SOURCE: Smith, Steven B. “Destruktion or Recovery?: Leo Strauss's Critique of Heidegger.” Review of Metaphysics 51, no. 2 (December 1997): 345-77.

[In the following essay, Smith evaluates Strauss's treatment of and relationship to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger.]

Of the numerous legacies bequeathed by Leo Strauss, his influence on the study of German philosophy frequently goes least mentioned. Apart from some early reviews and other occasional pieces, Strauss left no major work on any German thinker.¹ With the exception of the chapter on Max Weber in Natural Right and History and a short essay on Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil written near the end of his life, there are no works on such giants of the German Aufklärung as Mendelssohn, Kant, and Hegel to rival his studies of other seminal figures in the history of political thought.² Why, for example, did Strauss not write a Thoughts on Kant to parallel his study of Machiavelli, or The Argument and Action of Hegel's ‘Philosophy of Right’ to complement his commentary on the Laws of Plato, or The Literary Character of Nietzsche's ‘Zarathustra’ modeled after his essay on Maimonides's Guide of the Perplexed? In any case, for a thinker like Strauss who has emphasized that what a person does not say is almost as important as what he does, such a startling omission calls for comment.

The one partial exception to Strauss's generally curt treatment of German philosophy is, of course, Martin Heidegger.³ One could almost say that Heidegger is the unnamed presence to whom or against whom all of Strauss's writings are in large part directed. Strauss's acquaintance with Heidegger went back to the early twenties. He described how upon hearing Heidegger in 1922, it slowly became evident that Heidegger was preparing a “revolution” in thought the likes of which had not been experienced since Hegel.⁴ Heidegger brought to the study of philosophy a “passion” to the problems which showed up the “lostness” and emptiness of the then regnant academic orthodoxies, including that of his erstwhile dissertation adviser, the neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer. The famous confrontation between Heidegger and Cassirer at Davos in 1929 confirmed this fact for anyone with “sensitivity to greatness.”⁵

At the same time that Heidegger commanded Strauss's highest respect, he also elicited many of his sharpest criticisms. Heidegger accepted Nietzsche's proposition that human life and thought is radically historical. The meaning of Heidegger's “radical historicism” was not void of political consequences.⁶ Heidegger was not the only thinker of note but he was the greatest thinker to embrace Hitler's revolution of 1933. Since the publication of Victor Farias's Heidegger and Nazism in 1989 the now infamous “Heidegger problem” has become something of a public scandal.⁷ Strauss pointed to this scandal long ago. “One is bound to misunderstand Heidegger's thought radically,” he wrote, if one does not see its “intimate connection” to the events of 1933.⁸ Heidegger may have surpassed all his contemporaries in terms of “speculative intelligence,” yet he was “at the same time intellectually the counterpart of what Hitler was politically.”⁹ Indeed, Strauss notes that Heidegger, who had never praised any other contemporary political movement or leader, even refused to repudiate National Socialism long after Hitler had been “muted.”¹⁰

It is one thing to trace the influence of Heidegger on Strauss, quite another to evaluate it. Does Strauss's alleged “Heideggerianism” provide the reader with a critical perspective on some of the problems of modernity not available to those operating within a more standard liberal democratic framework? Or does Strauss's appropriation of certain Heideggerian tropes lead to dangerous antiliberal doctrines crucially at odds with the spirit of individualistic modernity? This latter possibility has been developed at considerable length by the French critic Luc Ferry in his book Rights—The New Quarrel Between the Ancients and the Moderns.¹¹ Here we find the most impressive case to date alleging Strauss's indebtedness to Heidegger and bemoaning the political consequences of that indebtedness.

The core of The New Quarrel is that Strauss took over Heidegger's wholesale critique of modernity, but turned it away from first philosophy or “fundamental ontology” and gave it a more directly political meaning. Ferry asserts boldly that Strauss's “political critique of modernity” is “fueled by” the “philosophical presuppositions” of Heideggerian phenemenology.¹² Strauss is said to have “almost literally transposed” Heidegger's “phenomenological deconstruction of metaphysical humanism” to the domain of political philosophy.¹³ Ferry notes that unlike Heidegger, Strauss's critique of modernity did not inveigh against rationalism and as such did not lead to the invocation of a new mythos.¹⁴ This qualification notwithstanding, he maintains “undeniably” that Strauss's antimodernism is dictated by the same “logic” that inspired Heidegger.¹⁵

The upshot of this “logic” is clear. “The political motivation for a return to classical thinking,” Ferry says, “is deeply antidemocratic.”¹⁶ Strauss's thinking is antidemocratic because it assumes that the political world mirrors or is an imitation of the natural order. Because classical political philosophy “in Strauss's sense” depends upon a teleological cosmology, it is said to follow that Strauss is committed to justifying a political hierarchy where individuals are “destined to occupy different hierarchical stations in the social body.” Plato's Republic is called “the most striking example” of this point of view.¹⁷ The idea that Strauss attempts to justify political inequality by reading it directly out of classical cosmology is palpably false. I will return to this issue later. However, if Strauss's reading of the Republic is vulnerable to criticism it is for exactly the opposite reason, namely, that he minimizes, if not outright denies, the relation between ancient cosmology and political philosophy.

Ferry is not content to aver Strauss's antimodernism. Natural Right and History, he maintains, is “one of the most vigorous critiques of the very idea of human rights” ever written.¹⁸ Conceiving human rights along the lines of free “subjectivity,” Ferry notes correctly that they are “a purely modern invention” with no analogue in the Greek world. Nevertheless Strauss's attack on the idea of rights is said to be consonant with “the neoconservative tendency to sacralize natural inequalities” both “in fact and in law within the social and political hierarchy.”¹⁹ Ferry concludes that one cannot be both a Straussian and a liberal without falling into logical “absurdity.”²⁰

It is not necessary to carry through Ferry's critique of Strauss any further, much less to consider his own eccentric defense of modernity. Rather, I mention the work at all because it offers an analysis of Strauss's dependence on Heidegger deeply at odds with my own. While appropriating various Heideggerian problems and language, Strauss provides a far reaching critique of Heidegger's antimodernity. To say as Ferry does that Strauss simply appropriated Heidegger's critique of metaphysical humanism and applied it to the domain of politics is a non sequitur for, as we shall see, a main line of Strauss's critique of Heideggerianism is its obliviousness to politics. To turn to the primacy of the political things is not to apply Heideggerian insights to some new domain but is the basis of Strauss's critique of Heidegger.

I

To start perhaps with the most obvious: both Heidegger and Strauss begin their works with a sense of impending crisis or catastrophe. Heidegger spoke ominously about a “darkening of the world” with its attendant “enfeeblement of the spirit,” while Strauss spoke about a “crisis of the West” or a “crisis of our time” which he identifies with an encroaching nihilism. How are we to understand these claims?

It is curious to note that despite their alleged similarities, Heidegger and Strauss offer completely different diagnoses of the current problem. In the Introduction to Metaphysics Heidegger explains the crisis by reference to the unique historical situation of Germany. Germany, he claims, is caught in a “pincers” between the world of Anglo-American democracy to the West and Soviet communism to the East.²¹ The German nation is at once subject to “the severest pressure” and is accordingly “the most endangered.” Given these historical pressures, it remains to Germany, “the most metaphysical of nations” to look inward in order “to wrest a destiny from … within itself” (es in sich selbst).²²

Heidegger gives as yet no positive indication of what the contours of this destiny will look like, but he gives some clues as to what it will try to avoid. Drawing on a century-old theme that contrasted Anglo-French civilization with German Kultur, Heidegger gives this a new twist. Germany must resist the pull of modern, urban, technological civilization.²³ “From a metaphysical point of view,” and for Heidegger there is no other, “Russia and America are the same; the same dreary technological frenzy, the same unrestricted organization of the average man.”²⁴ It is the dominance of this kind of technological political order common to both democracy and communism that Heidegger regards as the root of “the spiritual decline of the earth” (der geistige Verfall der Erde), “the flight of the gods” (Die Flucht der Gotter), “the destruction of the earth” (die Zerstörung der Erde), and “the hatred and suspicion of everything free and creative.”²⁵

Heidegger's answer to the problem of an incipient nihilism was, of course, his infamous Rektoratsrede of 1933.²⁶ Whether Heidegger's embrace of Hitler in this speech constituted a brief and unfortunate “episode” in his career or grew out of the deepest well-springs of his thought is a subject that is not likely to be resolved. We do know, however, that at that time National Socialism represented just such a third way, an alternative to the two metaphysically indistinct and technologically levelling movements of democracy and communism referred to in the Introduction to Metaphysics. Indeed, in the edition of the work published in 1953 Heidegger could still speak unabashedly of the “inner truth and greatness” of the Nazi movement, adding parenthetically that this referred to “the encounter between global technology and modern man.”²⁷

Contrast this attitude with Strauss's understanding of the crisis facing not Germany but liberal democracy. Strauss is less concerned with the problems created by liberal democracy than those caused by its eclipse. Ferry's statement that Natural Right and History is a vigorous assault on “the very idea of human rights” is contradicted by Strauss's opening remarks. In the introduction to the book he begins with a quotation from the Declaration of Independence asserting the universality of equal human rights and warns his readers of the dangers attending the abandonment of this ideal. Without mentioning Heidegger by name Strauss is not so much troubled by American egalitarianism as by the emergence of the German “historical sense” which today goes under the name of an “unqualified relativism.” This would not be the first time in history, he warns his American audience, that a nation defeated on the battle field had risen up posthumously, as it were, to deprive the victors of “the most sublime fruit of victory.”²⁸ The crisis of the West, Strauss avers, is in the first instance a theoretical one created by the emergence of the German philosophy of history.

To gain critical purchase on this problem consider Strauss's critique of Isaiah Berlin's famous Two Concepts of Liberty which he calls “a characteristic document of the crisis of liberalism.”²⁹ Contrary to what Ferry and others might have us believe, Strauss is by no means an enemy of modern “negative liberty” as such. Unlike Heidegger who in the Rektoratsrede spoke derisively of negative liberty as synonymous with “arbitrariness of intentions and inclination” and “lack of restraint” and celebrated its banishment from the German university, Strauss approves of Berlin's essay calling it “very helpful for a political purpose,” in the struggle against communist totalitarianism.³⁰

While recognizing that Berlin's study may be useful for rallying anticommunists, it is deficient as a theoretical defense of liberalism against its enemies. The crisis in which liberalism is currently embroiled is, however, not principally political but theoretical. The problem is not that of particular policies but “the problem of the spirit that should inform particular policies.”³¹ Strauss finds inadequate Berlin's claim to defend “absolutely” a sphere of private, individual liberty while at the same time denying that liberalism rests on any absolute premises and even endorsing the merely “relative validity” of this conviction. It is precisely this contradiction between a maximum defense of individual freedom coupled with complete agnosticism about the foundations of liberty that Strauss finds symptomatic of the current crisis of liberalism. It is “the fact that liberalism has abandoned its absolutist basis” in the philosophy of natural rights “and is trying to become entirely relativistic” that is the cause of the crisis.³² Not liberalism but a contemporary misunderstanding of liberalism is at the root of the crisis.

In another formulation of the same problem, Strauss contends that “the crisis of the West consists in the West's having become uncertain of its purpose.” That purpose has been admirably contained in certain “famous official declarations made during the two World Wars,” but more importantly in “the most successful forms of modern political philosophy.”³³ These forms—and here Strauss seems to be pointing backward to the founders of modern liberalism—developed a conception of philosophy or science deeply at odds with the premodern tradition. The new philosophy would be “active and charitable,” devoted to “the relief of man's estate.” Rather than serving the interests of a tiny elite, it would enable all “to share in the advantages of society.” The new idea of science would ensure progress toward a society extending the benefits of liberty and prosperity to the whole of humanity consisting of “a universal league of free and equal nations, each nation consisting of free and equal men and women.”³⁴

For Strauss, as we can see from this passage, it is not the crisis engendered by modern philosophy that is at issue, but the crisis engendered by the loss of confidence in it. This loss of confidence is again traceable to the powerful, even consuming, influence of Nietzsche and Heidegger who have made it possible to doubt the essential “humanity” of the West. This doubt or lack of confidence is more than a “strong but vague feeling.” Rather it has received the official sanction of much contemporary theory with its distinction between facts and values, the “is” and the “ought.” This feeling which to some extent explains “many forms of contemporary Western degradation” is at the core of the phenomenon known as nihilism, the condition that obtains when there is no longer believed to be a rational manner of distinguishing ways of life or forms of society.³⁵ It is the advent not of liberal democracy but the modern inability to defend it that dictated Strauss's return to the classics.

II

Like Strauss, Heidegger's return to the Greeks was motivated by a desire to understand and ultimately overcome the problem of nihilism. This problem is rooted not in any particular moral, political, or even aesthetic mode of perception but in the very question of Being (Seinsfrage). The question of Being, first raised profoundly in Plato's Sophist, is not concerned with any particular kind of being but with the general ground or ordering of beings as such. More specifically, it is the question of the meaning that beings have and how those meanings are acquired. The inquiry, then, into the meaning of Being is not to be confused with moral philosophy or political science but takes the forms of a “fundamental ontology” aimed at the very structure of human “being in the world” (Dasein).

The problem is that Plato's answer to the question of Being was so successful that it helped to induce a kind of forgetfulness or amnesia about the very question itself. His identification of “to be” with “to be always” established a way of thinking that has forever fixed the history of metaphysics or what Heidegger would later call the tradition of “onto-theology.” In Being and Time and his later essay on “Plato's Doctrine of Truth,” Heidegger demonstrated that the gulf between the sensible and the intelligible, the human and the divine, the thing and the thing-in-itself created a certain “forgetfulness of Being” (Seinsvergessenheit) that contains within it the seeds of nihilism.³⁶ What is more, Heidegger claims that this nihilism is the true fate and destiny of the Western metaphysical tradition. Far from being an aberration or one historical form of modern thought, nihilism has been the secret meaning of the West from Plato onwards.

To be sure, Heidegger did not diagnose this problem out of disinterested or antiquarian research. Part of the attraction of a work like Being and Time is its sheer bravado, the enormous sense of urgency and risk attending the most apparently abstract metaphysical problems. Hans-Georg Gadamer has noted that “the catchword with which Heidegger approached the tradition of metaphysics at that time was ‘destruction’—destruction above all, of the concepts with which modern philosophy operated.”³⁷ His call for a destruction of metaphysics was offered as a key to our liberation from it.

Heidegger's call for a Destruktion of metaphysics was to be caried out in the first instance through a historical investigation into the question of Being. Historical investigation in Being and Time was intended not to provide a survey of classic issues or fundamental alternatives but as a means of bringing to light the various “horizons” within which Dasein is interpreted.³⁸ It is the forgetfulness of the temporal structure of our being in the world that has led to the obscuring or concealment of the question of Being. Only when we see that “Dasein's Being finds its meaning in temporality” will we be able to break the grip or hold tht it exercises over us.³⁹

Today this grip takes the form of a metaphysical tradition that has become our “master” to such an extent that “it blocks our access to those primordial ‘sources’ from which the categories and concepts handed down to us have been in part quite genuinely drawn.”⁴⁰ Heidegger's response to this blockage was to declare that historical analysis be “loosened up” and this “hardened tradition … be dissolved.”⁴¹ It thus becomes necessary “to destroy the traditional content of ancient ontology until we arrive at those primordial experiences in which we achieved our first ways of determining the nature of Being.” Heidegger denies that the purpose of his call for a creative destruction is “to bury the past in nullity (Nichtigkeit: nothingness), but the positive purpose it serves remains obscure.⁴²

In Being and Time what Heidegger had called a destruction was only partially modified in his later works. His later call for an “overcoming” (Überwindung) of metaphysics signalled a “going beyond” that is both an acceptance and a deepening. Heidegger spoke of metaphysics in medical terms as a pain or wound which must be gotten over if health is to be restored. Thus the verwindung der Metaphysik must be regarded as a convalescence in the sense of a Krankheit verwinden which is not simply forgotten or overcome but remains with us like a scar after an operation. The task of the philosopher, then, is less that of a destroyer engaged in a perpetual wrestling match with the power of tradition but that of a wary physician or therapist trying to talk us out of some deeply held but long repressed disorder.⁴³

III

Ferry and others are no doubt correct when they remind us that Strauss's return to the Greeks was decisively mediated by the example of Heidegger. Strauss himself admits that “by uprooting and not merely rejecting the tradition of philosophy,” Heidegger “made it possible for the first time after many centuries … to see the roots of the tradition as they are.”⁴⁴ The unintended consequence of Heidegger's “uprooting” of the tradition is that it opened up the possibility of “a genuine return to classical political philosophy, to the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle.”⁴⁵

Heidegger's readings of such works as Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Rhetoric came as a profound revelation to those of Strauss's generation who had been taught to approach the ancients largely along the model of nineteenth century Entwicklungsgeschichte as practiced by Wilamowitz-Mollendorff and perfected by his student Werner Jaeger.⁴⁶ Heidegger changed all of this by teaching Plato, as had Nietzsche a generation earlier, not as an ancient precursor of modern Wissenschaft but as a living and vital contemporary. Consider the following passage from Hannah Arendt's recollections of Heidegger's pedagogy:

It was technically decisive that, for instance, Plato was not talked about and his theory of Ideas expounded; rather for an entire semester a single dialogue was pursued and subjected to question step by step, until the time-honored doctrine had disappeared to make room for a set of problems of immediate and urgent relevance. Today this sounds quite familiar, because nowadays so many proceed in this way: but no one did so before Heidegger.⁴⁷

Anyone familiar with Strauss's method of “close reading” cannot fail to notice a striking connection to Heidegger's focus on single texts with relatively little concern for developmental history or contextualist background.⁴⁸ Similarly, anyone who has pondered Strauss's preference for speaking about a thinker's “teaching” and his aversion to formal “systems” or “doctrines” will also discover a relation to Heidegger's concern for an autonomous domain of human praxis and judgment independent of the pretentions of transcendental philosophy. Yet these similarities are sufficient to mask real differences between Strauss and Heidegger. While Heidegger spoke uncompromisingly of the Destruktion of the Western metaphysics, Strauss referred continuously to a “recovery” and a “loving reinterpretation” of the past. These differences are more than merely rhetorical. In what, then, do they consist?

In the first place, Strauss returned to the ancients not to discover the origins of modern nihilism but to consider an alternative to it. While Heidegger saw in Plato's theory of the forms and the Idea of the Good the first and fateful step toward metaphysical nihilism, Strauss turned to the classics, especially Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Politics, to provide an articulation of the “natural consciousness” or the “common sense” understanding prior to the emergence of philosophy and modern scientific method.⁴⁹ The dialogues of Plato as well as the works of his contemporaries (and near contemporaries) Thucydides, Xenophon, and Aristotle make possible a rearticulation of the natural phenomena that have become lost to us. In a particularly striking use of Platonic imagery Strauss speaks about the creation of an artificial pit even below the “natural cave” of our prescientific understanding, a cave beneath the cave, as it were.⁵⁰ For Strauss, Plato and the classics showed us first of all our way back to the natural horizon of the cave with which philosophy must initially contend.⁵¹ It is for the reconstruction of the prescientific consciousness and not any specific set of doctrines or systems that Strauss turns to Plato.

This is a very different understanding of Plato from that conceived by Heidegger. Strauss desired a return to the classics not in order to destroy their conception of truth as “unconcealment” (alētheia), but in order, precisely, to preserve the phenomena. In what Seth Benardete has referred to as Strauss's “golden sentence”⁵² we read: “The problem inherent in the surface of things, and only in the surface of things, is the heart of things.”⁵³ In other words, the surface of things constitutes the life world, “the world in which we live” which today at least exists in contradistinction to “the world of science.” The unnatural or artificial world we now inhabit has been shaped to such an extent by developments in modern philosophy and science that it has become virtually impossible to grasp the nature of the phenomena themselves.

Whereas Heidegger believed it possible to think our way back to the Lebenswelt through what was in fact an ontology of everyday life, Strauss thought that today only historical studies can recapture a public world of prescientific meanings. We can no longer make our way back to the phenomena by an examination of the opinions and beliefs, the endoxa, of the world around us precisely because these opinions and beliefs have been partially manufactured by certain “artificial” or unnatural circumstances. Strauss's return to the ancients, then, is motivated by a desire “to grasp the natural world as a world that is radically prescientific or prephilosophic” and this can only be done by information supplied by classical philosophy and “supplemented by considerations of the most elementary premises of the Bible.”⁵⁴

Strauss is fully aware of the objections to which his project of restoring classical natural right is subject. In particular we have seen Ferry accuse him of engaging in the reactionary project of trying to rehabilitate classical physics and metaphysics as the premise of his doctrine of natural right. Since, it is alleged, the modern natural sciences have destroyed the viability of the universe understood as a teleologically ordered whole, Strauss's project necessarily fails. It is doomed to failure either because classical political philosophy is meaningless without its ancient metaphysical underpinnings or because efforts to revive classical cosmology are based on deep ignorance of the modern natural and social sciences.

This criticism misses the point. In Natural Right and History Strauss admits that the emergence of modern natural science has led to two rival conceptions of social science. The first is that the new mechanical physics must be followed up by an equally nonteleological social science à la Hobbes. The other “typically modern” solution favored by certain modern day Thomists is to establish a dualism between a nonteleological science of nature and a teleological understanding of man. Neither of these alternatives seems to be adequate to Strauss. The former is exposed to the “grave difficulties” of attempting to read human ends out of our desires and inclinations purely naturalistically conceived; the latter, while not exposed to this problem, still “presupposes a break with the comprehensive view of Aristotle as well as that of Thomas Aquinas himself.” Strauss does not take sides in this contemporary debate, although he notes inconclusively that “an adequate solution to the problem of natural right cannot be found before this basic problem has been solved.”⁵⁵

Precisely this “basic problem” was addressed from a somewhat different angle in What is Political Philosophy. Rather than posing the problem in terms of a stark either/or, Strauss here maintains that classical political philosophy presupposes no specific cosmology or strong teleological commitments. What distinguishes classical political philosophy is independence from dogmatic physics or metaphysics. The crucial passage reads thus:

Whatever the significance of modern natural science may be, it cannot affect our understanding of what is human in man. To understand man in the light of the whole means for modern natural science to understand man in the light of the sub-human. But in that light man as man is wholly unintelligible. Classical political philosophy viewed man in a different light.⁵⁶

Strauss goes on to suggest that Socrates, the founder of classical natural right, was animated not by any cosmology but by an awareness of the limits of knowledge or “the elusive character of the truth, of the whole.” It is here that he restates the view that Socrates “viewed man in the light of the unchangeable ideas, that is, of the fundamental and permanent problems. For to articulate the situation of man means to articulate man's openness to the whole. This understanding of the situation of man which includes then, the quest for cosmology rather than a solution to the cosmological problem, was the foundation of classical political philosophy.”⁵⁷

Note that nowhere does Strauss ever suggest that the rehabilitation of classical natural right requires the restoration of ancient physics. Indeed, he goes to the opposite extreme of denying that one can infer any substantive moral and political conclusions from cosmology which “cannot affect our understanding of what is human in man.” Strauss appears willing to accord classical natural right a considerable degree of autonomy apart from either Platonic or Aristotelian metaphysics. Ancient cosmology seems to have been at most a sufficient but not a necessary precondition for the emergence of natural right.⁵⁸

Strauss describes his attempt to return to classical political philosophy as necessarily “tentative” and “experimental.”⁵⁹ While it may grow out of the current crisis of liberalism, we cannot expect to find in the ancients answers to the questions of today. He emphaticaly denies the old canard that he seeks to restore directly a “golden age” or a discredited cosmology. “We cannot reasonably expect that a fresh understanding of classical political philosophy will supply us with recipes for today's use.”⁶⁰ Instead the “relative success” of modern science and philosophy has created a society “wholly unknown” to the ancients. “Only we living today can possibly find a solution to the problems of today,” he avows. The point of a return to the ancients is not to find “immediately applicable” answers to current problems, but to gain clarity about the “starting point” that such answers would have to have.⁶¹

The starting points or “principles” alluded to above are precisely the premises embedded in common sense or the prescientific understanding that have become lost or obscure. Interestingly, Strauss suggests that it is precisely the crisis of the understanding created by modern relativism and historicism that has at the same time created a unique vantage point from which to recover these principles. By throwing all tradition into question, Strauss even congratulates historicism for contributing, if even unwittingly, to a “genuine understanding of the political philosophies.” Thus Strauss refers to “the accidental advantage” accruing from the “shaking of all traditions” which has made it possible “to understand in an untraditional or fresh manner what was hitherto understood only in a traditional or derivative manner.”⁶²

IV

Strauss's return to the classics in order to preserve the surface of things only points to a further and even more decisive difference with Heidegger. For Strauss, the natural understanding referred to above comes to light first and foremost as a moral and political understanding. What he calls the “inevitable problem” of natural right is simply an extension of the common sense or prescientific awareness.⁶³

It is the moral and political character of natural right that makes it absurd to charge Strauss with the simple translation of Heideggerian insights into the domain of political theory. Heidegger had systematically and deliberately removed ethics from the center of philosophy. One can search in vain for the Heideggerian equivalent of the Aristotelian golden mean or the Kantian categorical imperative. Heidegger rejected ethics because he thought it was one more form of dogmatic rationalism, putting Being in the service of man and not the other way round. The return to the problem of natural right was not, then, an application of Heideggerian ideas, but a radical correction of the blindness of Heidegger to the moral and political dimensions of the human situation. An awareness of the primacy of the political is, above all, what distinguishes Strauss from Heidegger.⁶⁴

Strauss's remarks on natural right make it abundantly clear that he is referring to certain fundamental experiences of right and wrong, just and injust, that are inseparable from humanity. The two passages from the Hebrew Scripture that he uses as an epigraph to Natural Right and History seem to be examples of the prephilosophic experience of natural right that he is searching for.⁶⁵ Early in the book he refers to “those simple experiences of right and wrong which are at the bottom of the philosophic contention that there is a natural right.”⁶⁶ Later in the same work he speaks of the “well-ordered or healthy soul” as “incomparably the most admirable human phenomenon” and goes on to suggest that “the rules circumscribing the general character of the good life” may therefore be called the “natural law.”⁶⁷ The fact that we admire human excellence without reference to mercenary or utilitarian considerations is for Strauss evidence that natural right cannot be reduced to materialistic or instrumental considerations.

Elsewhere in the context of his debate with the Hegelian philosopher Alexandre Kojève, Strauss alludes to the experience of natural right as a doctrine of limits and constraints. In contrast to the Hegelian belief that human beings are constituted by the need for recognition from others, Strauss avows what “every reasonably well-brought up child” is said to know, namely that one should not be blinded by the desire for recognition.⁶⁸ His summary is worth quoting:

Syntheses effect miracles. Kojève's or Hegel's synthesis of classical and Biblical morality effects the miracle of producing an amazingly lax morality out of two moralities both of which made very strict demands on self-restraint. Neither Biblical nor classical morality encourages all statesmen to try to extend their authority over all men in order to achieve universal recognition … Both doctrines [Hegel's and Hobbes's] construct human society by starting from the untrue assumption that man as man is thinkable as a being that lacks awareness of sacred restraints or as a being that is guided by nothing but a desire for recognition.⁶⁹

Again in Natural Right and History Strauss attempts to derive natural right from the fact of human rationality. Rationality gives human beings a freedom of choice in their actions denied to every other species. This rationality, however, is accompanied by a “sense” that “the full and unrestrained exercise of that freedom is not right.” Our freedom is, in other words, accompanied by a “sacred awe” or a “divination” that not everything is permissable. Strauss refers to this primeval sense of restraint or “awe-inspired fear” as equivalent to “man's natural conscience.”⁷⁰

Strauss's emphasis on the irreducibly political character of natural right constitutes his greatest difference with Heidegger. It follows, therefore, that political philosophy, not fundamental ontology, is the primary means of access to the human world.⁷¹ A further consequence of this difference in perspective is that natural right is said to carry with it certain built-in limitations regarding the efficacy of human action. The standpoint of natural right, rather than demanding the one absolutely best regime, culminates in Strauss's insight that the best regime is, for all intents and purposes, unrealizable and that one must need to know how to make the best out of less than desirable circumstances. Rather than demanding the restitution of the ancient polis or the Platonic kallipolis, he warns his readers against the attempt to mandate the best regime or the regime according to nature.

Strauss's teachings about natural right are inseparable from his skepticism about political utopianism and idealism. His expression “the limits of justice” has given rise to the view expressed by Ferry that he is no more than a “neoconservative” attempting to “sacralize” the status quo.⁷² This is clearly an example of a critic wanting to have it both ways. Strauss cannot be both a Heideggerian phenomenologist devoted to the wholesale destruction of modernity and at the same time a conservative (neo- or otherwise) devoted to preserving existing inequalities “in fact and in law.” To see Strauss simply as a conservative bent on defending inequalities of station is to miss the profoundly skeptical temper of his philosophical politics. His endorsement of liberal democracy as the best practicable regime was not only prudential (the best of a bad lot), but related to this skeptical turn of mind. Democracy is the practicably best regime because it makes the fewest epistemic demands on its citizens. It permits philosophy—understood as the Socratic investigation of alternatives—precisely because it does not insist on rigid adherence to dogma or orthodoxy. At the very least Strauss's skeptical defense of liberty gives the lie to the absurd charge that he was a dangerous enemy of democracy.⁷³

Strauss's conception of the limits of politics grows out of a serious and principled conception of philosophy and not some desire to sanctify existing inequalities. Philosophy consists neither in propounding systems nor in extolling doctrines but in an awareness of what Strauss calls “the fundamental and comprehensive problems.” An awareness of the problems, more than a devotion to one of “the very few typical solutions” is what distinguishes the philosopher from the ideologist of either the left or the right. It is when the belief in the certainty of any solution comes to outweigh our awareness of the problematic status of the solution that the “sectarian is born.” Strauss describes this conception of philosophy as “zetetic” or “skeptic in the original sense of the term.”⁷⁴

It is the skeptical disposition, the Socratic awareness that one does not know, that is at the core of Strauss's conception of philosophy.⁷⁵ A skeptical awareness of the insufficiency of the solutions leads to a reconsideration of the various alternatives. Philosophy is nothing other than an openness to the alternatives, to the fundamental and comprehensive problems. Indeed, Strauss's reading of the Republic culminates in an interpretation of the famous Platonic Ideas not as self-subsistent metaphysical certainties (a claim he calls “incredible, not to say … fantastic”), but as the permanent problems that beset humanity.⁷⁶ It is precisely this sense that the problems resist permanent solution that led Strauss to an appreciation of the dangers inherent in political idealism and other forms of dogmatic certainty.⁷⁷

Strauss's skeptical teaching argues for, rather than assumes, an appreciation of the limits of action and knowledge of the fact that “evil cannot be eradicated and therefore one's expectations from politics must be moderate.”⁷⁸ So far is the teaching of natural right an encouragement to revolutionary action that Strauss cautions that one must limit one's expectations to mitigating as far as possible “the evils which are inseparable from the human condition.”⁷⁹ There are deep-seated reservations against any attempt to mandate or legislate natural right. While Heidegger encouraged “resolute” action carrying this to the point of extremism, Strauss continually enjoins a policy of moderation as the highest lesson of wisdom.⁸⁰

It is ultimately because the natural condition is one of limits and restraints and not simply a set of open-ended possibilities that Strauss urges a recovery, not a destruction, of the tradition of political philosophy. While Heidegger regarded this tradition from Plato to Nietzsche as one of accumulated error culminating in technological nihilism, Strauss regards nihilism not as endemic to the tradition but as a relatively recent phenomenon. Consequently, the tradition of philosophy, rather than a source of the problem, contains the internal resources to provide alternatives. The alternative to nihilism is not the “overcoming” of metaphysics, but a return to or recollection of what is presupposed in metaphysics, namely, the experience of natural right.

V

No thinker has done more than Heidegger to reawaken a sense of the holy or the divine. Strauss even admits that Heidegger's critique of metaphysics opens up the possibility of non-Western alternatives, “one form” of which is the Bible.⁸¹ Heidegger did not, however, return to biblical antiquity as the ur-form of poetic mythos. Instead he accepted Nietzsche's verdict that God, or at least the God of Judeo-Christianity, is dead and devoted his later writings to hastening the arrival of new gods.⁸²

In his post-Being and Time works Heidegger increasingly found in Hölderlin “the poet who points toward the future” and “who expects the god.”⁸³ Hölderlin was to the Germans what Shakespeare was to the English and Homer was to the Greeks. The contemporary of Schelling and Hegel, Hölderlin was deeply troubled by what he perceived to be the end of the Greco-Christian era and the subsequent disenchantment of the world. For Hölderlin, it was not so much men who have lost belief in God as the gods who have deserted the world and gone into hiding (“Aber freund! wir kommen zu spat”).⁸⁴ What is worse is not only that the gods have fled but that modern man is searcely aware of the loss.⁸⁵ The task of the poet who lives in an age of “destitution” is to awaken the sense of possibility that attends the flight of the gods. Heidegger interpreted poetry as preparing a new age of cultural renewal to be achieved through the redemptive power of art and the aesthetic. A state of spiritual destitution may pose grave dangers, but also great possibilities for cultural renewal and redemption. In this context he enjoyed quoting Hölderlin's “Patmos”: “But where danger is, grows the saving power also.”⁸⁶

In his lectures on Hölderlin given during the 1930s Heidegger focussed on Hölderlin's “Germania” for its mood of “sacred mourning” (heilege Trauer) at the loss of the gods.⁸⁷ Only by adopting an attiude of mourning or affliction for the loss of the gods can men be prepared to receive the “saving power.” This saving power Heidegger identified unambiguously with a revivified German “homeland” (Heimat) free of the grip of technological nihilism. This new homeland would mark a different direction in the “path” of history and take the form of a “state rooted in the earth and historical space” (Staatsgrunders der Erde und dem geschichtlichen Raum).⁸⁸ Later on, Heidegger denied that he used the term “homeland” in an ideologically loaded way. In calling on his countrymen to find their homeland, he claimed not to be invoking the “egoism” of any particular nation. Rather the homeland in question was a sense of “belongingness to the destiny of the West.” The German's true homeland was a historical “nearness to Being.”⁸⁹

Heidegger's abandonment of philosophy in favor of a new mythos became ever more prominent in his last works. His earlier discussion of Dasein gave way to a new poetic of Gelassenheit or “letting be.”⁹⁰ Rather than adopting an attitude of sternness or “resoluteness” as he had in Being and Time, Gelassenheit was meant to signify noninterference or simply letting things take their course. This “turn” in Heidegger's thought is sometimes thought to represent an unspoken repudiation of his Nazi past. In fact it was not so much a repudiation of Nazism as the routinization of it. Nazism, along with communism and “Americanism” became merely one more form of modern thoughtlessness and the “forgetfulness of Being.”⁹¹ It was not the inhumanity of the National Socialist movement but the fact that it remained rooted in Western “humanism” that accounted for its failure to get to the root of “the encounter between global technology and modern man.”⁹²

The lesson of the Nazi experience, then, showed Heidegger the futility of action in a world dominated by global technology. It is “the planetary movement of modern technology,” he told an interviewer in Der Spiegel in 1966, as a “history-determining” force that can today scarcely be “overestimated.”⁹³ Political remedies such as democracy, constitutional guarantees of human rights, and so on are but palliatives, “half-way measures,” that provide no real confrontation with the world of technology. Heidegger's alternative to the purely functional universe was a new Bodenständigkeit or rootedness. “Everything essential and great had only emerged when human beings had a home and were rooted in a tradition,” he said.⁹⁴ To restore some kind of authentic tradition in a community or a common “destiny” was a constant of Heidegger's thought from Being and Time onwards.

Heidegger's belated response to the atrocities of the holocaust was to urge a withdrawal from public life and adopt an attitude of patient resignation. Instead of attempting to direct or influence action, one should prepare for an as yet undisclosed theological dispensation:

Philosophy will not be able to bring about a direct change of the present state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all purely human meditations and endeavors. Only a god can still save us (Nur noch ein Gott kann uns rennen). I think the only possibility of salvation left to us is to prepare readiness, through thinking and poetry, for the appearance of the god, or for the absence of the god during the decline; so that we do not, simply put, die meaningless deaths, but that when we decline, we decline in the face of the absent god.⁹⁵

It was clear that in this context he meant not some personal deity but rather a new and mysterious revelation of Being that we can do nothing to bring about but must be prepared to await.

VI

Instead of a waiting for new gods, Strauss speaks of the “theologico-political problem,” a term borrowed from Spinoza, which is intended to underscore the relationship between the claims of reason and revelation.⁹⁶ At its simplest level, the theologico-political problem concerns “the all-important question” quid sit deus, adding that it is rarely pronounced as such by philosophers.⁹⁷ This question, Strauss claimed, remained “the theme” of all his later investigations.⁹⁸

As the term itself implies, the question of God or the gods initially comes to light in relation to the city. Theology is in the first instance political theology.⁹⁹ By political theology Strauss understands teachings whose authority is derived from divine revelation. Religion presents itself in the first instance as a body of authoritative law whose bringer or interpreter is a “prophet.”¹⁰⁰ The task of the prophet, like the Socratic philosopher-king, is fundamentally legislative, the founding of a political community.¹⁰¹ For this reason, every society, insofar as it is a political society, is based on religion and requires a belief in the sacred or divine character of its laws.¹⁰²

A belief in the divine origin of law is one of those prephilosophic insights that for Strauss is certified by the virtually universal experience of mankind. It is only at specific times and places that this belief comes into conflict with philosophy. At times he suggests that religion is “radically distinct” from philosophy or, to paraphrase his lecture of the same name, that “Jerusalem and Athens” are founded on fundamentally different principles.¹⁰³ Philosophy or the Socratic life is based on the endless quest for knowledge regarding “the whole,” whereas biblical thought stresses the ultimate subservience of human reason to revealed law. Philosophy and the Bible are presented here as representing “two antagonists” locked in a kind of life and death struggle regarding the one right way of life.

Elsewhere Strauss presents the relation between philosophy and religion less as mutually antagonistic than as engaged in a more subtle, even dialectical, “tension” with one another. Despite their radically different premises, theology and philosophy are far from incompatible in the manner Strauss sometimes suggests. First, the Bible, along with Plato, remains the most important source we have of the prephilosophic experience of natural right. The belief that God or the gods are in some sense “first for us” and that consequently the city is subordinate to a divine or revealed legislation constitutes the original form of political self-understanding.¹⁰⁴ Second, there is at least among the ancient and medieval philosophers broad agreement about the necessity of religion for the maintenance of a sound or decent political order. Indeed, premodern writers often developed elaborate esoteric strategies of communication precisely to conceal their atheism both for purposes of self-protection but more importantly for the health of society.¹⁰⁵

Finally, Strauss denies that philosophy has or perhaps ever can refute the premises of the Bible. He denies, for example, that modern science and historical criticism has even refuted “the most fundamentalistic orthodoxy.”¹⁰⁶ The quarrel between the Enlightenment and biblical orthodoxy has resulted in a standoff where neither party has been able to subdue the other. Strauss comes close to arguing that orthodoxy is in fact impervious to falsification from either experience or the principles of logic. The “genuine refutation” of orthodoxy would require proof that “the world and human life are perfectly intelligible without the assumption of a mysterious God.”¹⁰⁷ Strauss doubts that such a proof is forthcoming. Even Spinoza's Ethics, the most thoroughgoing attempt to replace the biblical God with modern materialistic physics has failed to show that man is both theoretically and practically the master of his fate. The “cognitive status” of Spinoza's works, to say nothing of all the rationalist explanations that followed, are no different from the orthodox account, that is to say, they remain “fundamentally hypothetical.”¹⁰⁸

It is sometimes believed that Strauss's defense of orthodoxy against the Enlightenment constitutes decisive evidence for his radical antimodernity and that his arguments about the political character of religion testify to an antidemocratic elitism. Contrary to the charge of antimodernism, note that Strauss never defends the truth of orthodoxy; he only denies the adequacy of the philosophies that have claimed to refute it. But to say that orthodoxy has not been refuted it is by no means to say that it is true or defensible. Indeed, in his discussion of Franz Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption Strauss explicitly points out the dangers and difficulties of trying to reoccupy orthodoxy in the modern world.¹⁰⁹ In another context he warns that every modern attempt to return to an earlier position has only led to “a much more radical form of modernity.”¹¹⁰

Strauss's warnings are consistent with the skeptical disposition described earlier. His radical “fideism” prevented a final resolution of the ancient quarrel between faith and reason.¹¹¹ Because neither philosophy nor religion can refute the other, we must remain open or attentive to the arguments embodied in each. The tension between the biblical and Greek philosophic understandings has, moreover, been the “core” of the West and “the secret of [its] vitality.”¹¹² Strauss is committed to maintaining the creative “tension” between Athens and Jerusalem rather than providing a final knock-down argument in favor of one of the contestants.

Further, in opposition to Ferry's claim that Strauss's motives were “deeply antidemocratic,” Strauss always considered modern liberal democracy with its constitutional separation of state and society the best practicable solution to the theologico-political problem. Far from demonstrating that the linkage of the terms “Straussian” and “liberal” is absurd, I would call Strauss's politics a liberalism without illusions. As a secular Jew, the liberal solution to the theologico-political problem appeared to offer Jews a greater degree of freedom and security than that afforded by any other solution. However, while Strauss may have embraced this solution as the best practicable one, his endorsement was not unqualified. The constitutional separation of state and society required that religion be depoliticized, confined to the precincts of individual conscience and intellectual persuasion as had been argued forcefully in Locke's Letter on Toleration and Mendelssohn's Jerusalem. Yet the separation of religion and politics did not put an end to discrimination; it merely privatized it. The danger of liberal democracy for the Jews was not so much its inability to end social inequality but its creation of “the illusory surrogate of trust in the humanity of civilization.”¹¹³ It was precisely this illusion that proved fatal to European Jewry.

Strauss's cautious embrace of the liberalist separation of state and society extended also to his endorsement of political Zionism. The state of Israel is “literally beyond praise” and “the only bright spot for the contemporary Jew who knows where he comes from.”¹¹⁴ But even Zionism with its creation of a modern, secular state remains an imperfect solution to the Jewish question. The establishment of the Israeli state may be “the most profound modification of the Galut which has occurred … but it is not the end of the Galut” and may in fact be a part of the Galut.¹¹⁵ “Finite, relative problems can be solved,” Strauss says, “infinite, absolute problems cannot be solved.” As a result “human beings will never create a society which is free from contradictions.”¹¹⁶ In other words the inability of Zionism to solve the Jewish question, to put an end to the exile and fulfill the promise of redemption, remains vivid testimony to the permanence of the theologico-political problem.

Strauss's answer to the permanence of the theologico-political problem, then, is not to reconcile, flatten-out, or synthesize but to keep alive the contradictory demands made by Jerusalem and Athens. Just as he refused to succumb to the “ire” of those who proclaimed the death of God, so too did he resist the lure of those who promised the creation of new ones. His solution is a kind of unflinching avoidance of two powerful but equally dangerous “charms”:

Men are constantly attracted and deluded by two opposite charms: the charm of competence which is engendered by mathematics and everything akin to mathematics, and the charms of humble awe, which is engendered by meditation on the human soul and its experiences. Philosophy is characterized by the gentle, if firm, refusal to succumb to either charm.¹¹⁷

If the Enlightenment in all its varieties represents the charm of competence, Heideggerian Bodenständigkeit represented perhaps the more seductive charm of “humble awe.”

VII

In the final analysis I suggest that Heidegger represented an enigma for Strauss that he never fully resolved. Heidegger's influence on Strauss is incontrovertible down to and including the titles of their two most important works: Being and Time and Natural Right and History. For Strauss, Heidegger was “the only great thinker in our time” and the “highest self-consciousness” of modern thought.¹¹⁸ There is virtually no philosophy apart from Heidegger's. By comparison to Heidegger, “all rational liberal philosophic positions have lost their significance and power.”¹¹⁹ Strauss admits that he may “deplore” this fact, but he cannot bring himself to overlook or ignore it. Today it will take “a very great effort” to restore “a solid basis for rational liberalism.”¹²⁰ Liberalism will require a thinker of the stature of Heidegger, but as of yet no such thinker has emerged. Instead, the only great or serious thinker of our age was a Nazi, and not merely an unreflective participant, but a willing collaborator in radical evil. What is more, Heidegger's collaboration was, for Strauss, not merely an unfortunate “episode” in an otherwise unblemished life, but was intimately connected to his philosophy. How, then, can we explain this fact?

Strauss offers two, not necessarily consistent or even fully satisfactory, answers. At times he maintains that Heidegger's embrace of National Socialism was compelled by his radical historicism. Like Heidegger's student Karl Löwith, Strauss maintains that Heidegger's “renunciation of the very notion of eternity” is bound up with his “submission” to the events of 1933.¹²¹ The result of this renunciation was a deferral to an historical fate or destiny which made “discredited democracy [that is, Weimar] look like the golden age.”¹²² It was his contempt for “those permanent characteristics of humanity” that led Heidegger to submit to and even endorse “the verdict of the least wise and least moderate part of his nation while it was in its least wise and least moderate mood.”¹²³

However, is it correct to conclude that the ideas of Being and Time are intimately connected to the ideology of National Socialism? Is it not more accurate to say that while Heidegger's thought did not compel surrender to the events of 1933, it provided no principled grounds for resistance to it?¹²⁴ It seems that Heidegger's account of historical Dasein is at most contingently related to his political choices. The problem with Heidegger's philosophy is not that it is intimately tied to any particular politics, but that it is almost infinitely elastic, capable of adapting itself to whatever permutation of Dasein happens to come next.

Imagine, for example, the following scenario. Had Hitler come to power in Russia and Lenin and the Bolsheviks in Germany, there is no reason to believe that Heidegger could not have just as consistently become a member of the communist party. Under different circumstances, it is just as easy to imagine him arguing that Marxism-Leninism is the authentic fate and destiny of the German nation which must be defended against Anglo-American democracy and Russian Nazism. One can almost hear Heidegger saying in a hypothetical moment of self-criticism that Stalin's purges and policies of forced collectivization were themselves the result of a misplaced “humanism” with its desire to make man the master and possessor of the earth.¹²⁵ Indeed, Heidegger's politics, such as they are, have proved remarkably susceptible to manipulation for different ends. Segments of the postwar left found no difficulty turning his strictures against the dominance of global technology into a critique of capitalist society and more recently environmentalists have found in his analysis of productionist metaphysics an argument for “green” politics and “deep ecology.”¹²⁶

At another point, Strauss suggests that not historicism as such, but Heidegger's virtually exclusive concern with Being blinded him to the real facts of tyranny. His subordination of political philosophy to fundamental ontology created its own forms of moral blindness. It was Heidegger's own curious “forgetfulness” of politics and the primacy of political philosophy that led him to minimize, if not deny altogether, the atrocities of the Holocaust. For Heidegger, the Holocaust remained fundamentally a consequence of technology, not a moral and political problem.¹²⁷

It was Heidegger's indifference to the moral phenomena that Strauss ultimately finds inexcusable. In the final sentence of his reply to Kojève (at last fully restored to the English edition), Strauss attacks Heidegger for moral cowardice in the face of tyranny and for lacking the courage to face the consequences of his own philosophy. Here Strauss makes common cause with Kojève for their close attention to the primacy of the political:

But we have been constantly mindful of it [that is, the relation between tyranny and philosophy], for both of us appear to turn our attention away from Being and toward tyranny because we saw that those who lacked the courage to face the consequences of tyranny, who, therefore et humiliter serviebant et superbe dominabantur, were at the same time forced to escape the consequences of Being precisely because they did nothing but speak about Being.¹²⁸

Strauss seems to suggest here that it was Heidegger's concern for Being, rather than beings, that led to his indifference to the fact of tyranny. At issue is the very abstractness of Heidegger's articulation of the problem of Being. The extreme artificiality of regarding human beings under the rubric of an anonymous historical Dasein could not but anesthetize him to the suffering of actual historical persons. I am not finally convinced that Heidegger's Nazi problem is intimately connected to his analysis of Being, but Strauss's critique enables us to see the high price of Heidegger's forgetfulness of the political.

Notes

1. The most important of these was Strauss's “Anmerkungen zu Carl Schmitt, ‘Der Begriff des Politischen,’” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 67 (1932): 732-49; an English translation by E. M. Sinclair appeared as an appendix to Leo Strauss, Spinoza's Critique of Religion (New York: Schocken, 1965), 331-51. The exchange between Strauss and Schmitt has recently been studied by Henrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, trans. Harvey Lomax (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); for a thoughtful overview of some of the issues involved, see Robert Howse, “From Legitimacy to Dictatorship—And Back Again: Leo Strauss' Critique of the Anti-Liberalism of Carl Schmitt,” The Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 10 (1997): 77-103.

2. Recently Laurence Lampert has found in Stauss's “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche's ‘Beyond Good and Evil,’” Interpretation 3 (1973): 97-113; reprinted in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, ed. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 174-91 the hidden plan to Strauss's own teachings; see Laurence Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); the importance of Nietzsche on Strauss's writings has, of course, been noted before; see Rémi Brague, “Leo Strauss and Maimonides,” Leo Strauss' Thought: Toward a Critical Engagement, ed. Alan Udoff (Boulder: Lynne Reinner, 1991), 104-5.

3. Hwa Yol Jung, “The Life-World, Historicity and Truth: Reflections on Leo Strauss's Encounter with Heidegger and Husserl,” Journal for the British Society for Phenomenology 9 (1978): 11-25; James F. Ward, “Political Philosophy and History: The Links Between Strauss and Heidegger,” Polity 20 (1987): 273-95; Laurence Berns, “The Prescientific World and Historicism: Some Reflections on Strauss, Heidegger, and Husserl,” Leo Strauss's Thought, 169-81; Horst Mewes, “Leo Strauss and Martin Heidegger: Greek Antiquity and the Meaning of Modernity,” Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: German Emigrés and American Political Thought after World War II, ed. Peter Graf Kielmansess, Horst Mewes, and Elisabeth Glaser-Schmidt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 105-20.

4. Leo Strauss, The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 28; What is Political Philosophy and Other Studies (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1959), 246: “One has to go back to Hegel until one finds another professor of philosophy who affected in a comparable manner the thought of Germany, nay, of Europe. But Hegel had some contemporaries whose power equalled his or at any rate whom one could compare to him without being manifestly foolish. Heidegger surpasses all his contemporaries by far.”

5. Strauss, Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, 28; What is Political Philosophy, 246.

6. Strauss, Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, 30-1; What is Political Philosophy, 55; Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, 30-1.

7. Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism, trans. Paul Burrell and Gabriel R. Ricci (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); a critical appraisal of the maelstrom produced by the book is provided by Thomas Sheehan, “Heidegger and the Nazis,” New York Review of Books 35, 16 June 1988, 38-47; see also his “A Normal Nazi,” New York Review of Books 40, 14 January 1993, 30-5; among the several works devoted to this issue see Gunther Neske and Emil Kettering, eds., Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers (New York: Paragon, 1990) and Richard Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993).

8. Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, 30.

9. Leo Strauss, “An Unspoken Prologue to a Lecture at Saint John's,” Interpretation 7 (1978): 2.

10. Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, 30.

11. Luc Ferry, Political Philosophy, vol. 1, Rights: The New Quarrel Between the Ancients and the Moderns, trans. Franklin Philip (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

12. Ferry, The New Quarrel, 3.

13. Ibid., 4.

14. Ibid., 3.

15. Ibid., 18.

16. Ibid., 20.

17. Ibid., 20.

18. Ibid., 21.

19. Ferry, The New Quarrel, 21.

20. Ibid., 20.

21. Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 38.

22. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 38.

23. Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 49: “We are cultivated to a high degree by art and science. We are civilised to the point of excess in all kinds of social courtesies and proprieties. But we are still a long way from the point where we could consider ourselves morally mature.” See also Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 3-6 where Nietzsche speaks of “an alien ‘cultivatedness’ (unnationale Gebildetheit) which is nowadays dangerously misunderstood to constitute culture” and goes on to complain that this confusion is especially rife in Germany “where there no longer exists any clear conception of what culture is.” This distinction runs throughout Thomas Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, trans. Walter D. Morris (New York: Ungar, 1987); see, for example, p. 17: “The difference between intellect and politics includes that of culture and civilization, of soul and society, of freedom and voting rights, of art and literature; and German tradition is culture, soul, freedom and art and not civilization, society, voting rights, and literature.”

24. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 37.

25. Ibid., 38.

26. Martin Heidegger, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” Martin Heidegger and National Socialism, 5-13.

27. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 199.

28. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 1-2.

29. Leo Strauss, “Relativism,” Relativism and the Study of Man, ed. Helmut Schoeck and J. W. Wiggins (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1961); reprinted in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, 17.

30. Contrast Heidegger, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” 10: “To give oneself the law is the highest freedom. The much-lauded ‘academicfreedom’ will be expelled from the German university; for this freedom was not genuine because it was only negative. It primarily meant lack of concern, arbitrariness of intentions, lack of restraint in what was done and left undone” to Strauss, “Relativism,” 15-16: “It would be shortsighted to deny that Berlin's formula is very helpful for a political purpose—for the purpose of an anticommunist manifesto designed to rally all anticommunists.”

31. Strauss, “Relativism,” 13.

32. Strauss, “Relativism,” 17; Strauss finds particularly problematic Berlin's endorsement of Schumpeter's view that: “To realise the relative validity of one's convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly, is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian,” cited in Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 172.

33. Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 3.

34. Ibid., 3-4.

35. Ibid., 3, 6-7; Natural Right and History, 5-6.

36. For Heidegger's critique of Plato see Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Plato and Heidegger,” The Question of Being, ed. Mervyn Sprung (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1978), 44-53; William Galston, “Heidegger's Plato: A Critique of ‘Plato's Doctrine of Truth,’” Philosophical Forum 13 (1982): 371-84.

37. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Heidegger and the History of Philosophy,” The Monist 64 (1981): 436.

38. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1962), 39.

39. Ibid., 41.

40. Ibid., 43.

41. Ibid., 44.

42. Ibid.

43. Martin Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954), …

44. Strauss, “An Unspoken Prologue,” 2; he refers to the roots of the tradition here as “the only natural and healthy” ones.

45. Ibid., 2.

46. Strauss, Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, 28: “I had heard Heidegger's interpretation of certain sections of Aristotle, and some time later I heard Werner Jaeger in Berlin interpret the same texts. Charity compels me to limit my comparison to the remark that there was no comparison.” One wonders what an uncharitable judgment would have produced.

47. Hannah Arendt, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, ed. Michael Murray (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 295.

48. In his contribution to a festschrift for Strauss, his friend Jacob Klein, without mentioning Heidegger by name, relates the following story: “Many, many years ago I attended a series of lectures on Aristotle's philosophy. The lecturer began his exposition as follows: ‘As regards Aristotle himself, as regards the circumstances and the course of his life, suffice it to say: Aristotle was born, he spent his life in philosophizing, and died.’” Jacob Klein, “Aristotle, An Introduction,” Ancients and Moderns: Essays on the Tradition of Political Philosophy in Honor of Leo Strauss, ed. Joseph Cropsey (New York: Basic Books, 1964), 50.

49. Strauss, City and Man, 12: “We contend that [the] coherent and comprehensive understanding of political things is available to us in Aristotle's Politics precisely because the Politics is the original form of political science. … Classical political philosophy is the primary form of political science because the common sense understanding of political things is primary.”

50. The first use of this image of a “second cave” or a cave below the cave appears in Strauss's review of Julius Ebbinghaus's Uber die Fortschritte der Metaphysik which appeared in the Deutsche Literaturzeitung 52 (December 27, 1931): 2451-3.

51. Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1952), 155-6.

52. Seth Benardete, “Leo Strauss' ‘The City and Man,’” Political Science Reviewer 8 (1978): 1.

53. Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1958), 13.

54. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 79-80.

55. Ibid., 7-8.

56. Strauss, What is Political Philosophy, 38.

57. Strauss, What is Political Philosophy, 39.

58. For a useful discussion of these issues, see Victor Gourevitch, “Philosophy and Politics, I-II,” The Review of Metaphysics 22 (1968): 58-84, 281-328, esp. 281-99; Laurence Lampert, “The Argument of Leo Strauss in ‘What is Political Philosophy,’” Modern Age 22 (Winter 1978): 38-46.

59. Strauss, City and Man, 11.

60. Ibid.

61. Strauss, City and Man, 11.

62. Ibid., 9.

63. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 81.

64. Strauss, Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, 28; What is Political Philosophy, 246: “Heidegger … explicitly denies the possibility of ethics because he feels that there is a revolting disproportion between the idea of ethics and those phenomena which ethics pretended to articulate.” See also Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, 30: “There is no room for political philosophy in Heidegger's work, and this may well be due to the fact that the room in question is occupied by god or the gods.”

65. The two passages in question are Nathan's parable about the rich man's theft of a poor man's lamb in 2 Sam. 12 and the story of Ahab's covetousness of Naboth's vineyard in 1 Kings 21.

66. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 31-2, 105.

67. Ibid., 127-8.

68. Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael Roth (New York: Free Press, 1991), 191.

69. Strauss, On Tyranny, 191-2.

70. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 130. See also On Tyranny, 204 where Strauss argues that the philosopher does not require “recognition” from others but is fortified by an inner sense of self-satisfaction or self-admiration as something “akin to ‘the good conscience’ which as such does not require confirmation from other.” In a letter to Strauss dated September 19, 1950, Kojève suggested that Strauss's appeal to moral conscience is as “problematic” as his [Kojève's] appeal to mutual recognition and then asks: “Did Torquemada or Dzerzhinski have ‘bad consciences’?” See On Tyranny, 255. Kojève's reply seems to miss the point since neither Torquemada nor Dzerzhinski were philosophers in Strauss's specific sense of the term.

71. Strauss, City and Man, 12.

72. Strauss, City and Man, 138; Ferry, The New Quarrel, 21.

73. Strauss, City and Man, 131: “Democracy itself is characterized by freedom which includes the right to say and do whatever one wishes … Hence, we must understand, democracy is the only regime other than the best in which the philosopher can lead his peculiar way of life without being disturbed … Plato himself called the Athenian democracy, looking back on it from the rule of the Thirty Tyrants, ‘golden.’” In this context it is interesting that Strauss says three times that Plato deliberately “exaggerates” his critique of democracy.

74. Strauss, On Tyranny, 196.

75. See Myles F. Burnyeat, “Sphinx Without a Secret,” New York Review of Books 32, 30 May 1985, 32: “There is much talk in Straussian writings about the nature of ‘the philosopher’ but no sign of any knowledge, from the inside, of what it is to be actively involved in philosophy.” This accusation seems to have been written in ignorance of Strauss's extensive discussion of the “zetetic” nature of philosophy. This is all the more surprising since the accuser is himself an authority on the history and theory of philosophical skepticism; see Myles F. Burnyeat, ed., The Skeptical Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

76. Strauss, City and Man, 119-20.

77. Strauss, Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, 162: “To return to the argument of the Republic, by realizing the essential limitations of the political, one is indeed liberated from the charms of what we now would call political idealism.”

78. Strauss, What is Political Philosophy, 28.

79. Strauss, On Tyranny, 200.

80. Leo Strauss, Liberalism, Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 24: “Moderation will protect us against the twin dangers of visionary expectations from politics and unmanly contempt for politics.”

81. Strauss, Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, 43-4.

82. See Heidegger, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” 8: “… if it is true what that passionate seeker after God and last German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, said: ‘God is dead’—[then] we must be serious about this forsakenness of modern human beings in the midst of what is. …” See also Heidegger's later lecture “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead,’” The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 53-112.

83. Heidegger, “The Spiegel Interview,” Heidegger and National Socialism, 62; see also “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” Existence and Being, ed. Werner Brock (Chicago: Regnery, 1949), 289: “Hölderlin, in the act of establishing the essence of poetry, first determines a new time. It is the time of the gods that have fled and of the god that is coming.”

84. Hölderlin, “Brot und Wein,” cited in Heidegger, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” 290.

85. Martin Heidegger, “What are Poets For?” Poetry, Language, Thought, ed. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 96.

86. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” Basic Writings, ed. David Krell (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1977), 316.

87. Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen ‘Germanien’ und ‘Der Rhein’ Gesamtausgabe, ed. Susanne Ziegler (Frankfurt: Klosterman, 1980), 39: 80-2, 87-9, 141.

88. Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen, 120, 121: “Das ‘Vaterland’ ist das Seyn selbst … Das Vaterland ist keine abstrakte, uberzeitliche Idee an sich, sondern das Vaterland sieht der Dichter in einem ursprunglichen Sinne geschichtlich.”

89. Heidegger, Basic Writings, 218.

90. Martin Heidegger, “Memorial Address,” Discourse on Thinking, trans. John Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 43-57.

91. See Heidegger, “The Spiegel Interview,” 61: “I think that the task of thinking is precisely to help, within its bounds, human beings to attain an adequate relationship to the essence of technology at all. Although National Socialism went in that direction, those people were much too limited in their thinking to gain a really explicit relationship to what is happening today and what has been under way for three centuries.”

92. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 199; the claim that Nazism grew out of an excess of humanism has given rise to justified incredulity; for a recent attempt to defend the claim see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art, and Politics, trans. Chris Turner (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 95-6: “Nazism is a humanism in so far as it rests upon a determination of humanitas which is, in its view, more powerful—that is, more effective—than any other … The fact this subject lacks the universality which apparently defines the humanitas of humanism in the received sense, still does not make Nazism an anti-humanism. It simply situates it within the logic, of which there are many other examples, of the realization and the becoming-concrete of ‘abstractions.’”

93. Heidegger, “The Spiegel Interview,” 54.

94. Heidegger, “The Spiegel Interview,” 56.

95. Heidegger, “The Spiegel Interview,” 56-7.

96. Steven B. Smith, “Leo Strauss: Between Jerusalem and Athens,” Leo Strauss: Political Philosopher and Jewish Thinker, ed. Kenneth Deutsch and Walter Nicgorski (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994), 81-105.

97. Strauss, City and Man, 241.

98. Leo Strauss, “Preface to ‘Hobbes Politische Wissenschaft,’” Interpretation 8 (1979): 1.

99. Strauss, What is Political Philosophy, 13.

100. For an argument that Strauss's conception of “prophetology” derives neither from Greek (“athénien”) nor Jewish (“hiérosolymatain”) but muslim (“mecquois”) sources see Rémi Brague, “Athènes, Jérusalem, La Mecque: L'interprétation ‘musulmane’ de la philosophie greque chez Leo Strauss,” Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale 3 (1989): 309-36 at 316. At issue is Strauss's use of Avicenna as an authoritative interpreter of Plato's Laws; see Leo Strauss, The Argument and Action of Plato's Laws (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 1; Ralph Lerner and Mushin Mahdi, eds., Medieval Political Philosophy: A Sourcebook (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1963), 97: “Of this science, the treatment of kingship is contained in the book by Plato and that by Aristotle on the regime, and the treatment of prophecy and the Law is contained in their two books on the laws.”

101. Strauss, Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, 223-4.

102. See Strauss, The Argument and Action of Plato's Laws, 1-3.

103. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 74: “No alternative is more fundamental than this: human guidance or divine guidance. The first possibility is characteristic of philosophy or science in the original sense of the term, the second is presented in the Bible. The dilemma cannot be evaded by any harmonization or synthesis.” See also “Jerusalem and Athens: Some Introductory Reflections,” Commentary 43 (1967): 45-57; reprinted in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, 147-73.

104. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 81-3; City and Man, 241.

105. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 169.

106. Strauss, “Mutual Influence of Theology and Philosophy,” Independent Journal of Philosophy 3 (1979): 116.

107. Leo Strauss, “Preface to Spinoza's Critique of Religion,” Liberalism, Ancient and Modern, 254.

108. Strauss, “Preface to Spinoza's Critique of Religion,” 255.

109. Ibid., 238-9.

110. Strauss, What is Political Philosophy, 50.

111. Strauss, “Jerusalem and Athens,” 149-50; but contrast this to the opening paragraph of Strauss's “Niccolo Machiavelli,” History of Political Philosophy, ed. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1972), 271-2.

112. Strauss, “Mutual Influence of Theology and Philosophy,” 111, 113.

113. Leo Strauss, “Zionism in Max Nordau,” The Jew: Essays from Martin Buber's Journal ‘Der Jude’ 1916-1928, ed. Arthur Cohen (University, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1980), 124; see also Smith, “Leo Strauss: Between Athens and Jerusalem,” 89-91.

114. Strauss, Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, 31.

115. Strauss, “Preface to Spinoza's Critique of Religion,” 230.

116. Ibid.

117. Strauss, What is Political Philosophy, 40.

118. Strauss, Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, 29; What is Political Philosophy, 55.

119. Strauss, Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, 29.

120. Ibid.

121. Strauss, What is Political Philosophy, 55; see also Karl Löwith, “M. Heidegger and F. Rosenzweig or Temporality and Eternity,” Philosophy and Phenemenological Research 3 (1942-43): 75: “[Heidegger's] political commitment … was not—as naive people thought—a deviation from the main path of his philosophy, but a consequence of his concept of historical existence which only recognizes truths that are relative to the actual and proper.”

122. Strauss, What is Political Philosophy, 55.

123. Ibid., 27: “The biggest event of 1933 would rather seem to have proved, if such proof was necessary, that man cannot abandon the question of the good society, and that he cannot free himself from the responsibility for answering it by deferring to History or to any other power different from his own reason.”

124. Emile Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of Future Jewish Thought (New York: Schocken, 1982), 169-70.

125. Heidegger's views on Marx are surprisingly sympathetic; see Basic Writings, 219 where Marx is praised for recognizing “the homelessness of modern man” as “an essential and significant” element of modern history: “Because Marx by experiencing estrangement attains an essential dimension of history, the Marxist view of history is superior to that of other historical accounts.”

126. For some of the recent political appropriations of Heidegger, see Michael E. Zimmerman, Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, Art (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 248-74.

127. Heidegger's infamous statement that the mechanized production of food stuffs is “the same thing” as the “production of corpses” in Auschwitz is cited in Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art, and Politics, 34.

128. Strauss, On Tyranny, 212. For reasons that appear inexplicable, this sentence and the entire final paragraph of On Tyranny was omitted from the earlier edition of the work. Because Strauss's text was then unavailable to the new editors, Gourevitch translated the final paragraph from the French edition of On Tyranny. Strauss's typewritten manuscript has since been made available to me by Nathan Tarcov. The quoted statement reads as follows: “But we have always been mindful of it. For we both apparently turned away from Being to Tyranny because we have seen that those who lack the courage to face the issue of Tyranny, who therefore et humiliter serviebant et superbe dominabantur, were forced to evade the issue of Being as well, precisely because they did nothing but talk of Being.”