“Reading Leo Strauss- Politics, Philosophy, Judaism” by Steven B. Smith

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.

“Protagoras” by Plato (translated by Stanley Lombardo and Karen Bell).

In “Protagoras” Plato has Socrates recall a debate he has had with the sophist, Protagoras. Socrates has to urge Protagoras not to give long winded speeches, but to debate him succinctly. Socrates states, “To me, the mutual exchange of a dialogue is something quite distinct from a public address.” The back and forth in conversation is how Socrates prefers to probe for the truth.

In this dialogue, the questions entertained are whether virtue can be taught, and, perhaps even more importantly, what exactly the definition of virtue is to begin with, particularly whether virtue is one thing or can be many. Socrates starts out by explicitly stating that virtue cannot be taught. He says, “The wisest and best of our citizens are unable to transmit to others the virtues that they possess…. I just don’t think that virtue can be taught.” However, Protagoras claims that, while in other fields of expertise one is wise to only let the experts take the lead, in claims of justice and politics, everyone, particularly in democratic Athens, believes that they are qualified to judge. He states, “But when the debate involves political excellence, which must proceed entirely from justice and temperance, they accept advice from anyone, and with good reason, for they think that this particular virtue, political or civic virtue, is shared by all, or there wouldn’t be any cities…. They will say that everyone ought to claim to be just, whether they are or not, and that it is madness not to pretend to justice, since one must have some trace of it or not be human.” The sense of justice in us all is what makes us human, what makes us social, what allows us to develop cities and live together.

Socrates later asks, “Is virtue a single thing, with justice and temperance and piety its parts, or are the things I have just listed all names for a single entity?” There is quite the back and forth between the two philosophers, culminating in a debate on the nature of courage, of knowledge, of pleasure, of self-control, of aspiration, and on goodness and badness. Socrates prods Protagoras, “Those who make mistakes with regard to the choice of pleasure and pain, in other words, with regard to good and bad, do so because of a lack of knowledge, and not merely a lack of knowledge but a lack of that knowledge you agreed was measurement…. So that is what “being overcome by pleasure” is—ignorance in the highest degree…. Are not all actions leading toward living painlessly and pleasantly honorable and beneficial? And isn’t honorable activity good and beneficial?… Then if the pleasant is the good, no one who knows or believes there is something else better than what he is doing, something possible, will go on doing what he had been doing when he could be doing what is better. To give in to oneself is nothing other than ignorance, and to control oneself is nothing other than wisdom…. Now, one goes willingly towards the bad or what he believes to be bad; neither is it in human nature, so it seems, to want to go toward what one believes to be bad instead of to the good. And when he is forced to choose between one of two bad things, no one will choose the greater if he is able to choose the lesser…. If what I said up to now is true, then would anyone be willing to go toward what he dreads, when he can go toward what he does not?… When the courageous fear, their fear is not disgraceful; nor when they are confident is their confidence disgraceful…. So, can we conclude that cowardice is ignorance of what is and is not to be feared?… So the wisdom about what is and is not to be feared is courage and is the opposite of this ignorance?”

In the end, it is Protagoras who points out to Socrates that their positions have seemed to have changed. While pushing the point that virtue is one thing alone, knowledge, Socrates has admitted that it can indeed be taught. Protagoras states that someone looking on at their debate might claim, “Socrates and Protagoras, how ridiculous you are, both of you. Socrates, you said earlier that virtue cannot be taught, but now you are arguing the very opposite and have attempted to show that everything is knowledge—justice, temperance, courage—in which case, virtue would appear to be eminently teachable. On the other hand, if virtue is anything other than knowledge, as Protagoras has been trying to say, then it clearly would be unteachable. But, if it turns out to be wholly knowledge, as you now urge, Socrates, it would be very surprising indeed if virtue could not be taught. Now Protagoras maintained at first that it could be taught, but now he thinks the opposite, urging that hardly any of the virtues turn out to be knowledge. On that view, virtue could hardly be taught at all.”

“The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry” by Eric Griffiths

This is a collection of four of Griffiths’ essays, ostensibly about Victorian poetry, but far reaching into the depths of culture, politics, religion, and marital relations. His first essay, “The Printed Voice”, most directly deals with the differences between the spoken word and the word on the page. Griffiths writes, “No page displays a voice’s pace, its dips and rises, how some words come readily to it and others only with reluctance, the ever-varying timbres of allegiance, longing, shyness, or disdain which colour utterance and give character to a voice, give voice to a character…. Print does not give conclusive evidence of a voice; this raises doubts about what we hear in writing but it also gives an essential pleasure of reading, for as we meet the demand a text makes on us for our voices, we are engaged in an activity of imagination which is delicately and thoroughly reciprocal.” In this essay, Griffiths first quotes John Hollander, “speaking and writing are both language…. it is the region between them which poetry inhabits.” And then, almost immediately, W.B. Yeats, “English literature, alone of great literatures, because the newest of them all, has all but completely shaped itself in the printed-press.” Griffiths continues, “Whatever else poetry may be, it is certainly a use of language that works with the sounds of words, and so the absence of clearly indicated sound from the silence of the written word creates a double nature in printed poetry, making it both itself and something other—a text of hints at voicing, whose centre in utterance lies outside itself, and also an achieved pattern on the page, salvaged from the evanescence of the voice in air.” Griffiths comments on meter and form, “metre tends to ‘divest language in a certain degree of its reality’ because it provides, as it were, an alibi for the words in a poem…. The metrical form of a poem records the poet’s compositional activity which may or may not entirely square with the drift of what is said, or the state of mind implicit in that drift…. Poetic forms…. speak to the divided soul of man.” Again speaking of poetry in general, Griffiths quotes T.S. Eliot, “To be living on several planes at once/Though one cannot speak with several voices at once.” Griffiths concludes that “ambiguity, in fact, requires the concept of intention, for to detect an ambiguity is to ascribe two or more possible intentions…. If reading is to be a response to a work, then ‘what seems important’ to a reader must be influenced by what was of moment to the writer of that work. Accent is the sound of what was of moment in writing.”

Griffiths' second essay, “Tennyson’s Breath”, focuses special attention on how Tennyson’s poetry sounded read aloud. Tennyson, himself, seemed to be of two minds. He wrote, “the Poet swears no being, existent or possible can read this but himself” and “He will not admit that any one save himself can read aloud his poems properly.” But later in his memoirs, Tennyson admits, “poetry looks better, more convincing, in print.” Griffiths considers, “Every body breathes, and poems written in the rhythm of the breath must be of all others those most patent to any body, but no two bodies breathe alike…. Tennyson’s verse sounds as if the body thought.” Griffiths returns to the effect of meter in this essay as well. “Metrical stress and the stress of meaning need not be identical.” Another theme of Griffiths’ essay is Tennyson’s conceptions of mortality and morality and how those affected his poems. Tennyson wrote, “I should consider that a liberty had been taken with me if I were made simply a means of ushering in something higher than myself.” He was, at heart, an individualist. Griffiths relates, “Goethian moral evolution, quite as much as Darwin’s physical evolution, worried Tennyson because growing thus ever upward, we might outgrow each other, and find that, from the perspective of our higher selves, our past lives and those we shared them with, had become dead things…. [Tennyson] repudiates the theory of infinite development because one of the simplest reasons for wishing to believe in immortality [of the soul] is the desire not to be separated from what we have loved, including our own selves. An immortality in which we endlessly change, though, would itself be a process of separation; finite people infinitely developed would eventually become incapable of recognizing each other.”

In Griffiths’ essay, “Companionable Forms”, he touches on how the Victorians incorporated into their poems ideas of love and marriage. He speaks of how “the lyric utterance consciously idealizes the facts of the dark world it issues from as it idealizes that world’s speech.” Griffiths relates how there might be multiple audiences for the poem- the (sometimes fictional) singular lover, as well as the reading public at large. “The world crowds itself betwixt poet and the unique addressee, lover and sole beloved, yielding up to public judgement lines which the fiction pretends are an intimate exchange.” Griffiths speaks to Browning’s use of rhyme to take us out of the direct exchange between two lovers to the page, while also relating the emotions between them. “The purpose of the rhymes…. when they have purpose rather than merely signalling his own exuberance, is to set the voice on edge with the demands of the page, indicating the distinct existences of the written text and vocal renditions of it, so that we shall not think that they are altogether such as each other, nor that we are altogether such ones as the speaker whose speech the text informs us of.” Line breaks can also serve the purpose of distinguishing verse from speech. “Lineation in poetry can make at once a ‘cut’ into speech, put speech in view of its own precarious position, and at the same time hold a firm ‘line’ of regular and decent behaviour.” Griffiths relates the strain and responsibility of the reader. “Particularly when a reader faces and tries to voice an intonationally ambiguous line, he is asked to reflect on the pull one reading rather than another exerts on him, and to ask why it does so. He comes to know himself in the act of becoming convinced that he knows the fictional speaker.” Griffiths again relates the tension between writing and speech in Victorian poetry in general, “writing may be regarded by the Victorians as an idealization of the actuality of speech, its refinement and correction, or speech may be the longed-for ideal of full and vivid communion on the condition of which writing continually only verges.” Later, he continues, “One condition of conversation which follows from the facts of acoustics is evanescence; the spoken word perishes as it comes into communicative being just to make way for the next word. Written words stay on the page after we have passed over them, and we may have recourse to them at will…. Print offers such time to revolve and absorb words which were too much for us in the prime of their occurrence.” Coventry Patmore writes, “In the finest specimens of versification, there seems to be a perpetual conflict between the law of the verse and the freedom of the language, and each is incessantly, though insignificantly, violated for the purpose of giving effect to the other…. The language should always seem to feel, though not to suffer from the bonds of verse.”

Griffiths' final essay, “Hopkins: The Perfection of Habit”, relates the strain that Gerard Manley Hopkins felt in leaving the Anglican Church for Rome. In particular, Hopkins’ conversion to Catholicism was to play a large role in the subject matter, as well as the form, of his later verse. Hopkins was well aware of his new minority status in England, as well as the hostility his newfound Catholic faith often engendered. “Hopkins was an artist consciously at odds with some parts of the community of English-speakers and so needed to resist as well as to collaborate…. Part of the nature Hopkins himself strained against was that Leavisian ‘spirit of the language’, as the numerous preciosities and dare-devillings of his poems against the norms of English speech show…. We should then expect Hopkins to be wary of the language while also schooled in it and responsive to it…. Language is such a ‘part of this world of objects’…. A language essentially informs the mediacy between the self and other selves. The conduct of poetic style within language, then, forms part of the broader activity of ‘knowing one’s place’ in a culture.” Griffiths writes of Hopkins’ use of repetition, “Hopkins characteristically and purposively creates his repetitions, as also the exclamations in his verse, to have such a double aspect, at once of baffled and of heightened fluency; repetition would not of itself suggest a range of possible bearings on vocalization but the short-term density of repetition in Hopkins and its frequent occurrence at points where it interrupts syntactic cohesion or strains liaison between words often lends it this dramatic aspect.” Another technique of Hopkins was his use of silence in his poems. “Hopkins’s attempt to make his poetry vocal and for realizing that the difficult reserve of his written texts, the occasions when they do not sit easily with spoken English, represent, amongst other things, an attempt to produce in verse something approaching ‘the silence and severity of God’ with regard to the language in which they are written, to make that silence itself audible.” Griffiths continues, “In Hopkins’s work, the drama of voicing exemplifies the activity of faith in search of understanding…. The special claim of the Catholic Church was to be the living bearer of the meaning of the Scriptures, writings were not a text for the Catholic, but a voice.” Hopkins, himself, wrote, “My verse is less to be read than heard, as I have told you before; it is oratorical, that is the rhythm is so.” Griffiths relates that the success or failure of how a poem is received by the reader is often a perilous circumstance. “It baffles poets when the page yields only with reluctance their intended voices back to readers…. It strikes a poet particularly, though, because the pleasure of poetry dwells in an exactness of words, blurs show up more clearly in the reading of poetry, especially in the reading of it aloud, like stains which are the more evident the whiter the table-linen is.” Griffiths concludes, “The language is a witness, and poetic work bears witness in and to a language and the world of those who use it.”

“Septology I-VII” by Jon Fosse (translated by Damion Searls)

This novel is a collection of three volumes, themselves broken into seven sections total, which flow back and forth chronologically. All the action takes place in the countryside of southwest Norway’s coast and its big city Bjorgvin. The narrator, Asle, is a successful painter, who has a doppelganger, also named Asle, a less successful painter. Doubles, twins, reoccurrences, repetitions, and de-ja-vu all play an essential role in the narration, which drifts between first and third person. The novel revolves around themes of art, aesthetics, religion, and duty. Asle admits, “when I paint it’s always as if I’m trying to paint away the pictures stuck inside me…. once a picture is finished the picture says whatever it can say, no more no less, the picture says in its silent way whatever can be said, and if it’s not finished yet then how it’s going to turn out and what it’s going to say isn’t something that can be said in words, I think.” A converted Catholic and long-since a widow, he muses to himself, “God isn’t anything He is separate from the world of created things, where everything has a limit, He is outside time and space, He is something we can’t think, He doesn’t exist, He’s not a thing, in other words He’s nothing, I say, and I say that no thing, no person, creates itself because it’s God who makes it possible for things to exist at all, without God there’s nothing, I say…. But no one can think their way to God, I say Because either they can feel that God is near or they can’t, I say Because God is both a very faraway absence, yes well, being itself, yes, and a very close presence, I say.” Finally, Asle pontificates more on painting, “now he’ll paint away the pictures he has in his head, but he doesn’t want to paint them exactly how he sees them in his head before his eyes, because there’s something like a sorrow, a pain, tied to every one of those pictures, he thinks, but also a kind of peace, yes, that too, yes he’ll paint away all the pictures he has collected in his head, if he can, so that only the peace stays behind.”