern Platos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); C. Zuckert and M. Zuckert, The Truth about Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

6. See chapter 7 below.

7. Notable exceptions, besides the authors cited in note 5 above, are Jeffrey Barash, Mark Blitz, Michael Gillespie, Robert Pippin, Stanley Rosen, and Gregory Bruce Smith. Rosen is one of the few writers to address Strauss’s concern with the possibility of philosophy. See “Wittgenstein, Strauss, and the Possibility of Philosophy,” in The Elusiveness of the Ordinary: Studies in the Possibility of Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).

8. TM, 13.

9. SPPP, 34–37; WIPP, 74–77; RCPR, 28–29. “Since the natural understanding is the presupposition of the scientific understanding, the analysis of science and the world of science presupposes the natural understanding, or the world of common sense.” NRH, 79. See also chapters 3 and 4 below.

10. See chapters 2 and 3 below.

11. For Strauss’s argument on this, see chapter 3 below.

12. WIPP, 39.

13. This is Strauss’s interpretation of Socrates’s account of his beginning philosophically with the direct approach to the causes of beings (his “pre-Socratic” phase), followed by his “second sailing” or his “taking refuge in speeches” as the approach to what the beings are. See Phaedo 95e–100b.

14. RCPR, 24–25, 38–42; CM, 2–3.

15. In “Nietzsche’s Word ‘God is Dead’” (1943), Heidegger writes: “Nietzsche himself interprets the course of Western history metaphysically, as the advent and development of nihilism. To think through Nietzsche’s metaphysics becomes a matter of reflecting on the situation and place of contemporary men, whose destiny with respect to truth is still little experienced.” H, 193–94. In “Religiöse Lage der Gegenwart” (1930), Strauss writes: “Through Nietzsche, tradition has been shaken to its roots. It has completely lost its self-evident truth. We are left in this world without any authority, any direction. Only now has the question pos bioteon again received its full edge. We can pose it again.” GS, 2: 389, trans. EW, 32. See L. Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), for an insightful discussion of Strauss’s relation to Nietzsche focusing on Strauss’s “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil.” On Heidegger’s appropriation of Nietzsche, see R. Pippin, “Nietzsche, Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Modernity,” in Nietzsche and Modern German Thought, ed. K. Ansell-Pearson (New York: Routledge, 1991), and the contributions in A. Denker, M. Heinz, J. Sallis, et al., eds., Heidegger und Nietzsche. Heidegger-Jahrbuch 2, (Freiburg/Munich: Alber Verlag, 2005).

16. CCWM, 5–12.

17. See chapter 2 below.

18. For intellectual biographies of Strauss, see the studies by David Janssens, Between Athens and Jerusalem: Philosophy, Prophecy and Politics in Leo Strauss’s Early Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008); Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Eugene R. Sheppard, Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile: The Making of a Political Philosopher (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2006); Daniel Tanguay, Leo Strauss: An Intellectual Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); and the introduction in EW. Principal friends and correspondents of Strauss among Heidegger’s students were Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hans Jonas, Jacob Klein, Gerhard Krüger, and Karl Löwith. The thought of another close correspondent, the Hegelian-Marxist Alexandre Kojève, is deeply engaged with Heidegger, although he was not Heidegger’s student. For Kojève’s relation to Heidegger, see E. Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927–1961 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).

19. “A Giving of Accounts,” JPCM, 461. Heidegger’s lecture course was Phänomenologische Interpretationen ausgewählter Abhandlungen des Aristoteles zur Ontologie und Logik, published in GA, 62. See also RCPR, 27–28. Heidegger states the fundamental intent of his interpretation of the Metaphysics in the following passage:

The question now is: In what way is an inquiry into Being to be motivated? What is the object-sphere, what is the mode of access, from which the ground-meaning [Grundsinn] of Being emerges that is decisive for philosophic inquiry? . . . The determination of the meaning of Being which deals solely with the ground-meaning of Being in the sphere of objects, and which is of interest to philosophy, finds itself led back to the analysis of Life, human life in its specific-factic way and in its historical Being. . . . The question is: How is one in the first place to set about an investigation of the ontological- and object-meaning of life? For the concrete starting-point it is a matter of appropriating the material for such an inquiry through critique of philosophy. The starting-point must emerge out of history. . . . A genuine starting-point is possible only by going back to the decisive starting-points of philosophy, in the rubble of whose tradition we stand. On this basis every step of the interpretation and translation of Aristotle is determined. (GA, 62: 173–74)

For an incisive account of Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, see S. Rosen, “Kant and Heidegger: Transcendental Alternatives to Aristotle,” in The Elusiveness of the Ordinary: Studies in the Possibility of Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).

20. JPCM, 462.

21. “An Unspoken Prologue to a Public Lecture at St. John’s College in Honor of Jacob Klein,” JPCM, 450.

22. JPCM, 462.

23. JPCM, 450.

24. NRH, 31. See chapter 7 below.

25. To my knowledge Strauss never characterizes Heidegger as a nihilist or his thought as nihilistic. He delivered a most interesting and revealing lecture in 1941 entitled “German Nihilism,” in which he analyzes and criticizes the broad German tendency in the early twentieth century toward opposition to “civilization,” understood as the Western democratic Enlightenment. See GN and corrections in Interpretation 28, no. 2 (fall 2000): 33–34, and also S. Shell’s excellent essay on the lecture, “To Spare the Vanquished and Crush the Arrogant,” in The Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss, ed. Steven B. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 171–92. Surely Heidegger’s thought has sympathies with this outlook, including a contempt for moderation that Strauss found in Heidegger’s teaching before it became manifest in his praise of the Nazi movement (see chapter 6 below). All the same, Strauss does not reduce Heidegger’s thinking, as genuinely philosophic, to the cultural tendencies of his time, and, if I am not mistaken, he regards nihilism as a subphilosophic phenomenon. For a thoughtful and careful study of how Heidegger’s philosophy relates to National Socialist ideology and its sources, see C. Bambach, Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism and the Greeks (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). Bambach writes of Heidegger’s “philosophical attempt at geo-politics, a grand metaphysical vision of German destiny based on the notion of a singular German form of autochthony or rootedness in the earth: Bodenständigkeit” (xix–xx). As Bambach argues, Heidegger’s concerns with “preserving and transforming the German Volk against the forces of industrialization, urbanization and the threat of foreign influence” linked him to Nazi ideology, but all the same Heidegger had philosophical concerns alien to Nazism, and his “ontological” account of German destiny brought him into explicit conflict with the biological racism and “political science” of Nazism. For accounts of Heidegger’s political engagement that initiated the recent debate about Heidegger’s Nazism, see V. Farias, Heidegger and National Socialism, trans. P. Burrell and G. Ricci (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), and H. Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, trans. A Blunden (New York: Basic Books, 1993). See also H. Sluga, Heidegger’s Crisis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); J. F. Ward, Heidegger’s Political Thinking (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995); M. Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); and most recently H. Zaborowski, “Eine Frage von Irre und Schuld?” Martin Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 2010), and the documents and interpretations collected in A. Denker and H. Zaborowski, eds., Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus. Heidegger-Jahrbuch, vols. 4 and 5 (Munich: Karl Alber, 2009). For Heidegger’s “idealist” concept of the Volk, see below, chapter 4.

26. RCPR, 37.

27. NRH, 122.

28. CM, 20.

29. TM, 19. See chapter 3 for more discussion of this and the previous two quotations.

30. Thus Steven Smith writes that there is “a set of common problems or questions that characterize Strauss’s work: for example, the difference between ancients and moderns, the quarrel between philosophy and poetry, and of course the tension between reason and revelation. None of these problems can be said to have priority over the others nor do they cohere in anything as crude as a system. Whatever may be alleged, there is hardly a single thread that runs throughout these different interests.” Reading Leo Strauss, 4. I have to disagree and say that the single thread running through Strauss’s inquiries is the duality of the human as political and transcending the political, for which he uses the expression “the city and man.”

31. 1 S. Smith, Reading Leo Strauss, 130.

32. OT, 212. I find it remarkable that Strauss implies that Kojève, the apologist for Stalin, has “the courage to face the issue of Tyranny” lacking in Heidegger, and that Strauss furthermore associates himself with Kojève in possessing such courage. This is especially odd in light of Strauss’s critical remarks about Kojève’s claiming that “all present-day tyrants are good tyrants in Xenophon’s sense,” which, as Strauss asserts, involves an allusion to Stalin, and also about Kojève’s failure to grasp the meaning of Stalin’s use of the NKVD and labor camps (OT, 188–89). Although Strauss’s criticism seems to suggest the moral equivalence of Hitler and Stalin, Kojève’s apology for Stalin did not earn from Strauss as much opprobrium as Heidegger’s endorsement of Hitler. One could argue that Heidegger’s action had greater practical consequences, lending authority to a new regime that was in need of legitimacy, whereas Kojève’s favoring of Stalin came after the fact of Stalin’s brutal accomplishments. But that would also make Kojève’s apology more reprehensible as based on knowledge of the dictator’s demonstrated capacity for inhuman cruelty such as Heidegger and others could not have concerning Hitler in 1933–34 at the peak of Heidegger’s enthusiasm for the Führer. (Negative judgments of Hitler’s character and of the Nazi program were of course certainly possible at that time.) Heidegger’s philosophic superiority to Kojève conceivably plays a role in Strauss’s stronger criticism of Heidegger. See the editors’ introduction to OT, ix–xxii.

33. SPPP, 30.

34. “At any rate, it is ultimately because he means to justify philosophy before the tribunal of the political community, and hence on the level of political discussion, that the philosopher has to understand the political things exactly as they are understood in political life.” See “On Classical Political Philosophy,” WIPP, 94.

35. JPCM, 463. See chapter 6 below. Strauss’s Natural Right and History is according to wide repute a defense of the America tradition of natural right, but only those who have not read the book could hold this opinion. Strauss refers to the Declaration of Independence with a one-line quotation and without analysis on the first two pages to establish the importance of the theme of natural right. (The University of Chicago Press in an astute marketing decision put the original Declaration on the cover of the paperback edition.) Strauss makes in the whole book just one brief reference to an American political thinker (Madison), and his treatment of the philosopher most closely associated with the American Founding, John Locke, is highly critical, arguing that the principles of Locke are ultimately barely distinguishable from those of Hobbes. At the same time, Strauss’s genuine respect for the moderation and stability of the American founding principles and for the statesmanship that produced them entails qualification of a simply Hobbesian reading of American democracy.

36. Among the few statements of Strauss on foreign policy questions and the practical implications of political philosophy are two unpublished lectures from the early 1940s that appear with an introduction by Nathan Tarcov in the Review of Politics 69, no. 4 (fall 2007): 513–38: “What Can We Learn from Political Theory?” and “The Re-education of Axis Countries concerning the Jews.” On the basis of these lectures, Tarcov remarks that “it turns out not only that Strauss’s views do not seem to have inspired recent U.S. policy, but that they might have served as warnings against some of the missteps that have plagued U.S. policy in recent years.” See N. Tarcov, “Will the Real Leo Strauss Please Stand Up?” American Interest online, September–October 2006.

37. WIPP, 16–17. One can think here of the three competing definitions of justice in Plato, Republic, book 1. See CM, 62–85.

38. Strauss was exposed to a version of this problem in his youth, before turning to philosophy, as he writes that he was “a young Jew born and raised in Germany who found himself in the grip of the theological-political predicament,” SCR, 1–31. The arguments between Jewish orthodoxy and political Zionism brought him to question the Enlightenment critique of orthodoxy, after which he moved to the consideration of the difference between modern and pre-modern (Islamic and Jewish medieval, then ancient) accounts of the relation of philosophy to orthodoxy. See also chapter 2 below. I will not dwell on the prehistory of Strauss’s discovery of Socratic philosophy, which has been closely examined by others, but only note that it shows that the theological-political was central to his own ascent to philosophy. See the writings in EW.

39. WIPP, 17.

40. See chapter 3 below. In anticipation of what is argued below, I will say that the theological-political problem concerns the fundamental duality of the human as political and transpolitical and that this problem is not about only the argument between philosophy and revelation, since it appears in various prephilosophic forms. Ordinary piety’s turn to gods that reward and punish reflects a deficiency in morality as law-abidingness—in the meaning of morality most basic to political life. Ordinary piety already shows that the human is not constituted only by the law or the needs of political life, although it interprets the transpolitical goods in terms of support of the law (the happiness of the virtuous) and so it conceals the deficiency of the law from itself. See chapter 9 below. The flexible, nonpious action of statesmen is freer to disclose the deficiency of law as it reflects on the good of the whole political community. Philosophy is the most comprehensive and fundamental reflection on the duality, and thus it poses the profoundest challenge to piety as it pursues an end altogether transpolitical and would give an intelligible account of what piety is in terms of the duality. Strauss expresses this point with respect to biblical revelation: “For the Bible claims to present a solution to the very problem which gave rise to philosophy,” and it offers a solution (obedience to the law of a mysterious God) diametrically opposed to philosophy’s (the life of autonomous reason in quest of knowledge; see RR, 148–49). It does not follow that piety is the highest alternative to philosophy from philosophy’s standpoint. (See Strauss’s formulation: “If we assume on the basis of the Fall that the alternative for man is philosophy or obedience to God’s revelation,” RR, 142). Strauss argues that for Plato the great alternative to Socratic philosophy is the philosophic poetry of Aristophanes, as the most profound alternative to the Socratic approach to the fundamental duality (see chapter 9 below). Reflection on human duality provides Socrates and Socratic thinkers with a way of seeing how the philosophic quest for knowledge of the whole is made possible through an examination of the “political things.” To that extent, indeed, the Socratic philosopher has grounds for being grateful for the existence of the city’s gods. Accordingly Socrates may have a kind of theology, one peculiar to the philosopher.

41. Strauss uses the term “whole” with a problematic meaning that emerges contextually, as the whole, or the cosmos, of the problems faced by the human.

42. See chapters 1, 2, and 5 below.

43. See chapters 1, 4, and 5 below.

44. JPCM, 463.

45. See EW, 31–32.

46. JPCM, 463.

47. OT, 212. See chapter 7 below.

48. See chapters 3, 8, and 9 below.

49. NRH, 125–26.

50. SZ, 180–230; Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 225–73.

51. A primary source for his suggestions on this is the Platonic trilogy Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman. See Strauss’s treatment of the Statesman in “Plato,” in HPP, and the comments on the trilogy in WIPP, 39–40. See also the letter to A. Kojève, 28.5.1957, in OT, 276–80 and chapters 2 and 3 below.

52. See NRH, chap. 3, and below, chapter 7.

53. Strauss on Socrates: “We may also say that he viewed man in the light of the unchangeable ideas, i.e., of the fundamental and permanent problems.” WIPP, 39. Equivalently Strauss interprets the ideas in terms of Socratic knowledge of ignorance. “In other words, philosophy is possible only if man, while incapable of acquiring wisdom or full understanding of the whole, is capable of knowing what he does not know, that is to say, of grasping the fundamental problems and therewith the fundamental alternatives, which are, in principle, coeval with human thought.” NRH, 35.

54. NRH, 81.

55. See chapter 9 below. I also mention (following a suggestion of Nathan Tarcov) the contest for rule within the soul in Republic, books 8–9, and in Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, aph. 19, which contest between kinds of souls or “parts” of the soul has implications for political rule.

56. See chapter 7 below. The praising comment on Montesquieu at NRH, 164, makes plain that Strauss is not a proponent of doctrinaire natural right or natural law. See also the observation in “How to Begin to Study Medieval Philosophy,” RCPR, 224: “The rules of conduct which are called by the Christian scholastics natural laws and by the mutakallimun rational laws are called by the Islamic-Jewish philosophers generally accepted opinions.”

57. See Robert Pippin, “The Modern World of Leo Strauss,” in Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), and Rosen, “Wittgenstein, Strauss, and the Possibility of Philosophy.” Although Strauss does not propose the notion of a natural life-world, he does argue for the existence of a natural problem—the tension between politics and philosophy—that comes to light for those who philosophize naturally. To the extent that Strauss suggests that the evidence for this problem arises from reflection on the alternatives of political life and philosophy as they once existed in their original, pure, and unmixed form—a reflection requiring historical studies for modern students—there is the possible theoretical difficulty that knowing that such reflection is a condition for the recovery of natural philosophizing presupposes somehow possessing already the grasp of the natural problem that needs to be recovered. (See chapter 2 below: Strauss’s asserts to Karl Löwith, “We are natural beings . . .” but then adds, “The means of thinking by the natural understanding are lost to us.”)

58. WIPP, 38: “To understand man in the light of the whole means for modern natural science to understand man in the light of the sub-human. But in that light man as man is wholly unintelligible.”

59. WIPP, 55.

60. See chapters 4 and 5 below. Strauss also has a dual relation to Nietzsche, for on the one hand Nietzsche abandons nature for history, but on the other his thought points to the recovery of the classical account of the natural distinction between the philosopher and the nonphilosopher. See especially “Note on the Plan, etc.” in SPPP.

61. NRH, 18. See chapters 6 and 7 below.

62. NRH, 176. See chapter 8 below.

63. TM, 294–96: Strauss cautions against “the error of denying the presence of philosophy in Machiavelli’s thought” but also writes that “Machiavelli’s philosophizing . . . remains on the whole within the limits set by the city qua closed to philosophy. Accepting the ends of the demos as beyond appeal, he seeks the best means conducive to those ends.”

64. PPH, xv (preface to the American edition).

65. RCPR, 270.

66. See Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, aphorisms 24, 59, 188, 230. See also Heidegger, N, vol. 1, “The Will to Power as Art,” section 25, and Strauss, SPPP, 174–75, 182–83. One should however add that for Strauss the highest models of this art are the classical authors.

67. RCPR, 115–16. Strauss continues: “But we must note that what Hegel calls the triumph of subjectivity is achieved in the Aristophanic comedy only by virtue of the knowledge of nature, i.e., the opposite of self-consciousness.” See also a letter to Hans-Georg Gadamer, 26.2.1961: “The deepest modern interpretation of Aristophanean comedy (Hegel’s) is much less adequate than Plato’s Aristophanizing presentation of Aristophanes in the Symposium.” Strauss adds, “Heidegger is silent on comedy.” CCWM, 7. See chapter 9 below as well. Hegel comments that “tragedy allows less scope for the free emergence of the poet’s personal views than comedy does because there from the beginning the ruling principle is the contingency and caprice of subjective life,” and notes the significance of Aristophanes’s parabases as putting the author in relation to the Athenian public to whom he gives advice and discloses his political views. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 2: 1180–81.

68. Consider in this context the thought of Seth Benardete: “The stories of poetry center around foundational crimes, crimes that reveal what must not be violated if either man is to be man or the city is to be possible. The line between man’s humanity and man’s sociality, the poets seem to be saying, cannot be clearly drawn, for they show that the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx and Oedipus’s incest and patricide are linked and that, in light of what Oedipus has done, Oedipus has to cease to be what he is. . . . The opposition, then, between philosophy and poetry seems straightforward enough. There is for philosophy a divide between man as man and man as political animal that poetry denies.” The Tragedy and Comedy of Life: Plato’s Philebus, trans. with commentary by S. Benardete (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), ix. At the same time Benardete observes that “the Socratic revolution seems to be coeval with Greek poetry, which had realized from the start, with its principle of telling lies like the truth, the relation of argument and action. Homer and Hesiod, then, would have to be recognized as already within the orbit of philosophy.” With reference to Strauss’s noting Homer’s philosophic use of “nature,” Benardete observes that “Strauss’s recovery of Plato opened up the possibility of gathering into the fold of philosophy more than philosophy had ever dreamed of.” The Argument of the Action: Essays on Greek Poetry and Philosophy, ed. R. Burger and M. Davis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 415–16. Thus Benardete following Strauss understands the “quarrel” between philosophy and poetry as premised on a profound kinship as to the fundamental problem of the relation of nature to law (or the gods), which philosophy and poetry tend to resolve in different ways. Benardete’s remarks, taken together, suggest that tragedy is less open to the idea of nature than epic poetry. See chapter 9 below.

69. NRH, 323.

CHAPTER 1

1. Nietzsche, Werke in drei Bänden, ed. K. Schlechta (Munich: Hanser, 1966) (henceforth W), 3: 464–65, and The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967) (henceforth WP), aph. 419.

2. Ibid., aph. 419.

3. W, 3: 765–67; WP, aph.437.

4. W, 3: 496; WP, aph. 416.

5. W, 3: 756–58; WP, aph. 428.

6. W, 3: 486: WP, aph. 410.

7. W, 3: 479; WP, aph. 415.

8. W, 3: 730; WP, aph. 429.

9. W, 3: 771–72; WP, aph. 432.

10. W, 3: 438; WP, aph. 407.

11. W, 2: 957–58 (Götzen-Dämmerung, “Die ‘Vernunft’ in der Philosophie,” 2).

12. W, 3: 757; WP, aph. 428.

13. W, 3: 912; WP aph. 417.

14. W, 2: 1109–10 (“Warum ich so gute Bücher Schreibe”).

15. W, 2: 1110, citing W, 2: 1032 (“Was ich den Alten Verdanke,” 5).

16. W, 3: 496; WP, aph. 416.

17. W, 2: 1111.

18. W, 2: 1111.

19. W, 2: 1111.

20. W, 1: 131–32 (Die Geburt der Tragödie, sec. 24).

21. W, 3: 912; WP, aph. 417.

22. W, 3: 432; WP, aph. 958.

23. W, 3: 912; WP, aph. 417.

24. W, 3: 351–52 (Die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen).

25. W, 3: 353–54; cf. Die Vorplatonischen Philosophen, “Einführung” (Nietzsche’s introduction), in Nietzsche Werke, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1995), pt. 2, vol. 4 (henceforth VP).

26. W, 3: 358–60.

27. VP, “Einführung.”

28. W, 3: 367–69.

29. W, 3: 376–84.

30. SZ, “Einleitung,” 2–40.

31. GA, 65. For the relation of Heidegger’s Nietzsche interpretation to the Contributions, see the essays by A. Vallega and D. Crownfield in Companion to Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy, ed. C. Scott, S. Schoenbohm, D. Vallega-Neu, A. Vallega (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), and R. Polt, The Emergency of Being: On Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).

32. SdU, 24.

33. SdU, 25.

34. SdU, 12–13.

35. GA, 36/37: 11.

36. “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit,” GA, 9: 190.

37. He does so in the Plato seminar mentioned and in a related essay, “Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit,” published 1942 in a revised version; see GA, 9: 203–38. See W. Galston, “Heidegger’s Plato: A Critique of Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” Philosophical Forum 13, no. 4 (Summer 1982): 371–84, for an incisive discussion.

38. GA, 9: 233–34.

39. GA, 9: 234–36.

40. GA, 9: 237.

41. H 306, citing Nietzsche, W, 3: 895–96; WP, aph. 617: “To stamp becoming with the character of being—that is the highest will to power.”

42. GA, 45: 126.

43. VA, 32.

44. H, 296–343.

45. H, 297–99; GA, 51: 105.

46. H, 305; GA 51: 99.

47. GA, 51: 123.

48. H, 300.

49. H, 300–302.

50. H, 307.

51. H, 310.

52. H, 311–12.

53. EM, 111, 145–46.

54. H, 336.

55. 40.

56. GA, 70: 140–42.

CHAPTER 2

1. See various letters cited in this chapter, and also the 1956 lecture “An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism,” RCPR, 38–39. For discussion of Heidegger’s thought before Being and Time, see T. Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), and W. J. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, 3rd ed. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974). For the phases of Heidegger’s developing criticism of Husserl’s phenomenology, see D. Dahlstrom, Heidegger’s Concept of Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), and for the relation of Heidegger’s thought to the “new thinking” of Rosenzweig, see P. E. Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

2. See preface, SCR.

3. JPCM, 462. Strauss notes he was greatly assisted by Lessing in the study of Spinoza. “Lessing was always at my elbow. . . . As I came to see later, Lessing had said everything I had found out about the distinction between exoteric and esoteric speech and its grounds.” See also Strauss, “Exoteric Teaching,” Interpretation 14, no. 1 (1986): 51–59, and RR, 178–79, the comments on Lessing, “that man to whom I owe, so to say, everything I have been able to discern in the labyrinth of that grave question” of reason and revelation. “Lessing’s attitude was characterized by an innate disgust against compromises in serious, i.e., theoretical, matters.”

4. SCR, 30–31. For discussion see H. Meier, “How Strauss Became Strauss,” in Enlightening Revolutions: Essays in Honor of Ralph Lerner, ed. S. Minkov (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 355–82.

5. See “Religöse Lage der Gegenwart” (1930), GS, 2: 377–91.

6. See note 20 below.

7. JPCM, 453.

8. 14.2.1934 in GS, 3: 494.

9. 17.11.1932, GS, 3: 406.

10. Plan for letter to Krüger, 12.12.1932, GS, 3: 415; see also NRH, 78. Strauss’s remark on modern philosophy as an attempt to reclaim its natural basis can be compared with this passage of Jacob Klein on the new science of the seventeenth century: “It [the new science] conceives itself as again taking up and further developing Greek science, i.e., as a recovery and elaboration of ‘natural’ cognition. It sees itself not only as a science of nature, but as ‘natural’ science—in opposition to school science. Whereas the ‘naturalness’ of Greek science is determined precisely by the fact that it arises out of ‘natural’ foundations . . . the naturalness of modern science is an expression of its polemical attitude toward school science. This special posture of the ‘new’ science fundamentally defines its horizon, delimits its methods, its general structure, and most important, determines the conceptual character of its concepts.” Klein also notes that this reclaiming of naturalness is pursued rather paradoxically by a new elevation of practical arts in relation to theoretical sciences so that “in general the distinction between the artes liberales and the artes mechanicae is slowly obliterated.” Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, trans. E. Brann (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968, German original published in 1934), 120, 125, and n. 132.

11. GS, 3: 414.

12. Letter to Krüger, 7.1.1930, GS, 3: 380.

13. Plan for letter to Krüger, 27.12.1932, GS, 3: 415; also the definitive letter of 27.12.1932, GS, 3: 420.

14. Letter of 27.12.1932, GS, 3: 420.

15. Plan for letter to Krüger, 27.12.1932, GS, 3: 414.

16. See Strauss, “Niccolo Machiavelli,” SPPP, 210–11.

17. See GS, 3: 412, 414, 415, 420.

18. Letter to Krüger, 27.12.1932, GS, 3: 420.

19. Letter to Löwith, 2.2.1933, GS, 3: 620.

20. GS, 3: 621. Strauss gives this account of his discovery: “One day, when reading in a Latin translation of Avicenna’s treatise On the Division of the Sciences, I came across the sentence (I quote from memory): the standard work on prophecy and revelation is Plato’s Laws.” This was the beginning of Strauss’s understanding of esotericism in Maimonides and other medieval writers. JPCM, 463.

21. Letter of 23.6.1935, GS, 3: 648.

22. GS, 3: 649–50.

23. Letter to Löwith, 15.8.1946, GS, 3: 662.

24. GS, 3: 661.

25. Letter of 27.12.1932, GS, 3: 422.

26. These quotations are from a review of J. Ebbinghaus, Über die Fortschritte der Metaphysik, in GS, 2: 438–39, and from an autobiographical note of 1930–32. The Ebbinghaus review contains Strauss’s first use of the figure “second cave” in print. Both are cited by H. Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 57.

27. Letter of 17.11.1932, GS, 3: 406.

28. “Die geistige Lage der Gegenwart,” lecture of 1932, in GS, 2: 456 and cited by Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 59–60.

29. Review of Ebbinghaus, cited by Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 57.

30. Letter of 1.8.1949, GS, 3: 598–99.

31. Strauss’s comments may refer to the 1929 lecture “What Is Metaphysics?” which treats das Nichts and its relation to Being. A fifth printing with a new introduction appeared in 1949. Concerning the reference to the “unsolved Humean problem” in this letter: Martin Sitte recalls a conversation with Strauss in the spring of 1973 in which Strauss spoke of plans to write studies of Plato’s Gorgias and Hume. Strauss died the following autumn and completed neither project.

32. These are translated as Off the Beaten Track, trans. J. Young and K. Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), and Nietzsche, ed. D. Krell, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Row, 1979–87). Although these two works are most prominently mentioned in the correspondence, Strauss read a number of other later writings, such as those cited at SPPP, 34, n. 3. The introduction to the fifth printing of “What Is Metaphysics?” (1949) would have given Strauss some indications of Heidegger’s later thought. Consider the following: “The name ‘existence’ is used exclusively in Being and Time as the designation of the being of the human (Dasein). From ‘existence’ rightly understood is the ‘essence’ of Dasein to be thought, in whose openness Being itself announces and conceals itself, endures and withdraws, without the truth of Being exhausting itself in Dasein or indeed being placed in identity with it according to the metaphysical kind of proposition: all objectivity is as such subjectivity.” GA, 9: 373–74.

33. Letter of 21.2.1950, GS, 3: 673.

34. Letter to Löwith, 23.2.1950, GS, 3: 674.

35. See chapter 7 below.

36. Letter to Löwith, 19.7.1951, GS, 3: 675.

37. Letter to Löwith, 21.12.1951, GS, 3: 676–77.

38. Letter to Löwith, 13.12.1960, GS, 3: 684–85. Strauss mentions that in addition to Löwith’s book on Nietzsche he is reading Der Satz vom Grund and other writings by Heidegger. It should be noted that in spite of his high estimation of the later work Strauss maintained deep reservations. One of his last utterances on Heidegger is in a letter to Gershom Scholem, 7.7.1973. “To me it is now clear after many years what is actually wrong in Heidegger: a phenomenal intellect inside a kitsch-soul; I can prove this. As I read a statement by him from the year 1934 about himself as a Black Forest peasant, I found the wish rising in me—in me!—to be or to become an intellectual.” GS, 3: 769–70.

39. See Strauss’s “Plato” essay in HPP, especially 69–70 in discussion of The Statesman, and OT, the letter of 28.5.1957 to Kojève, 279.

40. For more on Heidegger’s reading of Plato see chapter 1 above. For Strauss on Plato see chapter 3 below.

41. Letter to Löwith, 15.3.1962, GS, 3: 685–87. Strauss also writes that “the profoundest interpreter and at the same time the profoundest critic of Nietzsche is Heidegger. He is Nietzsche’s profoundest interpreter because he is the profoundest critic.” PS, 324.

42. Letter to Strauss, 27.3.1962, GS, 3: 687.

43. Letter to Löwith, 2.4.1962, GS, 3: 688.

44. Letter to Löwith, 12.3.1970, GS, 3: 696.

45. See PS, 330.

46. Letter of 30.9.1971, GS, 3: 697. But strangely Strauss overlooks Heidegger’s discussion of Hölderlin’s thought on Christ as the brother of Hercules and Dionysus in Was heißt Denken? (GA, 8: 74), a work that Strauss cites elsewhere (SPPP, 34). See chapter 5 below.

47. See chapters 6 and 7 below.

48. PS, 324–30.

49. PS, 330.

50. PS, 329–30.

51. See chapter 4 below for Heidegger’s reinterpretation of Kantian freedom.

52. In this regard consider the concluding sentences of “An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism”: “Esse (Being) as Heidegger understands it may be described crudely and superficially and even misleadingly, but not altogether misleadingly, by saying it is a synthesis of Platonic ideas and the biblical God: it is as impersonal as the Platonic ideas and as elusive as the biblical God.” RCPR, 46.

53. PS, 323.

54. PS, 333–34. On the other hand Xenophon in Memorabilia 1.2 shows that Alcibiades, the tyrant and friend of Socrates, raises this question in conversation with Pericles. See XS, 14–15. Strauss notes that Alcibiades is a Socratic and that his question is Socratic, although it is never raised by the Xenophonic Socrates. “This is another example of the limitation that Xenophon imposed on himself when writing his ‘recollections.’”

55. PS, 329.

CHAPTER 3

1. “Living Issues in German Postwar Philosophy,” LIGPP, 115–39.

2. LIGPP, 116.

3. Beyond Good and Evil, aph. 240. See the author’s Being after Rousseau: Philosophy and Culture in Question (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

4. LIGPP, 137.

5. LIGPP, 137–38.

6. LIGPP, 129. For an account of the separation of religious thought from political authority as the defining feature of modern Western life, see M. Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2007).

7. See sources cited in note 18 to Parabasis.

8. See NRH, 177.

9. LIGPP, 129–33.

10. LIGPP, 123. In this regard Strauss discerns a certain historical necessity in the course of modernity (though not in Western history as a whole) that allies him in a way (and not simply ironically) with Hegel. For Nietzsche’s critique of the idea of culture in modern historical consciousness, see SPPP, 148–49.

11. See PPH, 79–107. In his first study of Hobbes (1936), Strauss underlines three aspects of Hobbes’s new science of politics that prepare for the historical consciousness of later modern thought: the emphasis on applicability or effectiveness of principles, the rejection of the natural orientation in the world by speech in favor of mathematical method, and the account of knowing as a kind of making or construction.

12. LIGPP, 136–37. For remarks on Descartes’s importance (“The rights of man are the moral equivalent of the Ego cogitans”), see CM, 42–45. Strauss’s doctoral dissertation on F. H. Jacobi treats Jacobi’s criticism of Cartesian rationalism as grounded on a spurious form of certainty that precludes a true confrontation with the mystery of the grounds of existence. One might claim that Strauss’s lifelong concerns with the self-destructiveness of modern rationalism and the argument of reason versus faith have roots in his early work on Jacobi and the Pantheismusstreit that Jacobi initiated through his “exposure” of Lessing’s Spinozism, and that Strauss discusses in the Jubiläumausgabe of Moses Mendelssohn’s writings. For discussions of these issues see Batnitzky, Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas, and D. Janssens, “The Problem of Enlightenment: Strauss, Jacobi, and the Pantheism Controversy,” Review of Metaphysics 56 (2003): 605–32.

13. See SA, 11–53, 311–14. See also chapter 9 below.

14. CM, 11; WIPP, 38; RCPR, 34.

15. Strauss writes that Husserl’s analysis of the basic assumptions of modern science and philosophy, especially of the transformation of geometry underlying Galileo’s physics, is of unsurpassed significance. LIGPP, 137; RCPR, 28–29; SPPP, 34–37.

16. LIGPP, 134.

17. LIGPP, 137.

18. SPPP, 29–37; JPCM, 457–66; and PS.

19. “An Unspoken Prologue,” JPCM, 449–50.

20. JPCM, 464.

21. See chapter 7 below for Strauss on the genealogy of historicism.

22. WIPP, 26.

23. See chapter 6 below.

24. Letters to G. Krüger discussed in chapter 2 above and SCR, 9–11; RCPR, 28: Strauss notes that Ernst Cassirer had “silently dropped” ethics from H. Cohen’s Kantian system and “had not faced the problem” of ethics. “Heidegger did face the problem. He declared that ethics is impossible, and his whole being was permeated by the awareness that this fact opens up an abyss.” See chapter 4 below for the Cassirer-Heidegger confrontation at Davos.

25. See the exchange of letters with K. Löwith in chapter 2 above.

26. The meaning of the Kehre or “turn” in Heidegger’s thought in the 1930s is much debated. I hold the view that it involves no change in the fundamental question of Heidegger’s thought (the question of Being or the Seinsfrage) but a change in the approach to the question. See chapter 1 above and chapter 5 below. For a discussion of Heidegger’s later thought of Ereignis as the continuation of the inquiry into the “originary, fundamental, unifying meaning of Being,” which is the single defining concern of Heidegger’s path of thinking, see R. Capobianco, Engaging Heidegger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), chap. 2.

27. RCPR, 27–46.

28. RCPR, 38–39.

29. Letter to Löwith, 15.3.1962, discussed above in chapter 2.

30. Letter to Löwith, 21.12.1951, discussed above in chapter 2.

31. RCPR, 29.

32. Letter to Löwith, 23.2.1950, discussed above in chapter 2; cf. RCPR, 34.

33. Letter to Löwith, 13.12.1960, discussed above in chapter 2; cf. RCPR, 42–44.

34. WIPP, 26: “Historicism rejects the question of the good society.”

35. See chapter 2 above.

36. See TM, 78, for a statement on the defect of humanism: “Since man is a being that must try to transcend humanity, he must transcend humanity in the direction of the subhuman if he does not transcend it in the direction of the superhuman.”

37. NRH, 122.

38. CM, 20.

39. TM, 19.

40. NRH, 122–24.

41. CM, 20.

42. NRH, 32.

43. WIPP, 38–39.

44. WIPP, 39.

45. SA, 314.

46. NRH, 79.

47. NRH, 32.

48. CM, 20.

49. NRH, 125.

50. Related to this stance is the suggestion that the philosophic life is simply based on a choice or an act of will.

51. WIPP, 39.

52. RCPR, 132.

53. RCPR, 132.

54. RCPR, 133.

55. Even so Strauss makes the well-known comment in the German edition of PPH, referring to his early studies of seventeenth-century biblical criticism, that “the theologico-political problem has since remained the theme of my studies.” GS, 3: 7–8.

56. RCPR, 142.

57. CM, 127–28.

58. CM, 29.

59. CM, 138. S. Benardete admirably sums up the relation between Strauss’s approach to reading Platonic dialogic imitation and Strauss’s “linking up political philosophy with first philosophy” through the study of the soul: “Plato’s psychology was Strauss’ way to Plato’s ideas: and Strauss’ way was the way of the Republic. No single Platonic dialogue, however, can yield Plato’s teaching about the soul; Strauss put great stress on Socrates’ observation in the Republic that the problem of justice there precludes an exact account of the soul, even though the problem of justice seems to require such an account, inasmuch as the structure of the city is presumably in strict accordance with the structure of the soul. The Republic reveals the tension between the political and natural relation between thumos and eros. Such a tension needs to be represented or imitated. It is imitated through the action of the Republic that accompanies its argument. Strauss was the first, as far as we know, to give a coherent account of this double function. He showed that, how, and why the linking up of logos and psyche, which is dialectic, was of the essence of the Socratic revolution.” “Strauss and the Ancients,” memorial lecture delivered at the New School for Social Research, 1974.

60. “Without cities, no philosophers. They are the conditions.” JPCM, 465.

61. RCPR, 164.

62. Phaedo 95e–100b. For outstanding discussions of the causal problem in this dialogue, see S. Benardete, “On Plato’s Phaedo,” in Burger and Davis, Argument of the Action, and R. Burger, The “Phaedo”: A Platonic Labyrinth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984; rpt. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 1999). The quest for cosmology encounters the problem of including the human soul and its problematic telos within an intelligible order. Yet the soul’s problematic telos (bound up with its political nature) at the same time conditions inquiry about the cosmos as guided by the concerns with the beautiful, the good, and the just, and accordingly this inquiry cannot proceed except through examination of the soul’s “pretheoretical” orientation by such concerns.

63. WIPP, 61. See also the letter of 28.5.1957 to Kojève in OT, 279, on Platonic cosmology: “The adequate division [of ideas] would presuppose that one could deduce all ideas, especially also the ideas of living; it would presuppose a ‘rational biology’; this is impossible (see Timaeus); hence what is available is a dualism of a hypothetical mathematical physics and a non-hypothetical understanding of the human soul. The difference between Plato and Aristotle is that Aristotle believes that biology, as a mediation between knowledge of the inanimate and knowledge of man is available, or Aristotle believes in the availability of universal teleology, if not of the simplistic kind sketched in Phaedo 96b.”

64. NRH, 172.

65. R, 260.

CHAPTER 4

1. See Herman Philipse, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being: A Critical Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 256–66.

2. Philipse, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being, 223–29, 239–44.

3. Philipse, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being, 246–76.

4. Philipse, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being, 276: Heidegger’s view of National Socialism is “never unambiguously negative.” Philipse goes further. He characterizes the later theological thought as “spiritual Nazism” (270–72): grounded on the experience of the death of God as proclaimed by Nietzsche, and thus on the total withering of Christianity and its Platonic roots, this pious thinking awaits new gods who support the particular folk, the German folk, in its struggle with Western decadence. Heidegger’s account of the history of the West gives no place to Judaism, even though its eschatological structure has unmistakably biblical sources. This is a special sort of Nazism to be sure: the greatness of the folk is based not on biology but on the spirit of language and poetry.

5. See SPPP, 34: “One is inclined to say that Heidegger has learned the lesson of 1933 more thoroughly than any other man.”

6. See the account below of the Davos disputation with Cassirer, and the essay contemporary with it (1929), “Vom Wesen des Grundes,” GA, 9: 161–62.

7. SdU, 6. These writings are reprinted in GA, 16, which contains many important things—speeches, lectures, official documents, exhortations to students and faculty—that make evident the full range and intensity of Heidegger’s support of the new regime, even after his resignation from the rectorate in spring 1934.

8. See Philipse, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being, 248–49, whose chief source for biographical data is Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1988).

9. SdU, 23.

10. SdU, 25.

11. To accusations that he harmed individuals, groups, the university, or Germany itself by his actions, Heidegger’s response is one of full denial.

12. A start is made by Miguel de Beistegui, Heidegger and the Political: Dystopias (London: Routledge, 1988), 32–39.

13. See the author’s Freedom and the End of Reason: On the Moral Foundation of Kant’s Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

14. GA, 42: 61–72, and Jeffrey A. Barash, Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1988).

15. GA, 9, “Vom Wesen des Grundes,” 133n.

16. In one notable self-accounting, Heidegger claims that his thought renews and deepens a concept of the essence of freedom emerging at the end of the eighteenth century: “Freedom now (in that period) has for the Germans a new sound and meaning. Freedom means: adherence to the law of the folk-spirit, that manifests itself preeminently in the works of poets, thinkers and statesmen. . . . Freedom: responsibility for the destiny of the folk.” “Die deutsche Universität,” in GA, 16: 291. This is two addresses, previously unpublished, that Heidegger gave in a “course for foreigners”—clearly a performance of public service—at the University of Freiburg in November 1934, after his resignation from the rectorate. Heidegger traces this new concept to all of the leading thinkers and poets of Germany of the age and claims that it was the principle behind the founding of the University of Berlin. This is one of Heidegger’s most detailed statements linking his thought to earlier German political thought, and it concretely ascribes a common root to his philosophy and National Socialism. Special praise is given to Friedrich Karl von Savigny, who “showed in relation to the essence of the state, that political freedom and unfreedom depend not on the form of state [Staatsform] but above all on whether the power of the state is rooted in the nature and history of a folk, or is entirely used up in the will of individual power holders and governments” (294). For the relation of Heidegger to the “historical school” of Savigny and Barthold Niebuhr, and to the romantic approach to history in general, see Barash, Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning.

17. Noteworthy in this regard are the seminar of winter 1927–28 on Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft (GA, 25) and that of summer 1930 on Kant’s account of freedom in the Dialectic of the same work (GA, 31), bearing the title “Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit. Einleitung in die Philosophie.”

18. The Davos disputation is found in GA, 3: 274–96. I will not give page references for each passage cited and discussed in what follows, but refer the reader to the entire text. On the disputation see Strauss, WIPP, 245–46; J. A. Barash, ed., The Symbolic Construction of Reality: The Legacy of Ernst Cassirer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), essays by J. A. Barash and M. Roubach; M. Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer and Heidegger (Chicago: Open Court, 2000); P. E. Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010). Strauss wrote his doctoral dissertation on F. H. Jacobi for Cassirer; Heidegger and Strauss both have academic beginnings in Neo-Kantianism.

19. In a lecture given at Davos during the same Hochschulkurse (third appendix in GA, 3), Heidegger put forth the famous thesis, argued in the book, that “Kant through his own radicality brought himself before a position from which he had to draw back in fear [zurückschrecken]. That is to say: destruction of the foundations theretofore of Western metaphysics (Spirit, Logos, Reason)” (GA, 3: 273).

20. In the fourth edition of this book (1973) Heidegger says that Kant was for him just a “refuge” (Zuflucht) whom he could treat as the spokesman for his own account of Being; he says that he misunderstood both his own question and Kant at that time. GA, 3: xiv. For learned and penetrating discussions of Heidegger’s relation to Kant, see Stanley Rosen, The Question of Being: A Reversal of Heidegger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 192–211, and The Elusiveness of the Ordinary: Studies in the Possibility of Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 94–134. See also the references in note 43 below.

21. SdU, 21. “Was ist Metaphysik?” GA, 9: 103–22.

22. Vom Wesen der Wahrheit: Zu Platons Höhlengleichnis und Theaetet, GA, 34 (seminar winter 1931/32); “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit,” GA, 9: 177–202; “Platons Lehre der Wahrheit,” GA, 9: 203–38.

23. SdU, 22.

24. SdU, 24.

25. SdU, 13.

26. SdU, 25. Heidegger perhaps reads some thoughts of the later 1930s back into the period 1930–32. All the same, the memoir makes evident the persistence in Heidegger’s thought of the “idealist” orientation.

27. SdU, 26.

28. SdU, 39.

29. SdU, 39.

30. For discussion of this passage, see Philipse, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being, 260–62.

31. SdU, 12.

32. Einführung in die Metaphysik (Tübingen: Niemeyer Verlag, 1953 and later editions), reprinted as GA, 40. I will cite the Niemeyer edition as EM.

33. EM, 7.

34. EM, 8.

35. EM, 9.

36. EM, 29, 34.

37. EM, 28; cf. 35.

38. EM, 35–37.

39. Hegel, preface to first edition of Logik (1812), cited at GA, 54: 148–49.

40. GA, 16: 294: “Savigny showed that right [das Recht] arises not solely and not primarily from the formal legal thinking of legislation [Gesetzgebung], but rather, as in the case of language, from the folk-spirit of the peoples [Völker], with their belief and their customs.”

41. “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit,” GA, 9: 190; see also GA, 42: 15; H, 340–41.

42. For a formulation that has explicit reference to the contemporary political situation (Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations), see GA, 16: 333: “True historical freedom as the independence of the recognition of one folk by another has no need of the organized illusory community [Scheingemeinschaft] of a ‘League of Nations.’ . . . The true historical freedom of the peoples [Völker] of Europe is the presupposition for the West’s returning once again spiritually-historically to itself and for its securing its destiny in the great decision of the earth against the Asiatic.”

43. This perhaps emerges most forcefully from Heidegger’s extensive conversation with great philosophers from Parmenides to Nietzsche. For accounts of his “dialogue” with Kant, see F. Schalow, The Renewal of the Heidegger-Kant Dialogue: Action, Thought, and Responsibility (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), and C. Sherover, Heidegger, Kant and Time (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971).

CHAPTER 5

1. H, 340–41.

2. GA, 42: 21–22.

3. GA, 42: 15.

4. GA, 9: 187.

5. GA, 9: 188.

6. GA, 9: 190.

7. GA, 8: 60–61.

8. GA, 8: 70–71.

9. GA, 8: 71.

10. GA, 8: 71–72, citing Götzen-Dämmerung, “Streifzüge eines Unzeitgemässen,” aph. 39.

11. GA, 8: 72–74.

12. GA, 8: 74.

13. Nietzsche, Götzen-Dämmerung, “Streifzüge,” aph. 38.

14. Nietzsche, Götzen-Dämmerung, “Streifzüge,” aph. 41.

15. GA, 8: 19.

16. GA, 8: 32.

17. GA, 8: 81.

18. GA, 8: 87.

19. GA, 8: 95. Heidegger’s citation is from Schelling, Werke, I/7: 350.

20. GA, 8: 60.

21. GA, 3: 274–96. See also chapter 4, section III, above.

22. GA, 3: 274–96.

23. GA, 3: 274–96.

24. SdU, 24. See also chapter 4, section IV, above.

25. SdU, 25.

26. SdU, 12.

27. EM, 8.

28. GA, 54: 148–49.

29. SdU, 39.

30. EM, 9.

31. EM, 28–29, 34.

32. EM, 35–37.

33. EM, 32.

34. EM, 7.

35. EM, 117.

36. EM, 125.

37. EM, 96–97.

38. GA, 29/30: 109–10, citing Der Wille zur Macht, Musarion edition, 19: 360f., aph. 1050.

39. GA, 8: 75.

40. GA, 8: 20.

41. Götzen-Dämmerung, “Die vier grossen Irrtümer,” aph. 8.

42. Götzen-Dämmerung, “Streifzüge,” aph. 49.

43. Götzen-Dämmerung, “Streifzüge,” aph. 50.

CHAPTER 6

1. “Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy,” SPPP, 29.

2. CM, 3–4.

3. CM, 1–6.

4. SPPP, 30.

5. See chapter 3 above.

6. RCPR, 29. The passage continues: “I am afraid that we shall have to make a very great effort in order to find a solid basis for rational liberalism. Only a great thinker could help us in our intellectual plight. But here is the great trouble: the only great thinker in our time is Heidegger.”

7. SPPP, 32–33, and NRH, 28–29.

8. NRH, 29–30.

9. RCPR, 262. The paragraph ends with this important comment: “As far as I know, the present-day arguments in favor of revelation against philosophy are based on an inadequate understanding of classical philosophy.”

10. SPPP, 30.

11. SPPP, 32–33, and RCPR, 38–39.

12. This was not always the case. One cannot fail to mention in this connection Strauss’s letter of 19.5.1933 to Karl Löwith, in which Strauss praises the principles of the right (“fascist, authoritarian, imperialist”) by which he means the fascism of Mussolini, whereas he makes clear his contempt for the Nazis (GS, 2: 624–25). Werner Dannhauser comments: “we must admit that the young Strauss, not yet thirty-five at the time, was more reactionary than we might wish him to be.” Dannhauser’s whole discussion of the published correspondence of Strauss (“Leo Strauss in His Letters”) deserves attention, in Minkov, Enlightening Revolutions, 355–61.

13. “Philosophy is the attempt to replace opinion by knowledge; but opinion is the element of the city, hence philosophy is subversive, hence the philosopher must write in such a way that he will improve rather than subvert the city. In other words the virtue of the philosopher’s thought is a certain kind of mania, while the virtue of the philosopher’s public speech is sophrosune.” JPCM, 463. For a discussion of the deficiency of Heidegger’s political judgment, Smith, Reading Leo Strauss, chap. 5. Smith takes issue with the claim of Luc Ferry that Strauss’s return to Greek philosophy adopts wholesale Heidegger’s critique of modernity and applies it in a revival of hierarchical, antiliberal politics.

14. See letter to Karl Löwith of 21.12.1951, GS, 3: 676–77.

15. JPCM, 461.

16. JPCM, 147.

17. WIPP, 246. Concerning the decay of the faith in progress after the First World War, Strauss writes, “Spengler’s Decline of the West seemed to be much more credible [than the faith of the communists]. But one had to be inhuman to leave it at Spengler’s prognosis. Is there no hope for Europe? And therewith for mankind? It was in the spirit of such hope that Heidegger perversely welcomed 1933.” RCPR, 41.

18. JPCM, 450.

19. WIPP, 246.

20. RCPR, 27–46, and SPPP, 29–37.

21. SPPP, 30.

22. See letter to Karl Löwith, 15.3.1962 in GS, 3: 685–87: “But one may of course raise the question whether Nietzsche achieved what he intended . . . and then there is no possibility known to me superior to Heidegger’s philosophic doctrine of which his interpretation of Nietzsche forms an integral part.”

23. SPPP, 33.

24. SPPP, 34. In this same essay Strauss indicates that the lack of political philosophy in Heidegger may be partly explained by its absence from Husserl’s conception of “philosophy as rigorous science.” While praising Husserl’s phenomenological criticism of the scientific understanding of the world, he notes that there is no reflection in Husserl until the very end of his life—“under the impact of events which could not be overlooked or overheard” in 1935—on the possible adverse affects of philosophy as rigorous science upon those who need a worldview, and thus on the age-old antagonism between “those who are conservatively contented with the tradition and the circle of philosophic human beings.” SPPP, 34–37.

25. SPPP, 30.

26. RCPR, 29–31. Surely Strauss has some sympathy for Heidegger’s view of the technological world society as a “nightmare.” “It means unity of the human race on the lowest level, complete emptiness of life, self-perpetuating doctrine without rhyme or reason; no leisure, no elevation, no withdrawal; nothing but work and recreation; no individuals and no peoples, but instead ‘lonely crowds.’” RCPR, 42.

27. RCPR, 41.

28. RCPR, 41, 43–44; see JPCM, 150–51, 171–72.

29. RCPR, 43.

30. SPPP, 34.

31. Consider in this context the statement of Daniel Tanguay: “His [Strauss’s] aim is to present the ancients’ solution but without committing himself to a restoration of metaphysics or cosmologies incompatible with the proclamation of the radical limits of the human intellect and of the unintelligible and mysterious character of the Whole.” Tanguay, Leo Strauss: An Intellectual Biography, 108.

32. JPCM, 463. For discussion of Strauss on “synthesis,” see Tanguay, Leo Strauss: An Intellectual Biography; Zuckert, Postmodern Platos, 185–200.

33. NRH, 24–34, 176–77, 319–21; WIPP, 55; OT, 212. Relevant here is Leora Batnitzky’s observation that “on Strauss’s reading, Heidegger’s and Levinas’s error lies in a shared overinflated sense of philosophy, which denies the distinction of theory and practice.” Batnitzky, Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas, 178.

34. JPCM, 464. The paragraph continues thus: “What distinguishes present-day philosophy in its highest form, in its Heideggerian form, from classical philosophy is its historical character; it presupposes the historical consciousness. It is therefore necessary to understand the partly hidden roots of that consciousness.”

CHAPTER 7

1. Page numbers in text refer to NRH.

2. Moreover “the whole galaxy of political philosophers from Plato to Hegel, and certainly all adherents of natural right, assumed that the fundamental political problem is susceptible of a final solution. This assumption ultimately rested on the Socratic answer to the question of how man ought to live” (NRH, 35–36). As the reference to Hegel makes evident, there are political philosophers, both ancient and modern, who endorse the core idea of Socrates while not adhering to natural right. The central practical question of political philosophy, “the question of what the goal of wise action is,” need not be framed in terms of natural right.

3. See also WIPP, 26–27, 57. Elsewhere Strauss states that historicism is “the serious antagonist of political philosophy” and that “positivism necessarily transforms itself into historicism” (WIPP, 25–26). In present-day social science the appeal to History and the appeal to the distinction between Facts and Values (positivism) are the two grounds for rejecting natural right (NRH, 8). For a somewhat different approach to Natural Right and History as response to Heideggerian historicism, see Zuckert and Zuckert, The Truth about Leo Strauss, 91–102.

4. RCPR, 27–30.

5. See GA, 42, 83. In a significant pair of speeches given at the University of Freiburg in August 1934 (“Die deutsche Universität”), which certainly served state-approved political aims, Heidegger speaks of the importance of German romantic thought (Savigny is singled out for special praise) and its account of freedom as based in the Volk. Here Heidegger shows awareness of sources of his thought—and of current political realities—in the historical school (GA, 16: 285–307, esp. 289–97). All the same, Heidegger devotes little time to the sources of the modern historical consciousness in his teaching and writing.

6. A closely related point is made when Strauss notes that opposition to the doctrinaire early modern versions of natural right led to the stress on history in the effort to recover the distinction between theory and practice (NRH, 13–16, 319–20). The point helps one to see why Strauss investigates not simply “natural right” but “the problem of natural right.”

7. SZ, 15–19; GA, 3: 20–35.

8. It is helpful to recall that the primary modern philosophic sources for the young Heidegger, apart from Husserl, were Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Dilthey. See Otto Pöggeler, Der Denkweg Martin Heideggers (Pfullingen: Neske, 1963), 17–36, and Barash, Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning. For an important and revealing statement on Hegel see Heidegger, ID.

9. SPPP, 33–34.

10. RCPR, 27–30; SCR, 9–10; WIPP, 245–246; JPCM, 449–52, 460–62. See Steven B. Smith, “Destruktion or Recovery? Leo Strauss’s Critique of Heidegger,” in Reading Leo Strauss, for an account of Strauss’s judgment of Heidegger’s political-moral failure. See also Catherine Zuckert, Postmodern Platos, especially pp. 164–173.

11. One could think of the entire historical mode of presenting this critique of historicism as having ironic features. Strauss’s one book directly engaging German thought is his most “German” in form. The account of historical inevitability in the progression of modern thinkers is surely overstated so as to give less attention to the dissent from modern progress by Rousseau and Nietzsche. Strauss’s borrowing from Plato’s Republic of the “three waves” figure to describe the history of modern political philosophy (PP, 81–98) also points to an intent both playful and serious: like Socrates’s interlocutors, the reader must participate in the construction of the “ideal city” (in this case, Strauss’s ideal construction of the modern development) in order to uncover the limitations of this account. And that construction itself exploits, in an inverted way, the modern belief in inevitable progress. See Heinrich Meier, Die Denkbewegung von Leo Strauss (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1996), for distortions inherent in Strauss’s historical mode of argument.

12. JPCM, 450.

13. SCR, 31.

14. SCR, 9–10.

15. PPH, xv.

16. See also lecture version of NRH, 2: 3.

17. See especially EM, 1–39; “Was ist Metaphysik?” GA, 9: 103–22.

18. It is not possible here to enter into the subject of Heidegger’s indebtedness to Husserl’s phenomenological inquiry for the formulation of the ontological problem. But surely Husserl’s central concern with showing that reason’s openness to a world of objects or its “intentionality” is not explicable through causal-genetic accounts was decisive for Heidegger. See SPPP, 31, 34–37; the author, “Edmund Husserl,” in HPP, 870–87. Strauss refers to Husserl (again without naming him) when he describes modern science as a “radical modification” of the natural understanding, rather than the “perfection” of it, and calls for an analysis of the natural understanding as the presupposition for an analysis of science, at 78–80. Jacob Klein was following both Husserl and Heidegger in his historical investigation of the origins of modern mathematics as “symbol-generating abstraction” and in his account of it as presupposing a natural understanding of number that the modern notion conceals. Strauss makes evident a debt to his work (NRH, 78; PPH, 142, 163; JPCM, 449–52, 457–66). See the epilogue below. But Klein was most beholden to Heidegger for the latter’s analyses of Platonic-Aristotelian eidos as disclosing the world or as “apophantic.” Heidegger stresses that the Greeks, and especially Aristotle, were the greatest of all phenomenologists in their thinking of truth (aletheia) as “the self-announcing of the phenomena . . . the unconcealment of what is present, its disclosure and self-showing” (SD, 87).

19. As Strauss puts it: “Sein cannot be explained by das Seiende, as causality cannot be explained causally” (RCPR, 44; also PS, 328).

20. H, 336–37.

21. SPPP, 33–34.

22. WIPP, 38–39.

23. See also WIPP, 39–40.

24. The foundation of classical political philosophy was “the quest for cosmology rather than a solution to the cosmological problem” (WIPP, 39).

25. In the text Strauss asserts that according to Aristotle “the issue between the mechanical and the teleological conception of the universe is decided by the manner in which the problem of the heavens, the heavenly bodies, and their motions, is solved.” But the cited passages from the Physics (196a25ff., 199a3–5) argue that causality in the heavens is not “for the sake of an end” but necessary causation. Coming to be for the sake of an end is discovered from experience of terrestrial beings like ourselves, wherein chance is intermingled with final causation; the teleological nature of these beings is in no way deducible from the motion of the heavens. See also Rosen, Elusiveness of the Ordinary, 153–54.

26. WIPP, 38.

27. “Since man must understand himself in the light of the whole or of the origin of the whole which is not human, or since man is the being that must try to transcend humanity, he must transcend humanity in the direction of the subhuman if he does not transcend it in the direction of the superhuman” (TM, 78).

28. WIPP, 39.

29. RCPR, 30.

30. “Brief über den ‘Humanismus,’” GA, 9: 313–64.

31. With this one touches on the source of what Strauss calls the lack of “any charity as well as . . . any humanity” in Heidegger’s philosophy (SCR, 9).

32. See note 18 above.

33. OT, 212.

34. RCPR, 42–46; SPPP, 33–34.

35. GA, 9: 187–91; N, 2: 193–99.

36. SCR, 9–12, 29–30; cf. NRH, 26–27.

37. It is suggested in the note at 26 (Nietzsche’s preference for the “tragic life” to the theoretical life) and the references to “divination” at 12 and 33 and the reference to “revelation” at 28.

38. OT, 212.

39. Cf. WIPP, 45–46.

40. See Richard Kennington, “Strauss’s Natural Right and History,” Review of Metaphysics 35, no. 1 (September 1981): 57–86, for a very insightful treatment of the theme of “metaphysical neutrality” in Strauss’s account of modern philosophy. As Kennington points out, the emancipation of man from natural ends and from the whole is the root of the favoring of individuality, or of the individual’s becoming “the center and origin of the moral world” (NRH, 248).

41. I take this to be the most decisive point of Strauss’s critique of modern philosophy, and it is more central than his objections to “the lowering of the goals” in modern democratic politics. Indeed Strauss’s criticism applies in a way more certainly to post-Rousseauian idealistic versions of modern politics dedicated to raising the goals. On this I differ with the approach to Strauss of Robert Pippin, “The Modern World of Leo Strauss.”

42. RCPR, 270.

CHAPTER 8

1. PPH, 15.

2. WIPP, 27.

3. NRH, 78–80; CM, 43.

4. NRH, 32.

5. NRH, 34.

6. RCPR, 258.

7. NRH, 323.

8. RCPR, 161.

9. RCPR, 248.

10. RCPR, 161.

11. WIPP, 48.

12. WIPP, 51.

13. CM, 42–44.

14. RCPR, 162. Here one needs to have regard for the theological-political problem posed by revealed religion, especially the Christian form in which the promise of salvation transcends the law, and all believers partake of life in another kingdom as well as that of this world. Strauss saw this mixing of philosophy and “nomos tradition” as posing special problems not just for politics but for philosophy, which modern philosophy sought in its way to overcome. See chapter 2 above.

15. NRH, 279.

16. NRH, 172–77; RCPR, 243–44.

17. RCPR, 182. See chapter 9 below for further discussion of the points in this paragraph.

18. RCPR, 149–50, 125.

19. RCPR, 252; NRH, 90 n. 10; SA, 312.

20. WIPP, 50, 45.

21. NRH, 248.

22. WIPP, 50–55.

23. RCPR, 132–33, 142, 169; WIPP, 38–40. See chapter 3 above.

24. RCPR, 164.

25. NRH, 31.

26. WIPP, 55.

27. JPCM, 450.

28. SPPP, 32–34. Strauss’s moment, however, has crucial differences from those of his German predecessors. The moment of insight for Strauss enables us to uncover the natural, transhistorical truths that tradition has overlaid, and this recovery does not involve, it seems, progress beyond the original form of the insights. Yet I add the cautionary “it seems” in light of the thoughts in the text that follows.

29. CM, 9.

30. JPCM, 450.

31. SPPP, 30–34.

32. HPP, 77.

33. CM, 21. Of course Aristotelian philosophizing is still an ascent, and Strauss’s statements do not exclude the possibility that for Aristotle human theoria, as contemplation of nature apart from the political realm, is necessary for the completion of the whole or of nature. Platonic readings of Aristotle can be found in S. Benardete, “On Wisdom and Philosophy: The First Two Chapters of Aristotle’s Metaphysics A,” in The Argument of the Action; R. Burger, Aristotle’s Dialogue with Socrates: On the ‘Nicomachean Ethics’ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), and M. Davis, The Politics of Philosophy: A Commentary on Aristotle’s Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996).

CHAPTER 9

1. NRH, 323.

2. CM, 42; NRH, 78–80.

3. NRH, 32.

4. NRH, 35.

5. HPP, 74–75.

6. RCPR, 161.

7. RCPR, 182.

8. RCPR, 132.

9. RCPR, 126.

10. RCPR, 133.

11. WIPP, 38–40.

12. CM, 42–45.

13. CM, 43.

14. CM, 42.

15. NRH, 34.

16. TM, 296.

17. WIPP, 51.

18. WIPP, 40–50.

19. NRH, 279.

20. NRH, 169–77.

21. NRH, 248.

22. NRH, 294.

23. NRH, 174–75.

24. NRH, 176–77.

25. RCPR, 161. I shall frequently cite these lectures (RCPR, 103–83) in the remainder of this chapter. The version in RCPR omits the first of the original six lectures, which were delivered at the University of Chicago in fall 1958. A more authentic version of the lecture series appears in Interpretation, 23, no. 2 (1996): 129–207.

26. RCPR, 162.

27. NRH, 293, 312, 323.

28. See WIPP, 50, on “the poetry underlying modern prose” in Montesquieu, and TM, 289, 292.

29. RCPR, 238.

30. RCPR, 240–42.

31. RCPR, 245.

32. RCPR, 235–37.

33. RCPR, 246–48.

34. RCPR, 248.

35. RCPR, 252–56.

36. RCPR, 256–57.

37. RCPR, 271.

38. RCPR, 248–49.

39. RCPR, 250.

40. RCPR, 258.

41. RCPR, 262.

42. RCPR, 260.

43. Two views about Strauss are often found in the literature: that he held modern philosophy to be not genuinely philosophic, and that he regarded the argument between reason and revelation as leading only to an impasse. I have tried to show that both views of Strauss are erroneous. He did, however, argue that modern philosophy, as lacking the Socratic response to human ignorance of the whole, was less able than the Socratic to address the challenge of revelation. Strauss provides his own attempt to “deduce” biblical revelation (or its “idea”) and writes, “the task of the philosopher is to understand how the original (mythical) idea of the theios nomos is modified by the radical understanding of the moral implication and thus transformed into the idea of revelation,” but he also concludes his proposed “deduction” with objections. RR, 164–67. See also chapter 2 above and the epilogue below.

44. RCPR, 125.

45. RCPR, 149–50.

46. RCPR, 168–69.

47. RCPR, 125. See also CCWM, 7: “The greatest document of the case of poetry against philosophy is Aristophanes’ Clouds.”

48. SA, 6. See also the first lecture of the series “The Problem of Socrates” in Interpretation 23, no. 2 (1996): 136–38.

49. SA, 8.

50. NRH, 252–53.

51. RCPR, 111, 115, 118.

52. RCPR, 125–26.

53. RCPR, 109, 112.

54. RCPR, 155–59.

55. RCPR, 126.

56. RCPR, 165.

57. RCPR, 165–66.

58. RCPR, 159.

59. RCPR, 161.

60. RCPR, 146.

61. RCPR, 132, 142, 169.

62. RCPR, 165; see the remark on thumoeides.

63. RCPR, 133.

64. RCPR, 164; thus man is the microcosm, 133.

65. RCPR, 180.

66. RCPR, 151, 154.

67. RCPR, 181.

68. RCPR, 174.

69. RCPR, 150.

70. SA, 173: “This entitles us perhaps to say that Aristophanes is not opposed to philosophy simply, but only to a philosophy that, disregarding Eros, has no link to poetry.”

71. RCPR, 181.

72. RCPR, 180.

73. RCPR, 182.

74. NRH, 14, 22, 322–23.

75. NRH, 26 n. 9, 22.

EPILOGUE

1. PS, 335.

2. S. Benardete writes that the Platonic mode of imitation, “which never ceases to amaze, made it possible for Plato to preserve the Socrates who in never writing represents the truth that philosophy alone has no tradition within the perpetuation of philosophy in its necessary decline.” He adds: “Strauss’s deconstruction of philosophy is thus not Heidegger’s, who hurried past Plato to Parmenides and Heraclitus, by-passing Socrates.” Argument of the Action, 414.

3. Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origins of Algebra, 192. Klein proceeds to characterize this identification as a move in which “an object of an intentio secunda (second intention), namely the concept as such, is turned into the object of an intentio prima (first intention).” Contrary to what is often said, Klein does not regard ancient ontological inquiries, which ascend from the “natural” experience of number and bodies, as simply superior to the modern approach, which allowed for the whole range of discoveries in modern science. It is rather that these modern discoveries have concealed the aporia of Being, which ancient philosophy exposed. Thus Klein on Aristotle writes of a “bifurcation in the direction in which the eidos [works]” (in the process of generation and in the process of understanding) as one that “threatens the integrity of Aristotle’s philosophizing.” Similarly there is a duality in the meaning of arche for Aristotle: “it is (a) the begetting, unchanging and imperishable power which works on a suitable material and it is (b) that pliable material which is being transformed by the begetting power into the natural thing.” In both cases a stable principle of intelligibility has to relate to the elusive realm of change and becoming. See Klein, Lectures and Essays (Annapolis: St. John’s Press, 1985), 185, 226. In the case of Plato, Klein gives an account of the “failure of logos” to “count” the arithmetical structure of Being (on) as the community (koinonia) of motion and rest in Plato’s Sophist. See Greek Mathematical Thought, 94–95. I have profited from conversations about Klein’s work with Paul Wilford.

4. WIPP, 76. Among Strauss’s students Richard Kennington in particular developed a deep understanding of the relationship in early modern philosophy between new foundations of knowledge in “metaphysically neutral” principles and the new practical telos of mastery of nature. See R. Kennington, On Modern Origins: Essays in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. P. Kraus and F. Hunt (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004). Kennington saw the need to make some revision of Strauss’s constructivist view (“to understand is to make”) of the early modern accounts of knowledge.

5. WIPP, 76, and the entire essay “Political Philosophy and History,” ibid., 56–77. Strauss refers in the essay to Klein’s book on Greek mathematical thought and an essay, “Phenomenology and the History of Science,” which was reprinted in Klein, Lectures and Essays, 65–84.

6. NRH, 177.

7. RR, 154–55. See also SCR, preface to the English translation, where Strauss describes Spinoza’s account of nature and the whole as a version of constructivist thought.

8. RR, 177.

9. RR, 179. Strauss also mentions Kant’s criticism of the identification of “being” with “evidently knowable” in Kant’s critique of earlier philosophy and its approaches to theology. Earlier (classical) philosophy holds that “there is no revelation, because there can be no evident knowledge of the fact of revelation. The argument presupposes the tacit identification of ‘being’ with ‘evidently knowable.’ Philosophy is essentially ‘idealistic.’. . . It is this fact which gave rise to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, to his distinction between the phenomenon and the Thing-in-itself.” My understanding of Kant’s transcendental idealism is that it denies the possibility of revelation as the evident sign of supernatural events while admitting that God or being is not accessible through clear and distinct ideas. It is not altogether plain from the Strauss passage that he includes Kant among the moderns who deny the possibility of revelation. RR, 176–77. See Critique of Pure Reason A631/B659.

10. RCPR, 262. It is clear that Strauss does not mean that the whole is wholly unintelligible. “For of something of which we know absolutely nothing, we could not of course say anything.” The whole’s limited intelligibility is the intelligibility of the fundamental perplexities, the knowledge of which Socrates calls knowledge of ignorance. In Strauss’s view, Socrates sees the unavailability of wisdom as a permanent condition for man. Philosophy “is essentially a quest, because it is not able ever to become wisdom” (RCPR, 260). It is also clear that Strauss sees the knowledge of these perplexities as the basis of the goodness of the philosophic life and of its claim of superiority to revelation. “But the very uncertainty of all solutions, the very ignorance regarding the most important things, makes quest for knowledge the most important thing, and therefore makes a life devoted to it the right way of life” (RCPR, 260). Revelation would not be meaningful to human beings without the fundamental perplexities, of which only philosophy acquires natural knowledge—knowledge that is unavailable to revelation by its own principle. Strauss argues that both philosophy and revelation address the problem of justice, more specifically the insufficiency of justice as law (see chapter 9 above). Philosophy understands this as a permanent or natural problem without a perfect solution, whereas revelation offers the perfect solution of the mysterious omnipotent deity.

The penultimate paragraph in the lectures entitled Progress or Return? is often cited as presenting Strauss’s final thought on the quandary of philosophy, which, having to admit the possibility of revelation, is “not evidently the right way of life,” with the consequence that “the choice of philosophy is based on faith” (RCPR, 269). But Strauss goes on to say that “this difficulty underlies all present-day philosophizing,” which finds itself “incapable of giving an account of its own necessity.” He does not say it underlies all philosophy, and indeed in an earlier passage of the lecture (cited above) he describes philosophy “according to the original notion” as showing “why philosophy cannot possibly lead up to the insight that another way of life apart from the philosophic one is the right one” (RCPR, 260). There he speaks of classical philosophy, which he says is not adequately understood by present-day arguments in favor of revelation (RCPR, 262). Classical or Socratic philosophy seems capable of giving an account of its own necessity.

The penultimate paragraph, it should be noted, begins with an odd disclaimer of speaking “colloquially” and of making a point that Strauss can show “is not quite trivial,” i.e., is somewhat trivial. He goes on to say that his use of the term “philosophy” is “in the common and vague sense of the term where it includes any rational orientation in the world, including science and what-have-you, common sense” (RCPR, 269). Clearly he is not speaking of philosophy “according to the original notion,” and the present-day philosophizing that he adduces as unable to give an account of its own necessity is of a piece in this incapacity with science and common sense or “the vague sense” of philosophy.

11. RR, 174. Such statements make clear that Strauss’s position does not rest on any form of natural theology. He writes of a “most serious difficulty” that arises for natural theology (RR, 154) and more widely for efforts to establish metaphysically that philosophy is the right way of life (RCPR, 260).

12. See chapter 3 above.

13. NRH, 164.

14. WIPP, 27.

15. Heinrich Meier is perhaps the leading representative of this reading. Since the authority of Plato and Aristotle may be the most effective in this regard, one should note that neither thinker presents the life of the pious observer of the sacred law as the highest and most serious alternative to the life of the philosopher. (One might add that nothing remotely suggesting this ranking is to be found in Shakespeare.)

16. CCWM, 5–6.

17. RCPR, 29–30.

18. Strauss does not give much attention to the indications in modern philosophers of concern with the philosophic life as a distinctive life, apart from some remarks on Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Nietzsche. This concern is surely underplayed in the rhetoric of the modern philosophers, but that does not entail its essential absence. In the end it is difficult to assess the extent to which Strauss’s Platonic-Nietzschean device of dialectical overstatement controls his account of modern philosophy.

19. RCPR, 180. See discussion in chapter 9 above.

20. In his essay on Thucydides in The City and Man, Strauss writes that Thucydides as historian presents universals through his engagement with the particulars of the wars between Athens and Sparta, and therefore does something like what the poet does according to Aristotle. Thucydides can be vindicated as a historian who is not “less philosophic” than the poets, contrary to Aristotle’s ranking of poetry and history. CM, 141–44.

21. Such observations relate to Strauss’s Platonic claim that from the philosophic standpoint the true alternative to philosophy is poetry of a higher (Aristophanic) kind and its version of the problem of the individual and the city. See chapter 9 above.

22. RCPR, 34.