David Lewis Schaefer
The answer to modernity’s shallow historicism lies in rediscovering true philosophy.
Leo Strauss (1899–1973) was among the most profound philosophers of the twentieth century. He, more than any other individual, bears responsibility for reviving political philosophy—which he regarded as the core of philosophy—at a time when many believed it had ended with Nietzsche and Heidegger. Unfortunately, during the last decades of his life and beyond, Strauss’s work was increasingly dismissed and even denounced in the academy as “conservative.” Books and articles accused him of being antidemocratic, despite his affirmation that constitutional, liberal democracy was the best political regime available in our time. One author went so far as to blame him for inspiring his students to start the Iraq War—thirty years after his death!
To the extent that Strauss commented on contemporary politics, he was indeed a conservative in the literal sense—seeking to preserve decent institutions and improve them rather than attempting to transform them through revolutionary means into some sort of utopia. But just as accurately, he might have been described as a “liberal” in the classical sense, a champion of free institutions and freedom of thought—the essential precondition of philosophy. Strauss was fond of pointing out, jocularly, that back in the 1950s, the so-called “Daughters of the American Revolution” were one of the country’s most conservative—actually, reactionary—institutions, implying that even to be a “conservative” in America often entailed upholding our revolutionary tradition.
Yet Strauss said very little about contemporary political life, either in his books or in his graduate classes. His writings were devoted mostly to interpreting classic works of political philosophy, particularly the writings of the greatest ancient Greek thinkers (Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, Aristophanes, Lucretius), the Jewish medievals (such as Maimonides), and a number of moderns (Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Rousseau, and Nietzsche). This doesn’t mean that Strauss did not take advantage of what he once called “the specific immunity of the commentator” to set forth his own views in the context of interpreting a philosophic text. But his foremost aim was to understand the intentions of a great author as the author himself understood them.
It is that goal that set Strauss’s work apart from the dominant modes of nineteenth- and twentieth-century humanistic scholarship. These approaches, heavily influenced by Hegel, denied the possibility of recapturing the true thought embodied in a philosophic or literary work, insisting that any thinker’s outlook was inevitably shaped—and hence limited—by the dominant thought and circumstances of his time. In a word, the doctrine that Strauss dedicated his work to overcoming was historicism: an outlook that presumed the interpretive superiority of the present over the past on the grounds that earlier writers were unaware of the limitations of their thought. This assumption, Strauss believed, prevented present-day readers from learning anything from the past that they didn’t already “know.”
Fortunately, the flood of foolish, partisan books denouncing Strauss from both the left and right is now giving way to more serious scholarship undertaken by scholars in not only the United States and Europe but China and Japan as well. A number of these studies published in English have been issued under the auspices of the State University of New York’s excellent series on the Thought and Legacy of Leo Strauss, edited by Kenneth Hart Green of the University of Toronto. The book under review here, written by Alberto Ghibellini, an adjunct professor of law and political thought at the University of Torino, constitutes a worthy addition to that body of work. Drawing on recently published archival materials, including correspondence with Strauss’s friends Karl Löwith and Gerhard Krüger, the book offers insight into the early development of Strauss’s thought.
Ghibellini borrows the term “natural philosophizing” from Strauss himself, who, in his early writing, used it as a term of distinction. In Strauss’s account, the first philosophers—the Greeks—sought to comprehend the whole of things through reason rather than faith, tradition, or revelation. They began this pursuit by investigating and questioning the pre-theoretical opinions of human beings in their “natural” situation, that is, within a political community. As demonstrated by Socrates’ metaphor of the cave in Book VII of Plato’s Republic, those first philosophers strove to escape from the world of conventional opinion in order to discover, to the extent humanly possible, the objective truth. By contrast, Strauss maintained that modern thinkers face a further obstacle to philosophizing: We inhabit a “second cave,” where, rather than confronting the variety of opinions that naturally arise in political life, our outlook is shaped by philosophic and theological traditions that take us further away from fundamental human questions.
Were we bound to remain in that second cave, then the claim of historicism—the denial of access to the objective truth—might seem justified. But Strauss would not accept such a conclusion. Thanks in part to Heidegger’s “Destruktion” of the tradition, Strauss was inspired to return to the roots of philosophy in antiquity, challenging the notion that the modern tradition was impervious to serious critique. Here I would add that one of Strauss’s most distinct and controversial rediscoveries—which Ghibellini only briefly mentions—is the practice of “esoteric writing”: the concealment of a philosopher’s deepest and most controversial beliefs from all but his most careful readers. This practice served as not only a means of self-protection but also a way to avoid undermining moral and religious beliefs that the wisest philosophers and statesmen regarded as necessary for most human beings and for the overall health of political society.
To take one relatively obvious example of Strauss’s rediscovery of esotericism, for the past two centuries, most scholars have assumed that the arguments made by the character Socrates in Plato’s dialogues were meant to represent the views of Plato himself. As a result, Plato is often thought to have been a utopian who advocated the totalitarian “city in speech” that Socrates constructs in the Republic. Yet few ask why Plato put such extreme beliefs in the mouth of a dramatic character without ever espousing them in his own name. As Strauss explained in his chapter on the Republic in The City and Man, the dialogue is actually a critique of the sort of fanaticism that would result from pursuing justice as the unqualified greatest good. Once we recognize that philosophers from antiquity through at least the time of Rousseau engaged in such rhetorical concealment—or what Socrates calls “noble lies”—it becomes clear that these thinkers were not constrained to share the dominant prejudices of their time, as the historicist presupposes.
Returning to Ghibellini’s text, I must address the two most important points that he makes regarding Strauss’s thought. The first concerns the nature and origin of the “second cave” that we moderns inhabit—a condition placing us at a greater distance from genuine philosophizing than our ancient predecessors. One’s first inclination, judging from works such as Natural Right and History and The City and Man, would be to identify the walls of that cave with historicism itself. But Ghibellini provides striking evidence that historicism has deeper roots—namely, the long history of entanglement between philosophy and “biblical faith and its idea of God’s omnipotence.” As Strauss notes in Natural Right and History, the Old Testament, embodying “the spirit of Jerusalem, does not know nature.” That is, if human beings and the world they inhabit are the creations of an omnipotent God, there can be no such thing as a permanent or eternal “nature”—the sine qua non of philosophy, which aims to distinguish what is inherently, eternally true from what is merely conventionally believed. At best, as Strauss put it in Persecution and the Art of Writing, one can then have only “pseudo-philosophies,” rooted in a specific society, political regime, or historical period. In sum, there is in Strauss’s view a permanent tension between faith and reason, and while he denied that reason was capable of refuting religious faith and even encouraged his readers to pursue both alternatives, the notion of a “religious philosophy” is an oxymoron in his account.
Strauss himself hardly emphasized this fact. Though a loyal (if nonbelieving) Jew, he exhibited great respect for important twentieth-century Catholic writers such as his University of Chicago colleague Yves Simon. Unlike the “progressive” liberal relativists who dominated academic discourse at the time, Simon exhibited a serious concern with fundamental moral issues. (By contrast, Strauss strongly criticized the ostensibly “value-free” approach to political science that dominated the field in the United States during the 1950s and ’60s, which smuggled its adherents’ left-liberal politics through the back door without offering any sort of rational defense.) Today, it should be noted, Strauss’s work continues to draw attention from important Catholic thinkers such as Pierre Manent and Jewish scholars including Leora Batnitzky.
But here Ghibellini advances an even more remarkable claim: that Strauss attributed the ultimate root of the religiously rooted challenge to philosophy not to Christianity—which indeed had developed an elaborate theology but had thereby, in Strauss’s view, entangled philosophy in the dogmatism of the Scholastics—but to Judaism. In support of this argument, Ghibellini cites a little-noted remark in which Strauss attributes the origin of modern philosophy’s “shift of attitude”—from the ancient philosophers’ endeavor to comprehend nature to a desire to conquer nature so as to alleviate human suffering—to “a tradition of almost two thousand years” before the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This tradition, Strauss suggests, dates back to the initial contact between Athens and Jerusalem, at a time when the Hebrew Bible was first translated into Greek and when Alexander the Great conquered Jerusalem. Ghibellini reinforces this connection by citing Strauss’s reference to Hobbes’s effort to ground his assertion of the absoluteness of sovereignty in “the biblical right of kings” as explained in the Talmud, and Strauss’s comment that “the influence of Jewish law on the political discussions of the 16th and 17th centuries deserves a special study.” Ghibellini also cites a remark from a 1962 course that Strauss taught on natural right, where Strauss contrasts the “restrained atheism” of ancient philosophers with the “modern, enterprising” kind of today—a revolt against the biblical doctrine of Providence prompted by the perceived unacceptability of the sufferings of Job. In effect, Ghibellini presents Strauss as adopting a moderate version of the “secularization” thesis: the idea that modern political philosophy can be understood as a secularized reinterpretation of biblical theology. (As one bit of evidence in support of that claim, I would cite the emphasis placed by perhaps the first modern liberal political philosopher, Montaigne, on the virtue of compassion and the horror of cruelty—alongside his denunciations of the cruelties that had been committed in the name of Christ.)
If there is a limitation in Ghibellini’s informative and thoughtful study, it is that he seems to underestimate Strauss’s concern—beyond his primary aim of preserving and restoring philosophy in its original sense—for the political well-being of humanity more generally, and especially the preservation of Western civilization. Strauss’s admiration for Winston Churchill and his references to classic works of political history such as Macaulay’s History of England suggest he did not share what he once called the “ignoble contempt” for political life held by some residents of the ivory tower. Nor did Strauss ever abandon his concern for the welfare of the Jewish people. The only letter he is known to have published in an American periodical appeared in National Review in 1957. He urged the new conservative magazine to adopt a more favorable view of the state of Israel, suggesting it exemplified the virtues of true conservatism. Finally, Strauss published important essays stressing the importance of preserving liberal, classics-based education in modern democracies.
This limitation aside, Ghibellini’s book is learned, thoughtful, and thought-provoking. Although a difficult read, it merits the attention of all serious students of political philosophy and related fields.
David Lewis Schaefer is professor emeritus of political science at the College of the Holy Cross. He is the author of The Political Philosophy of Montaigne (second edition 2019) and Illiberal Justice: John Rawls vs. the American Political Tradition (2007).
Source: https://modernagejournal.com/strausss-escape-from-platos-cave/251771/
