It is probably accurate to say that, just as Marx was no Marxist, Leo Strauss would not consider himself a Straussian were he alive today (and certainly not the modern caricature of what it means to be a Straussian). He was a man of contradictions. He was a friend of democratic liberalism. He had a healthy disregard for modernism. He believed in the negative conception of liberty and in natural law.
Smith, in this collection of essays, tries to pick out the essence of the man- no easy task to untangle a philosopher who celebrated esotericism and doublespeak in the writings of others. Strauss’ lifelong themes were tensions in the grand style- “the difference between ancients and moderns, the quarrel between philosophy and poetry, and of course the tension between reason and revelation.” Strauss’ method was a careful reading of primary texts in their original language, with an eye to catch the out of place word or the hidden meaning. “Great writers often hide or conceal their most profound thoughts from all but the most careful and persistent readers.” Philosophy and politics, in its most general sense, cannot be divorced from each other, but there is, in there, a tension as well. “What distinguishes all philosophers as a class from non-philosophers is an intransigent desire to know, to know things from their roots or by their first principles. It is precisely because philosophy is radical that politics must be moderate.” Politics is the realm of opinion. Philosophy is truth.
For Strauss, his Jewishness was an important aspect of his humanity, if not his philosophy. It was the particularity of Judaism that it had “a preoccupation with such themes as exile, homelessness, and marginality…. The aspirations for assimilation and the assertion of separateness are the twin polarities which Jewish thought has developed.” Strauss viewed Jewish history as the particular proof as to the true general nature of man. As such, he viewed the Jewish problem as the human problem. “The Jewish people and their fate are the living witness for the absence of redemption. This, one could say, is the meaning of the chosen people; the Jews are chosen to prove the absence of redemption.” Maimonides typified Strauss’ ideal of a philosopher writing for his time, but also beyond it. Maimonides was writing for multiple audiences all at once. “It was precisely Maimonides’s use of a rhetoric of caution, indirection, and ellipsis that made him in Strauss’s view the political writer par excellence.”
Machiavelli, for Strauss, was the first of the moderns. “No longer would politics serve to promote the moral or intellectual virtues; instead, the virtues were to be instrumental to the collective safety and security of society.” It was Machiavelli who first deified the State. “His revolt against the ancient philosophers led him to substitute patriotism or “merely political virtue” for moral virtue and the contemplative ideal.” But for Strauss, it was the modernist Spinoza (along with Hegel) who gave the most compelling proofs of reason (Athens) against revelation (Jerusalem). In Spinoza, “the comprehensive goal of his work was to replace the God of Abraham with the light of reason as the authoritative guide to life.” Strauss’ dissertation in Germany, which he himself would later criticize as being immature, relied heavily on Jacobi’s “Letters” in their critique of Spinoza. Jacobi believed “moral beliefs and commitments require faith, not reason. Reason can analyze and criticize, but morality requires belief, at a minimum belief in human freedom and individual responsibility.” This was the crux of one of the problems of philosophy that became the backbone of all of Strauss’ musings.
For Strauss, “the fundamental question…. is whether men can acquire that knowledge of the good without which they cannot guide their lives individually or collectively by the unaided efforts of their natural powers, or whether they are dependent for that knowledge on Divine Revelation.” As he later puts it slightly differently, “a life of obedient love versus a life of free insight.” This is where Strauss’ admiration for the esotericism of Maimonides comes to play. Sometimes he wants to have it both ways. He seems to suggest “a “Maimonidean” strategy that combines outward fidelity to the community of Israel with a private or “esoteric” commitment to philosophy and the life of free inquiry…. This dual strategy allows one to maintain respect for, even love of, the tradition prophylactic to the alternatives of atheism and assimilation, while denying orthodoxy any truth value.” Smith posits, “the statement that Judaism represents a “heroic delusion” is as close as he ever came, I think, to expressing in his writing that orthodoxy is a kind of Platonic noble lie.”
Strauss might have seemed to have given the game up- to have shown where his true loyalties lie. But he was equally as hard on the limits of reason. “Strauss’s Plato is in the first instance a skeptic, a “zetetic” philosopher, whose thought is characterized by an awareness of the limits, the incompleteness, of human knowledge.” For Strauss, it is impossible to understand Plato, the philosopher, before understanding Plato, the author. “The dialogue is the form of writing that most closely imitates the openness of inquiry and the limitations on human understanding.” In Plato’s form of inquiry he is creating possibilities of mental thought for later philosophers. “First, the cave represents the city, even the best city (kallipolis). It is a fundamentally political rather than ontological category. The cave is in turn decorated with a variety of “images,” that is, opinions. Opinion, Strauss, maintains elsewhere, is “the element of society.” As such opinion stands in contrast to “philosophy, which seeks to replace opinion with knowledge.”
For Strauss, beware of those who take at face value Plato’s creation of a utopia ruled by philosopher kings as a true (or possible) ideal. “Having perceived the truly grand, the philosophers regard the human things paltry. Their very justice- their abstaining from wronging their fellow human beings- flows from contempt for the things for which non-philosophers hotly contest. They know that the life not dedicated to philosophy and therefore even political life at its best is like life in a cave, so much so that the city can be identified with the Cave.” The philosopher, however, lives within the city and must not openly oppose it. “Philosophy is the attempt to replace opinion with knowledge; but opinion is the element of the city, hence philosophy is subversive, hence the philosopher must write in such a way that he will improve rather than subvert the city.”
Strauss was interested in the classics not because he was anti-modern, but because he thought modernity, in its particulars, had gotten off track with the German historicism and moral relativism espoused by Weber and Heidegger. ““Only we living today can possibly find a solution to the problems of today,” he avows. The point of a return to the ancients is not to find “immediately applicable” answers to current problems, but to gain clarity about the “starting point” that such answers would have to address.” It was the problems that interested Strauss and not the solutions. It was the search for truth and the tensions and oppositions that that search engendered that tantalized him. “To idealize is not just to praise or flatter, but to use what one regards as the best or highest aspects of one’s tradition as a standard to criticize others.” For Strauss, “philosophy is nothing other than an openness to the alternatives, to the fundamental and comprehensive problems.” However, “to respect opinions is something entirely different from accepting them as true.”
Strauss constantly probed at the bounds of philosophy. Smith argues, “Strauss’s skeptical teaching argues for, rather than assumes, an appreciation of the limits of action and a knowledge of the fact that “evil cannot be eradicated and therefore one’s expectations of politics must be moderate.”” Just like philosophy is above politics, it is also beyond history. Philosophy is “the quest for eternal order, or for the eternal causes or causes of all things…. within which history takes place, and which remains entirely unaffected by history.”
Because he was a friend of liberalism, for he saw no other alternative, Strauss often wanted to protect liberalism from itself. “The liberal desire to secure the conditions for life is in danger of obscuring the question about the meaning of life.” The benefit of liberalism is that it allows the space for the quest for answers to flourish. “The virtue of democracy is its ability to foster the greatest variety of ways of life, among which must be included the philosopher, who “can lead his peculiar way of life without being disturbed.” This regime is “sweet” because it affords people the political liberty to do as they like, thereby making possible Socrates and Socratic-style conversations.” Democracy has its boundaries, however. “The ancients understood a regime to be possible only in a relatively small or “closed’ society. The conditions of mutual trust and common affection that hold society together are only possible within a small polis-like community…. The ancients regarded the regime to be something irremediably particular.”
Liberal democracy is no easy task and certainly not a universal certainty. “Today modern democracy has become mass democracy, and mass democracy is ruled by mass culture. To be sure, mass culture is compatible with, even presupposes, a high degree of scientific and technical expertise. What one finds is a highly developed scientific specialization and division of labor coexisting with a mass culture that panders to our lowest tastes and desires.” Strauss sees the role of philosophy to serve as a guide and a warning to the masses. “Men are constantly attracted and deluded by two opposite charms: the charm of competence which is engendered by mathematics and everything akin to mathematics, and the charm of humble awe, which is engendered by mediation on the human soul and its experiences. Philosophy is characterized by the gentle, if firm, refusal to succumb to either charm.”
The philosophic minded statesman has to be even more aware of the limits of his politics. “He will try to help his fellow man by mitigating, as far as in him lies, the evils that are inseparable from the human condition.” The philosopher, as guide, has to be humble as well. “We are supposed to train ourselves and others in seeing things as they are, and this means above all in seeing their greatness and their misery, their excellence and their vileness, their nobility and their triumphs, and therewith never to mistake mediocrity, however brilliant, for true greatness.” Strauss firmly believed that no one knows the answers to philosophy’s greatest problems. It was his life’s goal to probe around the edges, to take a stab, and to raise questions as best that he could.
No comments:
Post a Comment