Seth Benardete: Encounters and Reflections: Conversations with Seth Benardete. Ronna Burger, editor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

 

The preeminent scholar of English and American literary ‘modernists’, Hugh Kenner found occasions to deploy his prodigious memory. In class, when he wanted to illustrate a point, he could produce evidence by reciting a complete poem. “When the students get over being impressed,” he told an interviewer, “they see that it’s a useful thing to be able to do.” Seth Benardete also could do that useful thing. When asked if he could call to mind anything in the classical Greek and Roman texts, he allowed that this was so, modestly adding, “Wilamowitz could do it with the Byzantine literature, as well.” Whether in dialogue with students or (one presumes) himself, Benardete thus could produce the apposite quote, the crucial piece of the argument that might otherwise go unthought. What might for other minds serve merely as a gimmick for public display—rather along the lines of Ion the rhapsode—became rather a marker of the daring modesty of a philosopher who knew that others had thought the same thoughts before.

In the early 1990s, Ronna Burger, Michael Davis, and Robert Berman met Benardete in quest of such dialogue, which they had first experienced in and out of classes at the New School for Social Research, some twenty years earlier. By presenting philosophy in the form of dialogues, Plato suggests that philosophizing should never lose sight of the persons philosophizing, and especially of their characters, as manifested in the varieties of eros that lead them to engage in thinking and often to evade it. The dialectical quest of which philosophizing consists, and the noetic glimpses of the truths sought through it, are inflected through the traits of unique, sometimes eccentric human souls. The thoughts and actions of human individuals are not often predictable. (A Baptist preacher who would ask his congregants to “lead us in prayer” once said, “It’s surprising what people come up with.”) In the course of his own dialogues with his dialectical partners, Benardete would recur to what Burger calls “jewel-like vignettes of fascinating characters who belonged to a world of scholars that was disappearing and looked as if it could be forgotten”—many of them European émigrés who had “ended up, through all the turns of history, teaching a generation of American students after the war.” These stories illustrated Benardete’s “understanding of philosophy as the concrete encounter of thought with the unexpected.”

Hence the structure of the book, consisting of “encounters”—stories about and portraits of thinkers Benardete engaged with, always within certain places, settings, ‘regimes,’ if you will—and “reflections”—the thoughts of those thinkers, and the thoughts they elicited from Benardete. The two parts of the book “exhibit the structure Benardete liked to call an ‘indeterminate dyad’—a pair whose members are not independent units that can simply be counted up as two, but rather, parts of a whole, each of which in some way contains the other in itself.” “The duality of each part in itself and of both together is encapsulated in the formula for Greek tragedy, pathei mathos—learning by experience: there is an analogy, our discussions suggested, between the process of acquiring insight from what one undergoes in life, in particular from the mistakes one makes, and the process of interpreting a text, insofar as it involves the uncovering of one’s erroneous starting point, followed by the deeper recognition of the necessity of that starting point.”

Whether of persons or texts (with their arguments, images, and reported actions) memory makes philosophizing present. Memory without philosophy, however, is only rhapsody (at best).

As a student at the University of Chicago in the years following the Second World War, Benardete intuited that the theme of his thought would be death. He said so in response to a routine question from one of his fellow students; “I had no idea that years later it would turn out to be true that that’s what I had been doing.” Without the question, and without remembering his spontaneous answer, he might not have seen that so soon or so clearly, in retrospect. That’s the way philosophy works, moving from opinion to insight, with many careful steps along the way.

Among his young colleagues at the university, he recalls Richard Rorty, Richard Kennington, and Allan Bloom. Rorty was a bit like Young Werther, despairing at the discrepancy between what the world is and what it should be. “When he came to philosophy, it provided the proof of his despair. He now had an argument for his psychological state, which he then expresses in the book,” The Mirror of Nature. There Rorty denies that there is anything for the supposed mirror of the human mind to reflect; “there’s really nothing to know.” This claim was anticipated in his dissertation on Aristotle’s discussion of potentiality; “it was six hundred pages long,” so “actuality would have been very short.” It might be added that Rorty’s pragmatism, derived from the writings of John Dewey, attempts to solve the problem of the mismatch between the real and the ideal. However implausible one considers this solution to be, at least it would lead its proponent away from suicide, the premature experiential acquaintance with Benardete’s theme of death.

Richard Kennington also knew his Aristotle, and Benardete evidently found him the most impressive of his fellow students. “He was always very profound, very deep, both I think, psychologically and in terms of thought”—so much so that “it always seemed to me to be so much deeper than anything I was doing that I couldn’t catch up.” For example, when Benardete sent him notes on “Aristotle’s triple account of the principle of noncontradiction” in the Metaphysics, Kennington “wrote back with some acute questions about how the three formulations were related to one another, but I was not able to do anything with it.” Fortunately, Kennington left behind his writings, especially his studies on Descartes, which Benardete judges “convincing.” [1]

The student in his cohort who became (briefly) famous was Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind along with pioneering studies of Shakespeare and an excellent translation of Rousseau’s Emile. [2] Bloom seemed to him somewhat too interested in clear answers to philosophic problems than in the full statement of those problems and the dialectical arguments following that statement. “What he wanted was the bottom line—which of these possibilities was the right one.” This inclined him toward edification, which is undoubtedly the intention of The Closing. This concern opened him to charges of covering a philosophy of nihilism with moral uplift, much to the indignation of Harry V. Jaffa, who may be said to have taken morality very seriously, indeed. On the other hand, near the end of his life Bloom told Benardete that he had “just come to recognize how central the question ‘Quid sit deus?‘ is.” As for Bloom’s efforts at edification, Benardete considers them ineffectual, as they addressed a class of gentlemen (much as the Nicomachean Ethics does) at a time when “there aren’t any gentlemen around to address.” More precisely, he was addressing the American liberals of the 1950s, especially those in academia, after the New Left of the 1960s had largely displaced them in the universities. His book may not have been too little, but it was too late. Stanley Rosen saw this, as recounted in another story. Michael Platt, Bloom, and Rosen were at a conference, driving back to the hotel after dinner. Some deer blocked the road. Bloom, a city boy, became agitated. What were these animals going to do? Rosen reassured him: “Don’t worry, Allan. They haven’t read your book.”

Such criticisms notwithstanding, Benardete later concedes that the New Left’s agitation on university campuses in the late 1960s was more serious than he had thought. Bloom’s “experience of it always seemed to me, at the time at least, to be exaggerated. But then it turned out… that he was in fact correct.” “He had understood that the events had in fact this very deep effect,” and that “he had in fact seen correctly what had been going on under the surface of the universities at this time.” 

David Grene, Leo Strauss, and Peter Heinrich von Blanckenhagen were among Benardete’s teachers at Chicago. Grene “was the only person I knew whose character was really formed by the books he admired—of Joyce, Yeats, D. H. Lawrence.” It would have been hard to find anyone who was more truly a literary man—almost literally ‘bookish.’ With Blanckenhagen, it wasn’t a matter of life imitating art or more, being constituted by it, as it was art anticipating his own life. Marcel Proust’s Prince Charlus and the homosexual milieu in which readers meet him, with its aristocratic-coterie atmosphere—he was a von, after all—and discretion or secrecy, “looks like a perfect match” for Blanckenhagen. He idealized male friendship, culminating in “the need for physical beauty and the incarnation of beauty itself”—one is also reminded of John Ruskin and Walter Pater—in “a beautiful human being…beautiful only for one brief moment” but immortalized in that moment in a work of art. As with the Olympian Jupiter, “a god had become man” not in order to redeem man as man but “in order to make man into a god.” Not edification as morality but edification as estheticism becomes the ideal, to equate “the perfect friend” with “the perfect work of art” is evidently to confuse the character of both friendship and art, as a friend reciprocates love and a statue doesn’t. 

Strauss was a man of a different order. What Benardete took from Strauss was a way of reading. In the first class Benardete attended, Strauss “was talking about the beginning of book I of the Republic, and listed on the board seven items that occurred in a row, and circled the fourth one, this was the crucial one. No had ever heard that you could do this with at text,” that “you could take the details and in fact make something of it that linked up with a larger argument that was perfectly intelligible.” Strauss could show his students how each element of a philosophic text fit into the whole argument the philosopher is making, rather as the two elements of an “indeterminate dyad” fit together. In this, a philosophic text imitates Being. Benardete’s initial response was to assert, “If Shakespeare had wanted to, he could have written dialogues.” Just so, Strauss said.

As one might expect, Bloom’s reaction to Strauss was more dramatic than Benardete’s. Bloom took Strauss’s course on the Politics, he argued with Strauss about the authority of modern science. Strauss contended that Aristotle’s account of ethics and politics needed no revision in light of science, although of course modern science had vastly expanded the “scientific horizon” as it relates to the nature of the universe. Bloom contended that the horizon of human beings had similarly widened, thanks to the application of scientific methods to the problems of society. For example, it took Freud to discover the existence of infantile sexuality. “Oh, I think that any thoughtful nursemaid always knew that,” Strauss countered. For Bloom, this was the beginning of nothing less than a conversion of his soul (like that described in the Republic) from the prevalent opinions of ‘intellectuals’ in his time and place to a passion for philosophizing, for the ascent from such opinions. The ‘ancients’ weren’t merely ancient; they might be right, and they deserved serious study, their arguments both worthy of the reader’s erotic longing to know them better and serving as guides to the thinking about nature, and especially human nature, that those arguments bespeak.  For Benardete, already committed to such study and animated by such longing, Strauss “was amazing at giving hints as to how to read books,” at giving guidance for one already embarking on philosophic inquiry.

On a more mundane level, after Chicago Benardete embarked for Europe, meeting James Baldwin on shipboard. Baldwin has published his first novel, but “hadn’t written anything about the race problem.” He was, of course, thinking about it. “He gave an extraordinary impression of fear and uncertainty, and sort of bewilderment, really about things.” In his youth, black Americans living in Harlem couldn’t walk through the tonier neighborhoods of Manhattan “without being immediately picked up by the police.” “Somehow that had remained as the crucial experience” for him, an experience exacerbated by his self-exile in Paris, to which he was now returning. “I thought he didn’t know who he was.” Benardete’s interlocutors intervene to clarify: Burger observes that if the human individual is said to be “an infinite flux and indeterminacy” which fixes itself on an “identity” based (for example) on race, class, and/or gender, this is “inevitably alienating because it’s not an individual, it’s a type”; Davis adds that such identities differ from “family roles,” since the latter identities bestow “a particular relation that disposes you toward a particular human being.” “That would make sense of the Christian martyr,” Benardete remarks, the man or woman who confesses “I am a Christian” to the Roman persecutors. “That looks totally determinate because of the imitation involved,” namely, the imitation of Christ. “It really shows up in Paul, the way it’s described, ‘dead in Christ.'” The Christian splits from his natural family to accept adoption into the family of God. This remain a particular relationship, albeit spiritual instead of natural. It is different from identifying oneself as a member of a particular social group, a move that abstracts the person from personhood. 

What, then, of the human type, ‘the philosopher’? To aspire to be a philosopher might be to aspire to become a type instead of a person. It is precisely this danger that Benardete and his interlocutors intend to ward off in putting these “encounters” front and center. Philosophizing is an activity of the mind; ‘the philosopher’ is always an individual philosophizing, encountering the unexpected in real moments and circumstances; a political philosopher, particularly, remains mindful of the circumstances in which the thinks and speaks. By contrast, the charming Oxonians Benardete encountered after he got off the ship, including J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, struck him as academics far gone in ‘twee’—impressed “by the glories of the Middle Ages, in a very strange child-like manner.” They decried the abstractions of modern thought while abstracting themselves into an idealized world of heroic knights, distressed damsels, and plucky but deferential peasants. (This is a bit harsh, especially with respect to Lewis, but it is true that Lewis himself would not claim to have amounted to much, compared to Homer.)

And it was Homer that Benardete wanted to spend his time with. With a fellowship to study in Italy he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the Iliad. What he discovered was that the Iliad is structured along the same lines as “Diotima’s account of the structure of eros” in the Symposium. “The Iliad has the first two layers” of Diotima’s ladder of love, going from sexual love, the love of a woman, to the love of glory, through Achilles’ defeat of Hector. Plato’s Socrates’ Diotima then adds the love of wisdom or philosophy. “Once I realized that, I was able to write the dissertation in a month.” That was good enough for academic work, but Benardete kept thinking. “I had seen a pattern through the model of Diotima’s ladder of love” but he hadn’t accounted for the action of the poem, the plot. How does the hero get from one step on the ladder to the next? The answer cannot be found in the ladder, in the structure, in what Aristotle calls formal causality but in “narrative causality.” Strauss himself wrote a book titled The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws. In keeping with the experience of “encounters,” one must keep an ear on what people say but also an eye on what they do. “What I hadn’t yet discovered is what you might call the logos of the logos.” If I understand him correctly, Benardete is saying that it is one thing to see the structure of a philosophic argument, another to see how it unfolds. This is analogous to understanding the plot of an epic poem both in terms of its structure and in terms of its movement, its development. This again is the notion of the indeterminate dyad—indeterminate, in the case of epics and tragedies, because the characters do make choices even as they navigate amongst the rocks of fatality. A study of death, indeed, and of what it means for life.

By 1955, Benardete had a job teaching at St. John’s College (its name itself a reminder of soul-turning and of a dyad first indeterminate and then determinate). Then as now, St. John’s required students to read a determinate set of great books of the Western tradition in a set order, from ancient to modern. The leading spirit of St. John’s in those days was Jacob Klein, Strauss’ friend from pre-Nazi Germany. Benardete saw that Klein differed from Strauss, beginning with the question of morality. “I remember Strauss saying to me, ‘You know, I think I’m as moral as Klein. But not theoretically.” He meant that, unlike Klein, he was interested in vice; he was a careful reader of Machiavelli. He could look at vice, and at viciousness, without averting his eyes or covering it up. As a philosopher, he wanted first and foremost to understand both. He made himself into an exegete of Machiavelli without becoming a Machiavellian. In the Garden of Eden he would have studied both the humans and the serpent, wanting very much what they actually said to one another. Burger calls this being “amoral theoretically,” and I suppose it means that noetic perception itself is ‘beyond good and evil,’ even if the beholder (if only to be able to perceive good and evil noetically) must have some considerable strength of character—this, in view of the human tendency to think wishfully or fearfully. Klein, Burger remarks, “had a strange combination of mathematics and morality, without the political”—as seen in Plato’s Republic, Benardete adds. Whereas Strauss took the argument and the action of the Republic to be an ironic treatment of that combination, Klein was too much the embodiment of it. “I think Klein never understood the fact that there is always a double argument in Plato.” He didn’t fully ‘get the joke’ because he extended morality too far, into the act of intellection.

This Straussian insight is, crucially, not limited to the text written by the philosopher. There is not only “a hidden argument based on what [is] being said,” but the Platonic dialogues themselves “are constructed in such a way as to show the very nature of what is being discussed.” “The dialogue is an imitation of reality because it shows that reality has this double character to it with two strands not necessarily leading in the same direction, though attached to each other.” For example, in the Republic Socrates presents the the liberation of prisoners chained inside a cave, having seen nothing but the shadows of idols illuminated by a fire in the cave, which represents the political regime of the city. This liberation is an image of the philosophic periagoge, the “turning around” of the soul toward nature, represented by the light of the sun, which shines on the other natural objects outside the cave. Klein understood this turning around “very much like a conversion, in which you’re turning away from obscurity toward the light.” What Strauss saw was that Socrates wants the philosopher then to turn back to the cave, “seeing there wasn’t as much light as [he] thought there was.” Klein stopped at “the first level of the argument” but never got to the second, political part. 

What was Klein’s strength? Burger asks. “I thought he had some kind of insight into soul.” For example, he could draw a perfect circle on the blackboard. “He was able to turn his arm like a compass. Everybody else’s breaks at the bottom, but he would stand exactly right, so he could draw perfect circles.” That is, if I take Benardete’s playful observation rightly, Klein’s soul governed his body more fully than almost all other souls have learned to do. This suggests that he knew himself as a person if not as a citizen. It also comports with his moral sobriety, as morality requires the rule of the body and the soul’s appetites by something like l’esprit de géométrie (along with, Strauss would insist, l’esprit de finesse).I would only add, in further defense of Klein, that he also understood something of the political implication of mathematics, as seen in his outstanding book, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origins of Algebra, where he distinguishes a mathematics of form from a mathematics of motion. If the ‘moderns’ interest themselves in discovering laws of motion, of change, such a mathematics will have affinities with that combination of abstract thought and revolutionary action which has characterized so much of modern politics—though one hastens to add that the mathematicians did not likely have any such thing in mind.

Benardete’s own interest in the logic of motion, of plot, led him to consider historians and the histories they write—specifically, the ‘Father of History,’ Herodotus, in the study titled Herodotean Inquiries. What did Herodotus intend to father? In conversations with the distinguished scholar Arnaldo Momigliano, Benardete learned that Momigliano “wanted to understand Herodotus as the father of history, meaning history as we do it now.” That is, Momigliano was attempting to define Herodotus’ task as a sort of prelude to a symphony of thought that was only now culminating in careful, detailed, empirical research, in what Nietzsche calls “scientific history.” “His argument was that the really impressive thing about Herodotus was that he was the first to devise historical narrative.” The problem is that this insufficiently distinguishes history from epic poetry. As Davis puts it (and Benardete agrees), the real distinction begins with the fact that “Herodotus presents his story as though it’s an account of the real, and Homer doesn’t do that.” 

What does he do? Once again, Strauss provided a guiding hint. “Strauss had made this crucial observation about the interpretation of the story of Gyges, that Herodotus was not Gyges.” He refers to one of the stories about how the the seventh-century BC Lydian monarch Gyges seized power. In the Republic, Socrates recounts the version in which the shepherd Gyges found a ring which gave him the power to become invisible, which he used to murder the seduce the queen and murder the reigning king. But Herodotus tells a different story: King Candaules, boastful of his wife’s beauty, required the reluctant Gyges to spy on her when she was naked; the queen discovered Gyges and forced him to kill her husband, in revenge for this humiliation. In protesting his forced spying, Gyges says that “the beautiful things were found long ago, of which one of them is: only look at your own.” That is, the law prohibiting gazing on another man’s beautiful wife is itself a beautiful thing; put another way, and more broadly, the city insists that to love beauty is to look at your own. This contradictory pull between two forms of beauty leads Herodotus to distinguish law from nature: by law, one ought not, and ought not to be compelled to, gaze upon another’s man’s beautiful wife; by nature, one should gaze at and appreciate beautiful things. Herodotus “was making use in a coherent argument, of what [pre-Socratic] philosophers had discovered.” In his own ‘looking,’ he has no shame, does not restrict himself to looking at his own but considers the nature of the things he sees. What Plato’s Socrates adds is the political-philosophic dimension to the argument, showing that once the distinction has been made, the light of nature, now glimpsed, can be contrasted with the lesser light within the cave. To deploy another of Platonic Socrates’ images, Socrates first ‘sailing,’ his first voyage of inquiry resulted in understanding the distinction between physis and nomos discovered by his philosophic predecessors and introduced to narrative, to ‘history,’ by Herodotus; in Socrates’ second ‘sailing’ he brought the ship of inquiry back to his home port.

In the Republic, Socrates describes those who have undertaken the first sailing and returned to port as needing to recover their ‘land legs’ after months at sea; more precisely, having seen by the light of the sun their eyes are unaccustomed to the weaker light in the cave. They stumble, laughably. Even slave girls deride the disoriented philosopher who trips over a stone, a natural object, while thinking about nature as a whole. In the final section of the “Encounters” part of the book, Benardete recalls several of the most notable crackpots he ran into while teaching in New York City, where the occasional crackpot may still be found to this day. Political philosophy enables one better to distinguish kinds of eccentrics, those who deviate from the conventions of the city—crackpots from philosophers—precisely by its capacity to judge both the conventional and the unconventional by the natural standard. That standard is natural right, the first topic Benardete and his philosophic friends take up in Part Two, “Reflections.”

 

Note

1. See Richard Kennington: On Modern origins: Essayhs in Early Modern Political Philosophy. Pamela Kraus and Frank Hunt, editors. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004.
2. See Allan Bloom: The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. Reviewed on this website. Bloom was also a pioneer of the study of Shakespeare as a political thinker; see Bloom and Harry V. Jaffa: Shakespeare’s Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). His translation of Plato’s Republic was published by Basic Books (revised edition, 1991); his translation of the Emile was published by Basic Books in 1979.

 

 

Bruno Quélennec: Retour dans la caverne: Philosophie, politique et religion chez le jeune Leo Strauss. Paris: Hermann Éditeurs, 2018.

 

Admired and decried in his adopted American home, Leo Strauss has enjoyed a more favorable reception in France, thanks in large measure to the kind and perspicacious Pierre Manent, who shares Strauss’ intention of defending natural right against its enemies, ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern.’ Bruno Quélennec enters the fray as a critic of Strauss from the ‘Left,’ but does so much more intelligently than North American Leftists have done, attempting to understand Strauss’s though in its own terms before condemning it in the name of egalitarianism and democracy.

As Quélennec explains, in the past several decades Strauss has been (mis)understood as the progenitor of ‘neo-conservativism,’ despite his near-total avoidance of American political debates; illiberal, authoritarian-to-fascistic, and (most wildly) ‘La Rouchite,’ the Strauss depicted by the American Left was a very bad sort, indeed, somehow responsible for enormities ranging from Goldwaterism to the Second Gulf War. Central to this argument is a 1933 letter Strauss wrote to a friend in which he called for a sort of Unpopular Front consisting of the several right-wing Continental European regimes, including Mussolini’s Italy, to array itself against Nazi Germany. Having despaired of liberal democracy—already ruined in Germany, tottering in France—and shrinking from the Leninist-Stalinist regime in Russia, which he had rightly identified as malevolent the moment it appeared, Strauss shared with Winston Churchill the soon-to-be-disappointed hope that the ‘old’ Right might stand up and contain its radical challenger. From the Stalinists of the 1930s to the resolutely egalitarian ‘postmodernists’ of today, the Left is not amused.

Quélennec examines Strauss’s writings before and after the Nazi revolution, focusing particularly on his critique of the political philosophy of the Enlightenment, “modern liberalism.” In the decade before 1933, Strauss saw the liberalism of Germany’s Weimar Republic in crisis, challenged both philosophically by critics of the Enlightenment thought upon which it was based and practically by the ideological Jew-hatred which set itself against the “liberal model of German-Jewish emancipation.” to do this, Quélennec begins with an incisive account of that model and of the Enlightenment thought behind it, as understood by prominent Jewish intellectuals of the time criticized by Strauss, particularly Julius Guttmann, Herman Cohen, and Franz Rosenzweig. Quélennec rightly understands Strauss not as an ideologist bending philosophy to political ends but rather as a thinker engaged first of all in the thought of his times in order to study its philosophic underpinnings, and only then to “return to the Cave” (Plato’s familiar image of life in the political community”) in order to defend the possibility of the philosophic way of life in that constrained, dimly-lit circumstance. Quélennec provides “a sort of map” of the German-Jewish regions within that cave, first of all in the pre-republican German regimes between 1780 and 1918. In the early decades of that period, German Jews were excluded or ‘ghettoized’ economically, socially, and politically; emancipation was intended to make “morally corrupt” (allegedly usurious and religiously prejudiced) Jews better, that is, more like German Christians. Jews were expected to ‘assimilate’ with Germans, free themselves from Jewishness.

Many Germans were having none of this. Modern anti-Semitism arose, often led by ‘Left’ Hegelians (eventually including Karl Marx, no Aryan), who associated Jews with capitalism, but more usually by nationalists, who especially detested Jews from eastern Europe who had fled pogroms in Russia and Ukraine. Whereas the old Jew-hatred bespoke religious bigotry, the new Jew-hatred registered racial prejudice (animated by ‘race science’) and a sort of democracy (resentment of Jewish ‘elites’ in finance and commerce). The more assimilation progressed, the more virulent anti-Semitism became, leading to controversy among German Jewish intellectuals in the years prior to the First World War. One response, political Zionism, judged European anti-Semitism “incurable”; in his 1882 book, Autoemancipation, Leon Pinsker maintained that “liberalism could not fulfill its promises of liberty and equality,” that Jewish must establish their own national state on some other continent. Political Zionism’s leading thinkers, Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau, argued respectively for a “statist Zionism” (secular, nationalist, anti-socialist) and a “muscular Zionism” (anti-liberal, anti-progressive, anti-bourgeois). Another response, cultural Zionism, founded by Ahad Hasam and propound famously by Martin Buber, regarded political Zionism as unrealistic and rejected nationalism in favor of “a universalist and pacifist ethic.”

Neither political nor cultural Zionism could stop Jew-hatred, which increased during the war and found an early, murderous expression in the 1922 assassination of Walter Rathenau, the German-Jewish Foreign Affairs minister of the Weimar Republic. At the same time, Weimar saw a “Jewish Renaissance,” a “return to the Jewish religion” led by Cohen and Rosenzweig. Both men attempted to resolve the ‘Jewish problem’ with grand philosophic syntheses. The neo-Kantian Cohen combined the “prophetic ethic” of the Bible with Enlightenment themes, all to be safeguarded by democratic socialism within the Jewish community (he was a firm anti-statist). Rosenzweig, also a neo-Kantian, came down on the “liberal-imperialist” side of modern politics, although his ‘imperialism’ was entirely pacifistic and anti-statist, consisting of a belief in the evolution of all European nations toward peace and equality, an evolution to be spurred by the unification of Germans throughout Europe, who would thereby establish a benign hegemony over the Continent. He saw the Great War rather a Woodrow Wilson did: the harbinger of the Kantian version of the end of History, resulting in a League of Nations (to be dominated by Germans, not Anglo-Americans) whose members would make war against one another no more. With the German defeat, the undaunted Rosenzweig formulated a “new synthesis,” this one combining the high-enlightenment rationalism of Kantian and Hegelian ‘idealism’ with a ‘subjectivist’ or ‘perspectivist’ theology: “They complement one another, Rosenzweig averred. This time, not Germany but the Jewish nation would serve as the catalyst for change, as its longtime statelessness provided a model for the world’s peaceful future. In sum, both Cohen and Rosenzweig affirmed Jewish “self-emancipation, but [in] a religious, not Zionist form.

At these new forms of messianic utopianism the young Strauss raised a skeptical eyebrow above a cold, clear eye. In what would become characteristic of his thought throughout his life, Straus spurned attempts at combining opposites in grand syntheses; he ‘divided the house’ between national/secular Jews and universalist/religious Jews, between “radical atheism” and “religious orthodoxy.” He sided with Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder of Revisionist Zionism, a political realist with no patience for utopianism who advocated Jewish national unity, corporatism, military discipline, the rapid colonization of Palestine, and a sharp rejection of Orthodox Judaism as quietist, subservient to the despots of eastern Europe. Resolutely tough-minded when thinking of practical politics, Strauss praised Theodor Herzl for his clear-eyed geopolitical realism and did not hesitate to propose an alliance of Zionism with neither Orthodox Jewry nor Italian fascism but with German liberals, who equally rejected submission to the divine Law while advancing religious freedom.

This notwithstanding, Strauss interested himself much less in the practical side of Zionism as in Zionism as an instance of the “theologico-political problem”—that is, in Zionism’s theoretical implications. He expressed this problem in a paradox: there could be no Jewish nationalism without the (atheist) Enlightenment which—in its non-universalist form—valorized nationalism over the universalism of the revealed religions; however, without religion, there can be no Jewish people, ‘Semitism’ (and therefore anti-Semitism) being an excrescence of pseudo-science. Therefore, one must choose, and Strauss chose political Zionism, calling for “a strictly atheist and Zionist appropriation of the biblical text.” The liberalism, humanitarianism, and assimilationism of Enlightenment emancipation—that is, the universalist form of Enlightenment—had proved a weak reed, as had the German state which was supposed to guarantee it. Jews must face facts, abandon their utopian-socialist illusions whether purely secularist or ‘synthetic,’ understanding that they are not now and never will be Germans; in this, the anti-Semites are right, even if their malevolence i wrong; political societies are by nature exclusive, limited to the like-minded. Jews and Germans are not like-minded; absent thorough assimilation, they must separate. Quélennec objects, arguing that given the pogroms of 1922-24, any call upon German Jews to abandon their historical rights to German citizenship was “absurd.” But of course Strauss wasn’t calling upon Jews to abandon their rights; he called upon them to go someplace where they could secure them.

Be this as it may, one cannot read Straus’s writings of the 1920s without recognizing how Zionism spurs his mind to thought much more than to action. “The central opposition which haunts the texts of the young Strauss is that between ‘belief’ and ‘unbelief.'” Indeed, Strauss concurred with Goethe’s judgment, that the “struggle between unbelief and belief” constitutes “the eternal and sole theme of the entire history of the world and man.” Against “unconditional submission to Jewish law,” affirmation of certain “fundamental dogmas” creation, miracles, providence) Strauss opposed what looks to Quélennec very much like the Nietzschean claim (itself borrowed from the Protestant Bible scholar Julius Wellhausen) of Judaism as originally a form of nature-worship, and thus potentially a pathway to the rational study of nature, to philosophy. On this basis Strauss could claim that Zionism, aiming at the founding of a state based on natural principles, could be reconciled with Judaism in its original form, a nature-religion opposed and buried by priests. This would overcome the impasse of Jewish nationalism. It would require the formation o a Zionist elite who would hold up Judaism as a civic religion for the Jewish ‘masses,’ obviating the need for “a democratic politics,” which was proving itself impotent against proponents of tyranny ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ in 1920s Germany.

By the 1920s Strauss thus had established himself as an astringent critic of the ethics and politics of sentimentalism. It would be too much to call him a philosopher, yet, but his no-nonsense refusal to tolerate slovenly thought, sentimental moralism, and the wishful thinking resulting from them impelled him to an ascent from the ‘cave’ of the Weimar regime generally, and from its Jewish (and, as he saw it, insufficiently Judaic) milieu in particular. In the second half of the decade he began to turn away from “the political struggles of his time,” beyond the nationalist-Enlightenment critique of Orthodoxy as revised and radicalized by Nietzsche and toward a critique of the Enlightenment itself. For that, he turned to the study of Spinoza. Cohen had criticized Spinoza for his “aristocratic” concept of philosophy, for his naturalistic ethics founded not on divine law but on “the right of the stronger,” for his irreligious denial of prophetic inspiration, and for his use of revealed religion for merely civic purposes. “For Cohen, Spinoza totally lacked the universalistic dimension of Judaism, which was illustrated by the rabbinical doctrine of the Noachide [commandments], the source of modern natural right,” as Cohen thought. Strauss defended Spinoza for attempting “to deliver philosophy from the tutelage of the Church and for reinforcing the republic” in Holland, which was under attack by Calvinists who justified absolute monarchy by citing the Old Testament. Cohen failed to look at Spinoza in his political context, that is, as a ‘politic’ as well as political philosopher. Further, Cohen ignored the contradiction between Judaism and his own neo-Kantianism, itself an Enlightenment-based philosophy decisively inflected by Spinozist thought.

As he concentrated more carefully on Spinoza’s philosophy itself, however, Strauss began to think of “the modern critique of religion” not so much in historical terms but as a “philosophic problem.” Spinoza took aim at three adversaries: Orthodox Jews, who suspected philosophy as such of heresy; Maimonides, whose defense of philosophy before the bar of Orthodoxy remained mired in ancient Greek thought; and Calvinists, as hostile to philosophy as the Orthodox but anti-republican as well. Strauss rejects Spinoza’s critique of Orthodoxy because his critique of miracles presupposes that we have comprehensive knowledge of natural law; further, and in step with the Enlightenment generally, Spinoza sought to disprove Scripture by ‘crowding out’ divine providence with what Strauss would later recognize as the Machiavellian notion of progress—the use of reason to master fortune. This obviously leads to an infinite regress (how does one know that the scientific discoverer wasn’t aided by God’s grace?). Moreover, as Strauss puts it in a 1925 essay, science “knows nothing, and can now nothing, of all these things since it does not permit itself to believe.” This goes especially for modern “Bible science” which, like all modern science, is atheistic in principle. These weaknesses in Enlightenment arguments induced Enlighteners to supplement their critique with ridicule, replacing piety and prayer with irreverent jeering. Strauss found such antics unimpressive, writing, in his 1928 essay on Sigmund Freud, “If God’s thoughts are not the thoughts of men, and men’s ways are not the ways of God, then God’s thoughts and ways are not experimentally controllable; moreover, every attempt to justify directly by scientific means the denial of the existence of God is fundamentally deficient.” That goes for satire as well as science.

By contrast, in Spinoza’s estimation Maimonides is a fellow philosopher. But Maimonides concedes too much to biblical revelation, and his science consists of a now-discredited Aristotelianism. He has the wrong theological-political doctrine and the wrong philosophic doctrine. As Strauss observes, Spinoza sees that the new Cartesian science pays no respect to tradition, looking instead to the present and the future, regarding human thought alone to suffice for “the perfection of theory.” Contra Maimonides, no harmonization or even coordination of Scripture and philosophic theory need be attempted.

Much more firmly anti-rationalist than Orthodoxy (let alone Maimonides), Calvinism regards the Holy Spirit as the sole “necessary guide for the conduct of life,” as reason merely evinces human pride. Enlightenment science simply cannot address such a claim, much less refute it.”

Strauss finds Enlightenment philosophy as Spinoza and other neo-epicurean philosophers conceive it too ‘soft’ on religion, which is too ‘hard,’ stern and demanding, for epicureans of any stripe to withstand. “Biblical morality, as Strauss represents it, hardens the individual who has faith,” as seen in the example of Father Abraham, ready to sacrifice his own sons to his stern God. If atheism is to match faith, and overcome it, it must make itself equally stern. This is the dimension of Judaism Nietzsche praises. The young Strauss therefore joins Nietzsche in “valoriz[ing] all that which, in theism or atheism, favors the ‘hardening’ of man” against the mushy humanitarianism of Cohen and his predecessors. Strauss praises Hobbes as Nietzsche’s tough-minded forebear, deviser of “an authentically rationalist, atheist morality founded on fear” of death—that is to say, acknowledgement of grim reality far removed from ‘idealist’ illusions. But even Hobbes’s Leviathan, king of the proud, and Nietzsche’s new dawn of the Superman will not suffice: “the deification of mankind is no genuine atheism,” Strauss would eventually observe.

Quélennec tips his hand at this point, finding all of this “meager and superficial” compared to the thought of the young Marx, who bases his critique of philosophic idealism on the claim that class struggle underlies human ideas and the thought that produces them. But even the young Strauss had a refutation of Marxism well in hand, having shown that scientific materialism at the service of the human mastery of nature and fortune—the promise of all ‘modern’ philosophic doctrines including Marxism—can only ‘speak past’ claims of divine revelation, and never refute it on rational grounds. To his credit, despite his own neo-Marxism, Quélennec usually engages Strauss’s thought on its own terms, even while occasionally assuring his readers of his Leftist bona fides. In this he follows the young Strauss after all, who wrote, “Every author is measured first of all by the standard that he expressly acknowledges in his own work. The best way to dispose of an author is therefore to prove that he fails to achieve what he strives for.”

Having raised serious questions about the various contemporary attempts to ‘synthesize’ Judaism and Enlightenment philosophy and finding much of the latter inclined to soften human souls in a world that treats softness unkindly, Strauss turned away from Nietzsche and toward the philosopher many regard as the arch-idealist, Plato. What accounts for this turn?

Against such Straussian thinkers as Heinrich Meier and Michael and Catherine Zuckert, and indeed against Strauss’s own testimony, Quélennec regards the “turn” as “less a rupture with his engagement of the 1920s than a transformation of his mode of political intervention” [italics added]. Strauss, he argues, was forced into ‘Platonism’ by the final political crisis of the Weimar regime and the philosophic crisis it embodied. The Weimar Republic’s weakness stemmed not simply from liberalism’s softness, but more specifically from the incapacity of liberalism founded upon historicist philosophy to defend itself. The historicist claim—that all ‘epochs’ exhibit the ‘values’ of the persons who rule at a given time and place—results in a combination of moral relativism and sociopolitical anarchy incapable of defending itself. Historicist-relativist versions of liberalism cannot justify their own continued existence in the face of challenges mounted by would-be rulers who despise the liberal ‘values’ of egalitarianism and toleration—not incidentally the moral claims enabling the liberation of Jewry. Whereas initially, in the nineteenth century, historicism had resulted in nationalism (to each nation its own values), which led to German unification and strength, in the twentieth century a radical, Nietzsche-inspired historicism led to moral crisis and indeed to German defeat in the Great War, a view Strauss unknowingly shared with a then-obscure French army officer, Charles de Gaulle. [1]

To understand this radical historicism, Strauss examined the thought of Carl Schmitt, the proponent of a “political existentialism” pointing (very hard-headedly indeed) to the distinction between friends and enemies and the ensuing struggles to the death of friends with their enemies as the essence of politics and the revelation of the truth about human life. There isn’t a trace of epicureanism, or even eudaimonism, in Schmitt; he is no fuzzy-headed liberal. But, as Strauss sees, the confrontation of friends and enemies reprises Hegel’s struggle for recognition, a standard feature of historicist liberalism with its attendant desires for peace with liberty—the happy ending of mutual respect among the combatants. In asserting a ‘pessimistic’ account of the Hegelian dialectic, Schmitt offers only a ‘photographic negative’ of such liberalism. Whether pacifist or bellecist, historicist thought incorporates the Biblical and especially Christian themes it claims to overcome or at least to ‘synthesize’ within a grander ‘system.’ Recalling the imagery of Plato’s Republic and the aspiration of the philosopher to escape the ‘cave’ of political opinion and to ascend to rationally-discoverable truth, Strauss began to describe revealed religion as another nook in the cave, harder for philosopher to escape than the outer rooms, and then to see that historicism was a second cave beneath that enlarged cave. Instead of ascending to the light of the sun, philosophers were becoming more and more profound. But only in the sense of digging themselves a deeper hole. 

This meant that to philosophize under conditions of radical historicism Strauss could not just go ahead and ‘do philosophy,’ as professors like to say, but engaged in historical scholarship with respect to philosophy, revisiting the “historical problem.” Intended as a “corrective” to the rationalism of the Enlightenment, which failed to overcome Biblical revelation or “theological absolutism” rationally, historicism, in incorporating or ‘synthesizing’ Biblical principles with those of Enlightenment rationalism, had produced “the illusion of a liberation from illusion,” not overcoming revelation but allowing itself to become parasitical on it. There remained “a fragile line of continuity” between Christianity, the Enlightenment, and historicism, “each position constituting itself in polemical negation of the preceding one,” each as dogmatic at its core as the other.

Seeking to indict Strauss of failing to overcome his Nietzscheism of the 1920s, Quélennec charges that “to Christian modernity, linked historically to a project of intellectual and socio-political emancipation, Strauss would oppose another model of secularization and emancipation,” namely, a philosophic emancipation found in Platonism, approached via Maimonides. As Strauss explains in his 1935 study, Philosophy and Law, Maimonides confronted Christianity without having recourse to modern rationalism in either its Enlightenment or its historicist forms, finding ‘classical’ or Platonic rationalism (and not the Aristotelianism he apparently relies on) adequate to the task of addressing the challenge of revealed religion. “The moderns, from the radical Enlightenment to radical historicism, have wrongly universalized a limited and historically situated combat,” systematically confounding ‘natural’ opinion and ‘religious’ prejudice.” To distinguish such prejudice from such opinion will enable philosophers to ascend not to the ‘sunlight’ of truth outside the cave but to the first cave, reestablishing (as Strauss puts it) “philosophy in its natural difficulty” as the first step toward reestablishing “natural philosophy” undistracted by prejudice. [2] 

Recurring to his neo-Marxist framework, Quélennec begins his final chapter with a quote from the famed neo-Marxist Louis Althusser, who denounces Plato as “this aristocrat” who “despises Athenian democracy,” proposing “a revolt against the course of things”—against ‘history’ defined as the course of events. In Althusser’s judgment, the philosopher-king merely represents Plato’s own “interests”—the “pride of philosophy.” (In this he echoes the critique of the Apostle Paul.) Quélennec begins more cautiously with Strauss, saying that Strauss defends the liberty of the philosopher against “the politicization of philosophy” seen in “modern thought from Hobbes to Marxism to existentialism,” but also against “apolitical” philosophy, the failure of many academic philosophers to begin their philosophizing with consideration of the images on the walls of the ‘cave’ of social and political opinion. But he quickly applies the Althusserian critique of Plato to Strauss, charging that Strauss shared the intention, the illusion of German conservatives, who intended to use Nazism a a bludgeon to end the liberal-democratic Weimar regime and to replace it with a “fascist, authoritarian, imperial” regime (as Strauss put it in a1933 letter to Karl Löwith), a regime he supported in principle, not merely as a political stopgap against the Nazis. At stake, then, is whether Strauss’s defense of rightist authoritarianism was a matter of principle as well as (im)prudence, and exactly what those principles were.

Strauss began with what Quélennec calls “a radical critique of Hobbes,” the founder of liberalism and therefore (despite his monarchism) of the modern ‘Left’ in political philosophy. Quélennec rightly disagrees with critics of Strauss who describe him as a neo-Hobbesian, inasmuch as Strauss rejects “modern philosophy” in principle. Strauss’s Hobbes endorses monarchy only as a means to enforce such liberal principles as modern natural right and contractualism against ecclesiastical and aristocratic authority. To put it in Quélennec’s neo-Marxist terms, Hobbes would replace the vanity of the old-regime ‘few’ with a bourgeois morality valorizing economics over politics. Strauss disputes Hobbes because Hobbes makes the human fear of violent death the summum malum of human life, substituting the securing of peace over the securing of justice, effectively making political philosophy instrumental to the presentation of life and no longer a quest for life’s purpose. Add the doctrine of materialism to this, and reason becomes a technique of rule instead of a means of discovering the principles that justify rule. This means that the ‘right to life’ trumps duties which hitherto had imposed limits on the state because those duties derive from realities that transcend the all-too-human: God and nature.

Strauss does not, however, recur to the old aristocratic celebration of courage, recognizing that Plato subordinates courage to reason; indeed, contemporary German nihilists had forgotten reason altogether. Instead, Strauss argues that “political authority” can only be “assured if it has a foundation outside itself, in a  transcendent and immutable order which is not in the free disposition of individuals.” Following the example of Plato’s Socrates, Strauss affirms the need for dialogue as the first step for philosophers, dialogue asking what justice is; the dialectical reasoning exhibited in such dialogues winnows out false arguments about justice, taking the abler participants closer to a glimpse of what justice is.

Fearful of the physical warfare that has arisen from just such dialectical struggle, Hobbes endorses a mortal and philosophic egalitarianism whereby no distinction between the philosophic ‘few’ and the unphilosophic ‘many’ remains. Because reason is impotent, the dominant passion of the ‘many,’ the fear of violent death, replaces the quest for justice as the foundation of politics. Sovereign power inheres no longer in the exercise of reason (including and especially its exercise in theological dispute) but in the exercise of will—the strong will of the sovereign. “Faced with the union of the ‘tyrant’ and the ‘masses’ in National Socialism, of which Jews living in Germany are the primary victims,” Strauss “responds not with a critical analysis of authoritarianism and of anti-semitism in its political and socio-political causes, but…with a radical negation of equality among men.” It is surpassingly odd that Quélennec ignores the way in which so many Marxists themselves treated their fellow men as if they were subhuman, murdering millions of them in the quest to eliminate the supposed political and socio-political causes of inequality. On the theoretical level, Quéennec joins his fellow neo-Marxists in praising Strauss’s critique of liberalism’s “pseudo-neutrality” and pseudo-objectivity,” but criticizes him for failing to to recognize the “socio-historical” conditions of all thought, ‘ancient’ and ‘modern.’ “The Straussian return to nature ‘forgotten’ by the moderns is itself constructing on a forgetting, the forgetting of society and history.”

Given the fact that Strauss concentrates his attention on the Platonic dialogues titled The Regime and The Laws, one must wonder how ‘forgetful’ of society Strauss really was. It rather looks as if the young Strauss consciously rejected historicist reduction of philosophy and politics to economic and social causes understood as the motors of ‘History.’ This may be seen even in Quélennec’s own account of Strauss’s approach to Platonism through the philosophy of Moses Maimonides. In studying Maimonides, Strauss concluded that the problem of Orthodoxy and Enlightenment must remain insoluble “as long as one clings to modern premises.” Strauss “puts Orthodoxy against modernity” in view of Orthodoxy’s firm endorsement of divine revelation as fundamental to Judaism. But Platonic rationalism as understood by Maimonides approaches revelation differently. But Orthodoxy and Plato center their understanding of political life on consideration of law, ultimately on the regime—the “concrete and obligatory order of life” in the political community, as Strauss puts it. Plato requires the philosopher first to make a dialectical scent from the ‘cave,’ the city, but then requires him to return and to submit to its laws even while continuing, cautiously, to philosophize. Maimonides stands with Plato on this, while adding the additional and crucial argument that the prophet, not the philosopher, is the true lawgiver, the one who has the imaginative capacity to communicate theoretical truths to ‘the many’ in a form they can comprehend. The prophet thereby serves as a link between philosophy and legislation, “a political function,” his laws aiming at the perfection of the individual, body and soul, and of the city as a whole. Judaic prophecy realizes what Platonic philosophy leaves in the realm of the (practically unattainable) ideas.

Where does this leave philosophers? While recognizing the divine law as the starting point of their inquiries, both Jewish and Muslim medieval philosophers reserved the right to interpret that law. In so doing, they also recognized the limits of reason, which cannot (for example) say whether the world is eternal or was created by God. they therefore contented themselves with indirect influence on the city—interrogating, interpreting, unifying, repairing the law in accordance with reason, establishing “a sort of State in and under the State, the ‘ideal’ State united in its disjunction with the ‘real’ State and the ideology which sustains it.” Philosophy is a ‘guide for the perplexed’ for the young and perplexed potential philosopher, who wonders about the divine law, its apparent paradoxes, and the difficulties of applying it in hard cases. Quélennec suggests that “many German philosophers” were similarly perplexed in the wake of the Nazi revolution; their “unconditional submission to the new regime often went together with a certain defense of the autonomy of the field [i.e., philosophy] in the face of direct interventions of the State in the functioning of the [academic] institution.” This was surely true of Heidegger, although not true enough; as for Strauss, it is only just to say that the moral and political content of Nazi law precluded any such submission, a refusal based precisely on the hyper-modern content of that law. Quélennec recognizes this much later, observing that Strauss criticizes the Nazi sympathizer Carl Schmitt for giving the ‘total’ law a folkish or democratic foundation and for endorsing the Führerprinzip. Strauss understands law as endorsed by the medieval philosophers as “a counter-model to Schmitt,” a “neo-aristocratic program which inscribes inequality of intelligences and capacities into Being.” This is partially correct, except for the “inscribed” part. Inequality of intelligences and capacities isn’t somehow imposed by philosophers upon nature; they recognize it in nature. This in no way precludes the more fundamental equality of human beings as members of the same species. Quélennec misconceives Strauss as attempting to found a “reactionary utopia.” Strauss had no truck with utopianism, ‘reactionary’ or ‘progressive,’ precisely because he was no historicist. He never assumed that ‘History,’ conceived as the course of events, is necessarily going anywhere. 

In what Quélennec calls Strauss’s first “Platonic phase”—1932-36—Strauss “linked the liberty of the philosopher to the submission to and justification of the authoritarian political order.” Obviously, in theory Strauss justified only “authoritarian” political orders founded upon the divinely revealed law as interpreted by philosophers; no modern regime of ‘the few’ qualified. Strauss did in practice justify authoritarian political orders in order to contain the Nazis, but that hardly means he endorsed them on the highest level. No less a defender of republicanism than Winston Churchill continued to hope that Mussolini’s Italy, the archetype of fascism, would either join in alliance with the commercial republics against Hitler or at least remain neutral, as Franco would do in Spain. In his second “platonic turn”—1936-38—Quélennec’s Strauss abandoned his claim that Maimonides limited reason with a prophetic-revelatory framework while adhering to Maimonides’ assertion of the political need for a prophet to address ‘the many.’ With his well-known distinction between esoteric thought and exoteric dogma in hand, Strauss now argued that the ‘esoteric’ teaching of Maimonides proved him no pious Jew but “a radical critic of religion”; Strauss adopted the same stance for himself. In practice this meant that Strauss “now describ[ed] the relation of philosophy vis-à-vis the political and religious authorities as purely defensive,” while in practice advocating not the rule of ‘the few’ but Aristotle’s mixed regime, with its compromise between the wisdom of the philosophers and the consent of the people. he also took up his claim that Plato intended his regime in speech as an ironic construct, never to be implemented in practice.

Quélennec rejects all that. In his reading of Strauss, the mixed regime was only an exoteric shell covering a call for American or “Anglo-Saxon” imperialism, or what Strauss calls (thinking of Churchill’s imperialism) a “decent hegemony.” Such an empire would be ensured by Straussian disciples practicing a “Gramscianism of the Right”—that is, a ‘long march through the institutions’ initiated in the graduate program at the University of Chicago, where Strauss spent most of the last two decades of his life. In pursuit of this alleged goal, Straussians eventually allied with ‘neo-conservatives,’ who (Quélennec rightly remarks) were not conservatives in the European sense at all but old-fashioned liberals. The proffered evidence of this is Strauss’s argument in Persecution and the Art of Writing: Some degree of persecution of politically heterodox views is natural in any political regime, including the relatively tolerant liberal regimes, because any regime must resist its most radical enemies. As far as Quélennec is concerned, this amounts to “philosophic endorsement” of McCarthyism and “Anglo-Saxon propaganda for the ‘free world.'” Although Strauss presents philosophers as persecuted, in his Rightist-Gramscian scheme they are really pulling the strings of the political figures who do the actual persecution of the regime’s enemies, discreetly defending Strauss’s “reactionary utopia.”

It should be unnecessary to observe that one need not be a ‘McCarthyite’ to support the identification and removal of foreign agents from the government of the United States. Further, Quélennec produces no evidence that the ‘neo-conservatives’ had anything to do with McCarthyism; since there is none, his silence is understandable. It should also be unnecessary to observe that the original, leftist, Gramscians propounded an equally ‘elitist’ vanguardism. So does the ‘postmodernist’ Left of today, which acts exactly as Strauss expected every regime to acting—lauding and hiring its friends, condemning and excluding its enemies. Regimes impose limits and elevate ‘elites,’ period; even democracy requires an elite, namely, the majority that rules. The charge that Strauss thereby endorses McCarthyism thus invites an obvious reply of tu quoque. As for those scare quotes around the Cold-War phrase, the ‘free world,’ it is noteworthy that Quélennec never so much as mentions Strauss’s exchange with the self-proclaimed Hegelian Soviet sympathizer Alexandre Kojève. In his one philosophic dialogue with a real ‘totalitarian’ thinker, Strauss stood on the side of liberty.

On the practical/moral level, Strauss also testified that the example of Churchill made him see that the republican regimes could still defend themselves; it was not only or event mostly as an imperialist that Churchill galvanized Strauss’s attention. That is where Strauss drew the line in practice, even as he drew it between himself and Kojève in theory, for the balance of his life. Every one of his students knew that. (As an aside, it might be added that Strauss regarded his students, or that they regarded themselves, as the core of a new, Nietzschean ‘planetary aristocracy’ can only be seriously entertained by someone who never knew those guys. Stanley Rosen, Harry Jaffa, and Allan Bloom lacked nothing in self-esteem, but there were limits to it.)

With this intelligent and stimulating essay, Quélennec climbs to the top of the substantial heap of scholars who charge Strauss and his students with elitism, authoritarianism, imperialism, and so on. With regard to “the young Strauss,” Quélennec most likely wishes that he had favored not an anti-Nazi coalition of ‘Rightist’ regimes or even an Anglo-American alliance based partly on assaults launched from territories within the British Empire, but the Popular Front strategy of the 1930s Left. Honorable men took this position, including George Orwell and André Malraux, but they also abandoned hope of ‘one big Left’ after the moral and geopolitical  realities of the Cold War sank in.  Quélennec hasn’t learned enough from them.

As for the more recent controversies, it is hard to resist the opinion that the ‘Strauss Wars’ have really amounted to not so much a critique of American foreign policy under the Reagan and Bush administrations as an attempt to discredit faculty colleagues in North America, Britain, and continental Europe. The struggle is unquestionably a political one, very much among academic ‘elites,’ over who will be permitted to teach students and thereby advance the political principles and policies of the regimes they favor. Plato was right about Socrates and Athens, philosophers and sophists, philosophers and demagogues, and from the universities of seventeenth-century Europe to the universities in the West today, such struggles continue. 

 

Notes

1. See Charles de Gaulle:  The Enemy’s House Divided. Robert Eden translation. Durham: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
2. In this passage, Strauss does not mean “natural philosophy” in the sense of the pre-Socratics; he means rather philosophizing that begins in the polis, ‘the city,’ and ascends from there to insight into nature. 

 

 

Leo Strauss: On Hegel. Paul Franco, editor. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019.

 

Most readers of Strauss begin with Natural Right and History. There Strauss contrasts classical or ‘ancient’ political philosophy with ‘modern’ political philosophy. As Paul Franco remarks in his cogent introduction to On Hegel, “For Strauss the fear of violent death in Hobbes plays the same foundational role with respect to modern moral and political philosophy that radical doubt plays with respect to modern metaphysics.” Both radical doubt and fear of violent death derive “from distrust of nature”—to say nothing of God—rather than “grateful acceptance of it,” resulting in the characteristically modern philosophic attempt, instantiated in the technologies developed by modern scientists, “to actively control nature” instead of contemplating it.

In Natural Right and History Strauss remarks another contrast, one within the framework of this modern enterprise. Although the moderns would control nature, they nonetheless continue to appeal to nature, specifically human nature, as the source of moral and political right. In doing so, they also ‘lower’ the moral standard that human nature sets, inasmuch as they do not think very highly of human nature. Accordingly, thy replace the greatness of soul Aristotle upholds as the crown of ethical striving with the principles of self-preservation and acquisition. But these are still natural criteria for human conduct, down-to-earth though they are.

The tension between the attempt to conquer nature while upholding one part of nature, human nature, as the moral standard, heightens with Rousseau, in whom Strauss discerns a conception of human nature as being so malleable as hardly able to establish a usable standard at all. And so, Strauss argues, philosophers began to look elsewhere for a source of moral guidance. In the final section of Natural Right and History, Strauss finds in Edmund Burke’s celebrated denunciation of the French revolutionaries and their appeal to the natural “rights of man” a first attempt to derive right from “history”—meaning, the long course of human events which constitute the living tradition of a given people, or indeed of a given civilization. Strauss calls this new philosophic doctrine “historicism.”

Strauss’s selection of Burke as his specimen historicist may well puzzle his readers. Burke sometimes continues to profess natural-right principles and is in any event first and foremost a statesman rather than a philosopher. Just as puzzling, Strauss scarcely mentions G. W. F. Hegel, a philosopher par excellence, who elaborates an explicitly “historicist” doctrine in full and indeed systematic detail. [1]

Moreover, as Franco observes, there is a firm link between Hegel and Hobbes. “Hegel agrees with Hobbes on [the] foundational point” of modern political philosophy, locating “the origin of self-consciousness in the slave’s fear of violent death in his life-and-death struggle with the master”—the “struggle for recognition.” Hegel ‘historicizes’ the Hobbesian principle by putting it in the course of events, not in human beings as such. Under Hegel’s formulation, human nature can be as malleable as Rousseau said it was, without the consequent undermining of morality. Further, the modern project of controlling nature remains; indeed, the now-historical quest for human freedom from natural constraints makes possible not only (in Franco’s words) “the actualization of the best regime”—as Hobbes and Locke wanted to do—but (now going beyond Franco) makes his quest ‘nobler’ in its purpose than the low-but-realizable commercial monarchies and republics earlier moderns supposed possible. For Hegel, the modern state becomes not only useful but thoroughly rational to a degree even modern proponents of ‘Enlightenment’ though impossible.

Yet Strauss largely neglects Hegel in his published writings, with the exception of his exchange with the Hegelianizing Marxist and apologist for Stalin, Alexander Kojève, née Kojevnikov. That is, in the books and articles he published in his lifetime Strauss never addressed Hegel’s thought directly or in any detail. Between his accounts of Rousseau and Burke in Natural Right and History and his several engagements with Nietzsche, that grand historicist critic of Hegelian historicism, he leaves a hiatus, indeed a gulf. One wants to ask, ‘But Mr. Strauss, what about the master-historicist himself?’

We now have Strauss’s considered remarks on Hegel in the form of a well-annotated transcript of a graduate seminar on The Philosophy of History he conducted at the University of Chicago in 1965. Many of his classes were tape recorded by his students; typewritten transcripts of somewhat uneven quality have circulated for years as a sort of Straussian samizdat. In this seminar Strauss offered an interpretation of Hegel’s historicism remarkable not only for its acuity but for its equanimity. Far from a historicist himself, Strauss never descends to the level of polemical ‘critique’ so typical of latter-day adepts of ‘post-modernism.’ Indeed, he does not hesitate to correct students eager to judge Hegel too harshly and hastily.

An extraordinary caliber of students he did attract. We hear from “Mr. Shulsky”—Abram Shulsky, author of a study on Aristotle’s Politics and co-author of a standard text on the techniques of espionage; “Mr. Glenn”—Gary D. Glenn, long a mainstay of the political science department at Northern Illinois University; “Mr. Bruell”—Christopher Bruell, author of noteworthy treatments of Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle; and “Miss Heldt”—the redoubtable Catherine H. Zuckert, whose scholarship has ranged from Plato to Machiavelli to American novelists. On Hegel makes it easy to see why Strauss drew them to his classes. To l’esprit de géométrie and l’esprit de finesse he added l’esprit de politesse —a formal, old-world charm blended with witty use of American advertising slogans and news events in side-comments that obviously took his students by surprise, not expecting him to know about such things.

Strauss begins by asking: Why study Hegel “in our capacity as political scientists”? Because Hegel influenced Marx, whose latter-day disciples ruled a substantial portion of the world population at the time; because Hegel redirected intellectuals’ attention from the state to “culture” (and especially religion) “as the comprehensive theme of reflections of human society”; because The Philosophy of History consists of a series of lectures to university students, making its arguments “much more easy to follow” than those encountered in Hegel’s formal writings; and, above all, because “Hegel was the first to make the understanding of the history of political philosophy an essential ingredient of political philosophy itself.”

Strauss then introduces Hegel historically, without conceding anything to historicism as a philosophic doctrine. (“I am not a Hegelian, and I do not believe that one can say that history is rational.”) For example, he explains that “the simple formula of Hegel’s philosophy of history” is “order comes out of disorder without being intended.” In this he is obviously indebted to Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.” But Hegel “enlarged this” to encompass “the whole of history”; the moral sentiments Smith attributes to nature, and indeed nature itself, are reconceived by Hegel as part of a blind yet orderly movement, unfolding via rationally discernible laws, towards a fully “rational order,” one entirely conscious of itself as an order.

But how is it possible for the historically-determined philosopher to know that the ‘end of history’ has occurred? “Hegel was the first to face this difficulty: If the philosophy is the son of his time, how can he have found the eternal truth?” And Hegel’s general answer is: He can, if he lives in the moment “in which time as it were coincides with eternity,” if he lives in what Strauss calls the “absolute epoch” or “absolute moment” when the owl of Minerva not only takes flight but lands, the moment in which the love of wisdom, philo-sophia, has become wisdom itself. In this moment, the philosopher (it happens to have been Hegel, but that is of no importance) can solve the fundamental problem of Plato’s “dialectics of the ideas.” Platonic dialectic poses the problem of how the ideas, beings of a different order of being from the things we see around us, somehow generate those things? Hegelian dialectic, understood for the first time at the end of history, because of the end of history, reveals how this happens—why “the whole realm of ideas necessarily externalizes into nature on the one hand and mind on the other hand”—by the dialectical unfolding of the Absolute Spirit (which Hegel also calls “God), its dialectical work now completed. Hegel’s new theory of logic posits a dialectic that doesn’t merely catch opinionated folk in self-contradiction but rather works through contradictions, through the clash of contradictory opinions and actions (such as wars and factions) toward ever-grander syntheses of opposites, culminating in the final synthesis, the end of history. [2] With Hegel’s new logic, reason doesn’t simply discern contradiction; “reason thinks through contradiction.” In this, Strauss says, “Hegel surely is the most radical rationalist that ever wrote,” the one who understood reason as “something which is not merely a faculty of man” but instead subsumed all of being under the rubric of a reason not ‘above’ empirical reality, as in Plato, but as immanent in it, and immanent in the course of events in the empirical world. “God” isn’t transcendent but immanent. “There is nothing outside of reason, nothing which is not rational.” 

Politically, this means that political life is no longer architectonic, as Plato and Aristotle maintained. “The political life is part of a larger whole,” the life of the “collective mind, folk-mind”—a “culture” consisting of language, religion, arts, and (on the material side) natural descent, climate, and geography. “The folk-mind is the mediation between nature and mind.” No folk-mind dies but instead “becomes the matter for a higher principle embodied in another people”—a rational process in Hegel’s sense of the dialectical, namely, the clash of opposites leading to a new synthesis. In turn, “each folk-mind is a part, or facet, or stage of the mind, the world-mind” or Absolute Spirit, “and this is therefore a reconciliation between the universal and the particular.” It is also a reconciliation of good and evil, inasmuch as both are necessary elements of the world-historical dialectic. In this, Hegel satisfies himself that he has solved the theologians’ ‘problem of evil,’ while at the same time vindicating the religions, especially Christianity, as philosophically necessary steps toward full human self-consciousness or wisdom. His new dialectic also solves the philosophic problem posed by Hume, the problem of the ‘is’ and the ‘ought.’ Contra Hume, at the end of history one can indeed see how the ‘ought’ derives from the ‘is,’ because what is has worked toward what ought to be, what must be, namely, the end or purpose of history.

These matters being so, after his philosophic introduction Hegel divides his lectures on the philosophy of history into four parts, each corresponding to a culture, a folk-mind: the Oriental world; the Greek world; the Roman world; and the Germanic world, wherein the historically-unfolding Absolute Spirit or World Mind has reached its culmination in Hegel’s comprehensive rational system. Even in ‘pre-history,’ in Africa, we already see the human intention to oppose itself to external nature in the practice of sorcery and even of cannibalism, which form parts of African religion. But Asia is where history proper began. In Africa and elsewhere, the sorcerer assumes that the world around him “remains subject to arbitrariness”—manipulable at his command; he is a radical ‘subjectivist.’ The Chinese were the first to understand the world around them as ‘objective,’ as having a stubborn reality of its own. But in making this advance, Chinese civilization (and Asian civilization generally) run to the opposite extreme. They lack “an inner sense, pointing in the right direction,” instead obeying the Emperor’s commands “as a matter of course” because they are supposed to be the “Mandates of Heaven.” this paternalism and its accompanying rule by administration, leads finally to cultural-political ossification, as “there is no life, so to speak, in the state. it all depends on the man at the top.” In such civilizations as China, India, or ancient Judea there can be no “science and political liberty” because while there is an understanding that the world has an objective integrity of its own, there is no sense of rational opposition of human beings to this given order. This (Strauss emphasizes) has nothing to do with biological racialism; he quotes Carl Schmitt as saying that “the moment Hitler came to power…Hegel died” in Germany.

India is superior to China in that for the Chinese the highest thing is “a visible heaven,” whereas Hindus “go beyond and peer through heaven, as it were, and discover a spiritual principle—nothingness as the ground of everything—and this is an act of liberation.” It is not a liberation of reason, but it is a precondition of reasoning. In Persia we see another advance. The Persians “view the whole historical process as a fight” between opposites, between light and darkness, goodness and evil. “The point is that this highest, the light, does not absorb the individual things or human beings but lets them be what they are; whereas for the Hindu, nothingness leads to the negation of the particulars, Nirvana.” The Persian insight provides a foundation both for dialectic and for individuation—not yet understood rationally, but posited.

Notice that as Hegel uncovers these gradual advances in human thought in Asia, he moves geographically closer and closer toward the West. Phoenicia is the next step, where a a people goes to sea, trading as far away as the British Isles, and therefore needing a plan, needing to engage in practical if not theoretical reasoning about how to survive at sea, pursuing an active way of life, industrious and not merely agricultural or ‘vegetative.’ what is more the Phoenician god, Adonis, dies: “The death of God is the highest point of Phoenicia, and Hegel implies that there is some connection between this concept of the death of God—that the negativity belongs to the spirit itself—and what he had said about the industrial character of Phoenicia.” Neither commerce and industry nor a religion in which God dies bespeaks a way of life settled in a condition of changelessness. It prefigures Christianity and the Cross. “In the Old Testament there is indeed for the first time the primacy of the spirit,” the Persian light now the first sign of a Creator -God, a god of freedom, superior to material ‘givenness.’ In this, Hegel takes up Burke’s distinction between the beautiful—the harmonious, the natural, the created—and the sublime—the creative, but also the suffering, the sacrificial, the dialectical—and this may be the link Strauss sees between Hegel’s progressivism and Burke’s traditionalism. “For Hegel, the true is radically distinguished from the beautiful and higher than it,” while for “Plato and Aristotle, somehow the true and beautiful coincide on the highest level, the ideas.” But they did not set out to conquer nature, only to contemplate and apprehend it.

Yet Asia still does not produce the rational. The rational came to light “in the free, joyful spirit of Greece,” in the Apollonian command, “man, know thyself.” In answering the riddle posed by the Asian sphinx, Oedipus “overthrew the sphinx from the rock,” liberating the Oriental spirit, “which Egypt had advanced so far as to propose the problem.” “The answer is “that the inwardness of nature is the thought that has its existence only in the human consciousness.” In the realm of historical action, the same transition occurred when the Greeks defeated the Persians at Salamis, marking the limit of Persian imperialism, an imperialism that could never form itself into “a harmonious whole” and which now retreated against “Greek organization,” itself an expression of the liberated human spirit.

Hegel ignored the Greek understanding of art as imitation. Greek art, preeminently Greek poetry, is in his view rather a form of religion. “That is its peculiar greatness and freedom,” seen in the triumph of the Olympian gods over the old cthonic gods, Chronos and Ouranos. The freedom implied in art is not yet the full, modern freedom, as it retains what Hegel calls “an essential relation to some stimulus supplied by Nature,” something external to the human spirit. “Nevertheless,” Strauss says, “the freedom of the mind is recognized within these limits, and therefore Greece is higher than the Orient.” Among the arts practiced by the Greeks was rhetoric, the art of debate, the art of democratic politics, the nucleus of Socratic debate or dialectic. In negating traditional opinions and practices (and getting himself killed for it) Socrates and his dialectic still come from them, in some sense express them.

The defect of the Greek world is seen in the slavery that undergirds its democratic politics. For the Greeks, freedom consists of controlling the passions; they do not see that innate freedom of the human mind “by virtue of which every man is by nature free,” responsible, “and therefore an object of respect.” There is reason in Greece, but no “right of subjectivity,” no conscience—only the virtue of the self-governing citizen. The self-governing citizen shares in ruling the tiny polis; there is no central state, no sense of “a distinction between the people and the government,” and thus no realm of privacy, of personal subjectivity, and therefore of individual rights. Socrates provides the beginning of the salutary corruption of the Greek folk-mind by causing “the awakening of subjectivity.” But a fuller freedom of spirit, of conscience, and of individual rights must await the founding of Christianity.

But first came the conqueror of Greece—its dialectical opponent, Rome. Rome would eventuate in Christianity, “the complete break with naturalness” and its replacement (or at least displacement) in the Christian soul with Spirit. Before this though could occur, there needed to be a midway point; classical Rome provided this with the concept of personality. “Personality,” Strauss remarks, “is not individuality.” “The concept of personality is a legal concept”; in Rome, all men were understood to be “legal persons,” human beings with ‘standing’ in court. “Out of the full person of formal law there will grow the fuller individuality later on.” At the same time, legal standing in court implies conventionality, artificiality. The emphasis on the Roman citizen as a legal person comports with the fact that “Rome was from the outset not natural in any way; nor did it have the originality going together with naturalness.” On the contrary, it originated in fratricidal violence, the story of Romulus and Remus—a story, Strauss emphasizes, that the Romans told about themselves. “A nation which can tell this story about its own origin thereby reveals its soul,” whether the story is factually true or not.”

Rome “constitutes a progress beyond Greece” because “there is no longer the tutelage of nature which is in Greece,” no longer “the charming union of nature and mind which is charming and therefore also deceptive and untrue.” Rome’s origins were ugly and it ended in the ugly rule of emperor-tyrants. Rome had a civil religion but according to Hegel (following Machiavelli) it was a sham. The emptiness and misery of classical Rome was called ‘sin’ by Christians. And the sin it lived by—especially its unending, unjust imperial wars—aspired to universality, to worldwide empire. In attempting to save the old republic, Cicero wasted his time.” “Looking at this thing in hindsight,” Hegel “sees what wonderful things came out of this terrible Caesarism, namely, the emergence of Christianity and the modern world.”

Hegel’s “section of Christianity…is in a way the most important part of the whole work.” Roman imperialism brought the Romans to Transalpine Gaul, Germany, and Britain—to the Europe which would become the center of Christendom and then the center of modernity. Rome also prepared for Christianity by its universality of thought as well as action, by “purif[ying] the human mind and heart from all particularity because it recognized only the individual as an abstract legal person.” Christianity would take the Jewish claim that man is sinful, “wholly alienated from God and yet to be redeemed by God,” combine it with Roman universality while rejecting Rome itself as sinful, and finally give all of these themes a “visible, sensual certainty” by worshipping Jesus, “God’s son…incarnated as man.”

The final step will be the “spiritual” understanding of Jesus “as opposed to the carnal understanding,” that is, a fully rationalist form of ‘Christianity’ now purged of the miracles and the doctrine of sanctity or holiness. Science will replace miracles, mastering nature; immanence will replace the separation of Spirit and human nature. “The recognition of the rights of man, the recognition of the infinite value of the individual…this is the full realization of Christianity” according to Hegel. The rational Absolute Spirit replaces the Holy Spirit.

Strauss distinguishes Hegel’s philosophy of history from political philosophy. Political philosophy “was based from the very beginning on the difference between the good and the ancestral; the agathon and the patrium,” as seen in the second book of Aristotle’s Politics. To Plato’s Socrates, inquiring after the good in the Athenian marketplace by rationally testing the opinions of his fellow citizens, “the various forms of the ancestral” to which men characteristically appeal when struggling to define the good “are divinations or fragments of the good, and even souled fragments of it.” “Hegel says: No, there is an order among these ancestrals”—indeed, “an ascending order,” as they appear over the centuries. “Not only is the end toward which they point…rational, the way towards the end is itself rational” and therefore as necessary in its progress as a logical proof. “At the end there is complete reconciliation of reason and tradition” in the fully rational administrative state.

Classical philosophy was “cosmological,” “concerned with men within the cosmos,” with natural beings within the natural order. Changes in “human thoughts and human societies” were understood “within the cosmic context,” within nature as a whole. Well before Hegel, modern philosophy had rejected this. Hobbes asserts that “we understand only what we make, i.e., if we merely discover something, it is essentially unintelligible”; Descartes agrees, as for him “the beginning is the thinking ego, not the cosmos.” For the moderns, “the thinking, understanding subject is the origin of all meaning,” and the rights of man are “subjective rights.” As early as Machiavelli, one sees disdain for the “imagined commonwealths” of the ancients, pagan and Biblical—commonwealths said to be outside and indeed above men. Modern ‘subjectivity’ is, Strauss maintains, “the necessary but not sufficient condition of the discovery of history.” Modern ‘subjects’ or ‘selves’ consult their own desires and reach out to grasp, to manipulate, to control external nature, not to guide themselves by its laws or by some idea of the good discernible in it. This project of the conquest of nature is understood to be progressive.

“All of these kinds of things came together and made it compelling for man in the eighteenth century to say that the human mind necessarily progresses and its results necessarily spread. And then by the spread of knowledge the people become enlightened and opinion is changed; and if opinion is changed, power is changed, because power will now move in a different direction than it moved before it was enlightened.” This “altered the nature not only of political philosophy but of political life very profoundly.” Hegel synthesized all of these elements into his philosophy; this synthesis was the “absolute speech” in which Christianity, itself predicting the advent of a new heaven and a new earth, “becomes completely secularized,” instantiated by human rationality. “Christianity has become fully understood, i.e., religion has been transformed into philosophy by Hegel at the University of Berlin.” Similarly, the arts that once depicted the gods—whether Athena or Christ Pantocrator—are replaced by “philosophy, including science,” and especially the scientific art, technology, and by “the rational state, revealing itself in reasonable laws,” implemented in accordance with the principles of scientific administration. This is no longer political philosophy because it is no longer political—no longer an interplay of ruling and being ruled but instead a matter of consensual obedience to rational regulation. And it is no longer philosophy, either, but the wisdom for which philosophers had long searched but never found until the dialectic of the Absolute Spirit rested in Hegel’s fully rational and comprehensive system of thought and of action, now unified.

How would Hegel reply to what now calls itself ‘postmodernism,’ the refusal of the authority of the administrative state and indeed of reason itself? Hegel as illuminated by Strauss makes this quite clear: The ‘end of history is the peak of the roof, but the owl of Minerva which takes wing from it descends to catch rodents. From the heights, history has nowhere to go but down, or perhaps around. And so it has, into a democratized Nietzscheism for the Last Man.

 

Notes

1. For a step-by-step exposition of The Philosophy of History, see the five articles posted in the “Philosophers” section of this website.
2. See Stanley Rosen: G.W.F. Hegel: An Introduction to the Science of Wisdom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), discussed in “Historicity and Reason: Two Studies,” on this website in the “Philosophers” section of this website.