LEO STRAUSS DEVELOPED A NEW, VERY UNTRADITIONAL READING OF Plato as a result of his study of medieval Jewish and Islamic political philosophy.1 The dominant understanding of the Platonic dialogues in the Western philosophical tradition emphasized the centrality of Plato's “theory of the ideas” and the immortality of the soul.2 Both doctrines had been subjected to devastating critiques by later philosophers. But Strauss discovered that both were strangely lacking in the medieval Islamic philosopher Alfarabi's summary of “the philosophy of Plato.”3 Instead, the Islamic philosopher suggested, the conflict between philosophy and the “law” (which included both religion and politics for Jews, Muslims, and ancient Greeks) was at the core of Plato's thought. Looking back at Plato with fresh eyes after reading Farabi, Strauss developed a new way of reading the dialogues in terms of this conflict that gave Plato's thought renewed vitality and relevance.4
Strauss's new reading of Plato is to be found, first and foremost, in his commentary on Plato's Republic. Strauss published this essay on “Plato” first in the History of Political Philosophy that he edited with Joseph Cropsey, along with a short concluding section on the Statesman and Laws, to show that all three of Plato's major dialogues on politics point to the conclusion that the rule of law is the best practical outcome.5 The slightly longer version of his essay “On Plato's Republic” in The City and Man was prefaced by Strauss's reflections on how the dialogues need to be read. Strauss later wrote a series of essays on the dialogues connected to Socrates’ trial. “On Plato's Apology of Socrates and Crito” as well as “On the Euthydemus” were reprinted in his posthumously published Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, to which, Cropsey tells us in the Foreword, Strauss planned to add an essay on the Gorgias.6
Strauss's last works on Plato were concerned primarily with the Laws. Having published an account of “How Farabi read Plato's Laws” in 1957, Strauss included an essay “On the Minos,” the dialogue traditionally considered to be an introduction to Plato's Laws, because in it Socrates raises the question “What is law?” in Liberalism: Ancient and Modern in 1968.7 Strauss had just finished his own commentary on The Argument and the Action of Plato's Laws when he died in 1973.8 Both Strauss's selection of dialogues and the analyses he gave of them reflected the influence of Farabi, because both the selection of the dialogues and the analyses given emphasized the conflict between philosophy and politics.9
STRAUSS'S RULES FOR READING PLATO
Strauss did not simply follow Farabi's hints about the true character and content of Plato's teaching, however.10 On the contrary, at the beginning of his essay on “Plato's Republic” in The City and Man, Strauss set out his own rules for reading Plato.
In his dialogues, Strauss emphasized, Plato presents exclusively the speeches and deeds of others.11 The dialogues must, therefore, be read like dramas in which one never identifies the views of the author with any particular character. It may be tempting to take Socrates as Plato's spokesman. But Socrates is not the only philosopher who appears in the dialogues, and if we take him as Plato's spokesman, we are confronted by the fact that he is explicitly said to be ironic. There is a notable difference between Socrates and his student, moreover; Socrates did not write. Plato was surely aware of the essential defect of writing that Socrates stresses at the end of the Phaedrus, that writings say the same thing to all people; his dialogues must thus be understood to remedy this defect. For Plato “the proper work of a writing is … to reveal the truth to some while leading others to salutary opinions; … to arouse to thinking those who are by nature fit for it.”12 Plato thus shows Socrates saying different things to different people, first, because such differences are a requisite characteristic of both responsible and effective teaching. But the different teachings presented in the different dialogues do not merely reflect the different characters of the participants in the conversation, nor are they simply matters of rhetoric or persuasion.13 “Plato's work consists of many dialogues because it imitates the manyness, the variety, the heterogeneity of being…. There are many dialogues because the whole consists of many parts.”14 Unlike numerical units, however, the parts cannot simply be added up to constitute the whole.15
The individual dialogue is not a chapter from an encyclopedia of the philosophic sciences …, still less a relic of a stage of Plato's development. Each dialogue … reveals the truth about that part. But the truth about a part is a partial truth, a half truth. Each dialogue, we venture to say, abstracts from something that is most important to the subject matter of the dialogue.16
In order to see the way in which the truth presented in each dialogue is only partial, readers have to pay particular attention to the dramatic elements. “The principle guiding the specific abstraction which characterizes [a] dialogue … is revealed primarily by the setting…: its time, place, characters, and action.”17 The setting is what gives rise to and limits—that is, what literally defines—the conversation depicted. It is what Plato chooses to show presented as what has happened historically—that is, at least partially by chance.18 The task confronting the reader of a Platonic dialogue is thus to see the way in which the drama—i.e., the setting, characters, and action—shape or distort the argument. Plato does not tell us what he thinks; he shows us by presenting the speeches and deeds of others.
STRAUSS'S READING OF PLATO'S REPUBLIC
Strauss applied his rules for reading Plato dramatically first and foremost to the Republic, the dialogue many commentators think contains Plato's most comprehensive statements about both politics and philosophy. Attention to the setting of the dialogue—the time, place, and participants—alerts readers from the very beginning, Strauss suggested, that the Republic may not contain a serious proposal for political reform so much as a warning about the difficulties inherent in all such attempts. Plato lets us know the place in which the conversation was held and the names of some of the participants, but not the precise time. “Yet we are not left entirely in the dark” about “the political circumstances in which the conversation about the political principle took place.” By setting the dialogue in Piraeus, where Socrates is compelled to speak to a group of ten men, Plato reminded his readers that
Some years after the conversation, men linked to Socrates and Plato by kinship or friendship attempted … putting down the democracy and restoring an aristocratic regime dedicated to virtue and justice. Among other things they established an authority called the Ten in the Piraeus.19
The composition of the two groups of ten was different, however. “Polemarchus, Lysias, and Niceratus were mere victims of the so-called Thirty Tyrants.”20 By discussing “justice in the presence of victims of an abortive attempt made by most unjust men to restore justice,” Plato prepared his readers “for the possibility that the restoration attempted in the Republic will not take place on the political plane.”21 In the Republic, Strauss pointed out, Socrates’ major interlocutor is Plato's brother, Glaucon. And “Xenophon tells us that Socrates … cured him of his extreme political ambition…. Certain it is that the Republic supplies the most magnificent cure ever devised for every form of political ambition.”22 In a century that had witnessed the attempts of two different “totalitarian” regimes to establish world domination, Strauss thought that there was again a need for such a “magnificent cure.”
The explicit question raised in the Republic is “What is justice?” Although Socrates’ refutations of the three definitions offered by Cephalus, Polemarchus, and Thrasymachus in Book I appear abortive, Strauss explained, they point to both a definition of justice and the difficulty it entails. If, as Socrates’ refutation of Cephalus's more traditional definition of justice as giving to each his or her due suggests, justice consists in giving each what is good for him or her. And if injustice consists, as Socrates’ refutation of Thrasymachus is supposed to show, in one part of a community taking advantage of the other, justice becomes a problem if what is good for the community as a whole is not good for all of its members as individuals. Plato's Republic shows that this is the case: it would be good for the community if a philosopher ruled, but not for the philosopher himself.
Socrates begins, however, by suggesting that justice in the polity and in the individual must be essentially the same. When Glaucon challenges Socrates to show that justice is choiceworthy for its own sake, Socrates responds that first they have to determine what justice is. To find out, he suggests, they should look for justice “writ large” in a city. From the perspective of the traditional reading of Plato primarily in terms of his theory of the ideas, Strauss pointed out, Socrates’ mode of proceeding in the Republic appears anomalous. Rather than seek the answer to the question “What is justice?” in an eternal idea of justice in itself (which should be the same not merely in the individual and the city, but everywhere and at all times), he follows Glaucon's example by looking for it in the coming-into-being of a city, a new city that, unlike all others, has been established entirely according to nature.23 There is a significant difference, in other words, between the kind of education Socrates offers Plato's brothers in the dialogue and that he specifies for the “guardians” of his “city in speech.”24
That there is no unqualifiedly natural basis for the city is shown by the fact that it has to be founded; cities are products of human making or art. The first “true” city Socrates describes is not humanly satisfying, moreover, as Glaucon's passionate protest against the “city of pigs” indicates. By having each person do what he or she does best by nature and exchange the results, this city provides for the necessities of physical preservation. To develop any form of human excellence, however, human beings have to possess more goods or leisure than is necessary simply for their preservation; and in striving to obtain those goods, Socrates suggests, they necessarily come into conflict. Armed guards thus become necessary to defend the city from invasion.25
Once a part of the city is armed, however, it becomes potentially dangerous to the other, unarmed part. The guardians must be carefully educated, therefore, not to misuse their power. Yet, Strauss observed, “The whole discussion partakes of the character of myth.”26 The explicitly unrealizable character of the educational prescriptions, especially the “noble lie” in which they culminate, shows that Socrates is not putting forth a practical program. But the content of the prescribed education is nevertheless instructive. The difficulties point to the reasons why the institution of a perfectly just regime is impossible.
These difficulties arise from the inception of the guardians’ education. According to the traditional stories, the gods who were supposed to defend justice were themselves pleasure-seeking and unjust. To demonstrate the superiority of Justice to Injustice, as Glaucon demanded, Socrates had to divorce his praise of justice from traditional mythology.27 He thus begins his account of the education of the warriors with two laws concerning what Adeimantus calls “theology”: (1) gods shall be said only to cause good; and (2) as an apparent corollary of the first, gods shall not be said to change their shape (eidos or idea, Strauss noted) or to lie.28 Adeimantus is troubled by the second, because it suggests that the gods cannot rule (which Socrates later shows requires deceit) or, therefore, be just.29
Strauss shows that the purportedly “natural” foundation of the city is just as problematic as its “divine” support in his analysis of the “noble lie,” with which Socrates’ account of the warriors’ education ends. As the need to convince citizens (contrary to observable fact) they were born from the piece of land on which they live indicates, that no particular people have an unqualified or natural claim to possess any particular part of the earth. (Indeed, it is not clear that any political association that does not include the whole human race has a simply natural basis.) By stating that the founders also will have to convince the citizens, again contrary to easily observable fact, that the different classes have different types of blood, Socrates also indirectly admits that the conventional order in the city does not perfectly reflect a natural order of talent.
Justice proves to be difficult to find in the city they have established, moreover. “Justice is said to consist in each part of the city or of the soul ‘doing the work for which it is best fitted by nature.’ … If each part of the city does its work well, the city is wise, courageous, and moderate and therewith perfectly good; it does not need justice in addition.” But “the case of the individual is different. If he is wise, courageous, and moderate, he is not yet perfectly good; for his goodness toward his fellows, his willingness to help them …, as distinguished from unwillingness to harm them, does not follow from his possessing the three first virtues.”30 The city does not need to be just, whereas the individual does, because the city is self-sufficient, whereas the individual is not.31
To maintain the parallel between the city and the individual, Socrates has to find the same parts or “natures” in the individual as in the city. But, Strauss pointed out, that parallel depends on an abstraction from the body, because the parts of the individual that parallel the classes of the city are parts of the soul.32 The body, for the sake of which the city was originally established, is altogether ignored. It is ignored, we discover later in the discussion, because the attachment each individual has to his or her own bodily existence is the source of injustice.
If justice consists in the good order or health of the soul, it is clear that justice is choiceworthy for its own sake, whether or not the individual enjoys a reputation for virtue or not. By the end of Book 4, Socrates has thus satisfied Glaucon's demand in Book 2 that he show that justice is good in itself, without regard to its extrinsic benefits or effects.33 The difficulty is that, according to this definition of justice, “only the man in whom reason properly cultivated rules the other two parts …, i.e. only the wise man … can be just … and the philosopher can be just without being a member of the just city.”34
Because justice has been shown to be possible in the individual, but not so clearly in the city, a new beginning becomes necessary to determine whether it is possible to found a perfectly just regime. As at the very beginning of the dialogue, Socrates’ companions take a vote and, like a democratic assembly, compel him to serve them through a combination of persuasion and force. But this time, Strauss emphasized, Thrasymachus joins them. His joining “the city” is essential, because it turns out that the possibility of establishing a just city depends, to a great extent, on the power of his art.
Strauss observed that Alfarabi was the only commentator on Plato who had noted the central importance of Thrasymachus and his rhetoric for both the argument and the action of the dialogue.35 But Strauss did not refer to the Muslim philosopher in his published “summaries” of the Republic in The City and Man and the History of Political Philosophy. He did not understand the role of rhetoric exactly the way Farabi did. According to Farabi, Plato had combined the way of Socrates with the way of Thrasymachus to improve the opinions and so the politics of his readers gradually over time. According to Strauss, in the Republic Plato showed that the propagation of salutary teachings would never suffice to produce an entirely just polity; rational rule and popular enlightenment would always be limited by the needs of the body (which, Strauss reminded his readers, Aristotle said had to be ruled by the soul “despotically”—that is, not by persuasion but by force).
The explicit reason that Socrates’ companions would not allow him to end the conversation by showing that justice is choiceworthy for the individual was that they wanted him to explain the “communistic” institutions that he said would be necessary in addition to the noble lie to prevent the guardians from pursuing their own self-interest at the expense of the common good. As in The Assembly of Women, from which Plato literally took his proposals, the abolition of private property and the community of women and children establish justice by removing the fundamental cause of injustice, the primary attachment rooted in the body that each of us has to his or her own existence.36 Just as Aristophanes showed that in order to maintain the equality of condition necessary to end oligarchic oppression and democratic envy, Praxagora had to impose severe constraints on the natural preference or eros that people have for the young and the beautiful, so in the Republic Socrates subordinated eros entirely to the needs of the city. The guardians were to be bred like animals.37
But, Strauss observed, there was another way that a just city might come into being—by making a just individual—that is, a philosopher—its absolute ruler. Socrates suggests that “the coincidence of philosophy and political power is not only the necessary but the sufficient condition of universal happiness.”38 The communistic institutions that appear to be so contrary to human nature may not be required. Because philosophers desire only truth and have no interest in either wealth or fame, they will not seek to rule, however; they will have to be forced. The many will not compel philosophers to take the reins of government unless or until they are persuaded that it is desirable for them to do so. That is the function or role of Thrasymachus's art. The difficulty, according to Socrates, is not to persuade the many that it is desirable to have philosophers rule. The problem is that, once philosophers have seen “the light,” they do not want to return to the “cave.” But, Strauss concluded, as the danger that Socrates admits that philosophers encounter if and when they return to the cave indicates, it is not so much the philosophers’ unwillingness to serve their fellow citizens as it is their fellow citizens’ passionate attachment to the opinions they have grown up believing and their hatred of those who question and thus appear to discredit these opinions that makes it highly unlikely, if not simply impossible for philosophers to rule. The abstraction from the body that characterizes the Republic leads not only to a denigration of eros, but also to an overestimation of the power of rhetoric.
Although Socrates finally admits that the just city exists only “in speech,” Strauss observed, the fiction of its possibility is maintained throughout the Republic. That fiction is necessary to arouse the spiritedness of lovers of justice like Glaucon against the injustice they find, not only in existing regimes, but also in themselves. The need to counter their own inner temptation is the reason Socrates goes on, after the depiction of the just regime, not only to sketch the inferior regimes into which it decays, culminating with the portrait of the tyrant, but also to reintroduce the question of the utility and status of poetry.
Socrates does not actually provide a better answer in the Republic to the question “What is justice?” than he does in the Euthyphro to the question “What is piety?” But, Strauss concluded, Socrates does show us what the source or origin of injustice is—and how it is overcome in or by a few individual philosophers. There will be no just city until a philosopher becomes king, not because philosophers know what is good—in general, much less for each citizen—but because philosophers do not desire the wealth and esteem that lead other men, as Thrasymachus insisted, to seek to rule for their own advantage and thus unjustly.39 The reason no political association will ever be just is, therefore, that no philosopher will ever want to rule. Anyone who seeks to exercise political power shows by virtue of that fact that he or she is not truly a lover of wisdom. Because mortal nature makes it impossible for any human being entirely to obtain or retain knowledge, philosophers have to spend all their time and effort seeking it. They will feel obliged to help their fellows on whom they depend for their own existence by giving them political advice, but they will not seek to rule full-time or at the expense of their search for wisdom.40 As Plato shows in Book 8 of the Republic, philosophers will not praise democracies or seek to see them established merely because democracies are the regimes in which it is easiest to practice philosophy. Because philosophers are just, they will not undertake political action or give advice simply in their own interest any more than they will feel obliged to rule for the sake of others.
Rather than the presentation of any kind of “theory” (for example, of the “ideas”) or propagation of any “doctrine” (concerning the “truth” or the immortality of the soul), Strauss emphasized, Plato understood philosophy to be a way of life. As embodied by Socrates, indeed, philosophy constitutes the only truly worthwhile and satisfying way of living for a human being.41 That was the reason Plato did not write treatises containing his own arguments, but presented conversations, mostly between Socrates and others, to show what a philosopher would do and say. Although Socrates severely criticized other forms of poetry in the Republic, Strauss noted, poetry that presented philosophy as the best way of life would be allowed in the just city. Like Friedrich Nietzsche and Hans-Georg Gadamer, Strauss concluded, Plato's dialogues constituted the example par excellence of such ministerial poetry. Rather than being attempts to convey truths or put forward arguments, the dialogues were intended first and foremost to encourage their readers to engage in a search for wisdom and, if not to become philosophers themselves, to love philosophy.42
PLATO'S DEFENSE OF PHILOSOPHY
The picture most students have of the ancient conflict between the philosopher and the city is based on Plato's Apology of Socrates. But, Strauss argued, in his Apology and Crito Plato gives an explicitly popular and hence somewhat distorted picture of both the character and the effects of Socratic philosophy. In these dialogues Socrates presents himself as an innocent victim of political persecution, who tries not merely to converse with, but to improve anyone he meets. A careful reading of these dialogues (along with the Euthydemus) shows, however, not only that Socrates provoked the Athenians to kill him, but also that he sought to avoid conversing with youths who were not potential philosophers.
In his first speech in the Apology, Socrates shows that the official charges were trumped up by angry fathers. Unable to answer questions raised by youths imitating Socrates and seeking someone to blame for their own incapacity, his accusers reiterated the old charges against philosophers. This old prejudice might be traced partly to a certain comic poet; but, Socrates points out, he does not do or study any of the things Aristophanes ridiculed. Nor is it credible, as his new accuser, the poet Meletos, charges, that, acting in opposition to the efforts of all other citizens, Socrates alone could corrupt the youths of Athens.
Rather than impiously questioning the existence of the Olympian gods like Aristophanes’ philosopher, Socrates says that he has devoted his entire life to proving the wisdom of Apollo's oracle. By interrogating the men who claimed to have wisdom, he has shown why the oracle declared him to be the wisest; unlike them, he knows that he does not know. Responding to an anonymous interlocutor who asks what Socrates has been doing, if he has not done what his accusers charge, Socrates compares himself to Achilles. Like the epic hero, the philosopher has chosen to risk death rather than abandon the post at which the god stationed him. Neglecting his own affairs, Socrates has devoted himself to exhorting his fellow citizens to virtue. He has acted only as a private citizen and has not gone into politics, because he was forbidden to do so by a certain divine voice. In his defense, Socrates thus presents himself as a “god-fearing” man who has always sought to be just.43 The conflict between the philosopher and his fellow citizens is, Socrates suggests in his second speech, a product of a misunderstanding that he could remedy, if only he had more time. If Athens had had a law forbidding one-day trials for capital crimes, he would have been able to persuade the jury to acquit him.
Strauss questioned the validity of Socrates’ claims, however. First, Chairophon's asking the oracle whether there was anyone wiser than Socrates indicated that Socrates had a certain renown for philosophy and had engaged in it before undertaking his oracle-inspired mission. As Aristophanes showed in his Clouds, there was a pre-Delphic Socrates with whom Chairophon had investigated the things in the heavens and under the earth (the places in which the gods were traditionally said to dwell). Socrates’ claim that he would be able to persuade his fellow citizens of his innocence if he had more time seemed, moreover, to contradict his earlier claim that he had been conversing with his fellow citizens all day long for many years. In fact, Strauss pointed out, we never see Socrates engaged in a conversation with an ordinary artisan or a great politician in any of the other Platonic dialogues.44 Nor does Plato report any conversation occurring in the agora. Socrates’ speeches were more private and less public than he suggests in his Apology. That was one reason, perhaps, why the ancient prejudice against philosophers had persisted virtually unchallenged.
After the jury voted to convict him, moreover, Socrates admitted that his initial account of his piety was ironic. The philosopher had presented himself as serving the god, because if he had said “that it is the greatest good for a human being to engage every day in speeches about virtue and the other things about which they heard him converse and thereby examine himself and others … and that the unexamined life is not worth living for any human being” (Apology 38a), he would have convinced the jury even less than he did with his story about serving the god.
As Xenophon explicitly stated in his Apology, but Plato only showed in his, Strauss concluded, Socrates provoked the Athenians into killing him. The “penalty” he initially proposed as an alternative to death was “shocking.” His claim that he deserved to be fed and housed at public expense like a victor in the Olympic games assumed that he had succeeded in improving the character of his fellow citizens. But the fact that they had unjustly accused and condemned him showed that he had not improved their characters any more than the Athenian statesmen—Perikles, Kimon, Miltiades, and Themistoldes—he had criticized on precisely these grounds in the Gorgias (515b8–516e8). Socrates’ claim that he needed public support was equally faulty; it ignored the fact stressed in Xenophon's Oeconomicus that the philosopher could count on his friends—as Socrates himself reminded his audience, when he subsequently proposed paying a significant fine with their help. By explaining why he did not propose exile, Strauss pointed out, Socrates indicated that “there always was an alternative to the death penalty.” Socrates chose to die, because he thought it was better than the alternatives. But, “the Platonic Socrates, as distinguished from the Xenophontic Socrates, d[id] not explain his conduct at the trial by his view that in his advanced years it was good for him to die.”45
By not providing his readers with any information concerning the philosopher's own deliberations or the reasons that persuaded him that he ought to remain and die, Strauss emphasized, Plato made his account of what Socrates said and did into pure drama. We hear what the philosopher said and see what he did, but we are left to infer the reasons why.46 Comparing himself to a tragic hero, Socrates presented himself in his only public speech as willing to die rather than admit that he or his philosophy was wrong.47 In his Apology, Socrates suggested that, like a biblical prophet, he put himself in great danger by directly confronting rulers with their own injustice. Yet, Socrates admitted that he stayed out of politics until the very end of his life to secure his own preservation. Knowing that he was close to death in any case, Socrates took the opportunity offered by his trial to make a “statement,” in deed as much, if not more than, in speech, that would convince not only his compatriots, but also their descendants that philosophy does not constitute a threat to political order.48
Why Socrates provoked the Athenians to condemn him to death is not the only question left unanswered in Plato's Apology, Strauss observed. There is also the question of the significance of the difference Socrates emphasized between the jurors who voted to acquit and those who voted to condemn. In the Gorgias Socrates predicted that, if he were ever forced to defend himself and his philosophy in court, his position would be like that of a physician brought before a jury of children by a pastry cook who accused him of not giving them sweets. That is, he treated the demos as uniformly hostile to philosophy. But in the Apology Plato shows that this is simply not the case. If Meletos had not been joined by Anytus and Lykon, Socrates points out, he would have been acquitted. Neither the poets nor the people as a whole are the most serious critics of the philosopher. Ambitious democratic politicians, concerned particularly about their sons’ future, come to light as Socrates’ most dangerous accusers.49
In the Euthydemus, Strauss suggested, Plato shows that Socrates was partly responsible for people's mistaking his philosophy for sophistry. Socrates intentionally perpetuated the impression that philosophy was a useless endeavor to dissuade fathers of inept sons from pressing him to take them as students.
Rather than constituting a sign of his piety or divine inspiration, Strauss argued, Plato shows that Socrates used his daimonion as an excuse to do (or not to do) what he wanted. At the beginning of the Euthydemus, for example, Socrates tells Kriton that his daimonion warned him against leaving the dressing room. So he stayed and met, first, the sophists, Euthydemus and his brother Dionysodoros, with their students, and then Alkibiades’ grandson Kleinias with his train of lovers. By forbidding Socrates to leave, his daimonion seems to have imposed the subsequent conversation on Socrates; but, we see, the conversation is far from compulsory. The “divine” sign that gives no reasons appears to mark Socrates’ own inclinations; he did not leave, because he wanted to stay and talk to the young men who tend to gather in such places.50
Plato indicates the similarity between Socrates’ and the sophists’ teachings at the very beginning of their exchange. Seeking students, the brothers gladly agree to demonstrate their ability to refute whatever is said and to enable anyone else to do the same in a short time. “This power is necessarily identical with virtue,” Strauss observed, “if virtue is wisdom and if wisdom in the proper sense—knowledge of the most important things—is impossible.”51 Like Socrates, the brothers show that they are wiser and hence more virtuous than others by showing that those who think they know do not.
The difference between the sophists and Socrates becomes clear, however, in the subsequent action. The sophists discourage Kleinias from engaging in any further conversation by first refuting his contention that the ignorant learn, by pointing out that the stupid have proved themselves incapable of learning, and then refuting his second contention that it must be the wise who learn, by pointing out that the wise already know. Socrates, on the other hand, encourages the young man to seek wisdom in the protreptic speech with which he responds to the sophists’ “playfulness.”
But, Strauss pointed out, the positive effect of Socrates’ speech on Kleinias obscures some of its more unsettling implications. When Socrates suggests that a person might need good fortune as well as wisdom, Kleinias is so elated by his newly regained self-confidence that he fails to notice the philosopher's vacillation as to whether wisdom can altogether overcome the power of chance. Nor does Kleinias observe how Socrates’ contention that no human virtue or good is useful to its possessor unless he possesses wisdom involves a radical debunking of what Aristotle called moral virtue. According to Socrates’ argument, it would be better for an ignorant man to be unjust than to be just!
The drama also covers up Socrates’ refutation of the sophists. Having convinced Kleinias that he must seek to be wise, Socrates turns back to the brothers with the question as to whether it is possible to teach anyone to be virtuous—or wise. The brothers comically argue that it is not possible for anyone to learn anything. The importance of Socrates’ observation, that, if no one can learn, no one needs or can learn the sophists’ “art,” gets lost.
In the first half of the dialogue Socrates thus demonstrates his superiority to the sophists both in speech and in deed; but in the second half he lets himself appear to be bested.52 Why? Strauss characteristically argued that the reasons for Socrates’ apparent aporia are to be found in the dramatic setting. Socrates is relating this conversation to his friend Kriton, who is looking for a teacher for his son Kritoboulos. By showing that his questioning of Kleinias in the end proved to be fruitless, Socrates discourages Kriton from asking him to become his son's educator.53
Strauss suggested that Socrates emphasized the elenctic, aporetic character of his philosophy to discourage the fathers of inept sons, like Kriton, from pressing him to take their sons as students (and becoming angry when he refused to serve them and their concerns). As a result, many people were unable to distinguish Socrates’ philosophical investigations from the eristic refutations in which the sophists engaged. Plato dramatized the difference, however, in the argument and the action of the first part of the Euthydemus, as well as in the sophists’ comic critique of typical Socratic doctrines such as recollection and the theory of ideas. Whereas Socrates claimed to know simply that he did not know, he held out the possibility or hope of attaining knowledge. The sophists claimed, on the basis of a Zeno-like application of Parmenides’ argument that one can neither say nor think what is not, to be able to refute any proposition and thus to show that it is impossible to know anything. By not only dramatizing, but also having Socrates praise, their refutations of his characteristic teachings, Plato showed that both he and his teacher recognized the problematic character of Socrates’ arguments.54 According to Socrates, the partial, but only partial, intelligibility of the whole gives us grounds both to try to improve our understanding and not to overestimate the power of our intellect. Lacking full knowledge, we are never, as he initially suggests to Kleinias, free from the control of fortune or chance. Nor is it possible, as the sophists suggest, to establish one's preeminence over others simply by besting them in speech. In a world lacking a completely intelligible order, hierarchy cannot be established simply on the basis of logos; it requires force.
Contrary to many other commentators, Strauss concluded, “Socrates was not the mortal enemy of the sophists nor were the sophists the mortal enemies of Socrates. According to Socrates, the greatest enemy of philosophy, the greatest sophist, is the political multitude (Republic 492a5–e6)—i.e., the enactor of the Athenian laws.”55 As Aristophanes first warned his Socrates in the Clouds, so Plato's Socrates repeatedly reminds the sophists and rhetoricians with whom he speaks that “intellectuals” are always subject to persecution by unscrupulous democratic politicians who arouse the people against them by accusing them of teaching impious doctrines and so corrupting the young.56
PLATO'S “PRACTICAL” POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
In his commentaries on the Minos, Statesman, and Laws, Strauss argued, as he had in his commentary on the Republic, that philosophy not only cannot but also will not rule. The next-best alternative is rule of law. In the Statesman the Eleatic Stranger points out:
Rule of law is inferior to the rule of living intelligence because laws, owing to their generality, cannot determine wisely what is right and proper in all circumstances …: only the wise man on the spot could correctly decide…. Nevertheless laws are necessary. The few wise men cannot sit beside each of the many unwise men and tell him exactly what it is becoming for him to do.57
As Strauss emphasized:
All laws … are crude rules of thumb which are sufficient for the large majority of cases…. The freezing of crude rules of thumb into sacred, inviolable, unchangeable prescriptions which would be rejected by everyone as ridiculous if done in the sciences and the arts is a necessity in the ordering of human affairs; this necessity is the proximate cause of the ineradicable difference between the political and the suprapolitical spheres.58
The main problem with the rule of law is not its generality, however; it is the assumption that these crude rules should bind the wise man as well. As the Stranger explains:
The wise man is subjected to the laws, whose justice and wisdom is inferior to his, because the unwise men cannot help distrusting the wise man, and this distrust is not entirely indefensible given the fact that they cannot understand him. They cannot believe that a wise man who would deserve to rule as a true king without laws would be willing and able to rule over them. The ultimate reason for their unbelief is the fact that no human being has that manifest superiority … which would induce everybody to submit to his rule without any hesitation and without any reserve. The unwise men cannot help making themselves the judges of the wise man. No wonder then that the wise men are unwilling to rule over them.59
Demanding that the wise man regard the law as simply authoritative, the unwise will accuse the man who, like Socrates, raises questions about the justice and wisdom of the established order of corrupting the young, a capital crime.
The best practical solution to the division between the wise and the unwise presented in the Statesman seems to be for the philosopher to convince a legislator to enact a code of law, including provisions for the education of other wise men to administer the laws once enacted. That is precisely what the Athenian Stranger appears to do in the Laws. But, Strauss argued, by the end of the Laws we see that a philosopher is no more able or willing to act as a founder than he was to become a ruler in the Republic.
Because the Laws is the only Platonic dialogue in which Socrates does not appear, Strauss began his account of The Argument and the Action of Plato's “Laws” by asking what the relation between the Athenian Stranger and Socrates is.60 The difference seems to be a matter primarily of the setting—the interlocutors and the place.61 Because the conversation takes place on Crete, where the Athenian is a stranger, and the old Dorians with whom he talks have no knowledge of philosophy, he does not confront the same prejudice against philosophers that Socrates did in Athens. Whereas Socrates always spoke to or in front of youths, the Athenian talks to two old men. When they begin to react angrily, like the Athenian elders, to his criticisms of their revered institutions, the Athenian reminds them of the
Dorian law of laws … which forbids the young to criticize any of their institutions but stipulates that all should say with one voice that all their laws are fine since they were given by gods …; yet one of their old men may make speeches of this sort when speaking to a ruler and men of his own age, provided no one young is present.62
If Socrates had not been so old at the time of his trial, Strauss suggested, he might have gone into exile in Crete. In the Crito, “the Laws” tell Socrates that
If he left Athens he would go either to one of the well-governed cities nearby, where he would be utterly discredited by his unlawful escape, or to Thessaly, which is utterly lawless. [They do] not discuss what would happen to him if he went to a well-governed city far away like … Crete [which] he had mentioned … shortly before…. If Socrates had escaped from prison, he would have gone to Crete, where he was wholly unknown and would have come to sight only as an Athenian Stranger.
However, Strauss pointed out, Plato's art was not constrained by the facts of Socrates’ life. For example, in the Menexenus he has Socrates repeat a speech that mentions events that occurred after his death.63 There had to be another reason for Plato's replacing Socrates with an Athenian Stranger in his most practical political dialogue, the only dialogue in which the protagonist proposes an actual code of law.
In his commentary Strauss pointed out that the anonymity of the Athenian extends beyond his name to what he is—namely, a philosopher. The word “philosophy” does not appear in the dialogue until Book 9 in the context of their discussion on how to punish possible infractions of the laws. Philosophy is presented as a possible source of infraction, because it brings into question the most fundamental laws concerning the gods. The Athenian's failure to mention philosophy in specifying what the laws ought to be also means that he has not made the source and basis of his recommendations clear. He could not—and still persuade the old Dorians to accept them. Their conversations are a model, we learn in Book 7, of the poetry the Athenian suggests the legislator ought to use to persuade rather than force people to obey. Only at the very end of the dialogue does the Athenian admit, without saying so explicitly, that it will be necessary to abolish the “Dorian law of laws” to establish and maintain the new regime. In the Nocturnal Council the elders will discuss the foundations of the regime—the nature and unity of the virtues and the arguments for the existence of god—with young people. (Strauss pointed out that they may be female as well as male.) The law based on intelligence cannot be maintained solely on the basis of tradition. Rulers of the new regime will have to be philosophically educated, and philosophy necessarily raises questions about “received wisdom,” or tradition.
By depicting an anonymous Athenian Stranger discussing a possible reform of Dorian law with two old statesmen in a private conversation that lasts but a day, Plato had suggested that cooperation between traditional and rational forms of authority might be possible. But he indicated at the end of the dialogue that such cooperation would never really exist. The Athenian is not willing to stay to help see his laws enacted; like Socrates’ philosopher-king, he would have to be forced to rule. And, Strauss suggested, if the Dorians kept him and got to know him better, they would see more clearly just how critical he is of their ancestral laws. Their agreement is more apparent than real.
The reason Socrates does not appear in the Laws, Strauss concluded, is that he was prevented by his daimonion from engaging in politics. In other words, he could not engage in legislative activity without endangering his life. There was an unbridgeable opposition between philosophy, openly represented as such by Socrates, and legislation.64
That opposition seems, moreover, to parallel the most obvious difference between Socrates and Plato. “The laws proposed in the Laws are written.” The only other Platonic dialogue that is set outside of Athens is the Phaedrus, “which may be said to concern writing.” The singular absence of Socrates from the Laws leads us to ask whether Plato indicated the way in which he thought that the opposition between philosophy and politics could be overcome, by seeking gradually to alter the opinions of one's readers through writing rather than by directly challenging the opinions of the political elite as Socrates had.65
That was the conclusion to which Farabi had come, Strauss argued in his essay on “How Farabi Read Plato's Laws.”66 And that essay provides the key to Strauss's own account. Strauss does not mention or cite Farabi in The Argument and the Action. He reminds his readers of the “Averroist” understanding, however, by prefacing his study with a quotation from the medieval Islamic philosopher Avicenna, stating that “the treatment of prophecy and the Divine law is contained in … the Laws.”67 One of the techniques of esoteric teaching that Strauss claimed to have learned from Farabi was leaving out something of central importance to a discussion—such as the doctrine of the immortality of the soul from a summary of Plato. By failing to cite Farabi in his own study of Plato's Laws, Strauss indicated his disagreement with Farabi's major conclusion.
Like Farabi, Strauss seems to present a mere summary of the dialogue, organized simply book by book, with a brief Preface about the indirect character of Plato's writing. But, as Joseph Cropsey indicates in his Foreword, repeated rereadings show Strauss's account to be much more than a summary.
According to Farabi, Strauss noted, Plato did not think it wise to declare the truth openly to all readers. To illustrate the way in which Plato could nevertheless communicate the truth to discerning readers by stating it baldly in a context that prevented most from understanding, Farabi related a story about a pious ascetic. Threatened with persecution by the rulers of the city, the ascetic dressed up as a drunken beggar, and with clanging cymbals he approached the gates of the city. Accosted by the guard, he declared that he was the pious ascetic they were seeking. Thinking that the beggar was mocking him, the guard ordered him to pass through. If the ruse were later discovered, Strauss commented, the many would excuse the ascetic, believing that he remained true to his character by telling the truth. But, in fact, the ascetic lied in deed. That lie was, however, the necessary condition for his ability to declare the truth safely.68
Strauss indicated the importance of the distinction between speech and deed for his own analysis in the title The Argument and the Action of Plato's Laws. As in Farabi's story, so in the dialogue itself, the action is deceptive. Although the Athenian Stranger appears to be willing to give the Dorian founders of a new colony a code of laws and so to engage directly in political action, Strauss pointed out, he proves in fact willing merely to engage them in a conversation lasting one day.69 The dialogue concludes with Megillos's announcement that the city they have projected in speech will not work unless they compel the Athenian Stranger to become a participant—a duty from which the Athenian had excused himself along with Megillos in Book 6 (which, if we count the Preface, becomes the subject of the central chapter in Strauss's account).70 The conclusion of the Laws is the same as that of the Republic: the establishment of a just city is impossible unless and until a philosopher is compelled to become king.
Like Socrates in the Republic, the Athenian in the Laws describes a “city in speech.” But unlike Glaucon and Adeimantus, Strauss pointed out, the interlocutors in the Laws know nothing of philosophy. The treatment of the city in the Laws thus initially appears to be quite different.71 “In the Republic, reason or intellect guides the foundation of the city from the beginning, and it eventually rules the city in broad daylight without any dilution or disguise.”72 In the Laws the Stranger also suggests that the best condition for the founding of a city would be a combination of wisdom with tyrannical power.73 But, becuase the wise are few and the many strong, he concedes, the just claims of the wise to rule will have to be diluted by the necessity of recognizing the strength or power of the many—that is, by seeking their consent. “[R]ule of law is a kind of rule of the stronger while the rule of wisdom is not.”74 The rule of law may be necessary and even, in light of the probable alternatives, desirable, but it is never entirely right or just. Political moderation consists in the “adaptation of wisdom to the opinions of the citizen body or to consent,” but moderation is not, according to the Athenian, a virtue in and of itself. The combination of election and lot that he proposes for the selection of magistrates does not constitute a just mixture of two kinds of justice or equality.
According to an old saying, which is true, equality produces friendship, but there is a great difference, not to say opposition, between two kinds of equality. One kind demands that equal honor be given to everyone; this is achieved by lot …; the second kind of equality gives more to the greater and less to the smaller by giving to everyone what is appropriate to his nature, … virtue and education. It is the second kind of inequality which … is … the political right, because it produces for the cities all good things. This implies that the first kind … is conventional.
Strauss concluded:
There are, then, not two different and conflicting roots or principles of justice, say, freedom and good government; but the single principle of justice must be diluted on account of necessity—the compelling power of the many; … a rational society is not possible, unless it be the society ruled by a philosopher exercising tyrannical power…. We have here the core of the Athenian's political suggestions.75
The way the Athenian presents his political suggestions disguises the difference between the many unwise, who need to be persuaded to consent to the law, and the intellect of the individual who alone has a right to declare what it should be. Beginning the conversation by inquiring about the origin of their laws, the Athenian initially presents himself as a student rather than as a teacher of the old Dorians. Even after the Stranger's questions about their institutions convince Kleinias and Megillos that he may have something to teach them, he continues to present the conclusions and effects of philosophical conversations without mentioning philosophy by name. Just as the Stranger's description of Athenian drinking parties (or possibly philosophical symposia like those described in Plato's Symposium) in Book 1 has something of the effect of wine, if vicariously, on his elderly interlocutors, making them a bit more flexible and open to new ideas, so the Stranger's description of the highest Muse without mentioning its name in Book 2 indicates the way the clarity of the mind of the philosopher must be reduced, as if he too were metaphorically feeling the dulling effects of wine on the sharpness of the intellect, so that his unphilosophical interlocutors can understand him. The harmony thus achieved “between the few wise and the many unwise, the rulers and the ruled … is moderation in the highest sense of the word.”76
Strauss pointed out several examples of lack of clarity about the most fundamental issues in the Athenian's speech that serve to obscure the difference between the stranger and his Dorian interlocutors. Although he first distinguishes the logos that should rule the individual from the law, which is the reason accepted by the city, he later blurs that distinction without his interlocutors’ noticing it, as he blurs the distinction between the old and the wise.77 He is unclear about the question of the origins, the relation between the reverence due parents (or our natural origins) and that due the gods.78 He blurs the differences among intellect (nous), good sense (phronesis), and opinion (doxa).
The problems that arise from the Athenian's obscuring the character and source of his own wisdom—that is, the “manifest absence of philosophy”—nevertheless come out at the end of the dialogue. To institute and preserve the laws he has proposed, the Athenian has to educate successors who share his understanding. The Nocturnal Council is supposed to provide such an education, but the composition of the council is not made clear.
Are all its members men each of whom can acquire within his soul science of the subjects in question [the unity and differences among the virtues, the ideas of the noble and the good, and the being and power of the gods]? Are its members potential or actual philosophers? A glance at Kleinias [the Athenian's unphilosophic Cretan interlocutor who will presumably found the colony under his guidance] is sufficient to make one see the pertinence of the question. The heterogeneous composition of the Council makes it impossible to give a simple answer. Hence the Athenian cannot, as Socrates in the Republic can, determine the subjects of study and the time to be allotted to each.79
When the Athenian suggests that he and Kleinias investigate the question of the unity of the virtues by question and answer, the Old Cretan does not see the point. He does not understand the use or danger of engaging in Socratic dialectics which, Strauss pointed out, are as absent from the Laws as their originator.80
Because the Athenian obscures the philosophical foundation of the legislation he proposes, the word “philosophy” does not appear in the dialogue until Book 9. “Philosophy” is explicitly introduced only in the context of the discussion of penal legislation, because, its positive role in the formulation of the law not having been made manifest, it appears only in the form of a questioning of accepted opinions and thus as the potential source of the most heinous capital crime of impiety.81
In the Laws the tension between philosophy and politics at first appears to be overcome. As Strauss observed in his Preface:
The Laws opens with the word “god”; there is no other Platonic dialogue that opens in this manner. The Laws is Plato's most pious work. In the Apology of Socrates Socrates defends himself against the charge of impiety, of not believing in the gods in whom the city believes. In the Laws the Athenian stranger devises a law against impiety which would have been more favorable to Socrates than the corresponding Athenian law.82
The Athenian proposes that no capital crime be tried in one day. In the Apology (73a–b), Socrates claims that, under such conditions, he could have convinced his judges to acquit him.83 But Strauss observed toward the center of his study of the Laws, “Whether Socrates would have fared better in Kleinias’ or the Athenian's city than he fared in Athens cannot be guessed until one knows the Athenian's law regarding impiety and the prosecution of that crime.”84
In fact, both the law and the terms of its prosecution turn out to be unclear. “It is not clear whether a man who believes in the kosmic gods, … without believing in the Olympian gods, is guilty of impiety.”85 (Socrates might have passed the first test but could not pass the second.) The law recognizes that there are different kinds of atheists:
Some have a character by nature good, hate the bad men, and through loathing injustice do not do wrong …, while others are incontinent, possess powerful memories, and are quick at learning; the man of the first kind is likely to be of utter frankness of speech regarding the gods … and by ridiculing others would perhaps make them, too, impious, if he were not punished; the other, … full of craft and guile … belongs to the class of men from which come … tyrants, public speakers, and … sophists. Of these two types the dissembling one (the ironic one) deserves not one death or two, but the other needs admonition together with imprisonment.
But, Strauss pointed out,
The disjunction made by the law is not complete: what happens to the atheist who [like Socrates] is a just man and does not ridicule others because they sacrifice and pray and who to this extent is a dissembler? is it literally true of him that he deserves not one death or two, i.e., no death at all, nor imprisonment? … One could say that he will become guilty if he frankly expresses his unbelief—but what if he expresses his unbelief only to sensible friends? Can one imagine Socrates denouncing him to the authorities?86
According to the law, the just man is to be imprisoned in the sophronisterion—the name of which reminds one of the phronisterion in The Clouds—for “no less than five years, during which time no citizen may visit them except the members of the Nocturnal Council, who are to take care of their improvement; if after the lapse of the five years a man of this kind is thought to have come to his senses, he will be released; if he relapses, however, he will be punished with death.”87
The members of the Nocturnal Council are not to be allowed merely to profess belief “in the gods as the laws declare them to be and because the laws declare them to be”; they are supposed to prove to themselves and others that the gods exist. They will presumably have to raise the question “What is god?” and discuss it among themselves. A philosopher like Socrates might not be apt to denounce a counselor who expressed his doubts. But, Strauss asked, what about a nonphilosophical counselor such as Kleinias? Kleinias appears to believe “in the gods as the laws declare them to be and because the laws declare them to be.”88 How would he like his inability to defend his own opinions to be exposed before the youthful members of the council? What would become of the fame the Athenian Stranger promises he will gain as founder? It seems likely that the elder members of the council would finally react to the disruptive effects of the activities of a philosopher among them very much the way the Athenian fathers eventually did to Socrates.89
The tension between philosophy and the city does not become fully visible in the Laws, Strauss suggested, because “Socrates” is absent. As a result of the dramatic setting, there is no philosopher who arouses the anger of the fathers by explicitly bringing the authority of their opinions into question in front of their sons.90 As the conclusion of the Laws indicates, however, the tension between the philosopher and the fathers can never be entirely eradicated; it is impossible for a philosopher to be a philosopher without raising questions about the validity of inherited views. The tension between philosophy and politics can at most be meliorated, as it was in both Xenophon's and Plato's writings, by the presentation of the philosopher primarily as a phronimos, a man of practical wisdom willing to teach potential princes. But, as Plato indicates in his depiction of both Socrates and the Athenian, there are limits on the extent to which the philosopher is willing to dedicate himself to playing such a role.
In contrast to Farabi, who thought that the manifest absence of philosophy in the Laws suggested that the confrontational tactics of the moralist Socrates needed to be supplemented with the gradual reform of public opinion by the more theoretical Plato, Strauss concluded:
We are no longer … sure … we can draw a clear line between Socrates and Plato. There is traditional support for drawing such a clear line, above all in Aristotle; but Aristotle's statements on this kind of subject no longer possess for us the authority that they formerly possessed…. The decisive fact for us is that Plato as it were points away from himself to Socrates. Plato points not only to Socrates’ speeches but to his whole life, to his fate as well.91
As the highlighting of Socrates indicates, Plato's primary purpose in writing the dialogues was not effecting political reform through the gradual alteration of public opinion. Socrates was, after all, the philosopher who did not engage in political action. As Aristotle points out in his Politics, the best possible regime proposed in the Laws is ultimately as impossible to put into practice as the “city in speech” of the Republic. Plato's primary purpose in writing the dialogues appears, rather, to have been the protection and perpetuation of philosophy by convincing people that philosophy was not necessarily inimical to public order and morality. To do so, Plato saw, he had to persuade philosophers themselves to moderate their speech. By dramatizing not only the speeches but also the life and death of Socrates, Plato reminded would-be philosophers of the reasons they should not pose certain questions—questions regarding the gods and the soul—that is, questions regarding not only the basis and intelligibility of the cosmos but also the sources of support for justice, both natural and supernatural—too publicly or directly. By keeping himself and his own opinions always hidden, like his teacher Socrates, Plato taught his students, first and foremost, the need for self-restraint.
Like Plato, Strauss did not present his own arguments in treatises. Instead, he wrote commentaries on the writings of others. As Victor Gourevitch observed:
Strauss rarely speaks in his own name. Except for Prefaces and Introductions, that is to say except for what might be called public occasion when he is, as it were, compelled to speak in a popular manner, he prefers to appear in the guise of the historian and the exegete…. By casting his thought primarily in the form of historical studies that take the entire history of political philosophy for their province, he implies that the relationship between his views and the doctrines he studies is comparable to that between the views of a dramatist and those of his characters.92
Shadia Drury has claimed that, as Strauss observed of Farabi, so Strauss “avails himself of the specific immunity of the commentator or the historian in order to speak his mind concerning grave matters in his ‘historical’ works, rather than in the works in which he speaks in his own name.”93 She thus felt justified in attributing views and arguments that Strauss explicitly finds in the texts of Plato or Machiavelli or Nietzsche to Strauss himself. She did not appear to notice, as Strauss himself did, that these authors contradict each other. In his essay on liberal education, Strauss went so far as to equate philosophy, in our time at least, primarily with “listening to the conversation between the great philosophers.” But he also emphasized that “this conversation does not take place without our help…. The greatest minds utter monologues. We must transform their monologues into a dialogue.”
Even more, he insisted, “Since the greatest minds contradict one another regarding the most important matters, they compel us to judge of their monologues; we cannot take on trust what any one of them says.” The difficulty is that we are not competent to judge. At the most, we can try to understand the alternatives—that is, the reasons why the greatest minds have disagreed about the answers to the greatest questions.94 In search of such an understanding, Strauss wrote commentaries on the works of ancient, medieval, and modern philosophers. But in his commentaries Strauss showed that modern political philosophers such as Machiavelli and Hobbes thought that they had developed a political “science” by means of which they could show their fellow human beings how to establish and maintain the best possible form of government.95 Although they were certainly well-intentioned, Strauss concluded, these modern philosophers had both overestimated the power philosophy could exercise in politics and understated the value of philosophy itself as simply the best form of human existence, without regard to its service to others.
In the wake of a war for world domination waged by the ideological regimes to which modern political philosophy had given rise, Strauss thus sought to revive “Platonic political philosophy” as a cure for the extreme political ambition modern philosophers had displayed in trying to transform the world entirely. Karl Popper famously proclaimed in The Open Society and Its Enemies that Plato was the origin of totalitarian politics.96 Strauss argued, on the contrary, that a careful reading of Plato's most clearly and emphatically political dialogues showed that he recognized the limits of both politics and philosophy better than any of his successors. Plato did not present a doctrine so much as display the advantages of an ongoing examination of the opposed doctrines or opinions as the best form of human existence.
NOTES
1. “Quelques remarques sur la science politique de Maimoide et de Farabi,” Revue des Etudes Juives 100 (1936): 1–37, trans. Robert Bartlett, Interpretation 18, no. 1 (Fall 1990): 4–17; Philosophy and Law, trans. Eve Adler (Albany: State University of New York, 1995); “Farabi's Plato,” in Louis Ginzberg: Jubilee Volume, ed. Saul Liberman, Shalom Spiegel, Solomon Zeitlin, and Alexander Marx (New York: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1945).
2. E.g., Martin Heidegger, “Plato's Doctrine of the Truth,” trans. John Barlow, in William Barrett and Henry D. Aiden, ed., Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (New York: Random House, 1962), vol. 3, 251.
3. Alfarabi: The Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, trans. Muhsin Mahdi (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).
4. Daniel Tanguay, Leo Strauss: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Christopher Nadon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 80–84, calls this Strauss's “Farabian Turn.” As Thomas L. Pangle points out in his “Introduction” to Leo Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 2–3, Strauss's discounting of the doctrine of the ideas or the knowledge philosophers purportedly need to acquire is the most unusual element of his reading, not merely of the Republic, but of Plato's works as a whole. In his essay “On Plato's Republic” in The City and Man (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964), 119, Strauss observed: “No one has ever succeeded in giving a satisfactory or clear account of this doctrine. It is possible however to define rather precisely the central difficulty.” Strauss did not state the source of his explanation of that difficulty—the existence of the ideas separate from the things that participate somehow in them—but he gave basically the same critique that Aristotle had in his Metaphysics at a place Strauss cited earlier.
5. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, ed., The History of Political Philosophy (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1963, 1972), 7–63.
6. Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (SPPI), 38–88. Strauss also wrote, but although he himself did not publish, an essay on Plato's Euthyphro, in which he concluded that Socrates was guilty as charged—i.e., he did not believe in the gods of the city. This essay is included in a collection of Strauss's unpublished writings put together by Thomas L. Pangle, ed., The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 187–206. Because Strauss wrote essays on the first three of the four dialogues usually thought to depict the trial and death of Socrates, it is a striking fact that Strauss never wrote on the Phaedo, the dialogue in which Socrates states that he must make a second apology to his friends, and in which he defends not only his hypothesis about the ideas but also the immortality of the soul.
7. Liberalism: Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 65. First published in the third volume of Louis Massignon, Damascus, 1957, Strauss included “How Farabi Read Plato's Laws” in What Is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1959), 134–54.
8. Leo Strauss, The Argument and the Action of Plato's “Laws” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975).
9. Underlining the extent to which he was breaking with the received understanding of the history of philosophy, in his commentaries on Plato Strauss concentrated on the dialogues and rarely addressed other commentators or interpreters. Three notable exceptions were his lengthy review of John Wild, Plato's Theory of Man; “On a New Interpretation of Plato's Political Philosophy,” Social Research 13, no. 3 (September 1946): 326–67, which he never reprinted; his review of Eric Havelock's “The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics,” Review of Metaphysics 12, no. 3 (March 1959): 390–439, included in Liberalism Ancient and Modern (LAM), 26–64; and a parenthetical comment on an error made by Glen Morrow in The Argument and the Action of Plato's Laws (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 44, and a reference to England, 167.
10. Both in his own initial remarks on the character of Farabi's writing in Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1952), 10–37, and in his later “Correspondence concerning Wahrheit und Methode” with Hans Georg Gadamer, Independent Journal of Philosophy 2 (1978):5–12, Strauss insisted that each author must be read in his own terms. Plato and Farabi wrote at very different times and thus under quite different conditions; they also wrote their works in very different forms. To note the most obvious differences, Farabi wrote explicitly in light of scriptural revelation and the religious wars provoked by different versions or beliefs about the content and character of that revelation; Plato did not. Farabi also wrote treatises and commentaries, whereas Plato wrote dialogues. Strauss himself also wrote under different circumstances, at a time when a series of the world's greatest philosophers—Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger—had all declared, if for somewhat different reasons, that philosophy had come to an end. Strauss was trying to revive philosophy by returning to its origin in Plato and giving those origins a fresh reading. See Strauss, “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy,” SPPP, 29–37; “An Introduction to Existentialism,” Rebirth, 27–46; Catherine H. Zuckert, Postmodern Platos: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Strauss, Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
11. In his later works Strauss rarely refers to Plato's letters. He never mentions the Second Letter in which, as Strauss reminded his readers in his review of Wild, Plato says that he wrote nothing, he simply reported the sayings of a Socrates made young and beautiful (noble). Strauss refers to the Seventh Letter in The City and Man (CM), 63, in a footnote pointing out the differences between the discussion in the Republic and subsequent historical attempts to overthrow the Athenian democracy. But he never discusses Plato's account of the problematic results of his own political involvement.
12. CM, 53.
13. “The Platonic dialogue shows us much more clearly than an Epistle Dedicatory could, in what manner the teaching conveyed through the work is adapted by the main speaker to his particular audience and therewith how that teaching would have to be restated in order to be valid beyond the particular situation of the conversation in question” (CM, 54).
14. CM, 61–62.
15. Both Gadamer and Strauss were friends of Jacob Klein, and both attribute some of their decisive insights to him. The insights for which they thank Klein are, however, very different. Gadamer explicitly relies on Klein's analysis of the Greek understanding of number for his own understanding of the relation between the whole and the parts. Strauss praises Klein in Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 78, and “An Unspoken Prologue to a Public Lecture at St. John's,” Interpretation 7, no. 3 (1978): 1–3, primarily for showing how modern doctrines covered over and finally led philosophers to forget the foundation and roots of their own ideas in ancient ideas, which were based on common or natural, naive experience.
16. CM, 62.
17. Rebirth, 155.
18. Strauss points out that the two, and only two, aspects of the dialogues that can unquestionably be attributed to Plato himself are the titles and the selection of the conversations to be depicted. CM, 56–57. Insofar as the dialogues are works of art, moreover, rather than products of nature or random conjunction, they are products of intention, which abstracts from chance. CM, 60.
19. CM, 5.
20. Strauss thus corrects the tendency to associate Socrates with the Thirty Tyrants, because of his association with Critias and Charmides, e.g., in Indra Kagis McEwen, Socrates’ Ancestor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 97. As Strauss pointed out in his review of Wild, neither Plato nor his Socrates was a member of a political party, nor can their arguments be used to support one.
21. CM, 63.
22. CM, 65. If we look back at Xenophon's account of Socrates’ conversation with Glaucon in the Memorabilia (III.8), we discover that it is very different from the Republic. Whereas Xenophon's Socrates questions Glaucon in order to shame him into admitting that he knows nothing about politics and has therefore nothing of value to offer the Athenian people, Plato's Socrates gives his companions a lesson in “self-control regarding the pleasures, and even the needs, of the body” by substituting the conversation about justice, a feast of thought in which he conjures up “many grand and perplexing sights” like the city in speech and his famous images of the divided line and the cave for the dinner they were initially promised. This dual lesson in moderation—both physical and intellectual or political—constitutes the action of the dialogue. Both of Socrates’ students thus show him teaching continence as the precondition for wisdom, but Plato's Socrates is much less austere. He gives his readers an indication of the sort of intellectual pleasure that, Xenophon's Socrates explained to Antiphon, produced his continence regarding bodily things. To do so, he has to become something of a poet himself by presenting them with “grand sights” or images.
23. Strauss later comments, “Socrates’ procedure in the Republic can perhaps be explained as follows: there is a particularly close connection between justice and the city, and while there is surely an idea of justice, there is perhaps no idea of the city…. The eternal and unchangeable ideas are distinguished from the particular things which come into being and perish…. Perhaps the city belongs so radically to the sphere of becoming that there cannot be an idea of the city. Aristotle says that Plato recognized ideas only of natural beings…. Yet, if there is a strict parallel between the city and the human individual, the city would seem to be a natural being.” Ibid., 92–93.
24. Strauss's student Seth Benardete emphasizes that difference in the reading of the Republic he gives in Socrates Second Sailing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
25. Although these guardians are also said to be experts in one military art, Strauss pointed out, they, unlike the other citizens, are explicitly admitted not only to have but also to need a dual nature, containing two opposed drives or tendencies. The proposition that each human being is designed by nature to do one and only one thing is thus shown to be, at best, only partially true. Only when the city thus becomes divided into two potentially opposed factions, one armed and one unarmed, does its organization become political, properly speaking; only now are there rulers and ruled. Strauss did not agree with Hans Georg Gadamer, “Plato and the Poets,” Dialogue and Dialectic, trans. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 54–56, however, that the political is the historical. On the contrary, he pointed out, the premise of the description of the inferior regimes in Book 8 is that the best regime was once actual. The inferior regimes are decayed versions; there is no notion of progress gradually achieved over time. CM, 129.
26. CM, 98.
27. Rebirth, 157.
28. Strauss's use of the qualifying clause “what Adeimantus calls theology,” CM, 98, suggests that he does not think Socrates or Plato would call ‘theology’ anything that did not begin with the question “What is god?”
29. “Somewhat later in the conversation Socrates suggests that justice is a specifically human virtue (392a3–c3), perhaps because justice is rooted in the fact that every human being lacks self-sufficiency and hence is ordered toward the city (369b5–7) and therefore that man is essentially “erotic” whereas the gods are self-sufficient and hence free from eros. Eros and justice would thus seem to have the same root” (CM, 99–100). For this reason, in Book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics 1178b10–15, Aristotle declares that, being self-sufficient, the gods have no need for justice. The existence of Socrates’ gods would not seem to depend on human beings believing in them.
30. CM, 110.
31. Both Socrates and Strauss seem to ignore or abstract from international relations. Does the city not need to deal justly with other cities? As Socrates suggests in explaining, first, why guardians become necessary and, then, why they must be carefully educated, the city that does not restrict its citizens’ desires to what they need to survive will have to take things from others unjustly. The relations of a just city with others will be limited, therefore, to defense. Will a city that contains a sufficient number of people and variety of trades to provide for the necessities be large enough to defend itself from others? It is not clear. (In Plato's Laws the Athenian Stranger thus suggests that a good city needs to be founded in an isolated, but sufficiently fertile place.) The need for defense itself raises a problem, moreover. When the city asks some of its citizens to give their lives in its defense, it subordinates the good of the individual to the good of the rest. But such a subordination of the good of one to the good or advantage of others was the definition of injustice, according to the exchange between Thrasymachus and Socrates in Book I. The problem associated with defense points to the reasons Socrates has to abstract from the body or concerns with bodily preservation in the parallel he proceeds to draw between the individual and the city.
32. “A provisional consideration of the soul seems to … [show that it] contains desire, spiritedness or anger, and reason, just as the city consists of the money-makers, the warriors, and the rulers” (CM, 109–10).
33. Like Hans Georg Gadamer, in “Plato's Educational State,” Dialogue, 86–87, Strauss observes how strange it is that the answer to the question “What is justice?” should be given less than halfway through the dialogue. Like everything else in the dialogue, he argues, this anomaly reflects the political context or setting. Unlike philosophical inquiries, political questions have a certain urgency; they have to be answered, somehow, now. Because the answer Socrates gives here is defective, the difference between the apparently doctrinaire character of the Republic and the clearly elenctic dialogues is more apparent than real. CM, 105–6.
34. Ibid., 109. The parallel that Socrates draws between the city and the soul is defective, not merely because it results in a problematic abstraction from the body; it also produces a distorted view of the character and relation of the parts of the human soul. “It is very plausible that those who uphold the city against foreign and domestic enemies and who have received a music education should be more highly respected than those who lack public responsibility as well as music education,” Strauss observes. “But it is much less plausible that spiritedness as such should be higher in rank than desire as such.” Just as “spiritedness” encompasses a “large variety of phenomena ranging from the most noble indignation about injustice … to the anger of a spoiled child who resents being deprived of anything,” so desire includes “eros, which ranges in its healthy forms from the longing for immortality through offspring … to the longing for immortality through participation by knowledge in the things which are unchangeable in every respect” (ibid., 110). Socrates can maintain that spiritedness is unqualifiedly higher and more reasonable than desire only by abstracting from eros.
35. Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism (CR), 159; Seth Benardete, “Leo Strauss’ The City and Man,” Political Science Reviewer 8 (Fall 1978): 9.
36. As in an Aristophanic comedy, Socrates’ denial that the difference between the sexes has any more relevance to the organization of the polity than the difference between bald and hairy men produces some apparently ridiculous results—old women exercising in the nude.
37. According to Strauss, there is an important difference between Aristophanes’ “female” drama and Socrates’ corrected version, headed by philosopher-kings, which is “altogether of male origin.” Aristophanes’ utopia is egalitarian, whereas the Republic is an aristocracy. Cf. Leo Strauss, Socrates and Aristophanes (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 282, and CM, 114.
38. CM, 122.
39. As Strauss points out with regard to the final “proof” of its immortality, one cannot know what the order or good of the soul is without knowing what the soul is. But like the question “What is god?” the question “What is soul?” is not raised in this or any other of Plato's dialogues. Strauss indicates the reasons these questions are not asked in his analysis of the Minos, the Platonic dialogue in which Socrates explicitly raises one of the questions Xenophon's Socrates did not, “What is law?” In that dialogue, Socrates utterly dismisses consent as an ingredient of law, which he defines solely as the dictate of the divine intellect. Most laws are, we realize, mixtures, as Plato's two philosophical “strangers” teach. So, I believe, are the concepts of “soul” and “god” mixtures—of life with intellect in the case of soul and, as Strauss himself shows in his analysis of Maimonides’ arguments concerning the attributes of God in his Guide, agency that can punish injustice with intellect that can produce order. There is, in other words, no simple or adequate answer to the what is——question in these cases. To show that there is no soul or god per se would have pernicious effects on salutary popular opinions. The unanswerability of these three questions is an expression, however, of the noetic heterogeneity of the whole. Cf. LAM, 65–75.
40. Cf. CM, 124–38, and Leo Strauss, “Restatement on Xenophon's Hiero,” in On Tyranny, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth (New York: Free Press, 1991), 193–202.
41. Apology, 38a.
42. “What Is Liberal Education?” in LAM, 6–8.
43. Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith present such a view in Plato's Socrates (New York: Oxford, 1994).
44. As Farabi pointed out, Plato's Socrates converses only with members of the elite, if not the highest elite.
45. SPPP, 50–51. The reason Socrates says that he does not propose exile is that “in any other city … he would have the same troubles as in Athens. The young men would listen to his speeches; if he were to chase them away, they would persuade their elders to expel him; if he would not chase them away, their fathers and other relatives would” (Apology 37d–e; SPPP, 50). But, as Socrates reminded his audience in his first speech, he had survived in Athens for seventy years. As Strauss pointed out in his introduction to AAPL, the conjunction between the reasons “the laws” give in the Crito why Socrates should not run away with the setting of the Laws suggests the philosopher could have gone anonymously to Crete and continued philosophizing there, if he had been younger.
46. In presenting reasons why he should not escape to safety after he had been convicted in the Crito, Strauss pointed out, Socrates does not mention either the soul or philosophy—considerations both he and the Athenian Stranger argue should take precedence over concerns not only about one's bodily self-preservation but also one's forebeares, one of the grounds “the laws” give for his obligation to obey. The reasons “the laws” give correspond to Kriton's, but not to Socrates’ own concerns.
47. In Hermeneutics as Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 123, Stanley Rosen wonders why Strauss said in his discussion of Plato in CM, 61, that the dialogues are only “slightly” more akin to comedy than to tragedy. Here we have one reason; in the Apology of Socrates, Plato seems to many readers to present a tragedy. The conflict between politics and philosophy appears comic only “from some perspectives,” Strauss observed. (In his analysis of Aristophanes he pointed out that a comedy cannot depict a death, because it is too serious.) There is, however, something comic about Socrates’ presentation of himself as a tragic hero. He does not “seem to notice the slight incongruity of comparing his dying in ripe old age with Achilles’ dying young” (SPPP, 44).
48. “Deeds are more trustworthy than speeches: Socrates did stay in prison, he chose to stay, he had a logos telling him to stay. But is this logos identical with the logos by which he persuades Kriton? We have indicated why this is not likely…. Kriton is concerned above all with what the people of Athens will say if he has not helped Socrates to escape from prison: what Socrates tells Kriton, Kriton can and will tell the people” (SPPP, 66). In Birth of Tragedy, sec. 13, Nietzsche also suggested that Socrates orchestrated his own death.
49. In Plato's Meno, Socrates is shown to outrage Anytus by arguing that outstanding Athenian statesmen like Pericles have failed to educate even their own sons. In Xenophon's Apology to the Jury, Socrates makes a snide prediction about the future of Anytus's own son. In Xenophon's Symposium, Lykon is shown to be so enamored of his son that he sees little else.
50. Readers are reminded of the positive aspect of that daimonion or of Socrates’ eros—his desire to associate with young men as well as his ability to attract them to him—when Kleinias goes immediately to Socrates’ side, where after a short deliberation the sophists follow. Although the authenticity of the Theages has been questioned, Strauss points out, Plato shows the same relation between the daimonion and Socrates’ eros in this dialogue that Xenophon did, SPPP, 46–47. In Plato's Symposium, 216c–219c, Alcibiades suggests that Socrates only pretends to be attracted to young men; his purported eros is really a way of attracting them to him so that he can guide, if not dominate, their lives.
51. SPPP, 70.
52. Both dialectics and politics are disqualified, because they use materials—mathematical figures, in the case of dialectics, and men or wealth, in the case of politics—produced by other arts. The only kind of knowledge that would seem to satisfy the dual criteria of production and use would appear to be the only kind of knowledge Plato's Socrates ever claims to possess—i.e., the knowledge of erotic things that enables him, first, to arouse desire for knowledge on the part of his young interlocutors and then to use that desire to make them better. But neither Socrates nor Strauss mentions the positive side of the philosopher's daimonion or its relevance to the substance of the discussion.
53. In contrast to Xenophon's Socrates in his Oeconomicus, Strauss emphasizes, Plato's hero does not want to spend even an afternoon telling a foolish young man how to become kalos k'agathos, conventionally understood.
54. Socrates responds to Dionysodoros's critique of the doctrine of beautiful things “participating” in the beautiful and yet being different from the beautiful-in-itself with an eristic argument concerning the same and the different that reminds us of one of Plato's other philosophical spokesmen, the Eleatic Stranger, who suggests in the Sophist that we define everything according to its similarities and differences with others.
55. SPPP, 88. Strauss cites the passage in which Socrates explains why he and other philosophers stay out of politics with no reference to his daimonion whatsoever.
56. This is the message Socrates gives Gorgias and Protagoras in the dialogues named after them.
57. Leo Strauss, “Plato,” History of Political Philosophy (HPP), 1987, 74–75.
58. HPP, 75.
59. Ibid.
60. For a good introduction, see Mark Blitz, “Strauss's Laws,” Political Science Reviewer 20 (Spring 1991): 186–222.
61. In the Politics, Strauss reminded his readers that Aristotle calls the Stranger Socrates. Plato's greatest student did not see any significant difference between Socrates and the Athenian Stranger.
62. AAPL, 10–11.
63. Cf. Ibid., 2, “How Farabi Read Plato's Laws,” WIPP, 154: Just as “Farabi invented Platonic speeches … with ease,” so “Plato invented … Socratic and other stories.”
64. Farabi points to such an opposition, Strauss observed, by remaining altogether silent about philosophy in his Summary of Plato's “Laws” and by attributing the Laws to Socrates in his Philosophy of Plato, but not mentioning law as the subject of the dialogue. “It is as if Farabi had interpreted the absence of Socrates from the Laws to mean that Socrates has nothing to do with laws, and as if he had tried to express this interpretation by suggesting that if per impossible the Laws were Socratic, they would not deal with laws” (WIPP, 153).
65. In his account of “How Farabi Read Plato's Laws,” Strauss concluded that “Socrates’ silence about laws … must be understood in the light of the implicit distinction [made in section 30 of the Philosophy] between the way of Socrates and the way of Plato.” WIPP, 153.
66. Farabi's failure to use the word “philosophy” in his Summary “must be understood in light of the implicit distinction … between the way of Socrates and the way of Plato. The way of Plato emerges through a correction of the way of Socrates. The way of Socrates is intransigent; it demands of the philosopher an open break with the accepted opinions. The way of Plato combines the way of Socrates, which is appropriate for the philosopher's relations to the elite, with the way of Thrasymachus, which is appropriate for the philosopher's relations to the vulgar. The way of Plato demands therefore judicious conformity with the accepted opinions. If we consider the connection, stated in the Summary, between the vulgar and the laws, we arrive at the conclusion that the appreciation or legitimation of laws becomes possible by virtue of Plato's correction of the way of Socrates” (WIPP, 153). In the note Strauss appended to this statement, he observed, “The first half of the Philosophy of Plato ends with ‘Socrates’; the second half ends with ‘their laws,’ i.e., the laws of the Athenians.”
67. AAPL, 1.
68. In taking Strauss's comment on Farabi's “pious ascetic” to be an endorsement of “noble” lying, Shadia Drury fails to note Strauss's own conclusion that the ascetic lied “in deed,” and that his lying was justified only by the requirement of his own self preservation. Cf. The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988), xi, 14, with Catherine and Michael Zuckert, The Truth about Leo Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 116–20.
69. AAPL, 42, 64.
70. In his account of Farabi's reading, WIPP, 148–50, Strauss pointed out that, although the gods are frequently mentioned in his Summary in contrast to their complete absence in his Philosophy of Plato, they are not mentioned in Farabi's account of Book 6 (although they appear both in Plato's text and in Strauss's).
71. AAPL, 6.
72. Ibid., 38.
73. Laws, 709e–710d; AAPL, 56–57. Commentators such as Drury who take such restatements by Strauss of the positions taken by Plato's characters as Strauss's own endorsement of the advantages of combining philosophy with tyranny (or philosophers' seeking to obtain absolute power) fail to notice Strauss's insistence that philosophers in Plato (and according to Strauss) will not seek rule. Cf. On Tyranny (OT) 202, and Zuckerts, Truth, 158–66.
74. AAPL, 47. In other words, the argument of the Laws does not abstract from body the way the argument of the Republic does. This is the reason that the regime of the Republic is said in Laws Book 5 to be best, but to be suitable only for gods or demigods and not for human beings. In the Laws citizens are allowed to have private property and to select specific individuals to marry. Inequalities in wealth are strictly limited, however; members of the two sexes are treated as equally as possible; and family life is subject to a good deal of public supervision. The city is ruled, moreover, by a “Nocturnal Council” of wise old men who choose young men to join their secret deliberations and so to become educated. As Aristotle observes in Politics 1265a1, the institutions of the Laws finally become hard to distinguish from those of the Republic.
75. AAPL, 86–87. Strauss emphasizes his own agreement with this analysis when he reiterates “the necessity … of diluting true proportionate equality which for us is always the political right” (p. 180).
76. Ibid., 20–21, 33. This moderation is the quality Nietzsche lacked in contrast to Plato, according to Strauss. SPPP, 174, 183, 191. It is, we might venture to suggest, the distinguishing quality of the political philosopher qua political philosopher. Sophrosune is also the only “cardinal” virtue Socrates does not claim himself in Plato's Apology. But, as Xenophon shows, at his trial Socrates wanted to provoke the Athenians to condemn him; he was not trying to persuade them to live with him in peace.
77. AAPL, 20–21, 33.
78. Ibid., 63, 66, 165–66. Although he teaches that citizens must be led to honor their souls, second only to the gods, and to believe that, as the source of motion, soul is prior to matter and so presumably to believe in the gods as well, the Athenian does not, any more than Socrates, raise or answer the questions “What is soul?” or “What is god?”
79. Ibid., 85.
80. Ibid., 114, 180.
81. The obfuscation is not accidental, however. The Athenian explicitly argues that the successful legislator must convince his people that the laws he has drafted just now have been in effect from ancient times. Because nomos consists of a kind of opinion, it never has or can have the status of knowledge and will not, therefore, be able to answer philosophical questions or critiques. It has the same defect, in other words, that Socrates attributes to writing in general in the Phaedrus.
82. AAPL, 2.
83. But cf. SPPP, 49–50.
84. AAPL, 91.
85. Ibid., 156.
86. Ibid., 155–56.
87. Ibid., 155.
88. Ibid., 3, 7, 11. At the beginning of the dialogue Kleinias answered the Stranger's initial question about Zeus's being the origin of Cretan law by saying that this was the “just,” i.e., the conventional answer mandated by law. Even after the Athenian convinced Kleinias that it would be necessary to inculcate certain beliefs about the gods, in Book 10 he did not exhibit any indignation against atheists.
89. Cf. SPPP, 42–43. In his essay “On Plato's Apology of Socrates and Crito,” Strauss argued that Socrates shows that “the primary charge concerns his corruption of the young and that the other three charges [concerning his impiety] are pure inventions thought out in order to give some plausibility to the corruption charge” (ibid., 41).
90. Strauss indicated the extent to which thymos has been abstracted from in the Laws by rarely using the word in his summaries. Thomas Pangle lists more than seventy-seven instances in which the word “spiritedness,” “spirit,” or thymos occurs in the index to his translation of The Laws of Plato (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 560. But Strauss used the English translation only twice—once in his account of the need for human beings to be both gentle and spirited in his presentation of the discussion of the soul in Book 5, 68, and second in his commentary on Book 10, 141, 143, where he pointed out that, having urged his interlocutors that they need to try to persuade atheists of the existence of the gods without spirited anger, the Athenian then found it necessary to arouse Kleinias’ spirit. The Athenian's speech had apparently smothered the passion that led “fathers” like Kleinias to persecute Socrates. Strauss used the Greek word only in his account of Book 11, 167, when he observed that the Athenian's critique of “the kind of madness that comes from a bad nature and training of spiritedness (thymos)” led the Athenian by “logo-graphic necessity” to talk about “evil-speaking,” ridicule, and hence comedy. This was a reference, no doubt, to Aristophanes, who warned Socrates about the danger he might encounter by arousing the spirited opposition of the fathers by teaching their sons to be impious. Observing that comedy, although not necessarily tragedy, would be allowed in the city, Strauss concluded by noting that “what one ought to stress is the corresponding devaluation of thymos (cf. 888a2–6).”
91. SPPP, 168.
92. Victor Gourevitch, “Philosophy and Politics, I,” Review of Metaphysics 22 (1968): 60–61.
93. The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss by Shadia Drury (2005) Palgrave MacMillan, 27, quoting Strauss, PAW, 14.
94. “What Is Liberal Education?” LAM, 7–8.
95. Natural Right and History (NRH), “What Is Political Philosophy,” WIPP, 9–55; Thoughts on Machiavelli (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1959); “The Three Waves of Modernity,” in Hilail Gildin, ed., An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays by Leo Strauss (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 81–98.
96. The Open Society and Its Enemies (New York: Harper, 1962).