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Rodrigo Chacón
© 2014. Idealistic Studies. ISSN 0046-8541 Online First: April 28, 2015
DOI: 10.5840/idstudies201542031
IDEALISTIC STUDIES
“that we are always located in a ‘world.’” Rather, it means that “all possible
thoughts, above all those which are related to ourselves, can in the first place
only arise with regard to the order of the world.”37 According to Klein, the
Greeks understood this, yet only “unreflectively,” as part of their “natural
consciousness.”38 Reflective knowledge about our “world-relatedness,”
however, is extremely rare; it only appears much later in the work of Kant
or Heidegger.39 Absent that reflection, human thought is bound to become
dogmatic: it is bound to substitute the “natural world” with (for example)
the “historical” world or the world “beyond.”40 The task of what Strauss calls
a “truly critical philosophy”41 is then to move from unreflective “natural
consciousness” to reflective consciousness. The “natural consciousness” is
expressed in common opinions, which in turn are shaped by the “given law.”42
To the extent that it is possible, then, knowledge of the order of nature, i.e.,
of the first presupposition of all thought, must begin from such opinions.
This beginning—and remaining—with the “surface of things” inoculated
the Socratic Greeks against dogmatic metaphysics.
However, it would take decades for Strauss to attempt a return to the
“natural consciousness” of the ancients. Long before this, he relied on phe-
nomenology for the sake of critique—or, more precisely, “radical critique,”
“radical reflection,” and Destruktion.43 The target in the 1920s was the hid-
den presuppositions of modern thought. During this time his reliance on
phenomenology is eclectic, critical, and historical, drawing occasionally on
its Hegelian variant.44 Here a brief summary must suffice.
Strauss’s first book, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, has been read as
establishing the failure of the modern Enlightenment to refute the claims of
divine revelation. Insofar as modern rationalism cannot prove that it is the
superior alternative, it undermines itself (since it is thus shown to rest on an
arbitrary decision). Spinoza’s Critique has accordingly been understood as a
vindication of revelation.45 At best we can choose to believe in reason. In this
reading, the young Strauss appears as a fideist or as a decisionist.46 Modern
rationalism fares no better: from Descartes to Kant to Husserl, it appears as
groundless, even self-destructive. These conclusions, however, are not only,
to say the least, highly implausible as accounts of the arc of modern thought;
they are also exactly opposed to Strauss’s aim in Spinoza’s Critique. There
he seeks to find more solid, phenomenological, foundations for the critical
project of modern rationalism—in his words, to find the ground (Boden)
or “the conditions for the possibility of radical critique of religion.”47 For
radical critique to be possible, Strauss suggests, philosophy must first see
the roots of the phenomenon: it must first see the criticized (religious) posi-
tion, “as it shows itself from itself.”48 However, it must also clarify its own
presuppositions. It must undertake an inquiry into the pre-scientific ground
or soil of modern science, in particular, of Biblical criticism. Neither belief
in revelation nor scientific unbelief are given “naturally”: they presuppose,
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the basis of essential insights: notably, on the apodictic necessity that the
“idea” of “nature” has a (human, experiential) origin (if it does not reside in
a topos ouranios), as well as on the necessity that “men must always have
distinguished (e.g., in judicial matters) between hearsay and seeing with
one’s own eyes.”67
As to the meaning of that discovery, Strauss’s “intentional history” reveals
it as a possibility that, “at least according to its own interpretation, is trans-
historical, trans-social, trans-moral, and trans-religious.”68 Thus, “natural
right” is essentially a challenge to history, society, morality, and religion—in
short to law and convention—because it is in law and convention that nature
is both revealed and concealed.
Harvard University
Notes
1. Leo Strauss, “On a New Interpretation of Plato’s Political Philosophy,” Social
Research 13(3) (September 1946): 326–367, esp. 326, 338.
2. On Nietzsche and Heidegger, see, most recently, Laurence Lampert, The Enduring
Importance of Leo Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), and Richard
Velkley, Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy: On Original Forgetting
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). I explore the latter relation in “Reading
Strauss from the Start: On the Heideggerian Origins of ‘Political Philosophy,’” European
Journal of Political Theory 9(3) (2010): 287–307. On Strauss and Husserl, see Hwa Yol
Jung, “Two Critics of Scientism: Leo Strauss and Edmund Husserl,” The Independent
Journal of Philosophy 3 (1978): 81–88; Laurence Berns, “The Prescientific World and
Historicism: Some Reflections on Strauss, Heidegger, and Husserl,” in Leo Strauss’s
Thought: Toward a Critical Engagement, ed. Alan Udoff (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner,
1991), 169–181; and especially Pierpaolo Ciccarelli, “Filosofia e politica in Heidegger:
l’interpretazione fenomenologica di Leo Strauss,” Etica & Politica 11(1) (2009): 25–58.
The importance of Husserl and phenomenology has long been recognized (implicitly at
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least) in French scholarship on Strauss. See, e.g., Raymond Aron, ed., Le savant et le
politique (Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1963). Emmanuel Cattin, “La philosophie
politique comme philosophie première,” in Leo Strauss: art d’écrire, politique, philosophie,
ed. Laurent Jaffro, Benoît Frydman, and Emmanuel Cattin (Paris: J. Vrin, 2001), 41–57;
Gérald Sfez, Leo Strauss et les choses politiques (Futuroscope: SCÉRÉN-CNDP, 2011).
3. Leo Strauss, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy,” in Studies
in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), esp. 36.
4. Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2000), 196.
5. See Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1953), 125 (hereafter NRH). This paragraph draws on Richard Kennington’s indispens-
able “Strauss’s Natural Right and History,” The Review of Metaphysics 35(1) (September
1981): 57–86.
6. NRH, 81.
7. Leo Strauss, “On Collingwood’s Philosophy of History,” The Review of Metaphys-
ics 5(4) (June): 559–86, 586.
8. NRH, 123.
9. “Grounds” is used here in the ordinary sense of “ground or soil,” as a translation
of Strauss’s Boden. As Jacob Klein explains, Husserl’s favored term was “roots,” instead
of the traditional arche or “principle.” “A ‘root’ is something out of which things grow
until they reach their perfect shape . . . The ‘radical’ aspect of phenomenology is more
important to Husserl than its perfection.” Jacob Klein, “Phenomenology and the History
of Science,” in The Lectures and Essays of Jacob Klein, ed. R. Williamson and E. Zuck-
ermann (Annapolis, Md: St. John’s College Press, 1985), 65–85, 69.
10. Ibid., 70 (“intentional history”), 78 (epistemology), 67 (Sinngebilde). As Jacques
Derrida notes, this kind of history remains hidden to both the conventional history of em-
pirical facts or events and the non-historical, a priori, approach of Kant. Both appear as
uncritical insofar as they presuppose “nonempirical objects” (or sense-formations) without
inquiring into their genesis. “Kant’s indifference to empirical history is only legitimated
from the moment that a more profound history has already created nonempirical objects.
This history remains hidden from Kant.” Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of
Geometry: An Introduction, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1989), 42.
11. See Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenlogie und phänomenolo-
gischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977), §24, p. 44.
12. See Leo Strauss, Philosophy and Law: Contributions to the Understanding of
Maimonides and His Predecessors, trans. Eve Adler (New York: State University of New
York Press, 1995), 42, 138n2; and “Exoteric Teaching,” Interpretation 14(1) (1986):
51–59, esp. 58. I discuss this at greater length in “On a Forgotten Kind of Grounding:
Strauss, Jacobi, and the Phenomenological Critique of Modern Rationalism,” The Review
of Politics 76 (2014): 589–618.
13. See Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” in Phenomenology and
the Crisis of Philosophy, ed. Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper & Row, 1965).
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28. Strauss, GS3, 664. As I argue below, Strauss takes up the challenge of providing
a phenomenology of belief in his first book, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1997). For the German original, see Leo Strauss, Die Reli-
gionskritik Spinozas. In Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, Die Religionskritik Spinozas und
zugehörige Schriften, 2nd ed., ed. Heinrich Meier (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler), 2001.
29. See note 12 above.
30. Leo Strauss, “Living Issues of German Postwar Philosophy,” in Heinrich Meier,
Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2006), 136.
31. See NRH, as discussed below.
32. Letter to Gerhard Krüger, 27 December 1932, in GS3, 417 “Die ursprüngliche
Tatsache ist ein gegebenes Gesetz, wie sogar die Psychoanalyse unfreiwillig bestätigt.”
33. Cf. Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2006), 13: “The problem inherent in the surface of things, and only in the surface of things,
is the heart of things.”
34. As, for instance, that presupposed by a sophist like Callicles. See Strauss’s letters
to Krüger of 7 February 1933, in GS3, 426 and 18 August 1934 in GS3, 440.
35. See, e.g., GS3, 409: Hobbes “misses” the Socratic question concerning the right
life because he begins “with that completely different question concerning the ‘nature’
of man.” See also GS3, 172, 407, 416; NRH, 145: “Human nature is one thing, virtue or
the perfection of human nature is another.” Further, Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1964), 13: “‘the human things’ are not ‘the nature of man.’”
Political philosophy is concerned with “the human things,” not with “the nature of man.”
36. Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 298.
37. Jacob Klein to Gerhard Krüger, undated, ca. 1933, in “Selected Letters from
Jacob Klein to Gerhard Krüger, 1929–1933,” ed. and trans. Emmanuel Patard, in The
New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, Vol. 6, Issue 1
(Seattle: Noesis Press, 2006), 309–328, 325.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
41. See Leo Strauss, “Some Remarks on the Political Science of Maimonides and
Farabi,” trans. Robert Bartlett, Interpretation 18(1) ([1936] 1990): 3–30, 6. See also GS3,
440, on “Plato’s critical philosophy.”
42. See note 32 above.
43. See Strauss, Die politische Wissenschaft des Hobbes (MS) cited in GS3, xix
(“Destruktion”); Die Religionskritik Spinozas, in GS1, 152 (“radical reflection” and
“radical critique”).
44. GS3, 407.
45. Kenneth H. Green, Jew and Philosopher: The Return to Maimonides in the Jewish
Thought of Leo Strauss (New York: SUNY Press, 1993), 93.
IDEALISTIC STUDIES
46. For Strauss as fideist, see Steven B. Smith, Reading Leo Strauss: Politics,
Philosophy, Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 16–17; and Daniel
Tanguay, Leo Strauss: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Christopher Nadon (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 165. For Strauss as decisionist, see Michael Zank,
“Introduction,” in Leo Strauss: The Early Writings (1921–1932) (New York: SUNY Press,
2002), 34.
47. Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 108; GS1, 152.
48. GS1, 196: “So wie diese von sich selbst her zeigt.” This is lost in the English
translation; cf. Spinoza’s Critique, 148. The phrase is an almost verbatim repetition of
Heidegger’s definition of phenomenology in Being and Time. See Martin Heidegger, Sein
und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2001), 34: “Das was sich zeigt, so wie es sich
von ihm selbst her zeigt.”
49. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenom-
enology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern
University Press, 1970), 280.
50. Strauss, GS1, 230, cf. Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 179. In 1931, Strauss
takes explicit distance from phenomenology, understood rather loosely as akin to the
“New Thinking” of Franz Rosenweig and Heidegger, later described (in 1962) as a form
of “experiencing philosophy” or “unqualified empiricism.” See Strauss, “Cohen und
Maimuni,” in GS2, 410; and Leo Strauss, “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” in
Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, ed. Kenneth Hart Green (Albany: SUNY
Press, 1997), 147, 151. Importantly, as expressed in the 1962 “Preface,” Strauss’s critique
of the “New Thinking” is aimed at its anti-essentialism and anti-idealism. As such it does
not target the core of Husserl’s essentialist and idealist project. Yet it would also be false
to deny that by the 1930s, Strauss had moved far away from the main modern alterna-
tives. Suffice it to recall his claim, in 1935, that “the true natural model” of rationalism
is Maimonides—“the stumbling-block on which modern rationalism falls.” Strauss,
Philosophy and Law, 21.
51. See Strauss’s letter to Voegelin of 9 March 1946 in Glaube und Wissen: Der
Briefwechsel zwischen Eric Voegelin und Leo Strauss von 1934 bis 1964. trans. Emmanuel
Patard and Peter-Joachim Opitz (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2010), 36.
52. Ibid., 41.
53. Indeed, even the most “modern” neo-Cartesian development in his thought,
Husserl’s egology, “can be understood only as an answer to the Platonic-Aristotelian
question regarding the Nous.” Ibid. For Husserl’s 1929 defense of phenomenology as
“transcendental idealism”—and, specifically, as a “systematic egological science” and
an explication of the ego from which the world “gets its whole sense,” see his Cartesian
Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1999),
86, 21.
54. Strauss’s letter to Voegelin of 9 March 1946 in Glaube und Wissen, 36. Strauss
refers to Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.
For Strauss’s praise of Husserl, see also his “Living Issues of German Postwar Philosophy,”
137: “As regards Husserl’s work, I can only say that I believe it surpasses in significance
everything I know of, which was done in Germany in the last 50 years.”
55. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 7.
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