Strauss: of - isistatic.org Strauss: His Critique of Historicism PAUL NORTON MAN DESIRES to know the past. He inquires , into lives and events prior to …

Leo Strauss: His Critique of Historicism P A U L N O R T O N

MAN DESIRES to know the past. He inquires ,

into lives and events prior to and distant from his own. This inquiring comes from a desire which man has by nature, the desire to know. But to say that man naturally desires to know his past is not to say that knowing itself is “historical.” What is known does not define the capacity of man, his thinking, that enables him to know. The difference between knowing the past and knowing, or thinking, historically is fundamental: that man desires to know the past is not controversial, but that knowing it is part of the nature of knowing is very controversial, so much so that to affirm that knowing or thinking is itself historical is to affirm what is called “historicism.” The writings of Leo Strauss on “the history of political philosophy” are not only an example of the desire to know the past, but they are also a debate with historicism. Historicism holds that even philosophical thought is by nature historical, but Strauss holds that “historicism is incompatible with philosophy in the original meaning of the word,” and that it is the only “serious antagonist of political philosophy.” In his search for the truth about political philosophy, Strauss learned that a satisfactory understanding of historicism would amount to a satisfactory understanding of “modem philosophy in general.” His inquiry into the history and meaning of political philosophy, then, requires his critique of historicism.

Strauss’ thoughts on historicism are indeed a critique and not a system, and if a discovery, they are a discovery of errors in the thinking of others. But he sees historicism itself as a critique of classical or ancient thought and doubts that it has made a “discovery of a dimension of reality that had escaped classical thought.” As a critique, historicism responds to the failure in modem philosophy, demonstrated in ever higher waves by Nietzsche and

Heidegger, to accept Hegel as the philosopher, perhaps as Aristotle had once been the philosopher for the West. Taking historicism so seriously and yet calling into question its greatest teachers, Strauss seems to have eschewed the luster of “originality” for the sake of recalling philosophy as “the intention to know the truth about the whole.” He wondered whether “originality in the sense of discovery or invention of ‘systems’ has anything to do with philosophic depth or true originality.”‘ Yet when the conventional political wisdom enclosed by liberal democracy and com- munist democracy is challenged by historicism, the critique of historicism based upon philosophy in “the original meaning of the word’ opens a whole new world of thought.

Part I of this essay presents Strauss’ critique of the historicism that emerged from disagreements about Hegel’s philosophy of history. Part I1 describes how Nietzsche’s new kind of historicism broke the impasse to which these disagreements led, and it shows how Strauss regards Heidegger’s thought as the most radical historicism of all. In Part 111, I attempt to show the limits to an identification of Strauss’ critique of historicism with classical political philosophy. This limited identification enables him to make classical political philosophy speak to modem man with both practical and theoretical wisdom without assuming any place of authority for us.

I . Hegel and Post-Hegelian Hktonckm

THE BEGINNING of historicism is a response to Hegel’s “discovery of History,” to his s y n - thesis of philosophy and history. “The way leading from Hegel through Marx, Kierkegaard and historicism to Nietzsche and beyond is necessary not absolutely, but only on the basis of Hegel.” Historicism comes after Hegel, while being un-

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thinkable without his philosophy of history. But Hegel’s philosophy is more than a philosophy of history; it is also a philosophy of right. Accordingly, Strauss studies it and criticizes it as he does any other political philosophy, on the grounds that Hegel, too, “assumed that the fundamental political problem is susceptible of a final so lu t i~n .”~ Or, more simply, Hegel does not teach, while historicism does teach. that philosophy is absurd. Hegel’s position in the decisive respects is this: History is not merely a record of human events; it is a “rational and reasonable process.” In this historical process, both religious and secular thought at the highest level and political action at the highest level (the state based on the acknowledgment of the universal rights of man) culminate, and are known to culminate, in “the absolute moment,” at the “peak and end of history.” This most complex and perfect event is the completion of religion, philosophy, and politics in both theory, in “the true and final phi!~q$y” of UPUP~ ---o-“ and in practice, in the post-revolutionary state. This event signals the end of history “as meaningful change,” the end of “meaningful time,” and the completion of all “significant human action.” The recognition and knowledge of this absolute moment is the greatest achievement of philosophy and is in fact the transformation of philosophy, the quest for wisdom, into wisdom itself, into the knowledge that “the fundamental riddles have been solved.” Since history is a rational and progressive process, every stage of history and the leading thought of every stage cannot contain the absolute moment, but can only be a step toward the absolute moment. It follows from this fact that every individual is “the son or stepson of his time.” The relativism that is implied by this is avoided by the more fundamental fact that, although “every philosophy is the conceptual expression of the spirit of its time.” Hegel’s philosophy is the absolute insight into the historicity of thought and comes at the final moment in the historical process. Relativism and absolutism of thought are thus reconciled in the absolute

truth contained in Hegel’s phi l~sophy.~ Strauss confronts and criticizes Hegel’s

political philosophy in two ways. First, he shows how Hegel’s thoughts on human nature are founded on the Hobbesian con- cept of the state of nature. But “Hobbes attempts to overcome the state of nature” while still facing it as an ever-present possibility, “whereas his successors [Hegel], . . .allegedly possessing a deeper insight into man’s history and therewith into his essence, forget the state of nature.” This forgetfulness, however, is possible only as a result of “the negation of the state of nature begun by Hobbes.” This negation is civil society, the modem contractarian state, and it is problematic because it rests on the “untrue assumption that man as man is thinkable as a being that lacks sacred restraints or as a being that is guided by nothing but a desire for recognition.”5 Second, in his debate with Kojtve, Strauss rejects the political im- plications of Hegelian absolutism. He regards Kojke’s interpretation of Hegel’s idea nf the hest regime: of the inevitable and inevitably rational state of the final epoch, as an idea of utter ignobility. It en- visions the “hideous prospect” of citizen- ship in the final, universal, and homogen- eous state, of belonging to the herd of “last men,” perhaps even “homunculi” with a Thrasymachean and most terrible shepherd, “the Universal and Final Tyrant” with the highest, because final, philosophic authority and with all the devices of modern technology at his service for the persecution of all “false philosophies.”6 The ascent of theory and practice to the end and peak of the historical process will be no ascent at all, but the complete and final closing of the natural cave of human existence by man’s mastery of nature.

The Historical School

THE POINT OF departure of historicism, of the post-Hegelians whom Strauss calls “the historical school” of “decayed Hegel- ianism,” is the rejection of Hegel’s philosophy as “the absolute moment” in time and thought, while still holding to the

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historicity of thought. In fact, the historical school began not only with the abandonment of Hegelian absolutism, but also of the absolutism or universalism of the “abstract principles” of the modem

timism” of Hegel’s final moment at the end of the historical process, the historical school substituted its own “optimistic” belief in “infinite future progress.” And in place of the absolute natural rights of in- dividuals, it substituted, by affirming the historicity of all thought, the historically relative rights of particular times and countries. This substitution, in turn, re- quired the replacement of the sciences of right and politics by “historical jurispru- dence,” “historical political science,” etc. ’I

It is at this point, historically in the ideas of the “eminent conservatives” of the historical school, and theoretically in the elevation of the historical part over the natural whole, that Strauss’ critique of historicism comes into view. For the denial of all universal or timeless principles but that of historicism itself is the declaration of nihilism. It amounts to “the acceptance of every historical standard or of every vic- torious cause.” Professor Gadamer rightly sees in Strauss’ recoil from nihilism his “insight into the catastrophe of modern times.”* Strauss does not, however, merely recoil from the nihilism in which both early and contemporary historicism culminate. He points to the moderation and prudence which, as the ancient political philosophers first taught, should accompany universal principles and which make unnecessary the denial of the very possibilities of such principles; he undertakes to demonstrate historicism’s self-contradictoriness and its lack of confirmation by practical experience; he offers a refutation of its her- maneutical teaching; and he argues that behind the admittedly problematical principles of modem natural right lie the in- adequately considered principles of classical natural right. But the force of all these necessary and difficult arguments comes first of all from Strauss’ intention that philosophy should have no un- answered champions of nihilism.

I natural right teaching. In place of the “op-

The Self Contradiction of the Historical School

THE NIHILISM of early historicism is a func- tion of its holding to the idea of history as a “process,” but one with no final end or meaning. But without meaning, the SO-

called “historical process” is a “meaningless web,” the “tale told by an idiot.” Strauss observes that this is in fact the classical view, that “there is no such thing as ‘the historical process.”’ He calls attention to Plato’s, or the Athenian Stranger’s, opinion that “the human race may always have existed and will always exist,” or, at least, “the time during which there have been human beings is so immeasurably long that all kinds of changes in cities, including their coming into being and perishing, have taken place.” Strauss refutes H. Kuhn’s assertion that his opposition to historicism implies the view that history is “essentially ‘history of decay,’ ” since the classical (Aristotelian) view holds only that “all change of human thoughts and institu- tions.. .is necessary, but there is no necessity of its being reasonable or ‘meaningful.”’ Though Strauss disagrees (because of the possibility of creation), with this classical view that “the visible universe is eternal,” his arguments against historicism indeed follow from his opinion of the superior wisdom about man of the Socratic tradi- tion of political philo~ophy.~

The seriousness of the nihilism in this first theory of historicism, in the historical school, is mitigated by the fact that these scholars were not philosophers but historians. So far were they from being at- tentive to the nihilism implicit in their historicism that they amounted to a school of positivism, which would abstract from such ethical problems. They did not see their historicism as a deliberate attack upon political philosophy, but as a way of doing history. But precisely as such, as the assumption of the dependence of all thought upon specific and transitory historical contexts of great variety, the pretension to a science of history is fundamentally defective. The assumption of the historical conditionedness of thought is

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“essentially ambiguous,” for it overlooks the “obvious possibility” that a particular time or situation is, by chance, “particular- ly favorable to the discovery of the truth,” of “the true political philosophy.” More specifically, historicism does not allow the possibility that the discovery of natural right by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle was a genuine discovery, albeit one that “could have happened elsewhere or at other times,”

denial of this possibility amounts to the dogmatism characteristic of our time. 10

It is not in the work of the early historicists, however, but in that of one of their “spiritual descendants,” R. G. Col- lingwood, where Strauss most carefully exposes this dogmatic assumption that “the thought of all epochs is equally ‘true,’ because every philosophy is essentially the expression of its time.” He argues that Col- lingwood repeated the step taken by the historical school away from Hegel’s philosophy as the absolute moment, because Collingwood failed to see that the “rationalistic view of Hegel” and the historicists’ “non-rationalistic view” are “mutually incompatible.” His vacillation between these two views led him to believe in the equality of all ages, which is “only a more subtle form of the belief in progress.”ll Collingwoods belief in progress is implied in his claim to have “re- enacted” the thought of a past thinker “in the light of his time,” while simultaneously claiming to have understood the thinker of the past better than that thinker understood himself. It is true that this claim to a better understanding of the past thinker is not an explicit or even acknowledged claim - the equality of all epochs seems to deny it. But this claim is implicit in the historicist premise of the dependence of all thought upon its time; for it thereby asserts the superiority of the historicist approach over that of “practical- ly the whole thought of the past,” which was “radically ‘unhistorical.”’ The historicist premise makes it impossible to take seriously (or to “re-enact”) the earlier view that “to know the human mind is something fundamentally different from

or eveii -i+-khixit its bcing ho-.:?: :c us. The

knowing the history of the human mind.”’X Strauss’ critique of the historians’

historicism illuminates both its highest and lowest points. He does this by showing that it fails its own test of evidence, for historicism cannot be proven by historical evidence. In its pretension to absoluteness, historicism ascends to philosophy, for its basis is a “philosophic analysis” of thought which “presents itself as the authentic in- terpret~tinr? d the experience of many cen- turies with political philosophy.” Historicism, denying finality to all interpretations but its own, approaches philosophy by replacing “one kind of finality by another kind.. . ,by the final conviction that all human answers are essentially and radically ‘historical.’” In criticizing Gadamer’s historicist hermaneutics, Strauss describes this other kind of finality. It is the “negatively absolute situation,” in which “the insight into the historicity of one’s own existence and therewith the impossibility of one’s transcending one’s own horizon” is known to be the final insight, the “coriipleCed experieiice,” which i d 1 never be superseded. It claims the finality and “the same trans-historical character or pretension as any natural right doctrine.”lS

However, the argument that all thought is historical “must be applied to itself’ as well and this immediately undermines its claim to finality: “To assert the historicist thesis means to doubt it and thus transcend it.” Strauss does not make this argument as a logical puzzle or brain-teaser, since the “negatively absolute situation” is not logically impossible, anymore than is Hegel’s (or any other) absolute moment. Nevertheless, on its own terms, the historicist principle is valid only for ‘‘a specific historical situation,” or “for the time being only,” for it is “relative to modern man” and can give no reason why it will not be replaced in the future by the nonhistoricist principle. But, Strauss argues, “there always have and there always will be surprising, wholly unex- pected, changes of outlook which radically modify the meaning of all previously ac- quired knowledge.” Historicism denies the possibility of any trans-historical perspec-

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tive necessary to know that all thought is historical. Depriving itself of the absolute moment, historicism can approach philosophy only by making itself the exception to “its own verdict about all human thought. The historicist thesis is self- contradictory or absurd.”“

II. Hzitoncism in Nietzsche and Heidegger

EARLY HISTORICISM, in turn, became the point of departure for a decisive move in modem political philosophy. This move, which radicalizes the historicist thesis, was made by Nietzsche. He did this by under- taking to overcome the paralysis that results from an “excess” of history, from “theoretical” historicism. Nietzsche began this task from the typically modem motive: not for the sake of contemplation or for theory, but for the sake of “quickening my activity.” He saw “the historical movement” as one of “jaded idlers in the garden of knowledge,” and he undertook to rescue history from the historians, to make history serve “life and action.” His critique of the historical movement began by exposing the groundless optimism of its belief in progress that left no room for either individual or cultural greatness. The historicist thesis- “the relativity of all com- prehensive views” -deprives man of cer- tainty and confidence in his own views of the most important things. It leaves him unable to believe that his views come from “his free insight into the truth,” for he knows that they are determined by his historical situation: he can no longer believe in his answers to the most important questions. Nietzsche set out to overcome the “true but fatal idea” of “the flux of all ideas, types, and species,” an idea that leaves nothing desirable except the solitary and petty “shoals of egoism” and leads a man to withdraw into himself, “back into the small egoistic circle, where he must become dry and withered.”15

Nietzsche’s critique of the “excess of history” does not permit a retreat into science or positivism, for he exposes modem science as “only an interpretation and arrangement of the world.. .and not an

explanation of the world.” The choice of the scientific “picture of the world’ is thus as “groundless as the choice of an alternative orientation.” Nietzsche’s own “historical sense” knows no boundaries; all knowledge, even the most specialized and “scientific,” must be seen and judged as historically relative. l6

Nietzsche did not, then, reject “the historical sense,” but attempted to meet its challenge, to exploit what he took to be its truth. Indeed, he claimed it as his distinctive “virtue,” as his awareness that “the human soul has no unchangeable essence or limits, but is essentially historical.” Pro- fessor Gadamer argues that it is in fact the “dignity” and “value in truth” of the historical sense - of historicism that “takes itself seriously”-that it knows “no such thing as ‘the present,’ but’rather constantly changing horizons ‘of future and past.” Unable to find in nature either purpose or value, Nietzsche envisioned a “radically new kind of project, the transvaluation of all values.” This would rescue man who, Nietzsche believed, had become per- manently sensitive to the historical sense, from the paralysis of “theoretical” historicism by the act of willing, by the free commitment to the “culture,” or “horizon” or “world view” of his choice. By his choice of historically relative values, Nietzsche asserted, a man-or rather, a few men- could become nothing less than “the great ‘fighters against history,’ that is, against the blind power of the actual.” The proclamation of the overman is thus more than Nietzsche’s own subjective interpretation of the human condition; it is the proclamation of “the final insight.” The teacher of the overman appears when the historical sense has become problematic. Like early historicism, Nietzsche’s philosophy, says Strauss, “explicitly denies that the end of history has come, but it implicitly asserts the opposite.””

Strauss agrees with Heidegger in regarding the Nietzschean project as a “relapse into metaphysics,” the ineluctable “recourse to nature” that is the willing of the return or repetition of all that has been and will be. Nietzsche’s doctrine of the

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eternal return is his appeal to “nature or the past as authoritative or at least in- escapable,” as the source and guarantor of the hierarchy, inequality, and suffering that is necessary for all human greatness. Nietzsche teaches the overman in an attempt to reconstitute and re-invigorate the “pathos of distance” between high and low, noble and base, rather than deny, in nihilistic fashion, the distinction aitogether. But the basis of this distinction is not, for Nietzsche, the classical standard of virtue, but the will to power over other men that is the Machiavellian standard of virtu’, of war and the “merciless extinc- tion” and exploitation of the herd-like men, of a “planetary aristocracy.” Nietz- sche teaches the kind of evil that results from indifference to parliamentary moderation and from disdain for political responsibility. Nietzsche, says Strauss, is as much as the “stepgrandfather of fascism.”’8

Heidegger

NIETZSCHE TAKES THE historicist thesis as the occasion, the very reason, for his project, for the need for commitment to the transvaluation of values. Strauss compares Nietzsche’s historicist thesis with the natural right thesis: both “depend upon fate”; all thought, Strauss argues, depends upon fate. This means that every insight could in principle be discovered at any time; the moment of its discovery cannot be predicted or guaranteed; it cannot be located as a point in a “process.” The natural right thesis is a trans-historical insight “accessible to man as man,” understood first and best in antiquity by “the labor of human thought,” by Socratic philosophy. Strauss rejects Professor Kuhn’s argument that the natural right thesis must be said to have appeared in the “absolute moment in history,” in antiquity. The historicist thesis, however, is not only dependent upon fate, but declares itself not to be “accessible to man as man,” not accessible at all times. The historicist thesis makes itself known only at “the absolute moment” in history and itself declares the radical or unqualified “dependence of

thought on fate.“ The formal difference in the two theses, then, is that the natural right thesis was discovered ‘once upon a time,’ and declares a timeless truth, while the historicist thesis was given only ‘in due time’ or at the right time: the “surrep- titious assumption of an absolute moment in history is essential to historicism.” It denies the very possibility of any timeless truth, while declaring itself to be the final word on this possiiiiiity. 12

The formal difference between the two theses can be sustained only by their substantive difference, by their different accounts of man and nature. Historicism after Nietzsche assumes the “absolute moment” to be its final insight into the “insoluble character of the fundamental riddles,” or more specifically, the impossibility of “theoretical metaphysics and of philosophic ethics or natural right.” The demonstration of this impossibility is not an appeal to scepticism, but a “critique of reason,” a philosophy that undertakes no “project” but that of teaching the futility or absurdity of man’s desire to know, because that desire rests on “premises that are only ‘historical and relative.”’ This negative teaching, the core of the fully developed historicist philosophy, is the philosophy of Heidegger. Strauss’ critique of historicism is, at its core, a critique of Heidegger’s “existentialism.” Strauss readi- ly grants that Heidegger is a thinker of ex- traordinary power and greatness, whose teachings dominate European philosopy more than those of anyone since Hegel. He believes that like “all outstanding thinkers,” Heidegger has been adequately understood by neither his critics nor his followers. But he is persuaded that Heideg- ger’s philosophy is ultimately only “fan- tastic hopes, more to be expected from vi- sionaries than from philosophers.” Like early historicism and Nietzsche’s historicism, Heidegger’s “radical historicism” also culminates in nihilism. But being scan- dalized by Heidegger’s “false steps” in favor of Hitler’s revolution is not a critique. So Strauss confronts Heidegger’s attack on theoretical metaphysics and his denial of natural right. Besides, Strauss knows that

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“the passion and power of the originator of a doctrine do not establish the truth of a doctrine.” He argues that Heidegger’s historicist philosophizing has induced a “paralysis of the critical faculties” and has reduced the love of truth to “listening with reverence to the incipient ‘mythoi’ of Heidegger .”*O

Strauss’ critique of Heidegger’s .historicism begins, perhaps most simply, by showing that, like the hermeneutical principle of Collingwood, Heidegger’s teaching about historical truth results in a self-contradiction. But where Collingwood claimed to have understood the thought of a past thinker as that thinker understood it, “according to Heidegger, this is altogether impossible; it is not even a reasonable goal of understanding.” And where Collingwood implicitly claimed to be able to understand a thinker better than he understood himself, Heidegger, denying any progress to history, also denies that this is possible. For Heidegger, all that the philosopher can do is to philosophize, for “true understanding of a thinker is understanding him creatively,” by “transforming his thought.” However, Heidegger also claims that all thinkers before him have philosophized in ig- norance of “the true ground of grounds, the fundamental abyss” of Sein. But this amounts to a “fundamental criticism,” and “implies the claim that in the decisive respect Heidegger understands his great predecessors better than they understood themselves. ” *

If Collingwood contradicts himself because of an (implicit) belief in progress, Heidegger contradicts himself because of a belief in decay. Heidegger’s belief in the decay of the present age comes when (in the absolute moment) the “fundamental riddle,” the nature of being, is revealed as “insoluble.” This decay is the extreme loss of autochthony, the condition necessary for human greatness: its loss is the result of Western metaphysics, of the “fundamental defect of metaphysics” which is its assumption that “being is as such intelligible.” Heidegger holds that being is not intelligible because it is only dogmatism to believe

that “‘to be’ in the highest sense must mean ‘to be always.’ But the whole cannot be knowable if, as Heidegger’s historicism teaches, it is “actually always incomplete,” if it is “historical,” i . e . , “essentially changing,” or if human life or thought is “historical,” i. e . , if human thought depends “on something that cannot be an- ticipated’’ or that cannot be the object of a knowing subject, at least in the highest case, that of the philosophic mind. In place of knowledge of the whole, Heideg- ger puts “experience of nothingness,” the “objective groundlessness of all principles of thought and action.” This, then, is the absolute moment of Heidegger’s historicism, the “abyss of freedom” that appears in the “experience of nothingness,” the seeing in man’s Existenz the homelessness of (human) beings (entia) without being (esse) and without God (ens), This penetration of historicity into the human soul implies at least a formal ethics which, though “beyond good and evil,” challenges man to face the homelessness of his existence, and not to flee from it into ‘in- authentic’ delusions. Nothing should “seduce us,” Heidegger says, into avoiding this “ f ina l thought of Western metaphysics.” Heidegger does not, however, teach this as an ethics-“Heideg ger.. .explicitly denies the possibility of ethics”- but as an epistemology, the revelation of the meaning of man’s manner of being to “committed thought.” But this, Strauss observes, amounts to the absurdity of existentialism, its “subjective truth about the subjectivity of truth,” its blind sighting of finiteness without “the light of the infinite.”**

III. Historicism, Political Philosophy, and Natural Right

STRAUSS NOTES THAT “almost everyone rebelled against Hegel,” i . e . , against Hegel’s declaration that the “absolute peak of history” had been reached in his own thought and in his own time.4s With Nietz- sche and Heidegger, Strauss sees in modernity “an unprecedented crisis,” what Heidegger speaks of as “the approach of the world night.” But Strauss’ rebellion

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against Hegel follows neither the historicist rebellion against philosophy nor its descent into the abyss of freedom, enigma, and nothingness. Instead, he takes the rebellion and the descent as the occasion for wonder- ing anew about justice or right and its relation to philosophy. Historicism can stimulate this wonder, but can do nothing to satisfy it, for at its core, in Heidegger’s thought, there is “no place whatever for political philosophy,” no place, that is, for serious thought about justice. It thus leaves the field to partisans and ideologists. The fundamental abyss is not between the limitations of even the greatest minds and the mysteriousness of being, but between the openness of the greatest minds and the dogmatic conventions necessary for political life in even the most liberal of societies. The “insoluble character of the fundamental riddles” is not proof of the historicity of thought, for common sense suggests that “the fundamental problems, such as the problems of justice, persist.. .in a!! hlstnrica! changes.” Radically different solutions to these problems over time do not prove historicism; seeing these “problems as problems,” rather, aids the libera- tion of the mind “from its historical limitations.” To see the fundamental problems of man and nature as problems in fact “legitimizes” philosophy “in the original, Socratic sense,” as a true, timeless discovery. 44

In describing philosophy in this sense, Strauss shows how these riddles and problems are evidence not for historicism but for the existence of natural right. He does this in showing how political philosophy leads to the “core” of philosophy itself. In the attempt to understand political life and political ideas, “it is impossible to grasp the distinctive character of human things as such without grasping the difference between human things and the things which are not human.” To understand the human things “as such” requires grasping the “permanent characteristics of humanity, such as the distinction between the noble and the base.” These distinctions are not touched or weakened by even so pro- found a crisis as that which marks moder-

nity. On the contrary, it is when all “horizons” and “world-views’’ are lacking in authenticity and power that “the experiences regarding right and wrong” and the permanent characteristics of man most clearly “retain their evidence or binding power for everyone who is not a brute.” These characteristics and these experiences persevere through all changes; they are ‘‘ necessarily thematic within all ‘horizons.”’ The desire to know about human things, then, leads to “the com- prehensive study of ‘all things,”’ to thinking about the whole and about the difference between the way the whole is and the way the parts of the whole (such as the human things) are. It leads to thinking about being, to “the core of philosophy, or rather, ‘the first philosophy.’”Ps

Socratic “first philosophy” is most distinguished by its fusion of wisdom and moderation, its constant “return to ‘common sense’ or to ‘the world of common sense.”’ Socrates’ search for the ideas of things means to begin the search at the “surface of the things,” at what is first not “in itself or first by nature but from what is first for us,” from the “phenomena” and in “opinions about them.” Socrates believed that it was “madness” to abandon the search for the “ideas” of things in favor of “the universal doubt” of all opinions. There seems to be something mad, for example, about the historicist attack upon classical metaphysics, in its displacement of the cosmological problem (“the problem of the totality of beings,” of entia) by the ontological problem (“the problem of being,” of esse), which results in the contradiction that “there can be entia while there is no esse. (This displacement includes - since “God is dead” - the theological problem, “the problem of the highest being,” of em).P6 Doubt that leads to such conclusions, whether in the name of an empirical science which knows only efficient and sub-rational causes or, more seriously, in the name of “the historical sense” which knows only change and “the finality of Becoming” would lead us, “not into the heart of the truth, but into a void.” The historicist disdain for what is

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clear to “everyone who is not a brute,” for “what is first for us,” reminded Strauss of a childish “race in which he wins who offers the smallest security and the greatest ter- ror.” Heidegger’s “power” is not enough, for “just as an assertion does not become true because it is shown to be comforting, it does not become true because it is shown to be terrifying.” In any case, it is not the task of philosophy to comfort or terrify; this belongs to belief, religious belief or atheistic belief. Radical historicism takes its bearings only from acts of will, from commitment to the creation and transvaluation of values: it may, says Strauss, presage “a return of the gods.” But “being based on belief is fatal to any philosophy . ” I

Natural Right and Political Philosophy

IT MIGHT, however, be a question for some whether Strauss’ intransigent refusal to abandon “the question of the good society.. . by deferring to History,” is indeed philosophic and not moralistic, not a com- promise with convention that is no less fatal to philosophy than dependence upon belief. But this quarrel with modernity and with its historicist champions is not a defense of any conventions or moralities; it is an attempt to defend philosophy against the ever-present opinion that philosophy is either useless or vicious. This opinion was originally met by Socrates and Plato, but it could never be silenced once and for all, any more than “the experiences regarding right and wrong” could be silenced. Thus, Strauss rejects Hegel’s demand “that political philosophy refrain from constru- ing a state as it ought to be, or from teaching the state how it should be”; he rejects the “rejection of the raison d‘etre of classical political philosophy.” Strauss feared that unless philosophy’s search for the ideas of things is constantly guided by “what is first for us,” for the city or the political community, philosophy will indeed be guilty of being both useless and vicious. Philosophy “can only be intrin- sically edifying,” not moralistic, but of necessity good for the souls of those who truly philosophize.48

Strauss’ critique of historicism attempts to save both “the phenomena” and philosophy itself from the consequences of “universal doubt” and of nihilism. Intran- sigence on behalf of the ineluctability of good and evil marks all of Strauss’ work in both the history of political philosophy and the thematic examination of the timeless meaning of political philosophy. The seriousness with which he defends the interpretation of natural right in Natural Right and History against Helmut Kuhn’s critique of this interpretation is evidence of Strauss’ opinion that natural right indeed exists, that an ‘alternative’ to historicism exists- not a particular theory of justice or set of “absolute values,” but the idea or ground of right. Strauss’ critique leaves open many questions for further inquiry, but it is intransigent in holding, with Socrates, that “right opinion” (or morality) and “knowledge” (or natural right) are different (cJ. Meno 98b). This intransigence comes from Strauss’ recognition (expressed in the essay where, he says, he first considered the possibility of a return to classical political philosophy) that “agreement can always be reached in principle about the means to an already established end, whereas the ends are always controversial: we disagree with one another and with ourselves always only about the just and the good.” Agreement “at any price” is possible only when we “abandon altogether the question of what is right and.. .and limit [our] concern exclusively to the means.” The “means” in question are the result of the union in modernity of man’s making and man’s knowing, of technology, the “neutral ground’ upon which “to escape from the struggle about the right faith,” but which requires another faith, the faith in technology. And what, after all, is the “eternal return of the same,” but a means to an end, the end of the will to power, the will to power over all by technology?Pg

Historicism restates and promises to realize the goal first envisioned by Machiavelli: the assertion of man’s power over nature, his conquest of nature by the will to power of technology. “Only Nietz-

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sche’s successors restored the connection, which he had blurred, between the will to power and technology.” At its peak, in radical historicism, the philosophy of power teaches that man by nature desires not to know, but to make, to create. The philosophy of power unites knowing and making but only on the condition that no question be asked as to what good of the soul is served by this union. But silence on this question, agreement on the means oi technology, only disguises disagreement on the ends of technology: the “neutrality of technology is only apparent ,” for the will to power by technology must in fact be the will of some to overpower others. Agree- ment about the means of technology is agreement “at any price,” and such agreement abandons, in the name of history, “the task of raising the question of what is right, and when man abandons this question, he abandons his humanity.” Life given over to technology is not the philosophic life, but is the “farewell to reason” and “estrangement from man’s deepest desires and therewith from the primary issues.” Having set out over the low but solid ground of material well-being

*This article is a revision of a paper presented to the Canadian Political Science Association, in Lon- don, Ontario, May, 1978. In referring to Strauss’ writings, these abbreviations will be used: NRH, for Natural Right and History (Chicago, 1953); What?, for What is Political Philosophy? (Glencoe, Illinois, 1959); City, for The City and Man (Chicago, 1964); “3 Waves,” for “The Three Waves of Modernity.” in H. Gilden, ed., Political Philosophy: Six &ays by Leo S t r a w ( N . Y . , 1975); “PRSPP,” for “Philosophy As Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy,” in 2 Interpretation (Summer, 1968); and “Preface,” for “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” in Liberalism, Ancient and Modem (N.Y. . 1968).

‘What?, pp. 227, 26, 57, 60. Cf. Strauss’ statement in his “Letter to Kuhn” (I1 IJP. 1978, p. 23), that his “method’ is historical, while his “concern” is philosophical. ‘NRH, p. 33; What?, p. 230. As an example of this, Strauss gives Maimonides, a less “original” but “deeper” thinker than Spinoza. 3“Relativism,” in Schoeck and Wiggins, eds., Relativism and the Study of Man (Princeton, 1961), p. 151: “3 Waves.” p. 95; What?, pp. 58, 269; and NRH, p. 36. Pre-Hegelian modem philosophy, from Machiavelli onward, is also “marked from the outset by a nnvel emphasis on history,” e.g., by Rousseau’s argument that man developed, over a great but finite

to liberate himself from nature and to become the absolute sovereign and master of nature, modern man has lost his way, and so much so that man may have become “smaller and more miserable in proportion as the systematic civilization progresses.” The bold attempt to be the conqueror of chance has resulted in man’s enthrallment to history.

Strauss’ quarrel with historicism depends

original, Socratic sense.” He holds, therefore, that to philosophize beyond good and evil is not to philosophize. Know- ing that philosophy is edifying, that philosophy is the best in man, we become “aware of the dignity of the mind,” and “we realize the true ground of the dignity of man and therewith the goodness of the world, whether we understand it as created or uncreated, which is the home of man because it is the home of the human mind.”s1 We conclude from Strauss’ critique of historicism that man’s ability to philosophize is no cause for despair and that the timeiiness of man’s actions is transcended by the timelessness of his thought. *

upon ard reiiivigoraies p,liilosqhy “iil die

period, from the sub-human to the human. (What?, p. 58) G. Iggers, in The German Conception of History (Middletown, Conn., 1968), notes the especially important antecedents of historicism in the thought of Vico and Herder. Cf. Strauss’ comment on Vico in NRH, “Preface to the 7th Impression (1971),”

vii. “‘3 Waves,” p. 95; “PRSPP,” pp. 3-4; PRelativism,” pp. 151-2; NRH. pp. 29, 320. Stanley Rosen, in “Hegel and Historicism” (7 Clzo, No. 1. 1977, pp. 41-43), spells out “the dilemma of the end of history” that results from Hegel’s assertion of the absolute moment. The dilemma comes from the impossibility of anything logically or essentially new hap- pening after the absolute moment and the fact of “the deterioration of Hegel’s age,” of post-Hegelian experience which displays new events and new thoughts. What is new, according to Strauss, is, of course, historicism -“a fundamental change of philosophic orientation”-such as “from Hegel to Heidegger.” (Strauss’ letter to H. Gadamer. I1 IIP, 1978, p. 7). 5“Comments on Der Bepyf des Politischen by Carl Schmitt,” in Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (N .Y. , 1965). p. 338; On Tyranny (Ithaca, N . Y . , 1963), p. 205. ‘On Tyranny, pp. 224, 226. ’NRH, pp. 13-16: What?, pp. 60-61, 58; “Relativism,” pp. 151-2. Strauss does not identify the scholars of “the historical school.” Iggers (op.cit. , pp. 4-5) identifies the leading figures as W. von Humboldt and von Ranke. Also, see

152 Spnng 1981


E. Troeltsch, “The Ideas of Natural Law and Humanity in World Politics,” in Otto Gierke. Natural Law and the Theory of Society, E. Barker, trans. (Cambridge: 1958), p. 212. ‘NRH. pp. 14, 17; Hans- Georg Gadamer. Truth and Method, Second Edition (N.Y., 1975). p. 482. BNRH. p. 18; The Argument and the Action of Pluto’s “Laws,“(Chicago, 1975), p. 182; “Letter to Helmut Kuhn,” loc.cit., pp. 23-24. Cf. Plato, Laws VI, 781e-782a and Aristotle, Politics VII, 1329b27. R. Weil observes that Aristotle’s teleological view of history asserts only “a general framework, within which both progress and decline are possible.” (“Aristotle’s View of History,” in Ar- ticles on ATirtotle 2. Ethics and Politics, J. Barnes, M. Schofield, and R. Sorabji, eds., [London, 19771, p. 210.) IONRH, pp. 16, 19. 22; What?, pp. 63-64; ““On a New Interpretation of Plato’s Political Philosophy,” 13 Social Research, 1946, p. 330 (Strauss’ emphasis); “Letter to Helmut Kuhn,” loc.cit., 5 Rev. of Metaphysics (June, 1952), pp. 563, 574. l*What!, pp. 67-68; “On Collingwoods Philosophy of History,” loc.cit., p. 575. Cf. Strauss’ reply to Sabine’s historicism: “I do not know of any historian who grasped fully a fundamental presup- position of a great thinker which the great thinker himself did not fully grasp.” (What?, p. 227) In the same fashion, Strauss says to Gadamer that in making explicit “what the author merely presupposes. ..the interpreter does not understand the author better than the author understood himself.” (“Letter to Gadamer,” loc.cit., p. 6, point 3.) Also, see Note 21, below. ”What? pp. 69, 72; NRH, p. 24; “Letter to Gadamer,“ loc. cit. , p. 7. Cf. E. Gilson. Being and Some Philosophers (Toronto, 1952), p. x: “For the only task of history is to understand and to make understood, whereas philosophy must choose; and ap- plying to history for reasons to make a choice is no longer history, it is philosophy.” ”NRH, pp. 25, 21; What? pp. 72-73. 15Nietzsche. The Use and Abuse of History (Indianapolis, 1957), pp. 3, 61, 64; NRH, p. 26; “Relativism,” p. 152; What? p. 70. 16Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Aph. 14 (Nietzsche’s emphasis); “Relativism,” p. 154; NRH, p. 26. ““Preface,” p. 236; Gadamer. op. cit., pp. 483-84; “ 3 Waves,” p. 96; Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History. p. 54; NRH, p. 29. 18“Relativism,” pp. 153-54; “3 Waves.” p. 97; What?, pp. 54-55; “Liberal Education and Responsibility,” in Liberalism, An- cient and Modem, p. 24. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals 1.2 and Beyond Good and Evil. Aphs. 208, 210, 212, 225, 242, 253, 257, 258-65. Cf. Rosen, loc.cit., pp. 42-45; The “problem of explaining the post-Hegelian historical future” can be resolved only by “a rigorous version of Nietzsche’s teaching of the eternal return”; only in this way, says Rosen, by iden- tifying “eternity and temporality,” can the dilemma of the end of history be solved. (See Note 4, above) IPNRH, pp. 28-29; “Letter to Helmut Kuhn,” loc.cit.,

“Preface.” p. 227; What?, pp. 242. 246. It is in- teresting to compare Strauss’ opinion of Heidegger with his opinions of Riezler and KojCve. Riezler, says Strauss, was drawn to both Platonism and historicism;

p. 23. “NRH, pp. 19, 29-30; “PRSPP,” pp. 2, 5;

yet his “qualified relativism” was fully consistent with an awareness, unfound in Heidegger’s “narrow humanity.” of the passions, of love and friendship, of laughter and charity. It was this awareness that prevented Riezler from being “misled about the meaning of 1933.” (What?, pp. 255-256, 259-260) Strauss’ disagreement with KojCve could not be greater, but he compares KojCve most favorably with Heidegger when he implies that, unlike KojCve. Heidegger lacked “the courage to face the consequences of tyranny.” (See G. Grant, Technology and Empire [Toronto, 19691, p. 102 and M. Platt, “Leo Strauss: Three Quarrels, Three Questions,” The Newsletter [University of Dallas, Texas], Winter, 1978. pp. 5-6.) For a very careful examination in detail of Heidegger’s relation to National Socialism, see K. Hames, “Heidegger as a Political Thinker,” The Review of Metaphysics (June, 1976). *’“Relativism,” p. 156; “PRSPP,” p. 2. Strauss’ own answer to the question of how an interpreter should understand the thought of a past thinker is given in his correspondence with Professor Gadamer. The core of Strauss’ own hermeneutics is his opinion that “a doctrine ... must be understood in its claim to be true and this claim must be met.” This means that the claim must be accepted as true or rejected as untrue, or the senses in which it is true or untrue must be distinguished, or the inability to decide and therefore the need for more thought and knowledge must be declared. Moreover, Strauss asserts “the essentially ministerial element of interpretation.” as opposed to Gadamer’s view of the interpreter’s “productivity” (cf. Heidegger’s “transforming”). It accords with this “ministerial” hermeneutics that Strauss qualifies his own interpretations as always “incomplete,” always lacking in understanding “something of the utmost importance.” But it accords with his rejection of historicist hermeneutics that he denies that a “complete” or simply true understanding is impossible. The task, then, is in every case to attempt to discover the truth, to the best of one’s ability, undistractedbyeither the likelihoodof failureor by unwarranted assumptions of “absolute moments.” zzNRH, pp. 29-31 ; “PRSPP,” p. 5; “Relativism,” pp. 154-155; What?, pp. 246-248. See Heidegger, “Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?” in D. Allison, ed., The New Nietrtche (N.Y., 1977), pp. 76-79. Emil Fackenheim, Metaphysics and Historicity (Milwaukee: 1961), “Hegel,” pp. 67-70, for an explanation of how Hegel himself understood the consequences of being unable to take his philosophy of history as simply true and trans- historical. ““PRSPP,” pp. 4-5; “Letter to Gadamer,” loc.cit., pp. 5. 11; NRH, pp. 29-30, 32. For Strauss’ thematic discussion of the “crisis” of modernity, see “3 Waves,” the “Introduction” to City, and “Political Philosophy and the Crisis of our Time,” in H. Spaeth, ed., The Predicament of Modem Politics (Detroit, 1964). Note Strauss’ comment to Gadamer, in his replying letter (loc.cit., p. ll), that Gadamer’s “silence” on the matter of “the crisis of modernity is connected to Gadamer’s silence on the matter of “the relativity of all human values.” rsNRH, p. 122, 32; What?, p. 26; “Letter to Gadamer.” loc.cit., p. 11;

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City. p. 20. Professor Gadamer (op. cit. , pp. 489-90) expresses “surprise” that Strauss’ “defense of classical philosophy” understands it “as a unity, so that the extreme contrast that exists between Plato and Aristotle in the nature and the significance of their question concerning the good does not seem to cause him [Strauss] any trouble.” Strauss indeed recognizes serious differences between Plato or Socrates and Aristotle. He sees this difference, at a very high level. in the fact that “Aristotle’s cosmology, as distinguished from Plato’s, is unqualifiedly separable from the quest for the best political order. Aristotelian phi!csophizinn h i e nn lnnopr tn the simp d e p e and in the same way as Socratic philosophizing the character of ascent.” (City, p. 21) Straw’ opinion of this difference results in his combining, as “classical political philosophy,” Plato’s and Aristotle’s teaching on the essential difference between the human and non-human, which suffices for an (Aristotelian) “classical” political philosophy, with the Platonic (but not Aristotelian) teaching on political philosophy. Strauss’ combination of Platonic philosophy with Aristotelian political science seems to rest on the opinion that it is reasonable that the account of man should be less difficult to establish than an account of the whole that includes man. In any case, the tension between Plato and Aristotle should not obscure the possibility, as Strauss says, that “what Aristotle and Plato say about man and the affairs of men makes in- finitely more sense ... than what the modems have said or EIY.’’ (“letter !e He!mi~! Kuhn;” Inc.cit.: p. 24.) Cf. J. Klein’s explanation that Plato did not believe it possible to give “a nearly complete account of the world as a whole.” Yet “the philosophical enterprise” of Plato, “in its extravagance and divine immoderation, indeed demands that our efforts to reach it never cease. Aristotle undertook to satisfy that demand once and for all.” (“Aristotle, An Introduction,” in J. Cropsey, ed., Ancients and M o d e m [N.Y.. 19641, pp. 62-63). Also, cf. M. Richard Zinman’s extremely careful and detailed commentary on Strauss’ interpretation of “Aristotelian Politics and the Problem of the Natural Consciousness,” where Zinman concludes that “Strauss brings his discussion of Aristotle’s political science around by degrees to Socrates’ or Plato’s political philosophy.” (Unpublished Manuscript, p. 63.) rsNRH, pp. 123-4, 32; “Letter to Gadamer,” loc.cit., p. 6; What?, pp. 247-8. Cf. L. Berns’ comment on Xenophon’s Memorabilia 1.1.13 and 14: “If sobriety or moderation is the characteristic of Socratic philosophizing, and if it is the Socratic element that is common to the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, that characteristic might be traced to the Socratic thinkers’ insistence on doing justice to the cognitive significance of common, ordinary experience, (which we understand to in- clude what is said about the things exper- ienced).” (“Socratic and Non-Socratic Philosophy,” 28 Rev. of Metaphysics, September, 1974. p. 87.) “ N R H , p. 124; “Preface,“ pp. 235, 236. “What?, pp. 27, 88; “What is Liberal Education?“ in Liberalism, Ancient and Modern, p. 8 (emphasis added). I n different ways, V. Guievitch and H. Y. Jung seem to be critical of Strauss’ thought because

e _--- --- ---- ---

they believe his view of political philosophy to be moralistic. Gourevitch (“Philosophy and Politics,” 22 Rev. of Metaphysics, 1968-69) argues that Strauss’ argument on behalf of ancient or Socratic political philosophy is, at best “cathartic.” a purging of false ideas about the irrelevance of the ancients’ thoughts. and that it is, in fact, not merely a “zetetic” quest, but a hopeless, Sisyphean failure. (p. 235) Gourevitch suggests, in short, that Strauss is a disguised existentialist who wishes to spare the public from the pain of existentialism. Gourevitch has studied Strauss’ thought carefully and seriously. But it is not true that Strauss is an esoteric existentialist. Gourevitch does not give due weight to Strauss’ opinion that ancient political philosophy, however “inapplicable“ to contemporary political problems, is superior to modern thought. Gourevitch is not persuaded by this opinion that comes from Strauss’ intransigence, not about antiquity, but about the ineluctability of good and evil. Besides, Strauss does not say that political philosophy “in its original form” is Sisyphean simply; it is, he adds, “necessarily accompanied, sustained and elevated by ‘eros’ ..., by nature’s grace.” (What?, p. 40) The “divine immoderation” of Plato’s philosophizing (Note 24, above), of political philosophy as Strauss understands political philosophy, is given an unearned favor. But this is obviously not atheistic, it is only natural. Jung (“Two Critics of Scientism: Leo Strauss and Edmund Husserl,” I1 IJP, 1978) argues that S t r aw is “preoccupied with knowledge of the good as central to the aim of philosophy.” (p. 86; Jung’s emphasis) Jung argues that, because of this preoccupation, Strauss does not see in historicism a genuine alternative to the dehumanizing of man that is the meaning of positivism, or “calculative thinking.” Jung then argues that historicism properly understood in fact affirms the true ethics: because of his emancipation from both the natural and super- natural, man is free to choose the good which is not “pre-ordained by something that is more or less human.” (p, 87) Jung, too, has studied Strauss’ thought carefully. He is correct to point to important similarities between Strauss and Husserl. But Strauss’ thoughts on Husserl’s phenomenological critique of philosophy (in “PRSPP,” which Jung does not cite) make the fundamental point, not met by Jung, that Husserl did not reflect sufficiently on the natural tension between politics and philosophy. That is, the idea of “philosophy as rigorous science”- the goal of phenomenology in all its forms-depends upon the same ‘utopian’ premise as that of the Enlightenment or modernity generally, viz., that science or philosophy can overcome the city’s legitimate suspicion of science or philosophy, its natural preference for “what is first for us,” for our own, as opposed to “what is first by nature,” the good. (“PRSPP,” pp. 8-9) ‘g“Letter to Helmut Kuhn,” p. 24ff., re “The core of our disagreement.” “Comments on Der Segnyf des Politirchen by Carl Schmitt,” loc.cit., pp. 347-8. ”What?, pp. 172, 176, 55: “Commentson ... Schmitt,” 1 o c . d . . pp. 73, 79, on technology and the will to power (“dominion over the earth’). ”“What is Liberal Education?”, loc. cit. , p. 8.

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