Leo Strauss on Wholes and Parts
Great philosophers challenge their readers. In this aspect, there can be no doubt that Leo Strauss is a great philosopher. Strauss presents many problems to the readers who would attempt to understand him. There is one very major aspect of Strauss’s philosophy that stands out in the very beginning, which a discussant must call attention to. For Strauss starts off with the conviction that he knows something, that the others do not know: that the philosopher is exposed to so much danger in his pursuit of the truth, that he is at liberty, or even required, to attempt to conceal his arguments with misdirection.[1] This is a very strenuous principle for the interpreter. Some introductory comments seem imperative.
Many thinkers, when they make their arguments, do not set out with the conviction that Strauss starts out with. Many philosophers think that truth takes priority over security or self-preservation, and that philosophy has an obligation to the public to be open with its inquiries and arguments. Of these philosophers who believe in candor, they often lapse into contradictions; and these contradictions are seen to indict their philosophies.
Strauss’s doctrine is not vulnerable to this sort of criticism. For Strauss starts off with the premise that he is determined to present contradictory arguments, in order to protect himself and his students from persecution. Strauss therefore has an alibi for any contradictions that appear in his speech or writing. I see no way around this problem. For if it is the deliberate intention of a philosopher to unfold contradictory arguments, then the philosophy will contain contradictory arguments. The cause of truth will not be advanced in such a case by pointing out the contradictions that exist in the philosopher’s work, because the contradictions are planned for and indeed help to constitute the philosophy and its appeal to truth.
I do not propose, here, to try to reveal to the reader contradictions that exist in Strauss’s philosophy. My reason has been stated. What I propose to do however is to trace out one line of argument that is present in Strauss, that not many philosophers seem to be conversant with. That line of argument is the one we have been investigating for most of this book: the tradition of argument initiated by Parmenides, and adapted by the atomists, to the effect that nature is a “totality” or “unity,” a “whole.”
Scholars are not always familiar with this argument about nature as an alleged whole. Thus I have set it before the reader in the opening chapter of this work. In the case of Strauss, this thread of argument can be discerned. I do think it can be helpful to the reader to know the individual strands of argument that Strauss is appealing to in his work. By elucidating the atomist theory of metaphysics as one of the arguments to which Strauss appeals, and by furnishing the reader with Plato’s refutation of that line of argument, it is possible that a useful task in Straussian hermeneutics will be accomplished. The esoteric nature of the Eleatic philosophy is too large a blind spot in contemporary philosophy to ignore. Human beings judge better when they can see and perceive more accurately; by illustrating this thread of argument that exists in Strauss, therefore, I do not of course claim or wish to indicate that contradictory threads do not exist. I only wish to trace out the existence of this one thread, and to explain it. When the reader has come to terms with this particular thread of argument in Strauss, it is to be hoped that interpretations of Strauss will benefit from the new insight. That is the extent to which I think I may be of use in this epilogue.
This book has dealt with some abstract subject matter. The true cause of the book, however, is concrete. In our world, ordinary people, many of them non-philosophers, engage in various sorts of transactions, contracts, and altercations. Struggles take place at various levels. When ordinary people try to shape their world, they begin by considering the facts that they know, and usually the subject of justice. Justice is something human beings come to naturally; for life is unbearable without it.
The world in which we live is governed to a considerable degree by philosophy. This philosophy is most frequently known as science. Modern science prefers not to admit that it is philosophical. Locke and Hume helped to provide philosophy with the name of science through the doctrine of experimental method. However, the experimental philosophies of Locke and Hume are atomistic. Insofar as they are atomistic, these philosophies are metaphysical and deductive. The philosophy of atoms believes that it knows something. What the atomist philosophy believes that it knows, is that perception cannot tell us truths about external objects; for the real bodies, according to this philosophy, must be eternal bodies; and none of the perceptible ones has this quality.
The collision between this philosophy and ordinary opinion is about politics. Ordinary opinion, in its effort to form coherent pictures about the world and their place in it, relies upon its perceptions. The new philosophical perspective that sets out to guide the formation of public opinion heaps discredit upon the perceptions of the generality of the population. This discredit in effect silences the ordinary opinions, or otherwise interferes with the development and dissemination of such.
Leo Strauss, in part, is a practitioner of this philosophy. Strauss is a political philosopher. He leans with extra emphasis on the indictment that the philosophy of atoms brings against the ordinary perceptions. Nature, according to Strauss, is something that human beings cannot know by perception. It is rather something that must be “discovered,” because it is “hidden.” This nature is hidden, in such a way that only a philosopher can find it, Strauss argues; and it is to this natural beginning, this discovery of nature, that Strauss would lead discussions about politics. The philosophical perspective that Strauss develops cannot begin with the ordinary opinions. “Man,” in this point of view, “is essentially a particle of nature.”[2] This point of view begins with the alleged discovery of the truth of nature as a whole.
According to Strauss, “Philosophy is the quest for the ‘principles’ of all things, and this means primarily the quest for the ‘beginnings’ of all things or for ‘the first things.’ . . . The whole history of philosophy is nothing but the record of the ever repeated attempts to grasp fully what was implied in that crucial discovery which was made by some Greek 2,600 years ago or before.”[3] “The philosophic quest for the first things presupposes not merely that there are first things but that the first things are always and that things which are always or imperishable are more truly beings than the things which are not always. These presuppositions follow from the fundamental premise that no being emerges without a cause or that it is impossible that “at first Chaos came to be,” that is, that the first things jumped into being out of nothing and through nothing.”[4] “Beings that are always are of higher dignity than beings that are not always, because only the former can be the ultimate cause of the latter, of the being of the latter, or because what is not always finds itself constituted by what is always.”[5]
In this strand of argument Strauss is referring to both Parmenides’s philosophy and to the philosophy of atoms. The argument that “it is impossible” that the first things “jumped into being out of nothing” can be attributed to thinkers other than Parmenides and the atomists. Aristotle certainly believes the argument, or one version of it; as did the Ionian natural philosophers and even the Greek poets before them. Yet the version of this principle that “nothing comes from nothing” that Strauss appeals to is the atomist one first formulated by Parmenides. For the Ionian natural philosophers as for Aristotle, nature is not hidden. Sense perception for these thinkers reveals nature, and therefore sense perception is the first step on the ladder towards philosophy for them. Things are otherwise for Strauss and the philosophy of nature that he has in mind. “Nature would not have to be discovered if it were not hidden.”[6] Genesis is foreign to Strauss’s conception of nature, whereas it is the very purpose of nature in the Ionian philosophers and in Aristotle. Strauss in this respect hails from the Parmenidean or Eleatic line. As Parmenides argues, “for what creation of it will you look for? How, whence could it have sprung?”[7]
In Epicurus’s formulation, nature is the atoms: “and these are atomic and unchangeable, if indeed they are not all going to be destroyed into not being but will remain firmly during the dissolutions of compounds.”[8] The difference between the Ionian natural philosophers and Aristotle, on the one hand, and Parmenides and the atomists on the other, is that the former believe in the intention of nature to generate. The issue is very much one of purpose: does nature have a purpose or not? The argument that existing beings are generated out of eternal things such as the atoms denies purpose to nature. Parmenides’s poem conceives of justice itself as opposed to generation, as effectively repudiating its reality. This casts Parmenides’s philosophy as the antagonist of ordinary opinion, because ordinary opinion perceives the order that is in perishable nature through perception.
Strauss is a political philosopher. Thus he is never far distant from the discussion of political things. Strauss is an extremely, extremely gifted rhetorician. Readers of Strauss are frequently left dangling by the masterful twists and turns of argument that he employs. There is no object more obvious in politics than the common interest, the general good, the welfare of the “whole.” Strauss, in the political context, is however frequently using the name “whole” to discuss nature and reality as a totality. Or, in a more artful way, Strauss will start out talking about something as provincially political as the postal service, and suddenly identify that postal service as a part of the whole conceived in the broadest sense possible: the whole as “nature.” If Strauss was a casual speaker, he would be referring as I have said to what every person knows to be a perennial issue in politics: the common good. That is an object that one can attempt to indicate by the name “whole.” It is certainly the way that many of Strauss’s readers take him to be speaking. Yet this is not an adequate analysis of Strauss and his employment of the name “whole.”
The common interest of a society, for the ordinary person, will involve the legal boundaries of a geographical territory that is subject to one government. The common interest of a society, in the twenty-first century still largely focuses on the nation state, despite the power of international alliances, corporations which extend their power over several continents, and non-governmental organizations. The common interest of society, politically speaking, is still primarily or principally attended to through the franchise. Citizens vote. Or at least, they have the opportunity to vote. Political candidates advertise their views and gather like-minded partisans around them. This is the major quadrennial context for the pursuit of the common interest in American politics. There are courts of law, and a functioning free press; there are police and fire departments, as well as other provisions for the security of the homeland. All of these things are entirely within the experience of the ordinary individual in society. One does not need to be a philosopher to be aware that there is a primary season coming up, or a presidential election in 2016. Thus when Strauss is referring to political issues, and begins to talk about the “whole,” this is what people are likely to think that Strauss is referring to. They would be mistaken in so doing, a good deal of the time.
When Strauss talks about the “whole,” he does not necessarily limit the whole to politics. This whole in some cases may, and in some cases must include all nation states, first of all; and it must include human associations that have not yet attained to the status of states. Furthermore, this whole that Strauss talks about must extend to the other species of animals that exist on earth. The whole to which Strauss refers must extend to deer and arachnids, even to pools of water and walls of fire. Nor is this, however, all. The “whole” that Strauss refers to, comprehensively and intentionally, must include the other planets and everything in between. This “whole” that Strauss refers to finally must include everything that exists. Because it is a “whole,” as Strauss says, this everything must be “one” thing: a unity.
With every expansion of the contents of this whole that Strauss speaks of, our bearings are disabled a little bit more. For if we are going to bring attention to the murder that took place before our eyes an hour ago, we cannot in that instance be talking about a whole that includes all the people on earth; or even all the people in one nation; or even all the people in one state; or even all the people in one county; or even all the people on one street; or even all the people in one house. We’ve got to be able to talk about that single murdered person, as an existence in her own right; as an independently existing person. Yet we cannot do this, when confronted by the whole that Strauss wishes to employ as the original orientation of our philosophical and political compasses.
We cannot pay attention or call attention to the single person who has been murdered, and the nature of the attack, if philosophy alters the object of our speech and investigation, so as to obscure the imperative and sole relevance of that single individual who was murdered. Strauss’s invocation of the whole silences us. It prevents us from being able to reach the object of our perception in our speech. It widens, widens, widens the object, until we cannot even see or account for the murder that we have witnessed. Soon it simply vanishes into the haze of philosophic accounting.
It is a power of the special language of “parts” and “wholes,” such that when we refer to some object as a “part,” we instantaneously suspend our consideration of that particular aspect, in an attempt to gather to ourselves a comprehension of the whole of which it is alleged to be a part. This is how the logic of parts and wholes operates. It will not allow us really to consider the single object as an independently existing object. It insists to us that we must recur to the larger whole of which it is a part. In Strauss’s context, this “whole” continues to expand; it ceaselessly expands, as do the alleged infinite universes of atomistic philosophy. Thus we never reach the whole that Strauss is referring to, because it both includes everything and is limitless. This leaves us rather speechless as it leaves us without an object to talk about; for we are forever in transit to the unenumerated parts of that “whole” which is a beginning point for Straussian philosophy. This beginning point of Straussian philosophy, then, is not an object that we share in common with Strauss. For we are left in transit, permanent transit, to the whole that is never fully enumerated; which enables Strauss to determine the context of our discussion, through force of will, brilliance of rhetoric, and the rapid alteration of philosophical context.
Behind Strauss’s claim that there is a larger whole in which all political societies are situated, which finally includes, as Parmenides insists it does, everything, is the theory of nature. It is the theory of nature that has been “discovered,” allegedly; but with which the non-philosophers have no commerce. This nature that Strauss has invoked is alleged to be the “first” thing or things; and in fact, this “nature” is said to underlie all of the other things, to constitute them all, so that all the objects in nature are really one homogeneous object. When this sort of philosophy has the stage, political discourse becomes impossible.
“Philosophy strives for knowledge of the whole. The whole is the totality of the parts. The whole eludes us but we know parts; we possess partial knowledge of parts. The knowledge we possess is characterized by a fundamental dualism which has never been overcome. At one pole we find knowledge of homogeneity. . . . At the opposite pole we find knowledge of heterogeneity . . . the highest kind of this knowledge is the art of the statesman and the educator.”[9] These two poles indicate the universe as a whole, “homogeneity,” and the philosopher whose struggle for power this philosophy embodies. “It seems that knowledge of the whole would have to combine somehow political knowledge in the highest sense with knowledge of homogeneity.” “The idea of natural right must be unknown as long as the idea of nature is unknown. The discovery of nature is the discovery of philosophy.”[10] “For the meaning of a part depends on the meaning of the whole. In particular, such interpretation of a part as is based on fundamental experiences alone, without recourse to hypothetical assumptions about the whole is ultimately not superior to other interpretations of that part which are frankly based on such hypothetical assumptions.”[11] “Philosophy is originally the quest for truth, for the truth—for the beginnings of all things. . . . Nature was discovered when the possibility was realized that the first things may produce all other things, not by means of forethought, but by blind necessity. I say, the possibility.”[12] “Philosophy as the quest for the true beginnings of all things is the attempt to replace opinions about these beginnings by genuine knowledge, or science of them.”[13]
Strauss labors to impute this view to Plato’s Socrates.
Socrates’s study of the human things was then based on the comprehensive study of “all things.” Like every other philosopher, he identified wisdom, or the goal of philosophy, with the science of all the beings: he never ceased considering “what each of the beings is.” . . . Socrates deviated from his predecessors by identifying the science of the whole, or of everything that is, with the understanding of “what each of the beings is.” For “to be” means “to be something,” and hence to be different from things which are “something else”; “to be” means therefore “to be a part.”[14]
What we have taken great pains to present in this study is that this is not Plato’s view of what a “whole” is. Plato’s argument is that a “whole” exists by nature indeed; but that this whole cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts; because the whole exists as a container for the parts; and the container for the parts is not only limited, but it must possess the extremities of coming into being and passing away. Plato allows that a pebble may possess infinite parts, but these parts involve the unity and being of an object and its parts. The pebble is a whole that is more than the sum of its parts; it is a container for its parts. The container is not infinitely divisible. If it was, it would not be a whole. What is a whole must have all the parts: coming into being and passing away, magnitude, size, shape, color, texture. Plato’s conception of a whole vindicates the evidence provided to us by perception, unlike the Straussian conception of a whole that leads in the other direction, that is, into sightlessness. For Plato, there is no “whole” in nature that exists eternally, of which all other things are “parts.”
This discovery of nature to which Strauss points is no discovery of Plato’s. It is the discovery of Parmenides. It happens to be a theory that Plato has refuted. We have presented and applied Plato’s refutation of Parmenides theory of a whole more than once in this book. It is worthwhile to note that “homogeneity” is precisely the argument that both Parmenides and the atomists argue for, as the truth of nature. This is what Plato has disproven. For Strauss, the only “heterogeneity” in nature is the philosopher’s soul. There are but two poles of reality, Strauss argues in this particular context: that of “homogeneity,” and that of “heterogeneity.” We have seen already what “homogeneity” refers to: nature as a “unity,” as a “whole.” What then does “heterogeneity” indicate for Strauss? “At the opposite pole we find knowledge of heterogeneity, and in particular of heterogeneous ends; the highest form of this kind of knowledge is the art of the statesman and the educator.”[15]
These two things for Strauss, homogeneity and heterogeneity, parallel the distinction between facts and values. The entire domain of fact is subsumed by Strauss, as it is for Parmenides and the atomists, in homogeneity. Nature is alleged to be a unity. Only in “value” is “heterogeneity” allowed to emerge. The point is that for Strauss, these two categories are mutually interdependent. It is only by forcing the rest of the world into the category of the “homogeneous,” what Machiavelli likes to call “matter,” that the values or heterogeneity of the philosopher-politician can emerge. In fact, one can say that the reduction of the rest of the human race to “homogeneity” is precisely the application of the values or “heterogeneity” of the philosopher-educator. “Homogeneity” is not what the people are. It is not even what a single human being is. It is not even what a single pebble is. Homogeneity is the overpowering of the identity of the others and their natures, first of all in philosophy.
David Hume is the true founder of the fact-value distinction. It is Hume who argues that our moral emotions are like Locke’s “secondary qualities,” that our passions are not traceable to any external events like a murder we witness. In Hume’s point of view, we do not possess faculties that can enable us to distinguish what is a murder; and whatever condemnation we feel, Hume argues, cannot be said to originate in the nature of the deed that we have witnessed. The condemnation, Hume argues, must come from our own bodily constitution, which is entirely unrelated to any objects external to us that we witness or perceive.
Strauss is truly one of the rare minds of the twentieth century. He ranks with the great Early Modern philosophers in his mental powers and breadth of study: with Hobbes and Spinoza, Locke and Hume. It would be an insult to Strauss to suggest that he is not familiar with Hume’s fact-value distinction, especially since Strauss is truly a master of Early Modern philosophy. Strauss prefers to ascribe this dishonor to Max Weber, or more concretely to late nineteenth-century social science positivism or historicism. That historicism, unlike Hume, is hard, very hard to trace back to natural philosophy. It is in natural philosophy where all of the important facts reside for the modern period.
It is important to behold the fact-value distinction for a moment, to turn it about and examine it. We certainly always associate science with facts and factual information; but this is problematic. Science since Bacon and Hobbes involves experiments. The philosopher measures what he “makes.” These are the only terms upon which perceptions are conceded some authority to judge in the new experimental philosophy. Outside of the experimental situation, the perceptions of the scientist are as worthless as those of the ordinary person, from the modern philosophical point of view. As both Locke and Hume make clear in their attack on substances as possible objects of knowledge, the modern tradition does not concede, or even tolerate the possibility that perception can know true facts about objects. This is why Locke fully excludes civil speech from the inquiry into truth.
It is not just the ordinary citizens who are subjected to the alleged “homogeneity” of nature and all the objects in it. When science evaluates testimony about any kind of objects, including moral and psychological ones, it appraises them from this vantage point of the atoms, of the “wholeness” of nature. This is sometimes today called physicalism. To discuss the predicament of physicalism as one where facts are separated from values, is to argue prematurely. The argument indicating the “homogeneity” or “unity” of nature is first of all an attack on facts themselves, as human beings perceive and know them. It is the philosophic-scientific enumeration of what shall constitute a fact that does the original violence to the truth. For the human being is not like a tree. The philosophy of nature that Strauss appeals to claims to justify this view that man is “but a particle of nature.” Yet this philosophy, as we have seen, has fatal problems. It is a defective philosophy, and it can be demonstrated that it is defective. Thus the attempt to impose homogeneity upon unlike things, may be viewed in a very different light: as the application of brute force to human lives, as the literal overpowering of human minds through classifications and categories established by this philosophy. This philosophy as to the homogeneity of nature involves the suspension of the authority of human perception to know objects, and therewith the ability to know values. In fact, to impose the philosophy of homogeneity of nature upon human beings is to rudely assault the human sensibility; it is to practice bad values, that is, to injure in a premeditated and calculating way. All human mentality begins with the awareness of facts and bodies. When this mentality is arrested, penetrated, interfered with, attacked—the human being become speechless.
Plato disproves the homogeneity in nature to which Strauss’s “whole” is pledged. Unity and being are coequal original natures, and the observation that no object in nature can exist without these two heterogeneous characters quickly proves the existence of a number of other diverse realities. Plato’s critique of this philosophy of nature is not in circulation in our academy. To the contrary, the view that nature is one hegemonic unity is on the ascendant, and in this view man is just another part of the natural “whole.” The moral emotions characteristic of man, therefore, in the context of the atomist conception of nature as a “whole,” the mere application of this set of assumptions, imposes upon human beings a most devastating humiliation and degradation. The philosophy that claims to be interested only in facts, this philosophy anyway, refuses to acknowledge the true facts.
The application of the atomist conception of nature, or physicalism, to the human beings in their moral capacities constitutes a kind of war against human nature in its most fundamental aspects. Once the philosophy of nature as an indivisible whole is dispensed with—and it becomes possible to leave this cave and to evaluate objects afresh—the classical Greek theory that reason by nature governs the passions appears to be a quite sober and modest point of view. This sobriety does not at all appear to be what Strauss has in mind in his category of the “heterogeneous.”
In this single thread of argument, it is useful to stay a moment longer with the distinction between the homogeneous and the heterogeneous that Strauss adumbrates. The homogenous indicates that theory of nature as a whole, a unified whole. In that context, man has no dignity. Yet knowledge of nature contains the knowledge of matters of fact, as Hume repeatedly points out. Thus facts cannot be known, based upon this theory of nature as a unity; because everything is one big thing, or rather everything includes its opposite and every other thing. Names cease to have the capacity to refer, in the category of homogeneous nature. This is a condition of radical indignity; and it is with great purpose that Strauss holds out the possibility of a partial suspension of this condition, through the terminology of “values.”
It should be said at the outset that it is useless to talk about “values” if knowledge of fact is foreclosed upon. “Homogeneity” of nature forecloses upon knowledge of fact. Homogeneity of nature indicates that all things are a unity, so that anything goes with anything, so that any name indicates its opposite as well as itself. There is no possibility of judging true facts from a moral point of view in this context of nature as a “whole,” as discussed above. Strauss, however, insists on keeping this theory of nature as a whole in place, in this thread of argument. Man can have deliverance from this indignity, from this monstrous insult to his sensibilities, by accepting the category of values as Strauss seeks to make it available: really as a feature essentially of will, which is mute to considerations of truth. In the case of value judgments, Strauss affects to communicate, we will suspend the crushing definition of nature as a “whole.” We will allow to the human being the opportunity to enact “value” impulses; and this alone will be allowed to stand as a second dimension of reality in nature. Yet these value impulses cannot rely upon knowledge of fact; because “fact” or “what is” remains bound to the domain of “homogeneity.” “Values,” in the Straussian metaphysic under consideration, must be sui generis out of the individual. One can have values instead of truth of fact; but one cannot have values based on truth of fact. This is the signification of the “dualism” that Strauss says has never been overcome. The indication is that the view of nature as a “whole” will always be enforced, but that space will be made available for the individual assertion of “values” in this highly regimented context. Values cannot consort with truth; truth remains pledged to the homogeneity of nature, to that original discovery of nature, that is for Strauss the beginning of true philosophy.
The principal value of Straussian philosophy is what he calls “natural right.” Plato never articulates such a value as his own. The reader has the right to ask: what do you mean? What is the natural rights doctrine? The only true formulation of the natural rights doctrine that I am aware of is Hobbes’s and Spinoza’s. For Hobbes, man is betrayed by nature, rather than by philosophy. In Hobbes’s representation, nature has thrust man into a predicament, whereby he must surrender his dignity in order to survive. The values that man is encouraged by Hobbes to develop, in this context, hinge upon resentment: that is, imposing onerous conditions on those who do not have as much power as oneself. This sort of bastardized pride, that is, converting advantage into a new artificial version of honor, is precisely the doctrine of natural rights. In accordance with Hobbes’s worldview, nature has betrayed man, left him helpless and alone; so therefore he is entitled to disregard all impulses and cultural authorities which interfere with his preservation. Spinoza provides Strauss with a theory of natural right. “Since it is the supreme law of nature that each thing strive, so far as it in lies, to continue in its condition without regard for anything other than itself, therefore every individual and in particular every human individual, by having the power, also has the right to use such means as it has to self-preservation, without regard for others.”[16]
Strauss makes no attempt to defend the ability of the ordinary human beings to know true facts. Strauss makes no attempt to argue that the atomic theory interferes with science’s ability to know true facts. To the contrary: Strauss insists that it is at best useless to investigate the supposedly modern cosmologies, because we could never know for certain. Yet Strauss himself knows that the modern experimental method is laid upon the foundations of Epicurean science, and that even Machiavelli espouses this discovery of the “whole.” “Machiavelli knows, then, not only the variable ‘things of the world,’ but the invariable ‘world’ itself. He knows that heaven, the sun, the elements and man always have the same movement, order and power. . . . In a way, then, Machiavelli possesses knowledge of ‘all natural things.’ . . . He could not know the mixed bodies as such unless he had some knowledge of the simple bodies.”[17] “Certainly, Machiavelli’s notion of the beginning of the world is not the Biblical but rather the ‘Epicurean’ notion which presupposes the eternity of ‘matter.’”[18] Or, as Strauss might say, of homogeneity.
Machiavelli’s political science, therefore, denies that the ordinary people can know true facts about objects through perception. Machiavelli too, possesses that theory of causation that is deductive and metaphysical, developed originally by Parmenides and thereafter by the atomists. In this thread of argument, Strauss is invoking Machiavelli’s distinction between form and matter: for Machiavelli, the political world is homogeneous “matter”; for Machiavelli, “form” is that force of will that the politician-philosopher would impose upon it with his virtu.
When Strauss attempts to teach us about the fact-value distinction, he would have had to deliberately bypass Hume in order to pick Max Weber to be the representative. In Weber’s work, the cosmological issues are no longer on display. Just as Strauss has insisted to Hobbes scholars that they must not attempt to study Hobbes’s cosmology as in any way related to his political science, Strauss does not want cosmology to become an active interest of political philosophy.
As far as the fact-value distinction goes, Strauss has gone out of his way to rhetorically frame the debate in the following way. The social sciences, Strauss argues, are obsessed with “facts.” They do not believe that science can know “values.” Strauss is relentless in his indictment of Weber and modern social science for their refusal to make value judgments, or to own up to them when they do make them, which as Strauss reveals, is all the time.
Yet, something is being left out of this story. What is being left out of this story is the Straussian conviction as to the “whole” of nature. What is being left out of the story by Strauss, is not something that is left out of the story by Hume. What Hume has argued to us, is that facts cannot be known. The only objects that are knowable to our minds, Hume argues, are mental objects: that is, perceptions can by no means, in Hume’s view, be entitled to pronounce upon truth of fact as regards external objects. The perceptions in a man’s mind, Hume argues, could come from anywhere. They may come from our own bodies, for all we know, Hume argues. One obviously cannot get into a meaningful discussion about values, if one is barred by philosophy from the ability to know facts.
That brings us back to the authority of perception to know facts. The philosophy of Hume, which is the same theory of nature that Strauss appeals to in this context, absolutely denies that we can know any such facts. What in the world Strauss is doing, exhorting science to become lively in the pursuit of values, when its eyes stand plucked out by philosophy, is a worthy subject for investigation.
Since Hume has been part of the subject matter of this study, let us listen to what he has to say about wholes.
Could men anatomize nature, according to the most probable, at least most intelligible philosophy, they would find, that these causes are nothing but the particular fabric and structure of the minute parts of their own bodies and external objects; and that by a regular and constant machinery, all the events are produced, about which they are so much concerned.[19]
It has been one of the principle aims of this study to reveal what Plato knows, but which our scholarship usually does not know: that there is a deep philosophical basis in atomism that traces back to Parmenides’s philosophy, and that this avenue of Greek philosophy is wholly at loggerheads with that of the Socratic Greeks. It is widely believed that Leo Strauss is hostile to the moderns, because he champions ancient Greece. Yet there are two major philosophical traditions that began in ancient Greece: that of the Socratics Plato and Aristotle, and that of Parmenides, Zeno, Leucippus, and Democritus. It is only the Socratic Greek philosophy that is clearly in conflict with modern philosophy. It is far from clear that Modern philosophy is in any kind of conflict at all with the heritage of Parmenides and Democritus. To the contrary. It is our responsibility first to be aware of this dualism in the Greek heritage; and it is also our responsibility to ascertain which tradition Strauss’s conception of nature appeals to.
Parmenides’s poem is not often spoken about in a political context by the scholars who evaluate it. One reason may be due to the fact that few political philosophers study Parmenides’s poem nowadays. These two parts of Parmenides’s poem seem to parallel Strauss’s conception of facts and values, or “homogeneity” and “heterogeneity.” In the first part of Parmenides’s poem, the part that deals with truth, all is dissolved into “unity,” homogeneity; in the second part of the poem, the subject matter is the management of public opinion, or politics and “education.” The poem is broken down into two parts by Parmenides. The first part is entitled “the way of truth.” In it Parmenides sets forth his teaching that the only reality is “being.” That this being cannot have itself come into being; that it drives coming into being “far away.” In the “way of truth” Parmenides sketches a scene, whereby a youth from a Greek city is brought before a goddess for instruction. The goddess can only undertake this instruction once the youth has been ferried by chariot far away from the city and the ordinary opinions. When Strauss, in Persecution and the Art of Writing, sets out to make the argument that the true philosopher must be free to offer contradictory points of view as a matter of tactics and argumentative orthodoxy, he invokes the horses of the chariot of Parmenides, the one that ferries the youth to the goddess for enlightenment.[20]
The goddess teaches the youth how to make, or enforce the arguments as to this being and its homogeneity. “Nor is being divisible, for it is all alike.” The goddess takes time instructing the youth that he will have to overcome certain habits, especially the tendency to rely upon sense perception to know what objects are. The goddess at this point seems to be much more concerned with how the youth conducts the argument in public with other philosophers. The goddess warns the youth that her teaching will be challenged, but that he must not admit into evidence any information obtained by sense perception. Only arguments based in deductive philosophy will be allowed to enter into the contest.
The goddess takes pains to demonstrate to the youth that everything the ordinary people believe is a fabrication, a myth, a delusion.
To think is the same as the thought that it is; for you will not find thinking without being, in regard to which there is an expression. For nothing else either is or shall be except being, since fate has tied it down to be a whole and motionless; therefore all things that mortals have established, believing in their truth, are just a name; becoming and perishing, being and not-being, and change of position, and alteration of bright color.[21]
The youth who receives Parmenides’s instruction is given this coaching only for the purposes of handling rival philosophers. Yet when it comes time to discuss how the youth and the new philosophy should interact with the generality of the people, Parmenides’s goddess gives an entirely new teaching. This second part of the poem is entitled “the way of seeming.” This teaching formally breaks off from the “reliable theory” that the goddess has taught to the youth; it is a now a formal instruction about coordinating and overpowering the people. This may be just what Strauss has in mind with his theory of “heterogeneity” and “natural right.” “At this point I cease my reliable theory and thought, concerning truth; from here onwards you must learn the opinions of mortals, listening to the deceptive ordering of my words.”[22]
This model of Greek philosophy sorts much better with the thread of Straussian argument that we are trying to elucidate. Strauss is an innovator of course. There are so many levels of context between the ordinary speaker and the philosopher who has discovered “nature” and the “whole,” in Strauss’s view, that it is not possible to enumerate them all. The boundary between Parmenides’s “way of truth” and the “way of seeming” designed for the public, does not seem to be any steeper than the boundary that Strauss sets up between his categories of esoteric and exoteric speech. Allegedly, the ordinary individual is first of all formed into a point of view by the philosophy that is current in his land. He is limited by his own customary adaptation of the language; he is limited by the philosophical biases that are couched in language, and by the distance that separates language from objects as they are. He is vulnerable to the interpretations of language that he cannot help but make, in Strauss’s view. The true philosophers, however, Strauss insists, can know trans-historical truths. They can know nature when they realize that nature is something that one must “discover,” rather than something one obtains knowledge of through one’s experience of objects.
There is another aspect of Parmenides’s poem that is relevant to a discussion of Strauss. For Parmenides’s teaching about the great “being,” is that this being forbids coming into being, as a matter of justice. “So far as that is concerned, justice has never released being in its fetters, and set it free either to come into being or to perish, but holds it fast.” Only being can exist. Justice decrees it. Everything that exists is the same. If justice holds coming-into-being fast in its bonds, denying its reality or forcibly constricting its reality—then the perceptions of the people who have the perishable beings for their objects are likewise stricken from the record of truth. The articulation of injustice, or the indication of the absence of justice, is precisely the sort of “not-being” that Parmenides’s argument is designed to choke, to silence. Parmenides’s doctrine will only allow reference to what is, so the absence of justice does not qualify as a proper locution from that point of view.
Readers should not assume what they all too willingly assume: that when Strauss proclaims to be a devotee of the “Greeks,” that he is a devotee of the Socratic Greeks. IF Strauss was a devotee of the Socratic Greeks, then indeed he would be struggling mightily against modern philosophy, and modern cosmology. Yet IF Strauss is truly a disciple of the Eleatic Greeks—of Parmenides and Zeno, and their influence on the formulation of the atomist theory—then in that case Strauss would be very comfortable moving back and forth between the two philosophical periods, equally at home with both “ancients and moderns.” It is well known that Strauss advances many criticisms of Plato’s philosophy. On the other hand, I have not found any place in Strauss’s writings where he levels any serious charges or argument against the atomist theory of nature.
Leo Strauss is fairly consistent in his writings, when he talks about wholes and parts, and “nature.” Nature, for Strauss, is a whole. “Philosophy strives for knowledge of the whole. The whole is the totality of the parts. The whole eludes us but we know parts: we possess partial knowledge of parts.”[23] Compare this with Parmenides: “There is only one other description of the way remaining, that what is is. To this way there are very many signposts: that being has no coming into being and no destruction, for it is whole of limb, without motion, and without end. And it never was, nor will be, because it is now, a whole altogether, one, continuous; for what creation of it will you look for? How, whence could it have sprung?”[24] Epicurus’s philosophy moves in the same conceptual orbit.
And the atoms move continuously for all time, some recoiling far apart from one another upon collision, and others, by contrast, maintaining a constant vibration when they are locked into a compound or enclosed by the surrounding atoms of a compound. . . . There is no principle for these entities, since the atoms and the void are eternal.[25]
Plato is terribly clear about his theory of causation. Plato most certainly possesses a cosmology. Plato believes, as stated in the Republic, that the natural world is marked by patterns. These patterns or forms, or ideas, or natures, involve the “whatness” of objects. Perception, not moral ideology or practical wisdom, gives us this information. Scientific definition has nothing to do with practical or political reason from Plato’s point of view. “What is” is the language of true philosophy. Choices and decisions cannot be made until we know what is, until we know what ordinary people would refer to as the facts. For Plato, what is beauty? Plato does not lack a cosmology, a sense of the truth in nature that makes the beautiful object beautiful. Beauty is one of the patterns. It cannot be broken down into parts. The beautiful object is caused by its form, by “participating” in it.[26]
Plato overcomes Parmenides’s argument based upon his explication of the form of unity. Unity cannot itself be plurality. Unity, for Plato, is a lonely reality in the universe. All of the forms or patterns are alone in nature. A form qua form is not a “part” of anything, such as a larger whole, taken strictly by itself. The opposite forms, for Plato, absolutely repel each other. They cannot fit in the same whole. Unity means the absence of parts. Parmenides tries with all his considerable might to make it appear that “being” can be a unity, and yet be a seamless whole. Plato proves that “unity” has no such commitment. Unity by itself eschews all plurality, and “being” is a nature that is wholly distinct from that of unity. The cause of “unity,” for Plato, is not some miraculous “whole”; it is the absolute form of unity which is the cause of unity in every and any object that has existence, and no other cause is countenanced.
That is the opening argument of the Parmenides. Plato never wavers; and it proves to be the insight that leads to the defeat of Parmenides’ argument. What is truly unity, cannot be anything else but unity. This means that it cannot contain within itself any divisions. Parmenides attempts to argue that his “being” is a unity. Yet unity and being are not the same form. Being cannot take the place of unity, nor can unity be derived from “being.” What is perfectly a unity, cannot so much as provide a place for any being or existence whatsoever. These are the terms upon which Plato brings down Parmenides’s entire thesis; and they are the very terms upon which he brings down the atomistic thesis, in the same dialogue.
Always, with Plato, true philosophy must begin with what is most easily known and attempt to ascend to what is harder to know. Beauty, as Plato argues, is something that all human beings are familiar with. They know it through their experience. They know, that is, that certain objects have the quality of beauty, the part of beauty. The song has beauty. The vase has beauty. The human figure has beauty. The sunset has beauty. Yet beauty remains a narrow thing. It does not dissolve into any homogeneous category. Plato never recurs to any “whole” of which beauty is merely a part. Now will Plato countenance that beauty can be broken down into smaller parts. Beauty is a part of the vase, of the athlete’s body, of the painting: and these objects are wholes-of-parts in nature. They come into being and pass away. “Beauty itself”: this is as abstract as Plato gets.
The philosopher attempts to define beauty. Beauty as a pattern, a nature, a form. Plato never attempts to argue that the form of beauty can have any other cause, aside from its own nature. Plato’s Socrates received much ridicule for this argument; but there is genius and truth in it. It also preserves the relationship between true philosophy and the evidence known by ordinary opinion, that which is in between being and not-being. The non-philosopher can recognize beauty, as an image; as a quality; but the non-philosopher cannot formulate arguments about it. This is where true philosophy and sophistry part ways. For the sophist can make that which is ugly appear beautiful, with his arguments. The sophist can make it appear that beauty and ugliness mix, just as Zeno tries to make the argument that unity and plurality mix, that is, are parts of each other. What is truly a unity will never be plurality, Plato’s Socrates argues; and he proves it, when he dismantles Parmenides’s argument.
Plato, in his cosmology, provides us with the forms, the natures: the just, unity, a whole, a part, beauty, tallness, sameness, being. The human being does not confuse unity with plurality, Plato argues in this Theaetetus, not even in his dreams. Plato’s questions are anchored in “what is” observations. They are in this respect discerning, but not assertive or willful. Investigation for Plato is not an exertion of will. For Plato, the profession of ignorance is a profession of humility before the others. He does not know better than the others, at the outset of an investigation. Plato’s Socrates does not claim to possess any special “way of truth.”
These thoughts on Strauss and his theory of nature, as I have indicated, are limited in the following ways. Strauss has prepared a theory of philosophical argumentation that relies upon the strategic deployment of contradictions or the appearances of contradictions. It would not be a mark of intelligence, therefore, to try to investigate Strauss’s argument by enumerating the contradictions that are present in it. For the contradictions are not the result of sloppy thinking, but of rigorous and premeditated thought. What I have been attempting to do in this epilogue is to trace out a single thread of argument that can be demonstrated to exist in Strauss’s work. This thread of argument deserves explication because it involves some theories that are quite obscure and rarely mentioned in contemporary scholarship.
My ambitions for this epilogue are limited to the attempt to elucidate this theory of nature that Strauss appeals to and develops. It is my belief that scholars, like human beings in general, judge better when they have fuller information. The quest to understand the work of Leo Strauss therefore can hardly be resolved by this brief exercise in exegesis. Yet the arguments brought to light here and explicated, may broaden that amount of information that scholars have available when they inquire into Strauss’s meanings, and in my view that is ambition enough.
Persecution and the Art of Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988, 35–36.
Spinoza’s Critique of Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997, 216.
Natural Right and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965, 82.
Natural Right and History, 89.
Natural Right and History, 989.
Natural Right and History, 90.
Kathleen Freeman. Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996, 43, fragment 8.
Letter to Herodotus 41. In The Epicurus Reader. Translated by Brad Inwood and L. P. Gerson. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994, 7.
“What Is Political Philosophy?” In An Introduction to Political Philosophy. Edited by Hilail Gildin. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1989.
Natural Right and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965, 81.
Natural Right and History, 126.
“Reason and Revelation. Previously unpublished lecture by Leo Strauss. In Heinrich Meier. Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 145.
Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 146.
Natural Right and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965, 122.
Introduction to Political Philosophy, 38.
Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 232.
Thoughts on Machiavelli. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978, 18.
Thoughts on Machiavelli, 201.
The Natural History of Religion. Edited by J. C. A. Gaskin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, 141.
Persecution and the Art of Writing, 23.
Kathleen Freeman. Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996, 44. This is from Parmenides’s eighth fragment.
Ibid.
“What Is Political Philosophy?” In An Introduction to Political Philosophy. Ten Essays by Leo Strauss. Edited by Hilail Gildin. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1989, 38.
Kathleen Freeman. Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers. Cambridge: Harvard, 1996, 43.
“Letter To Herodotus,” 44–45. In The Epicurus Reader. Translated by Brad Inwood and L. P. Gerson. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994.
Phaedo 100ac.