SOURCE: Lenzner, Steven. J. “Strauss's Fârâbî, Scholarly Prejudice, and Philosophic Politics.” Perspectives on Political Science 28, no. 4 (fall 1999): 194-202.

[In the following essay, Lenzner analyzes Strauss's rhetorical attempts to paint Muslim philosopher Fârâbî as an unbeliever and a Machiavellian, despite Strauss's admiration for much of Fârâbi's work.]

Leo Strauss is famous as a political philosopher who attempted to revive classical political philosophy in our time. Perhaps he is equally famous for the thesis that many of the great works of the past are “esoteric”; that is, they provide one salutary, “exoteric” teaching to the many who read with little care or thought, and a different, true, “esoteric” teaching to those able to “read between the lines.” Fârâbî was a tenth-century Islamic philosopher who, like Strauss, attempted to revive Platonic political philosophy in an age when philosophy “had been blurred or destroyed.”¹ Also like Strauss, Fârâbî presented many of his philosophic teachings in the form of commentary on the works of other philosophers. Moreover, both men present themselves publicly as friends of morality and religion. In light of these facts, some have surmised that in speaking of Fârâbî's teaching and practices Strauss often has himself in mind. Indeed, he seems to point to that conclusion by describing the way that Fârâbî conveyed his teachings in a manner that strongly recalls his own approach: “Fârâbî avails himself then of the specific immunity of the commentator, or of the historian, in order to speak his mind concerning grave matters in his ‘historical’ works rather than in the works setting forth what he presents as his own doctrine” (375; PAW [Persecution and the Art of Writing], 14).²

Yet when one turns to Strauss's essays on Fârâbî's Platonic writings, “Fârâbî's Plato” and “How Fârâbî Read Plato's Laws,” this conjecture becomes problematic. For in the former, Strauss goes out of his way to paint Fârâbî as an unbeliever who was politically ambitious, and in the latter, he emphasizes the nastier, more Machiavellian aspects of his teaching. What could have been Strauss's purpose in doing so? By looking at these writings, especially “Fârâbî's Plato,” I aim to bring out the rhetorical peculiarities of Strauss's treatment of Fârâbî; and I suggest that it was primarily with a view to undermining the prejudices of contemporary scholars regarding philosophers and philosophy that Strauss presented his interpretation as he did.

THE PROBLEM OF SCHOLARSHIP: STRAUSS'S INTRODUCTION TO FâRâBî

Strauss begins “Fârâbî's Plato” with a brief introductory section that is ostensibly devoted to justifying to his contemporaries his decision to study Fârâbî's treatise on Plato. In fact, the introduction is a satire on the methods and assumptions of contemporary scholarship. Through a series of compromises among various authorities and principles, historical accident, and bald assertion, Strauss arrives at the conclusion that Fârâbî's Plato is in fact the perfect work to study for understanding the “philosophic background” of Maimonides. And it is just such arguments that govern too much of contemporary scholarship. I am going to devote what may seem a disproportionate amount of my essay to a close reading of Strauss's introduction. My reason for doing so is twofold: First, one cannot understand Strauss's writings on Fârâbî without seeing their playful character, which is particularly evident in the introduction. Second, much of my argument rests on the contention that one cannot understand Strauss's seemingly immoderate claims except as an attempt to undermine prevailing scholarly assumptions; therefore I think it helpful to show to what extent Strauss had those assumptions in his sights from the outset—particularly the assumption that the great medieval Islamic and Jewish thinkers sought to synthesize religious and philosophical teachings.³

The first sentence of “Fârâbî's Plato” reads, “It is generally admitted that one cannot understand the teaching of Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed before one has understood the teaching of ‘the philosophers’; for the former presents itself as a Jewish correction of the latter” (357). Strauss seems to accept this piece of conventional wisdom without question. He then immediately turns his attention to determining what is the best approach to “the philosophers.”⁴

Strauss not only fails to question the conventional wisdom concerning “the philosophers” but also fails to challenge the erroneous assumption on which it rests. The Guide does not present itself as a Jewish correction of the philosophers, but as a rational correction of the Islamic theologians, the Mutakallimûm, whose intention—the defense of the law against the opinions of the philosophers—Maimonides claims to accept.⁵ He aims to correct the Mutakallimûm but to oppose the philosophers. His opposition to the philosophers consists of a defense of the Jewish faith. But that defense is not an attempt to correct the philosophers because such an attempt would presuppose that philosophy is amenable to correction, or that there is no fundamental incompatibility between Jewish faith and philosophy. Yet Maimonides “obviously assumes that the philosophers form a group distinguished from the adherents of the law and that both groups are mutually exclusive” (PAW, 43).

Perhaps most important, in the introductory section of “Fârâbî's Plato,” Strauss justifies the study of Fârâbî as contributing to the understanding of Maimonides, without raising the more fundamental question of why one would wish to study Maimonides in the first place. By contrast, in his early work on Maimonides, Philosophy and Law: Contributions to the Understanding of Maimonides and His Predecessors, Strauss states in the opening paragraph that his purpose is “to awaken a prejudice” in favor of the view that “Maimonides' rationalism is the true natural model” (PL [Philosophy and Law], 21). It is because Maimonides' teaching may be true that one should study it. Similarly, in his introduction to Persecution and the Art of Writing, a radical revision of “Fârâbî's Plato,” Strauss writes: “If Islamic and Jewish philosophy must be understood, they must be of philosophic and not merely of antiquarian interest” (8).

Strauss proceeds to identify “the philosophers” provisionally with the “Islamic Aristotelians” and says that “one may describe their teaching as a blend of genuine Aristotelianism with Neo-platonism and, of course, Islamic tenets” (357). He states that “if, however, one wants to grasp the principle transforming that mixture of heterogeneous elements into a consistent, or intelligible whole, one does well to follow the signpost erected by Maimonides himself” (357). And Maimonides, in a letter to Samuel ibn Tibbon, “makes it abundantly clear that he considered [Fârâbî] the greatest philosophic authority after Aristotle” (357). In that letter, Maimonides recommended “in the strongest terms” Fârâbî's The Political Governments (357). “Thus we may assume to begin with that he considered it Fârâbî's most important book” (357). From these considerations Strauss concludes that “there can be no doubt as to the proper beginning, i.e., the only beginning which is not arbitrary, of the understanding of Maimonides' philosophic background: one has to start from an analysis of Fârâbî's Political governments” (357-58, emphases added).

Strauss's provisional conclusion must be questioned. To give just one example, by tacitly shifting the aim of his study from understanding the thought of “the philosophers”⁶ to the understanding of Maimonides' “philosophic background,” Strauss calls into question the proper beginning point for study. For if Aristotle is a greater “authority”⁷ for Maimonides than is Fârâbî, would it not make more sense to begin a study of Maimonides' “philosophic background” with Aristotle's works?⁸

Having thus artfully demonstrated the need to study The Political Governments, Strauss explains why “such an analysis would be unwise now” (358). First, there did not then exist a satisfactory edition. Second, “above all,” a “full understanding” of that work presupposes the study of two parallel works, one of which had not been edited at all.⁹ Before Strauss drops The Political Governments, he digresses to give us a brief paragraph on its manner of presentation. There, he offers the most important observation of his introductory section:

We limit ourselves here to stressing one feature of The political governments (and mutatis mutandis, of the two parallel works) that by itself clearly indicates the most striking trait of Fârâbî's philosophy. As is shown already by the difference between its authentic and customary title, the book treats the whole of philosophy proper (i.e., with the omission of logic and mathematics) within a political framework.

(358)

The distinguishing characteristic of Fârâbî's philosophy is that it is political philosophy; Strauss's philosophy is even more so than Fârâbî's.

Fârâbî, according to Strauss, not only followed Plato by presenting philosophy politically, but “held the view that Plato's philosophy was the true philosophy” (359). Strauss offers no evidence to support this assertion. He merely lists the “three more or less different ways” by which Fârâbî could “reconcile his Platonism with his adherence to Aristotle” (359). Strauss does not even discuss here whether Fârâbî could reconcile his Platonism with Islam.¹⁰ The third way—to “show that ‘the aim’ of both philosophers is identical” (359)—turns out to be the most promising. Fârâbî had devoted his tripartite work The Aims of the Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle to that task. Strauss therefore concludes that “by studying [the] central part of that work [“The Philosophy of Plato”] which alone is at present accessible in a critical edition, one is enabled to grasp fully the character of Fârâbî's Platonism and therewith of Fârâbî's own philosophy” (360, emphasis added).

It is difficult to keep track of the various premises dropped, adopted, and adapted that allow Strauss to reach the conclusion that the best way to pursue the study of Maimonides' “philosophic background” is to study the one work of Fârâbî's that just happens to have been issued in a new critical edition. Let me instead briefly consider the adequacy of that conclusion itself. In the essay “Persecution and the Art of Writing,” Strauss set down the following rule for reading: “The context in which a statement occurs, and the literary character of the whole work as well as its plan, must be perfectly understood before an interpretation of the statement can claim to be adequate or even correct” (PAW, 30). Strauss's introduction¹¹ to Persecution and the Art of Writing is a severely modified and abridged version of “Fârâbî's Plato.” Strauss writes there, “Two points in Fârâbî's On the Purposes of Plato and Aristotle strike one most. The work owes its origin to the concern with the restoration of philosophy ‘after it has been blurred or destroyed’; and it is more concerned with the purposes common to Plato and Aristotle than with the agreement or the disagreement of the results of their investigations” (PAW, 12). In “Fârâbî's Plato,” Strauss does not note either of these striking points as such—that is to say, he offers an interpretation that is partial, one that demands correction in light of the work as a whole.

In case I have not yet sufficiently made my case as to the purposeful inadequacy of Strauss's introduction to “Fârâbî's Plato,” let me offer one last piece of evidence. Common sense demands that in selecting for intensive study a work to illumine a great thinker's philosophic background, one be sure that the thinker had read the work in question. In “The Literary Character of the Guide for the Perplexed,” however, Strauss writes, “Even the classical statement about the danger inherent in all writing may have been known to Maimonides, for the famous doctrine of Plato's Phaedrus had been summarized by Fârâbî in his treatise on Plato's philosophy” (PAW, 47, emphasis added). Maimonides may never even have read the Plato.

Strauss's introduction as a whole gradually replaces the view with which it began with an entirely different view—one that is far closer to Strauss's considered view. Instead of finding a principle that allows the reconciliation of “genuine Aristotelianism with Neo-platonism and … Islamic tenets” (357), Strauss discovers a Platonic teaching that is free of Islamic tenets and Neo-Platonism and which provisionally subsumes any differences between Plato and Aristotle beneath their common purpose.¹² Moreover, he does it in such a way that most readers are not apt to notice.

From the “mistake” in the opening sentence to the end of his brief introductory section, Strauss reverts time and again to the problem of synthesizing views that are, in fact, incompatible. Scholars today are apt to be particularly attracted to such syntheses because they view authors as products of their time, and they do not like to believe that great men would lie (and that scholars have been the dupes of such lies).¹³ By intimating what is problematic about that conventional approach at the outset of “Fârâbî's Plato,” Strauss forces the reader to question what amounts to a scholarly criticism of Maimonides and men of his kind. As he writes elsewhere, “to recognize that a scholarly criticism of Maimonides is unreasonable is equivalent to progressing in the understanding of his thought” (WIPP [What Is Political Philosophy?], 168). Moreover, by doing so in such a playful manner, Strauss makes study, at the least, attractive. What Strauss says of Maimonides' Guide can be applied to “Fârâbî's Plato”: “At first glance the book appears merely to be strange and in particular to lack order and consistency. But progress in understanding it is a progress in becoming enchanted by it. Enchanting understanding is perhaps the highest form of edification” (LAM [Liberalism, Ancient and Modern], 142).

One of Strauss's chief aims in his writings on medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophy is to demonstrate that a careful writer can write “carelessly”—for example, by intentionally contradicting himself—while drawing attention to the importance of careful writing. Scholars reacted to that thesis with hostility and incredulity. Readings of the sort that Strauss provides in “Fârâbî's Plato” persuaded the open-minded that such works had been written; writings such as “How Fârâbî Read Plato's Laws” prove that they can still be written.

SCHOLARLY PREJUDICE AND THE EMPHASIS ON FâRâBî'S REJECTION OF REVELATION

One of the most striking features of “Fârâbî's Plato” is the manner in which it repeatedly stresses Fârâbî's rejection of any claim on behalf of revelation. Strauss does not simply or quietly indicate that Fârâbî was a nonbeliever, as one might expect him to do. Instead, he argues at length and at times with an uncharacteristically insistent tone that Fârâbî was not a believing Muslim. About halfway through “Fârâbî's Plato,”¹⁴ he makes a long digression (370-77) wherein he seeks to show how Fârâbî laid the groundwork for initiating his readers into the view that “philosophy by itself is sufficient to produce happiness” (370). Unlike Aristotle, “medieval thinkers” were not free to state that view “without much ado” (371). To overcome the dangers inherent in his situation, Fârâbî had to write circumspectly. Strauss argues, “By studying how Fârâbî proceeds concerning a relatively simple aspect of the matter, we may be enabled to grasp his intention concerning its more complex aspects” (371). Strauss then highlights two devices by which Fârâbî overcame his difficult circumstances: meaningful silences and the pronouncement of heterodox views through the mouths of others.

The simple aspect that Strauss begins with is Fârâbî's Plato's rejection of the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. Strauss contrasts Fârâbî's mention “as a matter of course” of the distinction between worldly happiness and “the ultimate happiness in the other life” at the beginning of The Attainment of Happiness, the prefatory work to the Plato, with Fârâbî's failure to take account of that distinction in the Plato itself. According to Strauss, the meaning of that silence becomes “unmistakably clear” from Fârâbî's silence on the immortality of the soul in the Plato, a work that offers “summaries of the Phaedrus, the Phaedo and the Republic”: “Fârâbî's Plato silently rejects Plato's doctrine of immortality” (371). In the subsequent paragraph Strauss similarly contrasts Fârâbî's avowal of “more or less orthodox views concerning the life after death” in the works that present his own doctrine, with Fârâbî's procedure in his commentary on Aristotle's Ethics. There, according to Strauss, Fârâbî—not Fârâbî's Aristotle—“declares that there is only the happiness of this life and that all divergent statements are based on ‘ravings and old women's tales’” (372, emphasis added). The confidence with which Strauss ascribes this view to Fârâbî is even more remarkable in light of the fact that Fârâbî's commentary is not even extant.

Strauss's account of Fârâbî's manner of treating the immortality of the soul was apparently insufficient to allow us to grasp Fârâbî's intention concerning the “more complex aspects” of the “matter.” Somewhat awkwardly and even apologetically, Strauss continues his digression in the succeeding paragraph: “Considering the importance of the subject, we will be excused for adducing a third example” (372). This example contrasts Fârâbî's account of the religious sciences (fiqh and kalâm) in his Enumeration of the Sciences, where they are treated as “corollaries to political science,” with that offered in the Plato. Strauss writes, “At first sight one might believe that by assigning to the religious sciences that particular status Fârâbî merely wants to say that religion, i.e., revealed religion, i.e., the revealed law (the sharî'a) comes first into the sight of the philosopher as a political fact: precisely as a philosopher, he suspends his judgment as to the truth of the super-rational teaching of religion” (372-73). Strauss seems to raise this prospect only in order to dismiss it by reference to the Plato: “Through the mouth of Plato, Fârâbî declares that religious speculation, and religious investigation of the beings, and the religious syllogistic art do not supply the science of the beings, of which man's highest perfection consists, whereas philosophy does supply it” (373, emphasis added). Religious speculation as a cognitive pursuit is inferior even to grammar (373-74).

Although Fârâbî's treatment of the sciences in question may not be awkward, Strauss's treatment of that treatment is, to a considerable extent. Strauss discusses his third example in language that seems halting and stilted. For example, in one clause of the sentence about how Fârâbî's presentation of the religious sciences may initially appear, Strauss uses both “at first sight” and “first comes into sight,” as well as the less-than-graceful “i.e., revealed religion, i.e., the revealed law” (372).¹⁵

Strauss's digression reaches its rhetorical peak immediately after this awkward paragraph. Adopting the tone of a skeptical contemporary, he writes:

One might think to begin with that in order to get hold of Fârâbî's views, one ought to consult primarily the works in which he sets forth his own doctrine, and not his expositions of the doctrines of other men, especially if those other men were pagans. For may one not expound, as a commentator, or as a historian, with the greatest care and without a muttering of dissent such views as he rejects as a man? May Fârâbî not have been attracted as a pupil of philosophers by what he abhorred as a believer?

(374)

Strauss seems to offer an emphatic “no” to both questions. In the midst of his account of how Fârâbî hid himself behind Plato, Strauss the individual steps forward. In one of his infrequent uses of the first person singular,¹⁶ he voices considerable contempt for the contention that a man of Fârâbî's rank could have had a mind split against itself: “I do not know whether there ever was a ‘philosopher’ whose mind was so confused as to consist of hermetically sealed compartments: Fârâbî was a man of a different stamp” (374).

Strauss, however, is not willing either to rest his case there or to advance his argument in the direction that his assertion might suggest—that is, by discussing what type of man Fârâbî was. Instead, in the strongest terms possible he offers further evidence to remove any lingering suspicion that Fârâbî may have been a believing Muslim. Taking up once again Fârâbî's silence on Plato's doctrine of the immortality of the soul, Strauss declares, “His refusal [to embrace some tolerable doctrine concerning life after death], amounting to a flagrant deviation from the letter of Plato's teaching, to succumb to Plato's charms, proves it more convincingly than any explicit statement of his could have done, that he considered the belief in a happiness different from the happiness of this life, or the belief in the other life, utterly erroneous” (374-75, emphasis added).¹⁷ Having already assumed the tone and manner of a prosecuting attorney, Strauss adopts the language of one as well. He asserts that Fârâbî's silence in a work “destined¹⁸ to present the philosophy of Plato ‘from its beginning to its end’ sets it beyond any reasonable doubt that statements asserting that immortality which occur in other writings of his, have to be dismissed as prudential accommodations to the accepted dogma” (375).

It is worth noting that Strauss only seems to answer the two questions he has posed to himself. Instead of answering them, he denies the premise on which they were based. Such questions could be raised seriously only by people who believed that there did not exist an essential difference between themselves and someone such as Fârâbî. Fârâbî was not merely a “pupil of philosophers,” an intellectual. “To consider the author of the Plato a mere epitomist of a lost Greek text, means to disregard, not only the admiration which men of the competence of Avicenna and Maimonides felt for Fârâbî, but likewise the exceedingly careful wording of the Plato itself” (377). Intellectuals do not find it difficult to believe that a thinker of the past could hold with complacency starkly incompatible views because they lack the intellectual rigor necessary to determine whether views are compatible or not. In a posthumously published lecture, Strauss raised the following question: “Are those like myself who are inclined to sit at the feet of the old philosophers not exposed to the danger of the weak-kneed eclecticism which will not withstand a single blow on the part of those who are competent enough to remind them of the singleness of purpose and of inspiration that characterizes every thinker who deserves to be called great?”¹⁹ Strauss's disdain for his contemporaries was, as much as anything, a reaction to their inability to recognize that such a danger could exist—an inability that in large part stemmed from a democratic unwillingness to recognize the character of true greatness.²⁰

Strauss concludes his digression by digressing further, in words that are often taken to be self-referential: “It may be added that by transmitting the most precious knowledge, not in ‘systematic’ works, but in the guise of a historical account, Fârâbî indicates his view concerning ‘originality’ and ‘individuality’ in philosophy: what comes into sight as the ‘original’ or ‘personal’ ‘contribution’ of a philosopher is infinitely less significant than his private, and truly original and individual understanding of the necessarily anonymous truth” (377). That Strauss the individual comes to the fore so clearly in the part of the essay where he depreciates “individuality” and “originality” suggests that one should look skeptically at his account of Fârâbî's teaching before concluding that he shared it: If Fârâbî does not disclose his true views in his own name, one should not necessarily expect Strauss to do so when “speaking” about himself.²¹

Before I address the obvious question—Why does Strauss insist so strongly on Fârâbî's categorical unbelief?—let me try to bring the problem more sharply into focus through a brief consideration of “How Fârâbî Read Plato's Laws.” At the outset of that essay, Strauss depicts the means by which Fârâbî (and Fârâbî's Plato) enabled themselves to state useful though dangerous truths (FPL [“How Fârâbî Read Plato's Laws,” in What Is Political Philosphy?], 136). He illustrates by retelling the Fârâbîan story of how a well-known, pious ascetic, fearful of the oppressive ruler of his city, escaped from the city. The ruler ordered his arrest, and unable to leave from the city gates, the ascetic somehow obtained vagabond's clothes and approached a gate of the city acting as if he were drunk. When the guard asked him who he was, he replied mockingly that he was the ascetic. The guard, suspecting that he was being ridiculed, let the ascetic go. Strauss notes that “the story shows, among other things, that one can safely tell a very dangerous truth provided one tells it in the proper surroundings, for the public will interpret the absolutely unexpected speech in terms of the customary and expected meaning of the surroundings rather than it will interpret the surroundings in terms of the dangerous character of the speech” (FPL, 136). Strauss's retelling is not, however, faithful in every detail to Fârâbî's story. In particular, in Strauss's version there is a more pronounced hostility on the part of the ruler toward the ascetic—the ascetic is in even greater danger; yet despite being in greater danger, Strauss's ascetic does not act more cautiously than does Fârâbî's. On the contrary, he acts in an even more daring manner. In Fârâbî's account the ascetic merely answers the guard's inquiry, “I am so-and-so the ascetic.” In Strauss's retelling, the ascetic answers, “I am that pious ascetic you are looking for.” Fârâbî's ascetic tempts Fortune; Strauss's, as it were, challenges her. In short, as the ascetic in Strauss's retelling stands to the one in Fârâbî's original, so does Strauss's Fârâbî stand toward the actual Fârâbî: Strauss takes Fârâbî's remarkably bold speech and makes it even bolder.

In “How Fârâbî Read Plato's Laws,” Strauss highlights a different aspect of Fârâbî's boldness; whereas the emphasis in “Fârâbî's Plato” was on Fârâbî's irreligion, in. “How Fârâbî Read Plato's Laws” it is on immorality. Strauss emphasizes what one may call the “Machiavellian” side of Fârâbî. He presents there a Fârâbî almost exclusively concerned with the useful; he brings out a penchant for secrecy on the part of Fârâbî, especially in politics (he refers to Fârâbî's “independent discussion of the counsel or ruse to be employed in the establishment of laws in a new political society”); and Strauss's Fârâbî seems far more concerned with the beginnings and ends of political society than with its actual existence. To give just one example, Strauss presents Fârâbî as having a certain sympathy for tyranny. He writes:

In the fourth chapter he states what Plato said when “he undertook to explain the subject of tyranny,” while in the fifth chapter he states what Plato said when “he mentioned another useful subject” which he discussed with impressive terseness; in the first statement, tyranny is declared to be good if used for rule over slaves and wicked people, and to be bad if used for rule over free and virtuous men; in the second statement tyranny is said to be indispensable as a prelude to divine laws for two reasons.

(FPL, 141-42)

“Tyranny” for Strauss's Fârâbî would seem to be not only potentially “good” and “useful,” but “indispensable.”²² That Strauss overemphasizes Fârâbî's attraction to the wicked comes forth in his very use of the term “tyranny.” The Arabic term that Strauss translates as “tyranny” (taghalub) does not convey a sense of injustice that would justify such a translation; the literal sense is of overturning something, usually something negative.

PHILOSOPHIC POLITICS

Now I will address the obvious questions: Why does Strauss insist so strongly on Fârâbî's irreligion and suggest that he experimented with immorality? Why does he do so in essays that lend themselves easily to the impression that Fârâbî is the thinker on whom he modeled himself? In his “Restatement on Xenophon's Hiero,”²³ Strauss wrote, “For someone who is trying to form his taste or his mind by studying Xenophon, it is almost shocking to be suddenly confronted by the more than Machiavellian bluntness with which Kojève speaks of such terrible things as atheism and tyranny and takes them for granted” (WIPP, 104).²⁴ To understand Strauss's reasons for attributing similar views to Fârâbî, it helps to look at the reasons Strauss provides for Fârâbî's having expressed such views. According to Strauss, Fârâbî employed a most elliptical manner of writing, primarily, though by no means exclusively, as a device to free philosophic readers from the prejudices of their time (368, 377-78, 382). In Persecution and the Art of Writing Strauss puts it thus: “Those to whom such books are truly addressed are, however, neither the unphilosophic majority nor the perfect philosopher as such, but the young men who might become philosophers” (PAW, 36).²⁵

It is not accidental that “Fârâbî's Plato” repeats, as it were, the charges upon which Socrates was condemned in Athens: not believing in the gods of the city and corrupting the young.²⁶ In presenting the case for Fârâbî's unbelief, as I noted above, Strauss takes on the tone of a prosecutor—he proves “beyond any reasonable doubt” that Fârâbî rejects as “utterly erroneous” the belief in another life (375). Why did Strauss retry—and convict—philosophy?

The prejudices that Fârâbî had to overcome in the minds of the young were, above all, religious. To revive philosophy Fârâbî had to overcome a dogmatic belief on the part of his readers. Strauss faced a different problem: not belief, but dogmatic belief in belief. He had to overcome the dominant prejudice that the great Islamic philosophers of the past were in the decisive respect products of their time. Fârâbî's rather unprepossessing works offered a perfect medium by which to do so. Of Fârâbî's Summary of the Laws, Strauss wrote: “At a first reading, and at any superficial reading, the Summary presents itself as a pedantic, pedestrian and wooden writing which abounds in trivial or insipid remarks and which reveals an amazing lack of comprehension of Plato” (140). To show that in such a work there is a philosophic teaching of a very high order is to wave a yellow flag to those gifted youths who otherwise might dismiss such writings as irrelevant.

“Circumstances,” wrote Edmund Burke, “give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.”²⁷ Strauss's writings on Fârâbî can only be understood in light of the circumstances he faced, and they must be placed in their proper perspective within the body of Strauss's writings as a whole. In his “Restatement” he provides one of his very few explicit discussions of “philosophic politics”:²⁸

In what then does philosophic politics consist? In satisfying the city that the philosophers are not atheists,²⁹ that they do not desecrate everything sacred to the city, that they are not subversives, in short that they are not irresponsible adventurers but good citizens and even the best of citizens. This is the defense of philosophy which was required always and everywhere, whatever the regime might have been.

(WIPP, 126, emphases added)

Strauss's use of the past tense suggests that circumstances today are sufficiently different that they may require philosophic politics of a different sort, if with the same end in view. He proceeds to wonder, without elaboration, whether “the political action on behalf of philosophy by the philosophers … has not been too successful” (WIPP, 127).

What Strauss means by “too successful” can best be seen, I believe, by comparison with those times when philosophy was most in need of a successful philosophic politics. In the introduction to Persecution and the Art of Writing, he writes:

The precarious status of philosophy in Judaism as well as in Islam was not in every respect a misfortune for philosophy. The official recognition of philosophy in the Christian world made philosophy subject to ecclesiastical supervision. The precarious position of philosophy in the Islamic-Jewish world guaranteed its private character and therewith its inner freedom from supervision.

(21)

Legal tolerance of philosophy does not necessarily produce conditions that are congenial to genuine freedom of thought.³⁰ Strauss's situation resembled the one faced by Maimonides as described by Strauss. Maimonides' dilemma consisted in this: He had discovered the secret teaching of the Bible, the most precious wisdom. He feared that, given his circumstances, if he did not write it down it would once again be lost, perhaps for centuries. But there was a Talmudic prohibition against revealing such secrets. Maimonides' solution was to write it down, but only in a manner that was consistent with the spirit, if not the letter of the law: “Maimonides insisted on taking a middle course between impossible obedience and flagrant contradiction” (PAW, 52). That is, he wrote the teaching down in such a manner that it would reach only those fit to receive it. He wrote it exoterically; specifically, in contradictory speech—“if a man declares both that a is b and that a is not b, he cannot be said to declare anything” (LAM, 143).

Maimonides implored his readers not to reveal the secret teaching. Strauss, however, believed that he had a responsibility to his own and later generations to explain Maimonides' secrets, in the name of “freedom of thought”:

STRAUSS'S PHILOSOPHER DOES NOT RULE BUT LIVES “PRIVATELY AS A MEMBER OF AN IMPERFECT COMMUNITY.”

Freedom of thought being menaced in our time³¹ more than for several centuries, we have not only the right but even the duty to explain the teaching of Maimonides, in order to contribute to a better understanding of what freedom of thought means, i.e., what attitude it presupposes and what sacrifices it requires.

(PAW, 56)

Strauss therefore divulged Maimonides' secrets, but, like Maimonides, he steered a middle course: He revealed them esoterically (PAW, 57).³² That is, he gave hints that pointed in the direction of Maimonides' true teaching but did not reveal the teaching itself.

Strauss's case for Fârâbî's unbelief is remarkable for its lack of subtlety. In an essay praising Fârâbî's restraint and art, Strauss, in an apparently graceless and unrestrained manner, proclaims Fârâbî's unbelief. The penultimate sentence of “Fârâbî's Plato” reads, “What made [Fârâbî] a philosopher, according to his own view of philosophy, were not [his] convictions, but the spirit in which they were acquired, in which they were maintained and in which they were intimated rather than preached from the house-tops” (393). One has only to ask to what sort of unbelief Strauss's essay, taken at face value, would lead to see that it should not be taken as a serious expression of his view on religion. Strauss notes elsewhere the need to “refuse respect to unreasoned unbelief” (LAM, 218-19). He no doubt wanted to counter the reflexive, unthinking way in which dogmatic belief was ascribed to thinkers such as Fârâbî. He did not wish to replace that dogmatic belief in belief with dogmatic unbelief.³³

It is not my intent to deny the truth underlying Strauss's portrayals of Fârâbî: Philosophers are not believers, and philosophic morality rests on premises extrinsic to conventional morality (388-89; FPL, 152). That being stipulated, it is necessary to point out the extent to which Strauss—even, or especially, in his most outspoken essays—gives moderation its due. He does so in both what he says and what he does not say in his essays on Fârâbî. Perhaps the best way to bring out that aspect of Strauss's teaching is by examining in some detail a passage that suggests to many an inordinate political ambition on his part.

Strauss argues that, because the philosopher must necessarily live in an imperfect political community—one in which he will necessarily be “in grave danger” (382; Plato, 32 [XXXVIII])—he must take political action on behalf of philosophy. To avoid the fate of Socrates he must combine Socrates' way, which is appropriate for dealing with the elite, and the way of Thrasymachus, which is appropriate for interaction with the young and the vulgar (383).³⁴ Socrates' “uncompromising” way was determined by the fact that he was merely a moral philosopher and hence a “moralist” (383, emphasis added).³⁵ Because Plato recognized the essentially theoretical character of philosophy he was able to curb his “moral fervor” and avoid the unpleasant choice faced by Socrates—either to conform to the unjust ways of the city and live or to challenge them and die. In other words, Plato successfully combined the two opposing ways. His recognition of the theoretical character of philosophy did not, however, dissipate the quest for reform that is engendered by awareness of the city's imperfection; it merely channeled it in a safer and more effective direction. On the basis of this insight,

the “revolutionary quest” for the other city ceased to be a necessity: Plato substituted for it a much more “conservative” way of action, viz. the gradual replacement of the accepted opinions by the truth or approximation to the truth. The replacement, however gradual, of the accepted opinions is of course a destruction of the accepted opinions. … The goal of the gradual destruction of the accepted opinions is the truth, as far as the elite, the potential philosophers, is concerned, but only an approximation to the truth (or an imaginative representation of the truth) as far as the general run of men is concerned. We may say that Fârâbî's Plato replaces Socrates' philosopher-king who rules openly in the perfect city by the secret kingship of the philosopher who lives privately as a member of an imperfect community.

(383-84, emphases added)

Strauss's statement has suggested to many that he had political ambitions of almost unbounded dimensions. They see his discovery of a deep ambition underlying Fârâbî's seeming moderation as an implicit confession of his own. Adding fuel to the fire is the fact that Strauss uses deliberately exaggerated and provocative rhetoric to describe Fârâbî's scheme, as appears from a glance at Fârâbî's text.³⁶ But before reaching such a conclusion, the reader should consider Strauss's statement more carefully. The passage is qualified. Its most suggestive sentence begins with “We may say,” a phrase that indicates imprecision and demands caution; for what “we may say” is not what “I think” or even what “I believe.”³⁷ Moreover, the aims of Strauss's Fârâbî are moderate and instrumental: Their chief function is “to guide the potential philosophers towards the truth.” Strauss's philosopher does not rule but lives “privately as a member of an imperfect community.” “Fârâbî's Plato” as a whole, from its initial acceptance of scholarly opinion to its eventual repudiation of such opinion, paints a picture of the process it describes.

The essential moderation of Strauss's seemingly radical “secret kingship of the philosopher” is further brought out in the introduction, where Strauss repeats his statement about it. There he makes a number of seemingly minor changes, all of which point toward a more moderate philosophic politics.³⁸ Perhaps most important, Strauss there conveys the necessarily limited intent of Fârâbî's philosophic politics; Strauss shows that for Fârâbî the philosopher's self-conscious aim is not philosophic domination but, insofar as politics proper is concerned, merely “to humanize within the limits of the possible.” What this means is revealed in Strauss's “Restatement on Xenophon's Hiero.” Speaking of the attempt by the wise man—in this case, the poet Simonides—to reform tyranny, that regime most in need of reform, Strauss writes:

A sensible man like Simonides would think that he had deserved well of his fellow men if he could induce the tyrant to act humanely or rationally within a small area, or perhaps even in a single instance, where, without his advice, the tyrant would have continued an irrational or inhuman practice. … The general lesson is to the effect that the wise man who happens to have the chance to influence a tyrant should use his influence for benefiting his fellow man. One may say³⁹ that the lesson is trivial. It would be more accurate to say that it was trivial in former ages, for today such little actions like that of Simonides are not taken seriously because we are in the habit of expecting too much.

(WIPP, 107, emphasis added)

Strauss suggests the need for, as well as making the case for, moderation by his exaggerated account of Fârâbî's exaggerated account of Socrates' conflict with Athens. As if to overcompensate for his magnification of Fârâbî's irreligion, he takes Fârâbî's portrayal of a Socrates whose focus was too narrowly political⁴⁰ and makes him into a moralist.⁴¹ Strauss even speaks of the “moral fervor” of Fârâbî's Plato (383). By overstating the case for both philosophic amorality and philosophic moralism, Strauss points in the direction of a healthy mean that respects both philosophic questioning and societal opinion.⁴²

Strauss provides an instructive epigraph to “Fârâbî's Plato” from Lessing: “Precisely the same thought can, at a different place, have an entirely different value.”⁴³ Socrates' accusers in Athens were animated by hatred of philosophy. Strauss's “accusation” of Fârâbî proceeds from an entirely different motivation, to say the least. Socrates' accusers denounced his moral corruption. Strauss's accusation is in defense of Fârâbî's intellectual greatness. In Persecution and the Art of Writing, he quotes another passage from the same work of Lessing's that bridges the gap between Fârâbî's unbelief and Socrates' accusation: “According to Lessing, Socrates ‘believed in eternal punishment in all seriousness, or at least believed to the extent that he considered it expedient to teach in words that are least susceptible of arousing suspicion, and most explicit’” (182).⁴⁴ Strauss too was guided by a notion of the expedient that induced him to teach most explicitly in words precisely intended to arouse suspicion—a suspicion without which there could be no genuine understanding of the thought of the past. Strauss's “On a Forgotten Kind of Writing,”⁴⁵ in which he restates the thesis of Persecution and the Art of Writing, concludes in this way:

M. Kojève, comparing my method to that of a detective, asserted that there is this difference: that my method cannot lead up to the confession of the criminal. My answer is twofold: I know of cases where the criminal confessed posthumously after having made sure that the detective would not condemn him; and I would be happy if there were suspicion of crime where up to now there has only been implicit faith in perfect innocence. At the very least the observations I have made will force historians sooner or later to abandon the complacency with which they claim to know what the great thinkers thought, to admit that the thought of the past is much more enigmatic than it is generally held to be, and to begin to wonder whether the historical truth is not as difficult of access as the philosophic truth.

(WIPP, 232)

Strauss may or may not have believed that such suspicion would come in his lifetime. In any case, one should not underestimate the importance of that aim to him. In no other writing does he speak of his own happiness.

Notes

1. Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 12, 18 (hereinafter cited as PAW); Fârâbî, “On the Attainment of Happiness,” in Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, trans. Mushin Mahdi (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969), 50.

2. In the notes and text that follow, all otherwise unidentified references are to Leo Strauss, “Fârâbî's Plato,” in Louis Ginzberg Jubilee Volume (New York: American Academy of Jewish Research, 1945). Strauss's other works are referred to as follows: The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964) as CM; “How Fârâbî Read Plato's Laws,” in What Is Political Philosophy? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), as FPL; Liberalism, Ancient and Modern (New York: Free Press, 1968) as LAM; On Tyranny, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth (New York: Free Press, 1991), as OT; Philosophy and Law, trans. Eve Adler (Albany: SUNY, 1995), as PL; Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) as SPPP; Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958) as TM; What Is Political Philosophy? as WIPP. Fârâbî's Plato, the full title of which is “The Philosophy of Plato, Its Parts and the Grades of Dignity of Its Parts, from Its Beginning to Its End,” in Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, is cited as Plato with paragraph numbers (Strauss's division in Arabic numerals and Mahdi's in Roman numerals).

3. See PAW, 105 n. 29: “The possibility … of ‘adherents of philosophy who belong to the adherents of the religions’ is, to begin with, unintelligible rather than the truism which it is supposed to be today.”

4. He does not ask whether this is the best means of understanding Maimonides' thought. The opening of Strauss's “The Literary Character of the Guide for the Perplexed,” published four years prior to “Fârâbî's Plato,” provides a marked contrast:

   Among the many historians who have interpreted Maimonides' teaching, or who are making efforts to interpret it, there is scarcely one who would not agree to the principle that that teaching, being essentially medieval, cannot be understood by starting from modern presuppositions. … The present essay is based on the assumption that only through [the principle's] most thoroughgoing application can we arrive at our goal, the true and exact understanding of Maimonides' teaching.

   (PAW, 38)

   That principle would mean, to begin, that one would not concern oneself with authors' philosophic background except to the extent that they indicated it was necessary for understanding their thought. In its most thoroughgoing form it would entail that historians rid themselves of all modern assumptions, not the least of which is that Maimonides' teaching is essentially a product of its time.

5. PAW, 40; Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), pt. 1, chs. 71, 73, hereinafter cited as Guide.

6. In fact, after the first paragraph Strauss speaks only once again of “the philosophers” as such (384).

7. Maimonides may have thought of Aristotle as the greatest philosophic authority without having thought of him as the greatest philosopher; for one engaged in “true speculation” is not supposed to accept a view until “it becomes clear to him” (Guide, pt. 1, ch. 72, p. 194; LAM, 147, 148). Consider these two comments of Strauss: “Plato composed his writings in such a way as to prevent for all times their use as authoritative texts” (“On a New Interpretation of Plato's Political Philosophy,” Social Research [September 1946]: 351); and “When a medieval philosopher studied Aristotle's Politics, e.g., he did not engage in a historical study. The Politics was for him an authoritative text” (WIPP, 76).

8. The question becomes even more complicated if one takes a look at Maimonides' letter to ibn Tibbon. Strauss encourages us to do so by the awkward way in which he cites it: “Of Fârâbî's works, he mentions in that context only one by its title.” Though Maimonides does indeed praise The Political Governments, he does so in the context of explicitly instructing ibn Tibbon to read Fârâbî's works on “the art of logic.” There are times when a less fundamental work better serves the task at hand. Strauss, for example, wrote two essays in large part dedicated to teaching students how to read and study the Guide: “The Literary Character of the Guide for the Perplexed” and “How To Begin To Study The Guide of the Perplexed.” In neither of those two works does Strauss state the need to study The Principles of the Beings or, for that matter, the Plato. He does say, however, that “Fârâbî's discussion of the kalâm, and the framework of that discussion, are of decisive importance for studying the Guide” (PAW, 40 n. 9); the discussion occurs in Fârâbî's Enumeration of the Sciences. Strauss quotes the praise in its context in his essay “Some Remarks on the Political Science of Maimonides and Fârâbî,” trans. Robert Bartlett, Interpretation (Fall 1990): 6.

9. Strauss writes that one cannot “lay bare the teaching characteristic of The political governments” without comparing it to those other works because “that teaching consists, to some extent, of the silent rejection of certain tenets which are adhered to in the other works” (358, emphasis added). In describing the teaching of “the philosophers” in his opening paragraph, Strauss almost takes for granted its religious dimension: Their teaching consists of “genuine Aristotelianism with Neo-platonism and, of course, Islamic tenets” (357, emphasis added). It is in seeking the principle that transforms those three “heterogeneous elements into a consistent, or intelligible, whole” that Strauss turns to Maimonides and, via Maimonides, to Fârâbî. By his third paragraph, Strauss begins implicitly to call into question the extent to which all three elements are present in Fârâbî's teaching. For when one takes into account that the only tenets named in “Fârâbî's Plato” are Islamic and that the only doctrine that is explicitly said to be “silently rejected” is the doctrine of the immortality of the soul (371), it is a safe bet that the “certain tenets” Strauss had in mind were “Islamic tenets,” said to be characteristic of the Islamic Aristotelians. So, with a grain of salt, one might conclude that the reason “above all” that Strauss does not attempt an analysis of The political governments is that, without the other works to compare it to, he would not be able as effectively to demonstrate Fârâbî's unbelief. Strauss does not hesitate to make a comparison of The political governments with that unedited work later in the essay (372).

10. The first two ways are “to show that the explicit teachings of both philosophers can be reconciled with each other” and to “show that the esoteric teachings of both philosophers are identical.” Fârâbî's Concordance of the Opinions of Plato and Aristotle is devoted to the first way, but because it is “very doubtful whether Fârâbî considered his Concordance as more than an exoteric treatise” Strauss questions the wisdom of attaching “great importance to its explicit argument” (359). On its implicit argument Strauss does not comment. He does not elaborate on the central possibility that he raises.

11. Cited hereinafter simply as “introduction.”

12. Strauss provides a different, if complementary, reason in “Some Remarks on the Political Science of Maimonides and Fârâbî”: “Platonism did not give (or appeared not to give) sufficient guarantees against the superstitions of dying antiquities; the rebirth, menaced by hybrid speculations, of Platonic politics was not possible, without the aid of Aristotle's physics, which preserved the basis of Socrates' and Plato's inquiry, the world of common sense” (7).

13. “Every decent modern reader,” Strauss wrote, “is bound to be shocked by the mere suggestion that a great man might have deliberately deceived the large majority of his readers” (PAW, 35).

14. To be more precise, the digression occupies approximately the middle third (370-77) of the central section, “Philosophy and Politics,” of “Fârâbî's Plato.”

15. Strauss's repetition of this statement in the introduction provides a striking rhetorical contrast: “What first came to the sight of the Islamic and Jewish philosophers in their reflections on Revelation was not a creed, or a set of dogmas, but a social order, if an all-comprehensive order, which regulates not merely actions but thoughts or opinions as well” (9-10). See PAW, 72 n. 101.

16. Strauss uses the first person singular on only two other occasions in the text of “Fârâbî's Plato” (363, 385).

17. In a parallel statement in the introduction to Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss substitutes for the emphasized words “proves sufficiently” (15).

18. Strauss's diction is odd; in the parallel statement in the introduction to Persecution and the Art of Writing, he substitutes “designed” for”destined” (15).

19. RCPR, 34.

20. “Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear, of human greatness” (LAM, 5).

21. This is not to deny that Strauss's essays on Fârâbî are somehow singularly personal. According to a medieval tradition the number 23 represents “spiritual autobiography.” The companion essay to “Fârâbî's Plato,” “How Fârâbî Read Plato's Laws,” has twenty-three paragraphs and—almost unique in Strauss's writings—explicitly raises the question of how “personal” an author's writings are (140). See also the beginning of “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil” and of “Xenophon's Anabasis” in SPPP, and Kate Gartner Frost, “John Donne, the Number 23, and the Tradition of Spiritual Autobiography,” in Medieval Numerology: A Book of Essays, ed. Robert L. Surles (New York: Garland Publishing, 1993), 135-42.

22. Mushin Mahdi translates the term as “despotism” in a draft translation of the Summary that he was generous enough to share with me. I would also like to thank Kristin Smith for kindly helping me with this point and others related to Fârâbî's Arabic.

23. The “Restatement” is the essay immediately preceding “How Fârâbî Read Plato's Laws” in What Is Political Philosophy?

24. This statement occurs in the thirteenth paragraph of the “Restatement; similarly, the statement on tyranny occurs in the thirteenth paragraph of “How Fârâbî Read Plato's Laws” (141-42). For the significance of the number 13, see Strauss's essay “Niccolo Machiavelli” (SPPP, 223-25). Consider as well Strauss's references to Fârâbî in Thoughts on Machiavelli, 304 n. 50, 318 n. 63, and 328 n. 188.

25. Strauss mentions the young only once in “Fârâbî's Plato,” in describing “how the less exacting way of Thrasymachus is appropriate in [the philosopher's] dealings with … the young” (383).

26. The only specific “problem” that Strauss speaks about in “Fârâbî's Plato” and its adaptation in Persecution and the Art of Writing is that “posed by the fate of Socrates” (PAW, 16).

27. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in The Works of Edmund Burke (London: Bohn, 1855), 2:283.

28. As far as I know, he uses the term only in “Restatement” and “How Fârâbî Read Plato's Laws” (144).

29. It is worth noting that, insistent as he was on Fârâbî's disbelief, Strauss never called him an atheist.

30. Strauss's epigraph to On Tyranny states this in the words of Macaulay. It reads, in part, “At this day, foreigners, who dare not print a word reflecting on the government under which they live, are at a loss to understand how it happens that the freest press in Europe is the most prudish.”

31. Every time one sees a sentence in Strauss with the words “being” and “time” one should think of how the sentence might apply to Heidegger.

32. “An adequate interpretation of the Guide would thus have to take the form of an esoteric interpretation of an esoteric interpretation of an esoteric teaching. This suggestion may sound paradoxical and even ridiculous” (PAW, 56). Of Maimonides, though applicable to himself, Strauss wrote: “It is merely a popular fallacy to assume that such an explanation is an esoteric work of the second power, or at least twice as esoteric, and consequently twice as difficult as the text itself. Actually, any explanation, however esoteric, of a text is intended to be helpful for its understanding; and, provided the author is not a man of exceptional inability, is bound to be helpful” (PAW, 60).

33. In his “Restatement on Xenophon's Hiero,” Strauss speaks of “the many today who are unabashed atheists and more than Byzantine flatterers of tyrants for the same reason for which they would have been addicted to the grossest superstitions” (WIPP, 104).

34. Cf. Plato 30 (XXXVI); PAW, 16-17; CM, 123-24; FPL, 153.

35. Strauss leaves out the fact that, in addition to his “ability to conduct a scientific investigation of the virtues,” Fârâbî's Socrates possessed a “power of love” (Plato 30 [XXXVI]).

36. Plato 32 (XXXVIII).

37. PAW, 82-83.

38. In both essays, Strauss speaks of Fârâbî's Plato having replaced Socrates' “revolutionary quest for the other city” with a more “conservative way of action”—yet whereas in the first statement Strauss places “conservative” in quotes, in the second he drops the quotes, making Fârâbî appear more truly “conservative.” In the second statement, Strauss no longer speaks of the “destruction” of “accepted opinions”; instead, he speaks of their “replacement” (PAW, 16-17).

39. We see here the limited validity of what “may be said.”

40. Plato 24 (XXX), 30 (XXXVI).

41. “Moralism” is not a term often used by Strauss. When he does use it, it typically carries a negative connotation; consider, fo example, his description of a danger to which German thought is exposed: “moralism unmitigated by sense of humor or sense of proportion” (WIPP, 280-81). Contrast Strauss's description of the Platonic Socrates with that of his “Fârâbîan” Socrates, who as “a consequence of his uncompromising attitude … fell victim to the rage of the multitude” (383): Socrates' refusal to escape after Athens had condemned him “was not based on an appeal to a categorical imperative demanding passive obedience. His refusal was based on a deliberation, on a prudential consideration of what was the right thing to do in the circumstances” (WIPP, 33).

42. Strauss noted the use of meaningful silences in quite a few of the authors on whom he commented—including Thucydides, Xenophon, and Halevi—but nowhere so prominently as in his writings on Fârâbî (FP, 358, 371-72, 375-77, 380, 391-92; FPL, 138-40, 147-50). Given that emphasis, it is only natural to ask on what subjects Strauss himself was silent in his writings on Fârâbî. In neither “Fârâbî's Plato” nor “How Fârâbî Read Plato's Laws” does Strauss once mention moderation: He “abstracts” from moderation in writing about Fârâbî. (In “How Fârâbî Read Plato's Laws” Strauss also fails to mention education and justice; cf. his brief account of the Laws in “What Is Political Philosophy?” where he stresses wine drinking as an education in moderation [29-32].) He was able to write as shockingly as he did only because he specifically failed to take account of something that an adequate treatment must address. Like his Xenophon, Strauss “experiments with a type of wisdom that comes relatively close to a wisdom divorced from moderation” (WIPP, 103, emphasis added). One should not confuse what emerges from an experiment with the core of Strauss's thought. See also Xenophon's Socratic Discourse (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970), 203-4.

43. From Leibniz, von den ewigen Strafen (Leibniz, on Eternal Punishment).

44. Strauss quotes the passage in the midst of a discussion of thinkers who may have served as models for Spinoza's method of concealing his genuine views about religion—prominent among whom is Fârâbî.

45. In one sense this is Strauss's most “personal” essay; in an essay of fewer than thirteen pages he uses the first person singular 69 times—far more than in any other essay. (By way of contrast, in Persecution and the Art of Writing Strauss uses the first person singular 26 times.) Along with “Fârâbî's Plato,” it is also one of the few writings by Strauss that explicitly touch on the question of originality: “I doubt whether originality in the sense of discovery or invention of ‘systems’ has anything to do with philosophic depth or true originality. Spinoza was much more original in the present day sense of the term than was Maimonides; but Maimonides was nevertheless a deeper thinker than Spinoza” (WIPP, 230). See also Strauss's “The Weber Thesis Reexamined,” Church History (March 1961): 100; and note 21 above.

I would like to thank Edward Banfield, Mark Blitz, Peter Lawler, Mushin Mahdi, Harvey Mansfield and, especially, Kathryn Shea for their helpful comments.