SOURCE: Dallmayr, Fred. “Leo Strauss, Peregrinus.” Social Research 61, no. 4 (winter 1994): 877-906.

[In the following essay, Dallmayr explores Strauss's perspective on two prominent thematic concerns in his work: the tension between ancient and modern thought and the relationship between “Athens and Jerusalem.”]

The foreigner allows you to be yourself by making a foreigner of you.

—Edmond Jabès

More perhaps than ever before, the stranger, the alien, the displaced or exiled stands today in the forefront of both theoretical and political concerns. The shrinkage of our world coupled with the upsurge of powerful national or ethnic particularisms multiplies the chances of displacement, while at the same time saddling it with unprecedented risks. On the theoretical plane, this situation is reflected in the attention paid by contemporary philosophy—chiefly its Continental variant—to the theme of otherness, alterity, and dispossession. Among displaced people, the role of the emigré scholar or diasporic intellectual has always aroused special interest, mainly due to the impact of that role (actual or imagined) on the rest of society. To be sure, exile or emigration cannot signify here literally “dis-placement”—in the sense of a complete exodus from all times and places or a retreat into the world of “free-floating intellectuals” (to borrow Karl Mannheim's phrase). Seen as such an exodus, exile would no longer be experienced as exile or a wrenching journey, and the relation of the emigré to the host society would be flattened into mutual indifference or neglect. As it happens, displacement for most emigrés has had the character of an agony—in the sense of an “agon” involving unsettlement and mutual contestation. To this extent, exile implies a trespassing of concrete boundaries, making the emigré more an engaged Grenzgänger between places than a wandering tourist.

Among Western countries, none has experienced a more steady influx of emigré intellectuals than the United States. Ever since the colonial period, waves upon waves of talented people from foreign shores have enriched and nourished, as well as unsettled and disturbed, the complex fabric of American life. As history records, the reception accorded to these talents has varied over time, ranging from attempts at instant assimilation to episodes of ostracism, “know-nothingism,” and harsh vituperation. In our own century, the influx of emigré scholars reached unparalleled levels, chiefly due to the rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe. Among the various institutional arrangements designed to accommodate or absorb this massive influx, the most impressive—both quantitatively and qualitatively—was surely the so-called University in Exile established at the New School for Social Research in 1933. At that time, apart from sporadic instances of xenophobia, America as host country was remarkably willing to welcome new ideas or perspectives in all fields of learning—ideas which politically ranged from the conservative Right to the radical Left (including Marxism).¹ The situation changed progressively after World War II when the ideological rigidities of the Cold War—epitomized by McCarthyism—placed a heavy onus on left-leaning intellectuals critical of the structural constraints of capitalism. In the meantime, a completely new constellation has emerged in the wake of the demise of the former Soviet Union and the large-scale intellectual retreat from traditional Marxist positions. In this situation, marked by the triumphant ideological self-assertion of liberalism or neo-liberalism, the onus is now squarely placed on all intellectual deviants from the reigning creed, all those not fully reconciled with what Jacques Derrida has recently called the “good conscience” of the liberal hegemony (Derrida, 1994, p. 34). Hence, it is all the more important and timely to recall and commemorate the legacy of the emigré scholars assembled in New York around the mid-point of our century.

As an emigré myself—although belonging to a younger generation—I have always felt a special affinity and sense of indebtedness to the University in Exile and its accumulated wealth of scholarship. That sense was compounded in my case by the condition of my chosen field of intellectual endeavor: political science or the study of politics. When I first came to the United States, that field was entirely dominated by a confining mode of positivism or behavioral scientism, an outlook bent on relegating political theory or philosophy to an obsolete relic of the past. At that juncture, a counter-movement arose led by a small band of intellectual insurgents, many of whom had at some point been affiliated with the New School—and who included prominently Leo Strauss. The early years of my professional life were entirely overshadowed by this struggle. Yet, regarding Leo Strauss specifically, I must confess that my attitude at the time was ambivalent if not deeply skeptical. Although appreciating his labors on behalf of political philosophy, I—like many of my peers or friends in political theory—was repelled by a certain aura surrounding Strauss's work: the aura of “Straussianism.” By Straussianism I mean here a conservative if not reactionary kind of ideology promoted by a guru-like figure shrowded in “esoteric” wisdom and surrounded by a horde of unreflective acolytes. Associating philosophy, including political philosophy, with some form of critical reflection, perhaps even Socratic wondering, I could not see how my field could in the long run be advanced by this doctrinaire stance. In the meantime, the intellectual situation has changed, and so has my attitude. On a renewed reading of his works, I discovered that Strauss's thought is basically at odds with the Straussianism I suspected—a fact which is now also acknowledged and emphasized by his more thoughtful disciples.² Not only is his thought so at odds, but it contains (I believe) fruitful insights and guideposts which contemporary theorizing should not carelessly ignore. To put matters simply: I think Strauss's work is too important to be left to “Straussians.”

The importance of his work is underscored by developments to which I alluded previously: the upsurge of liberalism or neo-liberalism as not only a Western but potentially global hegemonic ideology. Here, new intellectual fault lines or divisions are bound to emerge. In a recent book titled The Anatomy of Antiliberalism, Stephen Holmes—bypassing a supposedly defunct Marxism—attacked Strauss as a leading figure in a long line of “antiliberal” thinkers, a line stretching back (curiously) to the French counter-revolutionary writer Joseph de Maistre. As Holmes wrote, Strauss was intensely “undemocratic and illiberal” for a number of reasons, but especially for espousing a model of society consisting of “the sedated masses, the gentlemen rulers, the promising puppies, and the philosophers who pursue knowledge, manipulate the gentlemen, anesthetize the people, and housebreak the most talented young” (Holmes, 1993, pp. 74, 79).³ Many Straussians have taken offense at this portrayal (an offense no doubt aggravated by Holmes' somewhat acerbic language). Some have even tried to reverse the premises by presenting Strauss as an ideal liberal or liberal democrat for our times.⁴ I am not entirely sure about the wisdom of this strategy: while it is unlikely to convince his enemies, the attempt is prone to muffle or domesticate the intrinsic provocativeness, and thus the timely importance, of Strauss's thought. Perhaps one should take seriously Strauss's argument in one of his essays when he writes: “All rational liberal philosophic positions have lost their significance and power. One may deplore this, but I for one cannot bring myself to cling to philosophic positions which have been shown to be inadequate.” What this statement indicates is a critically reflective attitude toward a reigning thought system, nourished by philosophical qualms; but having critical qualms about liberalism is by no means the same as being illiberal or antiliberal—just as being critical of modern rationalism does not equal a leap into irrationalism or antirationalism. Most importantly, critical reflectiveness may well be the best service philosophy can render to the cause of liberty or liberality. To quote Strauss again from the same essay: “It would be wholly unworthy of us as thinking beings not to listen to the critics of democracy—even if they are enemies of democracy—provided they are thinking men (and especially great thinkers) and not blustering fools” (Strauss, 1989, pp. 29, 31-2).⁵

In this essay, it cannot be my ambition to review the broad sweep of Strauss's writings—something which would vastly exceed the limits both of space and my ability. Instead, I intend to concentrate on two prominent, and probably central, themes in his work: the so-called “battle between ancients and moderns” and the relation between Athens and Jerusalem. Under the rubric of the first theme, Strauss situates himself vis-à-vis the status of modernity—one of whose crucial ingredients is (modern) liberalism. In contemporary parlance, he inserts himself into the ongoing “discourse of modernity,” that is, the debate over whether the modern age constitutes historically speaking a progress or a regress (or something in between). Under the second heading, Strauss positions himself particularly vis-à-vis the ascent of modern secularism—which, in turn, is a close corollary of political liberalism with its separation of public and private realms (and the concomitant privatization of religion). In both instances, Strauss places or displaces himself at the outskirts or margins of the dominant thought paradigm, a move which enables him to gain a critical perspective on our time. In so placing or displacing himself, one should note, Strauss does not simply exile himself into a no-man's land or adopt a “view from nowhere”; instead he takes his bearings from the counterfoil of distinct border lands of modernity and their teachings (highlighted by the labels “ancients” and “Jerusalem”).⁶ In this manner, Strauss shows himself as an emigré or peregrinus in our midst—but not simply as a detached sightseer; most emphatically, his writings are not aimless travelogues but animated by a deep, even passionate concern for the future direction of our time. In exploring this concern, I shall adopt the method favored by Strauss himself by sticking closely to selected texts.

The issue of the relation between “ancients and moderns” has been articulated by Strauss on numerous occasions. Typically in his presentation, the relation between the two terms is not one of mutual supplementation; nor is it dialectical in a manner which would allow their “sublation” (Aufhebung) in a higher synthesis. Instead, the accent is placed on struggle or conflict, that is, on the “querelle des anciens et modernes” involving reciprocal contestation. Repeatedly, Strauss speaks of the looming “crisis of modernity” or of the “modern project,” a crisis triggered by the wholesale forgetting or oblivion of basic teaching still available to the “ancients” (the latter being a stand-in for ancient or classical philosophy).⁷ To elucidate the forgetful and crisis-prone character of modernity I shall turn here first to an essay of 1952 titled “Progress or Return?” and subsequently amplify this account by glancing at one of Strauss's most seminal writings, his Natural Right and History (1953). (The essay, actually a sequence of two lectures, remained unpublished until 1981.) According to the 1952 essay, modernity is characterized by a host of distinctive features—among which, however, it is possible to extract a relatively small number of crucial traits. In Strauss's portrayal, the first and most basic feature of modernity or modern thought—from which all others in a sense derive—is its “anthropocentric” character, that is, its focus on “man” as the pivot of knowledge and action, in contradistinction from the “theocentric” character of biblical and medieval thought and the “cosmocentric” outlook of classical antiquity. This focus is said to surface clearly in the structure of modern philosophical thought, particularly in the accent on the grounding function of the cogito, subjectivity, consciousness, and self-constituting human activity. Strauss recalls some key phrases epitomizing the modern stance, like “we only know what we make” (Hobbes) and “understanding prescribes to nature its laws” (Kant). The underlying idea in all these formulations, he notes, is “that all truths, or all meaning, all order, all beauty, originate in the thinking subject, in human thought, in man” (Strauss, 1989b, pp. 243-44).

Closely linked with anthropocentrism as a point of departure, in Strauss's account, is a shift or rupture in “moral orientation”: namely, the shift from an emphasis on virtue, broadly understood, to an accent on man-centered or subject-centered interests, claims, or wants. In lieu of the classical or premodern conception of human life as embedded in a web of relationships and mutual obligations, modernity tends to disassemble relationships into an array of atomized individuals dedicated to securing their primary interests (particularly the famous triad of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.) A corollary of this moral shift is a radically new understanding of the notion of “rights”—a topic to which I shall return shortly; in lieu of the older view of rights as an outgrowth of moral right or “rightness” (reflecting an embeddedness which also lays claims on humans), the modern outlook tends to construe rights as the endowment of autonomous agency, that is, as a capacity of self-constituting subjects. Seen from the perspective of classical thought, this change amounts to a shift from reason to will and from virtue to desire and passion. As Strauss writes (not without hyperbole), in modernity “the passions are in a way emancipated, because in the traditional notion the passion is subordinate to the action, and the action means virtue.” Basically, what looms behind the turn to interests, rights, and individual claims is the modern preoccupation, perhaps obsessive preoccupation, with human emancipation and “freedom”—where the difference between freedom and license is obscure or constantly subject to renegotiation. Coupled with this turn to freedom and autonomy is the modern fascination with artifacts, technical production, and even willful self-production in the sense of radical self-constitution. In Strauss's words: “The good life does not consist, as it did according to the earlier notion, in compliance with a pattern antedating the human will, but consists primarily in originating the pattern itself. … [Man] makes himself what he is; man's very humanity is acquired” (Strauss, 1989b, pp. 244-45).

Human autonomy and self-production are liable to inject into human affairs an element of restlessness and malleability which is at odds with the relative calmness and stability of classical worldviews. Departing from classical views of time or temporality, modernity—and this is its third feature for Strauss—is gripped by a frenzy for change and innovation, a frenzy which undergirds the modern infatuation with “history,” and especially with a mode of teleology which is no longer classical (because it is open-ended): the teleology of infinite human and social “progress.” As the essay indicates, the modern concern with history does seem to acknowledge a certain kind of human embeddedness or conditioning; but this conditioning only points back to previous modes of self-production and, thus, to steps along the road of emancipation. “The so-called discovery of history,” we read, “consists in the realization, or in the alleged realization, that man's freedom is radically limited by his earlier use of his freedom” rather than by “his nature or by the whole order of nature or creation.” Regarding the issue of teleology or the direction of historical change, Strauss insists on the importance of distinguishing between the classical view of “perfection” and the modern concept of infinite “progress.” In the classical notion, perfection or human development always implied a return to beginnings or a movement whereby one “becomes what one is” (or what one is meant to be); differently phrased, the “simply good” or the “end” was “located in the beginning.” The modern conception of progress, by contrast, involves an accent on unlimited self-production, that is, on a movement whereby one fabricates what one is, ad infinitum. This means again a change from nature to artifact, or from createdness to (technical) self-creation. Summarizing his understanding of the difference between classical and modern teleology, Strauss writes: “I see two points. First, there is lacking in the classical conception the notion of a guaranteed parallelism between intellectual and social progress; secondly, there is in the modern conception no end of the progressive process through telluric or cosmic catastrophes” (Strauss, 1989b, pp. 235-36, 245).

The “querelle” between ancients and moderns was continued and fleshed out in Natural Right and History, with a focus on the shifting weights assigned to justice, virtue, rights, and desires. According to Strauss, ancient political philosophy maintained the view that certain ways of life or modes of conduct are naturally proper or right, a view which furnished the premise for what he calls the doctrine of “classic natural right.” In this conception, “natural” does not imply any kind of naturalistic or biological determinism, nor does it signal a retreat into a pre-social or extra-social terrain. On the contrary, human agents are seen as social begins “by nature,” that is, as naturally embedded in social and political groupings which provide the matrix of ethical concerns and obligations. In turn, social embeddedness does not transform natural right or rightness into an outgrowth of changeable convention or arbitrary agreement—which would rob right of its unfabricated naturalness; from the classical vantage, critical scrutiny of conventions could always yield pointers in the direction of appropriate standards (following the Socratic “dialectic” of opinion and truth). In Strauss's presentation, one of the most crucial aspects of classic natural right was its differentiated and inegalitarian character, a feature which accorded with the different functions performed in a well-ordered city and the different layers discernible in the human soul. In language reminiscent of Plato, Strauss speaks of the “hierarchic order of man's natural constitution” which is said to supply “the basis for natural right as the classics understood it” and to be reflected in the subordination of the body to the soul and of desire or passion to reason. The same kind of hierarchical ordering also governed the city or political community seen as the “soul writ large” or as the communal replica of the human striving for virtue and excellence. Although some capacity for virtue may be equally shared by all humans, ancient philosophy insisted that not all humans “strive for virtue with equal earnestness,” and among those who strive some require more guidance or direction than others. Given their dedication to perfection, classical thinkers in both moral and political matters, hence, “were not egalitarians.” In Strauss's pointed language: “Since men are then unequal in regard to human perfection, i.e., in the decisive respect, equal rights for all appeared to the classics as most unjust. They contended that some are by nature superior to others and therefore, according to natural right, the rulers of others” (Strauss, 1953, pp. 120-25, 127-30, 134-35).⁸

As can be expected from the preceding line of arguments, “modern natural right” in Strauss's study emerges as the antithesis of the classical viewpoint, a change effected through a radical reversal of priorities. Once love of virtue and wisdom gives way to more mundane concerns including the concern for self and personal autonomy, right loses its moral “naturalness” and is transformed into a synonym for self-interest and self-initiative; moreover, once human embeddedness in a differentiated social order is abandoned in favor of the conception of a pre-social “state of nature,” the differential quality of right is bound to give way to a set of basic claims or demands equally available to human agents at all times and places. In Strauss's portrayal, the first modern thinker to articulate these shifts with “marvellous clarity and force” was Thomas Hobbes. Starting from the premise of a disjointed pre-social condition with its looming peril of violence and destruction, Hobbes postulated as the most basic human claim—a claim equally pertaining to every human—the right to life and self-perservation as the cornerstone of his entire theory. The contrast with antiquity could not be more pronounced. For if the “desire for self-perservation,” in lieu of virtue, is the “root of all justice and morality,” then ethics is grounded not on “a duty but a right” (construed as desire). The situation is aggravated in Hobbes's case by the claim that self-perservation includes the right to the means required for this goal, and that everyone is by nature judge of these means—which cancels the earlier rule of wisdom. As Strauss writes (in a passage hardly welcome to modern liberals): “If we may call liberalism that political doctrine which regards as the fundamental political fact the rights, as distinguished from the duties, of man and which identifies the function of the state with the protection or the safeguarding of these rights, we must say that the founder of liberalism was Hobbes.” Hobbes's lead was followed and expanded by John Locke (despite his gestures toward a “law of nature” operative in the pre-social condition, gestures vitiated by his denial of “innate” or natural ideas of right). Going beyond his predecessor, Locke included among required means a right to the “natural” acquisition of property and its protection by society. But the structure of his argument obeyed the earlier model: natural rights for Locke are claims “antedating all duties for the same reason that, according to Hobbes, establishes as the fundamental moral fact the right of self-preservation” (Strauss, 1953, pp. 166, 181, 185-86, 202, 227, 234-36).

The second major theme pervading Strauss's work concerns the relation between Athens and Jerusalem, that is, broadly speaking the respective status of secular philosophy and religious faith. As in the case of the battle of ancients and moderns, the relation between the “two cities” in Strauss's thought is (at least in its basic structure) not one of mutual harmony and ready compatibility but one of strife and contestation. Not surprisingly, given his own background, the chief accent of his reflections rests on the status of (orthodox) Judaism—although, within limits, parallels can be drawn with other forms of monotheism (and perhaps even with some Eastern types of religion). In the following, my focus shall be mainly on two texts: an essay titled “Why We Remain Jews” (1962) and another essay with the title “Jerusalem and Athens: Some Preliminary Reflections” (1967); but I shall invoke the second text only to supplement or augment the arguments of the first. The first essay immediately delves into the difficult problem of the place of Judaism in the midst of modern secular society governed by the tenets of liberalism. In doing so, Strauss picks up a topic articulated long ago by Marx under the heading of the “Jewish Question.” Yet, whereas Marx had anticipated a solution or dissolution of that question in the context of a classless society—to be achieved through an emancipation of Jews first from the ghetto and secondly from their own particularity—Strauss points precisely in the opposite direction by challenging the liberal creed of assimilation. As he observes, assimilation under liberal auspices does not mean the equal co-existence of different traditions, but rather the subordination of particular faiths to a dominant thought system of a secular and universalist stripe. Moreover, given liberalism's segregation of state and society, of public and private realms, animosities curtailed on the public level are bound to resurface in social life with a vengeance. Thus, Strauss writes, liberal society “necessarily makes possible, permits, even fosters what is called by many people ‘discrimination’. And here in this well-known fact the ‘Jewish problem’ (if I may call it that) reappears” (Strauss, 1994, pp. 44-6).

Short of a dismantling of liberalism—an outlandish idea in view of totalitarian perils—the only conclusion to be derived from the preceding considerations for Strauss is that “it is impossible not to remain a Jew”; in other words, “it is impossible to run away from one's origins” or “to get rid of one's past by wishing it away.” The essay at this point reviews a number of prominent strategies proposed for “solving” and thus finally settling the Jewish question. In addition to the liberal strategy of wholesale assimilation, this array includes the recognition of Judaism as a “sect” or a private interest group based on voluntary membership—an option which conflicts with the fact that Jews are typically born into their faith. Another option—favored by many Jews in our century—is “political Zionism,” that is, the struggle for a Jewish homeland with political autonomy. For Strauss, however, despite its “honorable” intentions, this strategy constitutes only another disguised form of assimilation, namely, by levelling Judaism into the mold of the modern Western nation-state while neglecting its distinctive spiritual heritage. The latter defect was sought to be remedied by “cultural Zionism” which drew attention to Jewish art, literature, and intellectual achievements both in the present and the past. Although acknowledging its advantages over the purely political variant, Strauss in the end is skeptical even of this cultural strategy—and this for a reason which goes to the very heart of the issue looming between Athens and Jerusalem. As he writes—following in a sense the lead of post-liberal or “dialectical” theology (inaugurated by Karl Barth)—religion can in no way be reduced either to philosophy or any other cultural product or achievement. Jewish culture, he notes, means indeed

the product of the Jewish mind, in counterdistinction to other national minds. If we look, however, at what this means in specific terms, we see that the rock bottom of any Jewish culture are the Bible, Talmud, and Midrash. And if you take these things with a minimum of respect or seriousness, you must say they were not meant to be products of the Jewish mind. They were meant to be ultimately ‘from Heaven,’ and this is the crux of the matter: Judaism cannot be understood as a culture. … The substance is not culture, but divine revelation.

What this means is that the only appropriate way to deal with the Jewish problem is one which moves beyond cultural toward “religious Zionism”: “Return to the Jewish faith, to the faith of our ancestors” (Strauss, 1994, pp. 49-52).⁹

This move, however, is complicated in our time by the pervasive impact of modern secularism, and specifically by the widespread exposure of observant Jews (as well as other believers) to modern culture in general and critical philosophy in particular. Thus, the return to the ancestral faith is not unambiguously a “solution” to the Jewish problem, given the long-standing critical contestation of that faith (a critique dating back at least to the time of Spinoza). Strauss at this juncture revisits the issue of assimilation, focusing on the pressure of secularism exerted on believers by modern philosophy and science. In our century, this pressure has taken the form of an aggressive scientism or positivism disdainful of any element of non-empirical belief. As Strauss indicates, however (taking a leaf from Edmund Husserl), this scientism is ultimately self-defeating: for, while examining and giving an account of each facet of the world, positivist philosophy is unable to account for its own beginnings or underlying premises—which thus remain as contestible and mystery-shrouded as religious faith is presumed to be. Given the belief of contemporary scientists in the possibility of an infinite progress of science, Strauss notes, the target of scientific inquiry would likewise have to exhibit an “inner infinity.” Since the target of science, however, is “everything that is” or “being” as a whole, the assumption of an inner infinity necessarily entails that “being is mysterious” or unfathomable as such. This conclusion, in turn, lends credence to the substance of Jewish faith—which, if it is treated (by science) as a delusion, must at least be acknowledged to be a “heroic delusion.” In Strauss's portrayal, the substance of this faith is the belief that “the one thing needful is righteousness and charity,” a need which concurs with the view of creation by a “just and loving God, the holy God.” Lack of justice and charitableness in this view are not due to God but the result of continued human sinfulness—which testifies to the absence of final redemption. “The Jewish people and their fate,” Strauss adds, “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” (Strauss, 1994, pp. 60-2).

These comments are not meant to disparage modern science (in its own domain), and even less to suggest an ultimate convergence of science or scientific philosophy and religious faith. For Strauss, philosophy (including science) and religion remain separated by a gulf—although occasionally they may (as he says) “come within hailing distance.” The rift between the two, in his view, is particularly pronounced in the case of modern philosophy with its bent toward secularism, whereas in ancient philosophy we may sometimes detect tendencies toward a closer approximation. Yet, despite its non-secularist bent, even classical philosophy cannot be collapsed or coalesced with religion or theology—and this is due not to any mutual ill will but to the gulf yawning between critical human inquiry and the unconditional demands imposed on human thought by revelation. This aspect is clearly brought out in the second essay mentioned before, titled “Jerusalem and Athens.” Here, after noting that “Western man” was basically shaped by the two strands of biblical faith and Greek thought, Strauss initially alludes to the similarity or proximity of the two strands, a similarity deriving from their shared concern with wisdom. For “not only the Greek philosophers but the Greek poets as well were considered to be wise men,” while “the Torah is said in the Torah to be ‘your wisdom in the eyes of the nations’.” This proximity, however, is immediately sundered by the accent on difference and separation, a difference deriving from the diverse sources of wisdom: “According to the Bible, the beginning of wisdom is fear of the Lord; according to the Greek philosophers, the beginning of wisdom is wonder.” This divergence in proximity is clearly illustrated by a juxtaposition of Socrates, the original mentor of Western philosophy, and the Jewish prophets. Both Socrates and the prophets were impelled by a sense of mission, a mission triggered in the one case by the Delphic oracle and in the other by divine command. This similarity, however, conceals a basic split. In Strauss's words:

The fact that both Socrates and the prophets have a divine mission means or at any rate implies that both Socrates and the prophets are concerned with justice or righteousness, with the perfectly just society which as such would be free from all evils. To this extent Socrates' figuring out of the best social order and the prophets' vision of the Messianic age are in agreement. Yet whereas the prophets predict the coming of the Messianic age, Socrates merely holds that the perfect society is possible: whether it will ever be actual depends on an unlikely, although not impossible, coincidence, the coincidence of philosophy and political power.

(Strauss, 1983a, pp. 147-49, 168-71)

The difference has basically to do with the fact that prophetic prediction relies on divine intervention in, and interruption of, the course of human affairs, while Socratic expectation can only appeal to a possible occurrence, an occurrence which, though exceptional, still remains part of the ordinary course of the world. This divergence also affects the vision of perfection entertained by the two sides, with prophetic vision vastly exceeding even the most perfect city imaginable by the Socratic philosopher. As envisaged by the prophets, the Messianic age will be an “age of universal peace,” when “all nations shall come to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob.” On the other hand, even the best regime delineated by Socrates will only be able to animate a single city “which as a matter of course will become embroiled in wars with other cities”; thus, while terminating many forms of evil and corruption, the perfect city will not bring the cessation of warfare. The mentioned differences all converge on the point that philosophy is a human search or inquiry, whereas prophecy involves a witnessing to divine revelation or divine instruction. As Strauss observes, standing in the Socratic tradition, the philosopher is a “man who dedicates his life to the quest for knowledge of the good, of the idea of the good”; in the case of the prophets, on the other hand, there is “no need for the quest for knowledge of the good” because God has already disclosed to humankind the meaning of goodness. In accordance with this division, the prophets tend to address the people as a whole through hortative speech, whereas Socrates engages in dialogue or conversation about some disputed points of human knowledge. In the language of Socrates himself, Strauss notes, “the prophets are orators” while Socrates delights in “conversations” with his companions or interlocutors. The two types of positions—philosophy and religious-prophetic faith—cannot readily be combined, despite repeated attempts throughout history to affect a synthesis; for under the impact of modern secularism as well as political catastrophies of our age we are prone to wonder whether the two distinct strands of the Western tradition “are not more solid than that synthesis” (Strauss, 1983a, pp. 168-72).¹⁰

The preceding discussion was meant to offer a glimpse—though necessarily a very partial glimpse—of the rich fabric and provocative character of Strauss's work. Purposely I have concentrated on what I consider some key themes in that work, while bypassing his numerous detailed studies in the history of ideas (dealing with Spinoza, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and many others). Although sympathetic in many respects, my attitude toward his broader opus is not uncritical. Too frequently, I am afraid, Strauss himself sounds precisely like a typical “Straussian,” as this term was defined at the beginning. This aspect surfaces particularly in certain accents recurrent in his writings: especially in his tendency one-sidedly to privilege virtue over autonomy, traditional authority over freedom, and elite rule over popular participation (despite the admitted linkage of wisdom and consent). Another feature, not unrelated to the noted tendency, is the preference often granted to disjuncture over juncture, to dichotomous rupture or antinomy over reciprocity and correlation.¹¹ Furthermore, I detect in his writings numerous philosophical ambiguities and unresolved paradoxes (where “ambiguity” is not equivalent to a fruitful tension). Thus, while generally insisting on the political or life-world grounding of both science and pure theorizing. Strauss repeatedly accords to philosophy a status completely detached or immune from political contexts. Regarding the battle between ancient and modern philosophy, his texts clearly give precedence to the former over the latter—a privilege strangely disrupted or disarranged by the affinity of many of his arguments with Nietzschean teachings (where Nietzsche's master-slave distinction curiously seems to coalesce with a Platonic hierarchy of perfection). Finally, regarding the battle between philosophy and religion, Strauss's writings often suggest that the option between Athens and Jerusalem is the result of inexplicable choice—a claim which flatly contravenes both his critique of Weber's “decisionism” and the command-structure of biblical revelation.¹²

I shall not pursue these points further here—having developed over time a strong distaste for polemics (especially posthumous polemics). Instead, I wish to ponder in the remainder possible lessons which fruitfully might be derived from Strauss's work by Straussians and non-Straussians alike. As I indicated at the beginning, I believe there are many lessons to be learned—especially in the thematic area which has been the focus of these pages: the respective conflicts between ancients and moderns and Jerusalem and Athens (conflicts which are both diverse and overlapping in several ways). As it happens, it is precisely in regard to this broad thematic area that profound fissures have developed among students or followers of Strauss (to the point that observers now speak ironically of the “Strauss divided”). According to some readers, Strauss's own preference was unequivocally on the side of philosophy, specifically ancient philosophy, seen as a bulwark both against defective (egalitarian) forms of modern democracy and against religious obscurantism or fanaticism. To this extent, Strauss's work—though critical of some modern derailments—can be invoked on behalf of an “ennobled” vision of modernity (perhaps along the lines of an “aristocratic liberalism”). In the view of other followers, this interpretation is entirely misleading, because it neglects both Strauss's strong antimodernist animus as well as his real attachment to the tradition of biblical faith. To compound matters further, a third group ascribes to Strauss a stance above the arena of contestation, that is, the stance of an outsider or emigré from the quarrel between philosophy (ancient or modern) and religion. I consider all three alternatives unsatisfactory or mistaken: the first two because they prematurly terminate the quarrel in favor of a clear winning side, the third because it transforms Strauss into a neutral spectator making little or no contribution to ongoing concerns. As it seems to me, it is crucial to hold on to both sides of the polarities thematized by Strauss without absconding into a neutral realm. I believe this reading is “authorized” by Strauss himself, especially in this passage from “Progress or Return?” (which can hardly be treated as “esoteric writing”):

The recognition of two conflicting roots of Western civilization is, at first, a very disconcerting observation. Yet this realization has also something reassuring and comforting about it. The very life of Western civilization is the life between two codes, a fundamental tension. There is therefore no reason inherent in Western civilization itself, in its fundamental constitution, why it should give up life. But this comforting thought is justified only if we live that life, if we live that conflict.

(Strauss, 1989b, p. 270, emphasis added)¹³

Living the conflict, in my view, implies that the two poles of a fundamental opposition are both recognized and affirmed—in a manner which involves neither mutual rejection or negation, nor simple indifference or prevarication, and certainly not the withdrawal into a higher synthesis or “objective” standpoint. In counseling his readers to live through or sustain prevailing conflicts, Strauss squarely inserts himself into the intellectual agonies or dilemmas of our age, shunning the stance of a bystander. Sustaining prevailing agonies, however, further means that the parties to a “querelle” refrain from encapsulating themselves in a ghetto-like isolation or parochial exclusivism, while simultaneously resisting submergence in a bland assimilation or melting-pot ideology. This reading, I think, is again underwritten by Strauss himself when he continues the just quoted passage with these lines:

No one can be both a philosopher and a theologian, nor, for that matter, some possibility which transcends the conflict between philosophy and theology, or pretends to be a synthesis of both. But every one of us can be and ought to be either one or the other, the philosopher open to the challenge of theology or the theologian open to the challenge of philosophy.

(Emphasis added)

In modern philosophical parlance, Strauss's treatment of “querelle” comes close, I believe, to Nietzschean “agon” as well as to Heidegger's and Derrida's formulations of “difference.” As construed by recent interpreters, it is true, Nietzsche's term sometimes is equated with relentless warfare involving mutual denial or rejection; but this view surely ignores his pleas for an end to hostile “ressentiment.” Such resentment is canceled in Heidegger's portrayal of “ontological difference” as well as in Derrida's “différance”—notions which exceed the confines of both antithesis and synthesis. For present purposes, I find particularly instructive Heidegger's comments on art and on the tension between the constituent elements of art-works: “The work-quality of the art-work consists in the enactment of the strife between world and earth. … The serene repose of a work at peace with itself reflects the initimacy of that strife” (Heidegger, 1971, pp. 48-50).¹⁴

As it seems to me, notions of this kind may be helpful in reviewing the basic quarrels at the heart of Strauss's thought. With respect to the battle of ancients and moderns, agonistic difference implies that both ancient and modern philosophy allow a process of mutual questioning and contestation, while simultaneously preserving the integrity of their respective positions. This means that ancient philosophy must permit itself to be contested by modern philosophical thought, particularly by the modern accent on freedom and autonomous agency; surely ancient modes of social stratification and patriarchal governance cannot avoid being placed under pressure by more democratic ideas of self-governance of our age. This pressure, in my view, concurs quite well with Strauss's repeated admission that the point is not simply to abscond nostalgically into the past but to recuperate somehow the memory of the past—for the present and the future. Conversely, modern philosophy must likewise undergo the trial of contestation by facing up to the teachings of classical philosophy (and perhaps of non-Western traditions of thought as well). In this respect, the classical notion of “virtue” seen as a corollary of human embeddedness—and as a counterpoint to atomistic self-reliance—surely deserves close attention in our time of widespread anomie. Under the impact of the modern cogito, human life is sometimes seen as a process of radical self-constitution and even self-fabrication, in a manner which completely shuns considerations of duty. This aspect surfaces particularly in recent discussions of identity formation—where identity (individual or social) is often treated as the result of arbitrary invention or construction and, hence, also as the target of arbitrary deconstruction at any time. Yet, even outside of “essentialist” beliefs (postulating a fixed human nature), such constructionism clearly misses the mark by ignoring (among other things) the shared or reciprocal character of identity. To give simple examples (from which broader parallels might be drawn): a husband cannot suddenly “constitute” himself as a bachelor without disarranging and damaging relations with his wife and with the rest of his and her family. Likewise, a father cannot suddenly claim radical autonomy without thereby rupturing obligations to his children. To acknowledge these points, however, means to recognize the priority of ethical bonds over willful fabrication.¹⁵

These considerations carry over into Strauss's conception of (classical) “natural right”—certainly one of his more provocative views. Under the impact of modern science, nature has been transformed into a causal mechanism or into a network of cause-and-effect chains—in a manner which renders the notion of a right “by nature” nearly unintelligible. To make up for the loss of the classical notion, modern philosophy has developed the notion of human (sometimes called natural) rights seen as universal endowment of human agency—but where agency itself is only a link in a cause-and-effect process. Yet, despite and perhaps precisely because of these changes, our time has seen the emergence of a new sensitivity toward nature: that is, an awareness that there may be right or wrong ways of behaving, and perhaps even obligations, toward nature—notwithstanding the latter's lack of self-constituting agency. Broadening this awareness, there might also be the recognition of some kind of natural rightness in interhuman relations, once self-constitution is muted in favor of reciprocity—where “natural rightness” differs both from a naturalistic biological determinism and from artificial production or convention. Reflecting on the absence in the Hebrew Bible of a term precisely corresponding to the traditional concept of “nature,” Strauss at one point (following Maimonides) discovers in biblical thought a suggestive, though ambivalent and “pre-philosophic” equivalent to that concept: the notion of “custom” or “way.” Understood in its biblical context, he notes, custom or way cannot be equated with an artificial code or a constructed set of principles, nor can it be reduced to a causal determinism (in the sense of modern natural science). Thus, he adds, we came here “to the root of the problem” or at least to an insight which adumbrates the meaning of natural right. In an intriguing side-glance, Strauss refers to possible non-Western parallels of this insight:

I have also learned from a Hindu student that the Hindu term dharma, which is usually translated as “religion,” means custom or way, and can refer to such things as the custom or way of iron, of trees, and of what-not. And since the custom or way of human beings is, of course, the Hindu religion, it means derivatively, if most importantly, what is according to religion.

(Strauss, 1989b, pp. 253-54)¹⁶

An important corollary of Strauss's “natural right”—one particularly controversial under liberal-democratic auspices—is his insistence that rightness of this kind is differentiated and not universal-egalitarian in the modern sense. Borrowing a leaf from the “ancients,” Strauss repeatedly speaks of the differential character of human endowments and of the basic “heterogeneity” of social life—sometimes going to the length of asserting a kind of “natural inequality” based on “essential differences” between humans. Differentiation, one should note, implies here not only a factual diversity but a vertical gradation, pointing to a hierarchy of perfection. These arguments clearly raise complex and troublesome issues concerning the relation between equality and (non-arbitrary) difference—issues which cannot simply be resolved through ideological fiat (even outside “essentialist” claims).¹⁷ Vertical gradation, one needs to add, not only involves a human ranking but also and above all a gradation between human inquiry and divine revelation. This aspect leads us back to the second conflict discussed before: that between Athens and Jerusalem. The significance of Jerusalem (and of revealed religion in general) here consists in the fact that it signals the disruption or interruption of merely human affairs: namely, the intervention in the world by a “transcendent” or transcendently immanent God or divine power. Seen in this light, modern secularism involves the erasure or emasculation of a crucial hierarchical difference. More pointedly phrased, it amounts to a kind of “injustice” deriving from the one-sided cancellation of the reciprocal bond between humans and God, previously couched in covenantal terms. What this cancellation entails for Strauss (and other religious believers) is the flattening of human experience into a self-indulgent humanism or anthropocentrism; with the removal of the rugged peaks of faith, what is left is only the shallow landscape of a bland cosmopolitanism.¹⁸

These considerations bring back into view the basic point made by Strauss in “Why We Remain Jews”: the importance of biblical faith as a bulwark against the pull of assimilation. This pull has been greatly intensified since the time of his writing by the relentless march of globalization, a movement proceeding under the aegis of Western science, technology, and industry, with their homogenizing effects on cultural and religious differences. As a counterweight to this movement, it is important to recollect and rearticulate distinct cultural and religious traditions—which does not at all equal a retreat into parochialism or xenophobic exclusivism. It is with reference to this contemporary predicament that Strauss pays tribute to Heidegger—in a way which deserves to be pondered. According to Heidegger, he notes, our age heralds the “victory of an ever more completely urbanized, ever more completely technological West over the whole planet,” regardless of whether this triumph is brought about by compulsion or by “soapy advertisement of the output of mass production.” Against this sway of uniformity or homogeneity, Heidegger cultivated a thinking in and of difference: that is, a thinking attentive to the distinct roots of different faiths and cultures—an attention which precisely might pave the way for a genuine openness and reciprocity (including the reciprocity between West and East). In proceeding along these lines, Strauss observes, Heidegger shows a clear grasp of “the dimensions of the problem of a world society”; foremost among these dimensions is the need for the modern West to overcome its own triumphalism by recovering “its own deepest roots, which antedate its rationalism” and “in a way antedate the separation of West and East.”¹⁹ Seeking to retrieve these buried resources, however, means to embark on the path of emigration: the path of the emigré from, or at least the Grenzgänger on the borders of, modern Western culture. In his own writings, Strauss steadfastedly moved along this path of the emigré—though of one passionately concerned with the fate of our “world society.” To this extent, Strauss was always, in the words of Edmond Jabès, a “foreigner carrying in the crook of his arm a tiny book.” And as Jabès adds, “How can a foreigner define himself in relation to the foreignness of others? His ties to the world are, first of all, questions regarding his difference” (Jabès, 1993, p. 76).²⁰

Notes

1. For a review of the vicissitudes of emigré scholarship during this period, see especially Krohn, 1993.

2. See especially Tarcov, 1994.

3. There are some disturbing comments on emigré scholarship in the book. Thus, at one point, Holmes calls Strauss “an exotic flower transplanted from Central Europe to the plains of the American Midwest” (Holmes, 1993, p. 87). The Preface casts the net still more broadly:

   Having been welcomed as immigrants to this country, they [German emigré scholars] hesitated to announce that the ‘decline’ of modern times was caused by a ‘forgetfulness of Being’, in Heidegger's portentous phrase; that would have been wholly unintelligible to their culturally backward readers. Decadence resulted from our forgetting the Greek polis (Arendt) or losing sight of classical natural right (Strauss). Meanwhile Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, and other members of the Frankfurt school helped popularize Heidegger's suggestion that ‘modern man’, having lost his primeval reverence for nature, has adopted a basically instrumental attitude toward the world (Holmes, 1993, p. xi).

   For an able critique of the book's treatment of Strauss, see Berkowitz, 1994.

4. Thus, in their “Introduction,” the editors of Leo Strauss: Political Philosopher and Jewish Thinker remark that Strauss managed “to stir the minds and souls of numerous contemporaries to seek a much richer understanding of the substantive and procedural requisites of living the good life in a liberal democracy” (Deutsch and Nicgorski, 1994, p. 31).

5. Strauss's comments may be compared with Pangle's own statement in his “Introduction” to the volume: “Yet Strauss was far from joining those among his great contemporaries, like Heidegger, who regarded modern political rationalism as bankrupt; still less did he believe that liberal, and especially American liberal, democracy was tottering on its last legs” (Pangle, 1989a, pp. xxiii-xxiv).

6. For a critique of the “view from nowhere” and a discussion of Heidegger's contributions to an overcoming of this view, see Taylor, 1993. Compare also Habermas, 1987.

7. Compare Strauss's essays on “The Crisis of Our Time” and “The Crisis of Political Philosophy” in Spaeth, 1964, pp. 41-54, 91-103. For a general overview of the “querelle,” see Cropsey, 1964. As one may note, Strauss's talk of a modern crisis carries distant echoes of Edmund Husserl's famous The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1934-37). For Strauss's comments on Husserl, especially the latter's early work, see his “Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy,” in Strauss, 1983b, pp. 29-37.

8. Strauss does not ignore the linkage of wisdom or wise authority and citizens' consent; but he argues that whereas in modernity “consent takes precedence over wisdom,” from the vantage of classic natural right “wisdom takes precedence over consent” (Strauss, 1953, p. 141). I bypass Strauss's distinction between three types of classic natural right teachings: the Socratic-Platonic, the Aristotelian, and the Thomistic (except to note that his own account seems closest to the first).

9. Countering a statement by Heinrich Heine to the effect that “Judaism is not a religion but a misfortune,” Strauss writes in an eloquent and moving passage: “Our past, our heritage, our origin is then not misfortune as Heine said—still less, baseness. But suffering indeed; heroic suffering; suffering from the heroic act of self-dedication of a whole nation to something which it regarded as infinitely higher than itself—in fact, as the infinitely highest. No Jew can do anything better for himself today than to live in remembering this past” (Strauss, 1994, p. 56).

10. The essay on “Progress or Return?” is more adamant on the conflict between philosophy and religion. As Strauss notes there, the “radical disagreement” between Jerusalem and Athens is

    frequently played down, and this playing down has a certain superficial justification, for the whole history of the West presents itself at first glance as an attempt to harmonize, or to synthesize, the Bible and Greek philosophy. … [Yet] these attempts at harmonization were doomed to failure for the following reason: each of these two roots of the Western world sets forth one thing as the one thing needful, and the one thing needful proclaimed by the Bible is incompatible, as it is understood by the Bible, with the one thing needful proclaimed by Greek philosophy, as it is understood by Greek philosophy. To put it very simply and therefore somewhat crudely, the one thing needful according to Greek philosophy is the life of autonomous understanding. The one thing needful as spoken by the Bible is the life of obedient love. … The conflict is really a radical one (Strauss, 1989b, pp. 245-246).

11. This leaning may have something to do with Strauss's early roots in neo-Kantianism with its divorce of science and ethics (though a certain influence of Nietzsche and Carl Schmitt may also have played a role). Despite this penchant, however, Strauss is not unaware of the role of mediation. As he writes in “Progress or Return?” the very disagreement between Jerusalem and Athens “presupposes some agreement. In fact, every disagreement, we may say, presupposes some agreement, because people must disagree about something and must agree as to the importance of that something” (Strauss, 1989b, p. 246).

12. Regarding the importance of choice, see Strauss, 1989b, p. 269, and Strauss, 1965, p. 29. Regarding Strauss's affinities with Nietzsche, compare, for example, Drury, 1988, and Tolle, 1992. Next to Nietzsche, Strauss also seems to have been influenced by Schmitt—though he replaced Schmitt's horizontal “friend-foe” distinction with a more vertical distinction of moral worth; on this relation see especially Shell, 1962.

13. I find myself here disagreeing with an argument advanced by Steven B. Smith in an otherwise very insightful essay: namely, that for Strauss the modern problem became “a conflict between assimilation and eventual absorption in a universal humanity or the assertion of stubborn loyalty to a particular tradition. … It was precisely his choice to stand outside of or above this conflict as a sort of mediator between fidelity and assimilation that, I would argue, constitutes the uniqueness of Strauss's answer to the Jewish Question.” See Smith, 1962. Withdrawal from, or refusal to “live,” the conflict is even more pronounced in Werner J. Dannhauser's claim that Strauss had “no doctrine” or at best one which positioned him both “against the representatives of Heidegger and God” (where Heidegger seems to be a stand-in for philosophy); see Dannhauser, 1975. Regarding aristocratic liberalism, see the “Introduction” in Deutsch and Nicgorski, 1994, p. 23. Compare also Pangle, 1992.

14. Compare also Heidegger, 1969, and Derrida, 1982. Regarding recent Nietzsche interpretations, see especially Allison, 1977.

15. Willful fabrication or self-assertion here is not equivalent to human “freedom” (properly understood). From the above points parallels can be drawn, I believe, to contemporary issues of feminism and ethnic identity: in every case, identity formation cannot simply be the result of unilateral fiat but has to respect the context of reciprocity (which includes reciprocal contestation).

16. Understood in this way, the Hindu dharma clearly comes very close to the Chinese tao. One might also remember here that Heidegger considered his own thinking as simply a “way.”

17. Regarding the assertion of “natural equality” and “essential differences,” see especially Strauss, 1964, pp. 92-4. Among the broader issues raised here is that of the relation between the Western ego cogitans, conceived along egalitarian lines, and the Indian “homo hierarchicus” as discussed by Dumont. Compare Dumont, 1980, and Halbfass, 1991.

18. In the above I draw no inference regarding Strauss's personal religious beliefs. Quite apart from his work, contemporary philosophy has been re-sensitized to the demands of non-negotiable otherness, particularly by the writings of Emmanuel Levinas with his emphasis on the “face” of the other, especially the infinite other (or God). See, for example, Levinas, 1985. In Heidegger, one might add, the “call” of being and that of conscience are likewise not self-generated but demand a proper responsiveness.

19. Strauss actually writes that Heidegger is “the only man who has an inkling of the dimensions of the problem of a world society.” See Strauss, 1989a, p. 43. Regarding Heidegger's political derailment, Strauss comments, with remarkable restraint and fairness, “It was in the hope of European resurgence that Heidegger perversely welcomed 1933. He became disappointed and withdrew. What did the failure of the Nazis teach him? Nietzsche's hope of a united Europe ruling the planet, of a Europe not only united but revitalized by this new, transcendent responsibility of planetary rule, had proved to be a delusion” (Strauss, 1989a, p. 41).

20. The text also contains this memorable line: “The Jew does not quote the book. He is quoted by it” (Jabès, 1993, p. 57).

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