Timothy W. Burns: Leo Strauss on Democracy, Technology, and Liberal Education.  Albany: SUNY Press, 2021. 

 

The contemporary American academic Left decries Leo Strauss as an enemy of democracy while transforming Martin Heidegger, a Nazi, into an ally, a friend of democracy and of ‘liberal education’ as the Left has redefined them. Central to this equation, however, is technology, alternatively valorized (the Internet as the means of universal ‘communication’ of peoples throughout the world) or demonized (industrialism as the violator of Goddess Earth, our Mother). Technology is the most visible form of modern science, about which the Left is similarly ambivalent. Books vilifying and defending Strauss have become a small industry within the industry of academic publishing, with dozens of titles having appeared in the past three decades or so. This succinct, extraordinarily incisive essay is one of the few that repays the effort it takes to read it. One of Professor Burns’s most important insights is that Strauss, Heidegger’s younger contemporary, has him very much in mind even in writings where Heidegger is never named.

Burns begins with an overview of his account. Regarding democracy, he remarks that Strauss’s attempt to recover classical political philosophy “does not initially bespeak a friend of democracy” because Strauss understands the classics to have “rejected democracy” on the grounds that virtue, not freedom to live as one likes (the aim of democracy) is the natural aim of human life lived at its best. While it is true that classical democracy is the rule of the many who are poor, needy, often desirous of soaking the rich in order to obtain the freedom to live as they like—rather along the lines of comical Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, singing “If I were a rich man”—and while it is also true that modern democracy is the rule of the many who are comfortable, men and women of the middling class, that very middling sort of life lends itself to complacency, even corruption, to what the classics (and the Tevye’s Bible) condemn as the vices of ease. Strauss harbors doubts about democracy, ancient and modern, even while considering it “the most decent of the available modern regimes.” Such lukewarm esteem frustrates and even infuriates the more impassioned partisans of modern democracy, for whom the regime’s ills are curable only by further democratization, as in John Dewey’s mot, “the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy.” 

Strauss also takes issue with the scholarly majority in his account of the origins of modern democracy. Most scholars adhere to “the secularization thesis,” which takes modern democracy as “the secular manifestation of an advanced moral consciousness, first expressed within Christianity, of the equal dignity of each individual.” ‘Undemocratically’ opposing the majority view, Strauss “argued that modern democracy emerged, rather, through the modern philosophic-scientific project, and has therefore within it the very serious threat to humanity that is posed by technology,” by the kind of science that animates modernity, a science that emancipates technology, techne, art, “from moral and political control.” This potentially disastrous emancipation serves the passion for doing as one likes, not of doing what one ought—and thus, potentially, to “the dehumanization of man.” Christianity of course does no such thing. In opposing the claim that modern democracy secularizes Christianity, Strauss puts himself in apparent opposition not merely to modern scholars but to no less a political thinker than Alexis de Tocqueville.

Burns observes that Strauss “understood technological thinking to be at the very core of modern political philosophy,” which aims (with Machiavelli, Bacon, and Hobbes) to conquer nature, increasing human power over nature, by “shift[ing] human attention away from the political-moral question of the right end or ends of human life to the means to any desired end,” ultimately to the conquest of human nature itself. To do this, modern political philosophy obscures “the radical difference between the theoretical and practical/political/moral life.” This obscurantism stems not merely from materialism—Lucretius and the other Epicureans were materialists—but from what ‘Athens’ and ‘Jerusalem’ alike would have regarded as hubris, an arrogance that will lead, however, not to some secularized version of the kingdom of God but to the universal tyranny of a world state. Strauss maintains that the classics saw the possibility of technological science and rejected it as dangerous, even as the God of Israel struck down that technological marvel, the tower of Babylon, after emancipating His people from the pyramids and sorcery of Egypt. 

As for liberal education, “Plato and Aristotle did not lack social justice or a sense of it,” knowing “as well as we can know them the true principles of justice,” that “a society ruled by a privileged group is of questionable justice since social superiority and natural superiority do not necessarily coincide.” Accordingly, they understood that “only men who are truly educated, who are experienced in things noble and beautiful, ought to rule,” but also that “average men cannot fulfill this condition” because such an education requires leisure and leisure requires the wealth that few men of their time enjoyed. The classics resigned themselves to this degree of injustice because the alternative to it was “perpetual revolution, which means perpetual chaos.” Modernity’s “economy of plenty,” which makes a liberal education available to far more people, presents its own problem, however: by ‘democratizing’ the liberal arts and making them subservient to the conquest-of-nature project, the modern, centralized state deploys a political economy that encourages citizens to turn away from moral and political virtue, toward the pursuit of living as one likes, according to the passions and appetites that undermine the liberality, to say nothing of the mindfulness, that makes those arts liberal. Philosophically, this means turning away from the theoretical to the practical life and eventually to the ‘synthesis’ of theory and practice, begun by Hegel, advanced by Marx, consummated by Heidegger. Strauss denied Heidegger’s claim that the disjunction between theory and practice seen initially in Plato’s dialogues, led to the technological-philosophic proposal to conquer nature. On the contrary, the classics foresaw that possibility and rejected it. Just as Christianity is not to be credited or blamed for the rise of democracy, of civil-social egalitarianism in modernity, so Plato and Aristotle are not to be blamed for the atomic bomb.

Unlike Machiavelli, Strauss “did not consider the move to technology to have been necessary or impelled by a correction of an alleged weakness in philosophic thinking begun by the ancients that found its fuller elaboration or fate in the moderns.” Admittedly, Machiavelli was right in pointing to the problem of military defense as a weakness in classical (to say nothing of Christian) thought, but Strauss questioned the modern “use of science for this purpose.” Up until now, technological advances, good or bad, had been limited by nature, whose “periodic cataclysms in fact took care” of such double-edged circumstances. “Viewed in this light,” Strauss writes, “the natural cataclysms appear as a manifestation of the beneficence of nature.” But if nature itself were conquered, what then? A man-made cataclysm? Or a world state, perpetual peace under perpetual tyranny? Further, “both the promise and threat of technology is not limited to modern tyranny but is posed likewise by modern, liberal democracy,” whether in the form of material ruin in war or moral ruin amidst decadent affluence. In this, Strauss concurred with Tocqueville’s unforgettable, dystopian warning about “soft despotism.” [1]

Modernity’s moral crisis was delayed by Hobbes, who tempered his Machiavellian endorsement of nature conquest—expressed in his scientistic notion of life as a perpetual quest for “power,” a quest that “ceaseth only in death”—with a non-materialist (and therefore contradictory) notion of “right”—the “just use of that power”—which rests on an argument that smuggles an end into an otherwise non-teleological doctrine—the perpetuation of life itself, not a summum bonum so much as a summum malum, namely, the fear of violent death. It turns out that human beings have a distinctively human characteristic after all, the “nonmaterial capacity to conceive of ‘effects imagined’ beyond “immediately intended utility. Human beings have what would later be called ‘consciousness,’ in this case the consciousness of our own power and “hence to our becoming vainglorious—to our no longer innocently pursuing power like animals but instead our becoming capable of consumingly and wrongfully proud of our ability to acquire many powerful means to our ends.” Hobbes lauds the modern state not simply as Machiavelli does—as an instrument of power, as a means of conquering Fortuna—but as an instrument for keeping vainglorious men (particularly the titled aristocrats, whose quest for battlefield glory interferes with peaceful commerce) in their place. “Hobbes’s attention to justice,” to natural rights, “to what (he and other) citizens or subjects believe when they distinguish between a just ruler, leads him, inconsistently, to abandon his naturalist-materialist account while still presenting it as a materialist account” of man’s quest for conquering the nature upon which any doctrine of natural rights must, somehow, depend. [2] “This inconsistency is not, for Strauss, merely problematic, but helps to account for the continued, sustained role of a nonhistoricist, commonsense moral reasoning, and even greatness, in modern, liberal regimes.” Vive l’incohérence!” But Hume’s jibe about the incoherence of ‘is’ and ‘ought’ will loom, soon enough.

How, exactly, do democracy and technology link themselves together in modernity? The understanding of the natural equality of all men yields sovereignty of the people, democracy; the sovereignty of the people is intended to guarantee the equal rights of the people, rights deriving from their natural equality; the sovereignty of the people implies that no government, even a government elected by the people, is sovereign over the people, leading to separation of powers and other institutional guards against a centralized state that would otherwise aggrandize itself and compromise popular sovereignty, destroy equal rights. Such a state will serve the people’s desire for material prosperity, for doing and having what they like, by fostering the quest for the use of science for the relief of man’s estate, a project that replaces the landed gentry/aristocracy with a commercial/industrial elite, which threatens natural and civic equality from its position within the civil society beneath the state and, eventually, by co-opting the ruling institutions of that state for their own purposes. Meanwhile, the hoped-for virtues of the people decay, leading to a decline of the public spiritedness that must animate liberal democracy, if it is to resist its oligarchic enemies within, its tyrannical enemies without. At best, the “responsibility” of the people and their elected representatives (as per Madison’s tenth Federalist) replaces the sterner virtues, but this will prove insufficient to resist the blandishments of luxury or the ambitions of rulers domestic and foreign. 

There is a “deeper (and earlier) problem,” one associated with “the original, anti-biblical intention of the founders of the modern technological-scientific enterprise and its goal of ‘enlightenment’ of the people.” The way to prevent the moral decadence of a general commercial prosperity, in addition to the cultivation of such ‘bourgeois’ virtues as thrift, sobriety, and industriousness, was to make men not so much morally better as smarter, alert to the schemes of ambitious politicians and priests. This doesn’t quite meet the dilemma, however. “The late, open admission of modern science that it is (and ever was) incapable of providing any moral guidance to anyone, but (however increasingly efficient and specialized) is in fact ‘value-free,’ has finally had the result” Max Weber described: regimes consisting of “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart”—a “nullity” that imagines “it has achieved a level of civilization never before achieved.” Modern technological science enables democracy or civil-social egalitarianism “to emerge,” resulting, as Burns puts it, “in the highly problematic, deeply degraded contemporary situation in which we find ourselves.”

“Unlike Heidegger,” Strauss doesn’t think that the solution to the conquest of nature is to radicalize the historicism that has been the latest manifestation of the conquest of nature. He finds in Platonic political philosophy not the origin of technological overreach but an answer to it. Plato and “the other ancient political philosophers” were “unflinchingly aware of their mortality and the passing away of all human things and of its significance.” That was why they drew “a sharp distinction between philosophy and political-moral thinking,” a distinction Heidegger seeks to erase,” “with religion and ancestral tradition”—the bugbears of the Enlightenment—having “an important and admirable role in the latter, and serving as both a bulwark for human excellence and a crucial interlocutor with philosophy.” Even in the modern liberal democracies, the magnanimous man presented as the peak of the moral virtues in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics was still possible, as seen in Strauss’s great contemporary (his political counterpart, if you will) Winston Churchill, himself the author of the book, Great Contemporaries. “A faithful adherence to a liberal democratic constitutionalism whose tone and direction may be provided by a sub-political ‘aristocracy within democracy,’ one whose thinking is informed by both serious religious education in one’s ancestral traditions and the study of the Great Books” was still a reasonable, indeed indispensable stance to take. While Tocqueville had looked to his own class, the titled aristocrats, as guides of democracy, and while in England and even, if much more rarely, in Tocqueville’s France that class had delivered some great men, Strauss saw that it needed reinforcements in the persons of middle-class democrats who either emulated the great and good men they found in the course of their liberal education or at least had the ability to recognize and esteem such men when they came along. 

To clarify and elaborate on Strauss’s response to Heidegger and to the modernity (now calling itself ‘post-modernity’) he represented, Burns considers four essays: “What Is Liberal Education?”; “Liberal Education and Responsibility”; “German Nihilism”; and “The Liberalism of Classical Political Philosophy.” It is noteworthy that Strauss doesn’t mention Heidegger in any of these writings; Burns insightfully shows how the presence of Heidegger nonetheless stands beside each of them.

“What Is Liberal Education?” is a lecture delivered at the graduation exercises of the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults at the University of Chicago in June 1959. [3] Strauss begins with a definition of democracy offered by the sophist Protagoras in the Platonic dialogue named for him: democracy is “a regime in which all or most adults are men of virtue,” men especially of justice and wisdom who have “formed a fully rational society.” This “remarkably elevated characterization of democracy,” what Strauss calls “a universal aristocracy” or the rule of ‘the many’ who are virtuous, turns out to be ironic. Protagoras himself doesn’t really believe it, deploying it as a sort of advertising slogan for himself and the art that he claims to teach. Protagoras indicates his contempt for democracy soon enough. Strauss omits this “denigration of democracy” from his lecture, instead referring his audience to that modern critic of previous moderns, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who writes that “If there were a people consisting of gods, it would rule itself democratically,” but since there isn’t, natural equality will need to find some other regime to protect it. Political scientists should be able to devise such a regime, yet Strauss looks in vain for any such ‘scientists’ among his contemporaries.

Contemporary political scientists laud democracy while remarking, with what they take to be tough-minded realism, that “it is elites who really run things.” Being “value-free,” social-science behaviorialism can only describe, unless it chooses to contradict itself by telling its students things like the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy; that is, contemporary political scientists “are in fact trapped in contemporary, vulgar opinion.” They intend to unmask the pretensions of political men, but Strauss unmasks the unmaskers—without going so far as to imagine that he can enlighten the would-be enlighteners. In its turn, vulgar public opinion bubbles sluggishly in civil society; contemporary democracy, Strauss ventures to say, “is indeed then not mass rule but mass culture,” “a culture which can be appropriated by the meanest capacities without any intellectual and moral effort whatsoever and at a very low monetary price.” Since modern liberalism “stands or falls by the distinction between state and society, or by the recognition of a private sphere protected by the law but impervious to the law, with the understanding that, above all, religion as particular religion belongs to the private sphere,” in order to avoid the religiously motivated civil and international wars that nearly ruined Europe, the way to counter mass culture might be the institution of a non-mass culture next to it, a culture centered in colleges and universities. “Far from intending to lead a takeover of democracy by a new ‘elite,'” as some of his more captious critics charge [4], “Strauss calls for the founding of an aristocracy within the subpolitical, ‘cultural’ sphere of democracy, for the sake of cultivating habits of mind and heart needed by democracy, which cannot, as he sees it sustain itself on the thin, commercial gruel of mass culture.” Although his reminder of the example of the magnanimous statesman “is unlikely to have any effect on behavioral political scientists,” Strauss looks to those “who, reared in the fact-value distinction, need and already long to see examples of greatness” but who, in the Europe of his time, had instead fallen for the sham greatness of Hitler and Mussolini.

What, then, can be the status of greatness, of magnanimity, in democracy? While Strauss sees the merit of Tocqueville’s measured criticisms of democracy, he departs from him in several ways. In choosing Churchill as his example of a great statesman, he chooses a contemporary who works “within a liberal democracy, while Tocqueville points almost exclusively to the past for examples of greatness, and counsels contemporary democratic solutions—such as the doctrine of self-interest rightly understood, voluntary associations even of the most prosaic kind, and the democratic family—to ‘tyranny of the majority’ and ‘individualism.'” True to some degree, one should say, but Tocqueville also points to greatness in the present, and not only to what remains of the European aristocracy. Readers can see this in his account of the origins of democracy in Christianity, the main item of contention between the two thinkers. 

Burns accurately describes Strauss’s critique of Tocqueville, who advises his aristocratic friends to accept democracy, to give up the dreams of returning to rule that many still nurtured, decades after the French Revolution, and also to “abandon” the “possibilities of human greatness that [aristocracy] made possible.” “Strauss did not subscribe to what came to be called the Whig notion of democracy’s development—a variety of the secularization thesis—that lay behind Tocqueville’s judgment and counsel,” a thesis propounded by the German-influenced historian George Bancroft, shortly before Tocqueville arrived in America. One might say (although Strauss does not) that Tocqueville reommended an attitude of philosophic resignation in the face of this phenomenon, which he called “a force greater than man.” Unlike Strauss, who finds the origin of the decline of religiosity in the calculated efforts of modern philosophers, beginning with Machiavelli, Tocqueville tells his friend and correspondent Arthur de Gobineau that “the flesh would have rehabilitated itself just fine without the help of philosophers,” against Christianity. He calls Christianity “the great source of modern morality,” but no longer its guiding principle, with the Christian virtue of charity now taken over by the secular state in the form of ‘welfare,’ given “the disappearance of great individuals to whom one could have recourse in order to meet such obligations,” the aristocrats. Gobineau replies that such state-sponsored charity is no longer charity, comporting instead with what Gobineau sees as the decidedly un-Christian love of luxury and other “material pleasures” encouraged by commercial regimes. “Suffering is no longer holy,” having been reduced to the status of a socio-economic problem. 

Very uncharacteristically, Strauss misses, or perhaps makes a show of missing, some of Tocqueville’s nuance. Tocqueville attributes the origin of democracy to Christianity quite likely in order to appeal to the religious source of the aristocrats’ (and the monarchists’) claim to rule. While you once maintained that God ordained the hierarchic social and political order you ruled, in fact Christianity undermined it. But this speculation aside, Tocqueville explicitly states that Christianity undermined the ‘old regime’ of Europe, even as it seemed to reinforce it, because Christ revealed not only a teaching about God but the true teaching about man, God’s teaching about human nature: that all human beings are of the same species, their differences in virtue and talent real but not strictly dispositive in any way that could be accurately enacted in civil society or government. [5] What is more, human nature itself has greatness within it, a greatness that has gradually come to the surface of modern civil societies and the politics they support, despite the manipulation of conventions first by aristocrats and now by some states-men—i.e., men of the centralized modern state—who have worked to suppress it. “We ought not strain to make ourselves like our fathers, but to strive to attain the kind of greatness and happiness that is proper to us.” [6] This being so, the poets that once celebrated (and occasionally satirized) the pagan gods, who once suggested the greatness of the God of the Bible, can now find sublimity and beauty in man himself: “I do not need to travel through heaven and earth to discover a marvelous object full of contrasts, of infinite greatness and pettiness, of profound obscurity and singular clarity, capable of giving birth at once to pity, admiration, scorn and terror. I have only to consider myself: man comes from nothing, traverses time, and is going to disappear forever into the bosom of God. One sees him for only a moment wandering, lost, between the limits of the two abysses.” Poets in democracies should not be expected “to repopulate the universe with supernatural beings in which readers and poets themselves no longer believe…. But man remains, and he is enough for it,” man, “placed before nature and God with his passions, his doubts, his unheard-of prosperity, and his incomprehensible miseries.”  [7]

But in the end, Strauss’s quarrel is with Heidegger, not Tocqueville. He rejects the inclination of Heidegger to return to nature. To be sure, this is not the “mere romanticism” it seems, inasmuch as thermonuclear war “could compel future generations” to live in “illiterate tribes.” But tribal life has no place for philosophy, Heideggerian or otherwise. Tribal men worship their ancestors and obey ancestral custom, which they take to be “divine law.” The political life respected by the classical political philosophers that Heidegger regards as the progenitors of technological science replaced tribalism for a good reason: as Strauss puts it, those who revere customs and laws as divine “cannot be in direct contact with the original founders” of those customs and laws, and so “cannot know whether the fathers or grandfathers have not deviated from what the original founders meant, or have not defaced the divine message by merely human additions or subtractions.” Such writings therefore cannot deny the effort of philosophers, who arise within political societies, subjecting them to “rational scrutiny.” Socrates investigates “old books,” along with conversing with “young men.” Today, such investigations and conversations ought to include scrutiny of the books written by the moderns themselves, the Enlighteners, including their claim that philosophy in the service of modern science can enlighten citizens with respect to their moral and political duties and deserts. Indeed, because the books the greatest minds, the genuine philosophers, have left behind for us often contradict one another, liberal education cannot be indoctrination—an observation at least as ‘relevant’ today as it was when Strauss made it.

This leaves us with a dilemma. We non-philosophers can read the works of philosophers, but we are not their equals, let alone their superiors, superior because more ‘enlightened,’ or further along the historical curve of ‘progress.’ We must form opinions about thinkers who contradict one another, even though we are not fully competent to make such judgments. Still, we may come to occasional insights, moments of noesis noeseos, an experience quite different from the experience of pleasure or unpleasure. In this, liberal education, Strauss writes, is a “liberation from vulgarism,” and “experience in things beautiful.” This noetic experience reveals “the dignity of man” and the goodness of the world as the home of the human mind. In experiencing the satisfaction of insight, including insight into unpleasant things, we begin “to realize that all evils,” those ugly things that concentrate our minds, are in a sense necessary if there is to be understanding” and therefore to “accept all evils that may befall” us. There is beauty in understanding even the ugly.

But where does that leave those who will not receive a liberal education? The classical political philosophers were far from unmindful of them. While “modern philosophy was actively destructive of traditions, above all of the biblical tradition,” the classical philosophers were “much friendlier toward, more attentive to the preserving of, those authoritative traditions,” recognizing that they upheld the political framework which would protect their philosophic activity from barbarism, if traditionalists and politicians were not made to lose ‘face’ by philosophers. “The attribution of the rise of both technology and democracy to Christianity” by some of the Enlighteners (although many others condemned Christianity as the most formidable block against those supposed goods) “was a deliberate misunderstanding, perpetrated by the Enlightenment and its science, to hide its true intention, which from the start was to bring about the disenchantment of human life.” Such disenchantment has the malign effect of spreading not enlightenment, not rationality, but nihilism to the young, and through them to large swaths of civil society, leaving them incapable of recognizing or of appreciating genuine human greatness. At the same time, while Aristotle and other classical political philosophers saw the harshness of nature as clearly as the moderns, the moderns’ attempt to master nature’s harshness, often harshly (torturing nature in order to make her reveal her secrets, as Bacon describes it), amounts to “a failure of resignation” resulting from “a disappointed hope in the existence of a caring God and a consequent, confused sense of a ‘right to rebel'” against God, seizing (one might even say secularizing) the right to providential direction of Fortuna from God. For the classics, “the good life is the life according to nature, which means to stay within certain limits; virtue is essentially moderation.” The abandonment of moderation leads to the dangerous and dehumanizing excesses of modern politics.

Strauss offered further thoughts on liberal education in his essay, “Liberal Education and Responsibility,” first published in 1962. [8] Some of those who listened to his remarks at the Basic Program at the University of Chicago understandably had asked for clarification of his description of liberal education as “the founding of an aristocracy within democracy.” He begins with an account of the relations between the gentlemen-aristocrats of ancient Greece and the philosophers, relations which were “uneasy.” The aristocratic gentleman received “an education becoming a free man and the leisure that his wealth made available to him,” a preparation for a life devoted to ruling “nobly” his household and his city “by deed and by speech.” It is above all an education in the formation of character, attentive to “the good order of the soul and of the city,” as propounded in histories, poems, and travel books, as taught by tutors and above all by the young gentleman’s father and the other elders of the city. “There was no ‘philosophy’ in this education,” which partly accounts for the suspicions philosophers aroused among aristocrats: What were these strange men up to? The aristocrat was expected to be a man who ruled according to the interests of the whole city, not only of his class—a man of noblesse oblige. Inasmuch as his liberal education set him above those without such an education, an indispensable part of his rule was to set the tone of the city, to lend distinction and grace to it, and not to attempt to ‘enlighten’ the many who were poor, with whom he had no basis to deliberate. While the gentleman defined freedom as high-minded participation in civic life, the many who were poor inclined to define freedom as living as they liked; their freedom was prevented from becoming license because they respected the gods, the priests, the religious rites. 

In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates spends much of his time conversing with aristocrats, attempting to win friends of philosophy, especially the young men, whose fathers suspect a challenge to their traditional authority. To put it roughly, for the aristocratic citizens, consideration of ‘the whole’ and of the good of the whole meant the whole of the city as protected by its gods, celebrated by its poets, whereas for the philosophers ‘the whole’ meant nature, which encompasses the city and investigates the nature of its gods. When philosophers manage their relations with the gentlemen well, some gentlemen, “on the lookout for a ‘noble’ activity for his leisure that is genuinely an end in itself and hence becoming of him as a free man,” will “be not undisposed to philosophy as a possible candidate for that activity.” A very few might pursue philosophy seriously, but a crucial number will at least regard it as nothing to persecute. 

But are philosophers rightly interested in the gentlemen and the city, beyond such efforts at prophylaxis? After all, human things perish but gentlemen are “radically disinclined to accept that this is so.” They want their fame to live forever. “Men must be certain that what they live in and live for lasts forever, for otherwise it would be hard for them to dedicate themselves fully to their cities”; “one cannot act on a grand scale without hope.” [9] Like the many, if for different reasons, they are inclined “to hold that the world is the work of a mysterious but providential eternal god or gods”—just gods who uphold justice, the rule of the best men. The pre-Socratic philosophers’ nearly exclusive attention to nature, which led to behavior offensive to liberally educated gentlemen [10], not only endangered philosophy but, in Socrates’ view, handicapped philosophizing itself. Socrates “second sailing,” his turn from the nature-centered philosophy of his predecessors to political philosophy, aimed at “a dialectical examination of the understanding of virtue that vindicated the possibility of the philosophic life, and its ‘virtue,’ over and against that of the perfect gentleman.” This leads the philosopher to a better understanding the fundamental distinction” between “the things that are what they are simply” and the “things that are what they are only for man as man,” and “for man belonging to specific groups”—different cities, different regimes. And “this fundamental distinction is at the bottom of the distinction between theoretical and practical philosophy.” If, for philosophers, a true liberal education liberates the soul not for civic life but for a life lived in the city but in some sense above and beyond it, outside the ‘Cave’ of public opinion, then that kind of liberal education “is a necessary ‘preparation,’ as Strauss here puts it, for philosophy.” [11] But insofar as a man comes actually to philosophize, he “contributes to the city only indirectly and in diluted form,” as a “humanizing and civilizing” influence. Just as the aristocrat and the democrat cannot deliberate in common, neither, really can the aristocrat and the philosopher. “The gentleman is as incapable of giving the philosopher a coherent account of his understanding of his noble life, which he considers good in itself, as he is of giving it to the people,” in view of the fact that in the end their actual rule stands on their wealth, although their claim to rule stands on their education and the good character that education aims at cultivating. While the political philosopher understands this, he also sees that the city depends upon the gentlemen, the poets, and the priests; Strauss, unlike Heidegger, sees that Plato sees that philosophers will never be kings, that Plato is not really “engaged in a rationalist attempt to guide the city.” And Aristotle explicitly writes that without the priesthood there can be no city—the city, which the philosopher intellectually transcends but in which he physically lives and in which he finds potential philosophers. Classical political philosophy “did not aim at any scientific-philosophic transformation of society or of politics,” recognizing as it did “the depth of the opinions it refuted (or backed off from refuting) in private conversations.” The philosopher lives in “awareness of the perishing of all human things,” while also understanding that non-philosophers turn away from that awareness, and that turning away makes political life possible and indeed often better than it would be if it did not turn away from that awareness. “Not a genuine encounter with mortality and the destruction of all that has come into being, and the establishment of it as a necessity, on the basis of the dialectically demonstrated incoherence of those who claim the existence of miracle-working gods, but a flight from this encounter, characterizes modern thought, including Heidegger’s ‘new thinking.'” The attempt to conquer nature is a struggle against death, against that perishing, a struggle that must end futilely in an entropic cosmos.

Accordingly, that most sober of the classical political philosophers, Aristotle, holds up the “mixed regime,” the shared, balanced rule of oligarchs and democrats, with a sober middling class as mediator between them, as the best practicable regime for the city. Strauss sees that the most nearly moderate philosophers among the moderns—Locke being a distinguished example—looks instead to a regime of popular sovereignty, a regime “to be based on equality of ‘rights'” guarded by a government staffed by representatives of the people, responsible to them, representatives taken not from the landed gentry but from a commercial and industrial elite, aimed at constituting a new liberalism, a commercial and technological society that “aims precisely at the overthrow of all such religious authorities that guided both parts of the ancient mixed regime.” Locke’s Some Thoughts on Education testifies to this turn, as his “Young Gentleman” will indeed receive a liberal education, but one based upon utility, not nobility. Obligation is no longer a matter of noblesse but of usefulness at the service of “the new doctrine of rights”—specifically, the rights to life, liberty, and property. In the Lockean commercial republic of the United States, Strauss observes, “biblical education of the people” continues but in what at least some of the Founders took to be a rearguard action against the surging spirit of enterprise. Strauss asks, can liberal education in a democratic and commercial republican regime really “perform the function once performed by religious education?”

No: “the modern conception of philosophy is fundamentally democratic” in that it “subordinates its purpose to the purpose of non-philosophers,” relieving their solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short natural lives with the production of technological marvels that replace the economy of scarcity with the economy of plenty. While early modern philosophers addressed princes, monarchs, against the aristocrats, urging them to found the modern state, whose centralization diluted and eventually ruined aristocratic rule, they eventually turned to “the direct enlightenment of the people,” “open[ing] the people up to the gifts philosophy was now bringing them.” This strategy risked the philosophy that had now retooled itself as modern science, since “the people, having received a biblical education, were led by that stern education to reject in no uncertain terms the magic that had characterized the rule of Pharaoh, or, more generally, reliance on human arts instead of on God.” But given the inclination of democrats to define freedom of doing as one likes, the change from pursuit of heavenly bliss to worldly happiness, a happiness based upon satisfaction of the desire to acquire worldly goods, not Aristotelian eudaimonia, eventually began to prevail. Commerce itself circulates money and goods beyond the borders of states and their regimes, but in a far different way from universal, ‘catholic,’ Christianity. The universalism of commerce would form the material element of any future world state. 

“Two political consequences resulted from this growing shift to popular enlightenment.” Liberal education stopped being an instrument for converting men from preoccupation with worldly goods to goods of the soul and became instead a transition from “unenlightened to enlightened self-interest.” For its part, politics and political economy centered on the dismantling of aristocratic rule, now that “the removal of what had been the necessity of relative scarcity made it possible to ‘see and to admit the element of hypocrisy’ in the rule of the gentlemanly aristocrats, or brought to light” that the regimes they ruled were really oligarchies. Both of these elements of the new liberalism pointed to the replacement of divine providence (and indeed the ‘Fate’ of the ancients) with the hope of human progress based upon enlightenment itself, that is, upon the pervasiveness of the ambitions of modern philosophy with its techniques of modern experimental science. The notion of equal rights came in as, first, religious toleration, since religious animosities interfere with the orderly pursuit of scientific experimentation, and protection of equal rights, whereby each person was invited to join “the ‘race’ to this-worldly advancement,” with losers assuaged by acts of “compassion,” the worldly replacement for Christian charity. “This development toward this-worldly advancement obviously moves in the opposite direction of return (t’shuva) to the right way given by divine law,” a point Strauss indicates in the title of his essay, “Progress and Return.” The assertion of equal rights, evidence of ‘human dignity,’ along with the salve of compassion bespoke “a redefinition of virtue, as something not difficult or rare but rather common or potentially universal,” a matter of good intentions, of moral sentiments. Against Tocqueville, Strauss argues that “far from emerging out of Christianity, the elevation of democracy to the status of the one best or only legitimate regime, because it recognizes the dignity of each man, emerges, in Strauss’s account, as a tactical political corrective of the people made as part of the scientific, technological project of enlightenment.” Behind Kant lurks Machiavelli, all along, although perhaps Kant, and surely most Kantians, don’t see him. [12]

Kant attempts to overcome Hume’s ‘Is-Ought’ problem, the problem of deriving morality from a universe without God and a nature without purpose. Modern science cannot tell us what to do with modern science; it cannot justify itself. If one says, with Machiavelli and Bacon, that it is to bring nature to heel in the service of human intentions, what justifies those intentions? “What most characterizes our age can therefore be said to be ‘hardly more than the interplay of mass taste with high-grade but strictly speaking unprincipled efficiency,'” a “sham universality,” as Strauss calls it, subservient to popular opinion. “If those who initiated that project were indeed motivated by biblical charity, then they were colossal bunglers in their exercise of that virtue, since they wiped out the very source of the virtue they found it so important to exercise. If on the other hand their claim to be motivated by biblical charity is disingenuous, as we have seen Strauss suggesting, then the result is much closer to what they in fact wished to achieve, or accords with their true motive.” This raises the question that Burns asks, whether the American Founding, an example of the “moderate Enlightenment” that esteemed natural rights, was accomplished by men who knew what they were doing. It raises the further question of whether the “social science positivism or value-free social science” Strauss deplores is “not simply a ‘German import’ to America” but “the direct result of Cartesian constructivism,” yet another offshoot of Machiavellianism, driving the moral and intellectual forces that undermined serious convictions in favor of natural rights. 

Adam Smith’s ‘moral sentiments,’ Rousseau’s ‘compassion,’ and Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’ have had their adherents, but the most powerful set of doctrines that has attempted to give moral weight (some might say moral cover) to modernity has been historicism, which takes the modern theme of progress and makes it into an inevitable movement of all events towards a new ‘end’ or purpose, the ‘end of history,’ a worldwide state that will satisfy (its proponents promise us) all human needs and desires. In its mild forms, this can be seen in liberalism renamed as ‘progressivism,’ seen in America in the writings of John Dewey, Woodrow Wilson, and many others, and in the neo-Kantian politicians and professors of continental Europe before and after the First World War. Its radical forms included the ‘race science’ of European Right and the ‘scientific socialism’ of the European (especially Marxist) Left. All of these claims to rule were challenged by the still more radicalized form of historicism propounded by Heidegger, to whom Strauss turns explicitly in his lecture, “German Nihilism.” [13]

German nihilism arose among “the miseducated souls of German adolescents” who looked with moral revulsion at modern civilization, with its hostility toward nature, its individualism, and its utilitarianism. They rejected Marxism as yet another example of the modernity they loathed. That is to say, German nihilism stemmed from what Strauss calls a “non-nihilistic,” indeed moralistic, “root.” That is, the young Germans took over some of the attitude of the German Romantics of a century earlier, who themselves had read Rousseau’s animadversions against ‘the bourgeois’ with avidity; in the generation before them, Nietzsche had thunderously echoed those animadversions in his portrait of the Last Man, who knows nothing of sublimity, who is the very opposite of what the French call an homme sérieux. With its flaccid toleration of vice, the “morally open society” is “the enemy of morality,” a society that “precludes sacrifices and steadfast devotion to a distinctive, common way of life held to be good and wroth of devotion.” The example of Winston Churchill, then leading his people in the Battle of Britain, would have shown them otherwise, but that example came “too late” for German youth, who eventually became swept up by the Nazis, who promised them victory over all Germany’s enemies as the pride of the Aryan race. That is, the young Germans were anything but conservatives along the lines of Georges Duhamel in France or Hermann Rauschning in Germany. [14] What the nihilists sought to annihilate was a Western civilization that had gone wrong, although initially they weren’t sure about what might replace it.

Strauss argues that the example of Churchill suggests more than simply that there is still hope for modern liberal democracy, although that was no small thing in 1941 (or now). Consideration of Churchill would “have begun a liberation from the whole inherited, taken-for-granted notion of historical reasoning, from belief in a social progression of human consciousness, a ‘wheel of history’—a sense of belonging, to use a current phrase, to the ‘right side of History’—that would have begun to make possible the recovery of an older, truer understanding of reason.” Because Churchill was an excellent example of what Aristotle calls the magnanimous or great-souled man, the ethics of ‘the ancients,’ the moral reasoning of an ancient political philosopher, still makes sense, even under the radically different historical conditions of the twentieth century. Historicists are mistaken; a man like Churchill refutes their doctrines rationally, by counterexample. His example refutes both the historicists of ‘decline’ and the historicists of ‘progress,’ since he has no superior among the statesmen of antiquity and no inferior among the statesmen of modernity.  The young Germans had been “told that their opposition to communism was necessarily against reason,” against the supposed dialectic of History; loathing the pseudo-egalitarian drabness of the Soviet Union, they accordingly “rejected reason and the modern civilization it was busy bringing into being, preferring the “decisionism” of Heidegger and the decisiveness of Hitler. But Strauss argues that there is “another kind of reasoning” than Hegelian-Marxian dialectic, reasoning “which attempts to understand the world as it is rather than to transform it,” as the moderns would, “or engage it in accord with an alleged progressive consciousness” as Marxists and Progressives would. The reasoning of the ancients rightly took truth to be unchangeable, un-historicist, but nothing in young Germans’ intellectual formation had told them that it was anything but changeable, ‘historical.’ “The timeless example of Churchillian greatness within a liberal regime…would have awakened, Strauss is claiming, the older moral reasoning because the passionate desire to defend morality, which is at the root of nihilism, is, importantly, long-standing or transhistorical.” It is the very thing that the ancient philosophers considered critically but with a saving respect because it provided the political matrix within which they might philosophize. It is also the very thing that Heidegger (and before him, Nietzsche) had misunderstood about the classical political philosophers, despite their massive learning and philosophic brilliance. Similarly, although Nietzsche, Heidegger, and their genocidal Nazi vulgarizers “abhorred the modern ideas,” supposedly of British origin (Bacon, Hobbes, Locke) the ‘will to power’ is the British idea, nature-conquest being the principal example of it.

Because the classical political philosophers were indeed philosophers, they cannot rightly be called ‘conservatives.’ Conservatism “defines its ultimate goal by a specific tradition,” but “the education Strauss hopes to awaken within liberal democracy is not hagiographic.” Nor does he accept the modern liberal philosophers’ standard of individual natural rights. Natural rights philosophers argue in the manner of the American Declaration of Independence, which sets down the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as major premises of a syllogism, and further posits that government exists to secure those rights. This means that if you violate, or convincingly threaten to violate, one or more of my natural rights, I am fully entitled to violate your natural rights in order to prevent you from, or punish you for, that violation or threat. The problem is that “this ‘ought’ can have no meaning without an appeal to justice, to a perceived, preexisting moral law, one that obliges us to serve a common good, a law that in normal circumstances forbids many voluntary acts, such as murder and theft.” And indeed, the Declaration does appeal not only to natural rights but to the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. “The argument thus states, on the one hand, that we are compelled to seek our own interest, by a permanent necessity—so permanent that it justifies ‘inalienable’ selfish claims—even as it makes, on the other, a quiet or surreptitious appeal to an obligatory law that presumes our freedom from such necessity, a freedom and a duty to act for the common good, limiting and sacrificing our own good in accord with it.” What happens, in other words, if I am called to risk my life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness in order to defend the country whose regime is dedicated to securing those rights for me? That isn’t living according to the democratic notion of freedom, now taken over by the modern liberal democracies, of living as I like. In order to preserve itself, the regimes that uphold “the liberal democratic definition of rights”—even if it eschews historicism as the philosophic foundation of right and recurs to the natural-rights philosophy of the early moderns—must preserve, and in its ‘Churchillian’ potential does preserve, “the older moral reasoning.” It is a matter of bringing this out in the education of the young. As for their elders, they “continue to be moved by a positive notion of freedom and hence of excellence,” continuing “to respond to appeals to greatness and sacred duty and all that those appeals imply.” Hence the success of de Gaulle in France, Adenauer in West Germany, in the decades following the Second World War. 

Unfortunately, “the long-range tendency of liberal democracy is away from moral seriousness and toward permissiveness,” a tendency animated by the longings of democrats for John Lennon’s world, in which there is “nothing to kill or die for.” That is, the moralism of the young nihilists opposes the way of life, the wide path of democracy toward self-indulgence. Hence Strauss’s proposal “to promote the founding, within the cultural, subpolitical, or private sphere,” the increasingly less-than-civil society of the modern state, of an “aristocracy within democracy,” whose “moral reasoning…would endeavor to keep liberal democracy ‘closed’ not only to tyranny but also to the depravations brought on when license displaces liberty.” That moral reasoning, seen most clearly in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, aims not at scientific knowledge, at knowledge of nature (including human nature) but at practical knowledge, knowledge of means more than knowledge of ends. The ends are supplied by the regime of the political community. They may be, and are, quietly inquired into by the philosophers, who engage in dialogue with the good citizens who uphold those ends and that regime, along with the not-so-loyal citizens who oppose both. Modern philosophers who suppose that practical reasoning can subserve theoretical reasoning in an unproblematic way deceive themselves, as seen so notably in the then contemporaneous examples of Hitler and Stalin, those asserters of ‘the unity of theory and practice.’ The classical political philosophers understood that reasoning about practice mean reasoning about things that change; Aristotelian ethics is a ‘situation ethics,’ an ethics of prudential adjustment to changing circumstances. Scientific or theoretical knowledge is rather “knowledge of necessities by which motion or change comes about, the necessities that underlie all change.” This is the opposite of modern ‘pragmatism,’ as seen in (for example) the philosophy of John Dewey, who calls knowledge the “power to transform the world.” Strauss regards “the active, conquering disposition of modern science, and its deep opposition to the ‘philosophic attitude’ required for genuine science or theorizing” as a “delusion.”

He does not dispute the findings of that science, writing instead that “science teaches us that the existence of man on this planet will come to an end sometime in the future,” with “all achievements of the human race…sink[ing] into oblivion, into nothingness.” He only maintains that the serene resignation that can come from contemplating nature’s entropy lends itself to the practice of reasoned thought that guides the philosophic way of life, the true ‘Republic’ or regime, the one according to nature. “It is the essence of the philosophic attitude,” Strauss writes, “to live without delusions,” without “hope for any miracle”; philosophers “alone look at all things sub specie aeternitatis.” To refuse “every flight from the horror of life into consoling illusion,” to take “the eloquent depictions of the misery of man without God as a proof of the goodness of its case,” facing their own death and the eventual ‘death’ of the cosmos itself with “the courage to endure fearful truth,” with “hardness against the inclination of man to deceive himself about his situation”—in this, the philosophers exhibit “probity.” Probity is an especially happy choice of word, deriving as it does from the Latin probus, which means “good” in the sense of proven virtue, virtue that stands straight both “amidst these storms” (as Churchill puts it) and stands up to ‘probing’ questions of the sort philosophers ask of their fellow citizens, of one another, and of themselves. The philosopher is the true honnêtte homme. 

In his lecture on German nihilism, “Strauss is exposing both the absence of genuine resignation,” as seen in the moderns’ attempt to conquer nature with the techniques of modern science, “and the moderns’ overlooking of the genuine resignation to the ultimate destruction of all things that had in fact characterized the ancients.” For all their Machiavellianism, the modern philosophers have been too moralistic, at least in the sense that they, along with all moralists, affirm “a deeper significance to one’s life and that of one’s community than does the philosophic”—an affirmation “founded on hope of immortality.” As an honest man, the philosopher hates the lies that our souls tell themselves. But if so, where does that leave Strauss’s urging for a truce between the moral life as ordinarily understood and the philosophic life, the theme he sometimes calls the dialogue between Jerusalem and Athens? “Both religious experience and philosophy are responses, albeit radically different ones, to the unplanned human encounter with mortality,” an encounter that “awakens in all serious human beings a yearning for the noble, for a dignified life.” As such, the religious way of life “cannot be lightly dismissed,” as Enlightenment philosophes and their epigoni were apt to do. Nor should it be angrily dismissed, as it is by those animated by what Strauss calls “anti-theological ire.” The religious way of life should instead be considered, inquired into. “It is through painful, dialectical purification of this earning and of the thoughts to which it gives rise, a yearning which in classical political philosophers is called ‘erotic,’ that philosophers secure the serene if said resignation to necessity that, according to Strauss, marks the philosophic-scientific disposition or attitude,” a purification not by fire but by reasoning, without which “the philosophic disposition does not emerge an cannot be secured.” This is why Strauss shows such sympathy to the young nihilists, quite possibly including a few he met among the graduate students at the New School for Social Research. They have rejected modern rationalism; that is good. They have abandoned rationalism altogether; that is over-hasty. They have adopted a radical, very nearly apocalyptic nihilism because they have not seen the place of reasoning within moral thought, an insight which they can experience if they study Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon rather than, or perhaps better as a corrective to, Rousseau, Kant, Mill, Marx, Nietzsche, and (now especially) Heidegger. The classical political philosophers, men of both probity and of prudence, never forget that for all the striking warrior virtues of Achilles, for all the Stürm und Drang that accompany the birth of tragedy, happiness is “the natural aim of man.” Moral men need not be fanatical men, as not only the classical political philosophers but Jewish, Christian, and Muslim philosophers have demonstrated in their own arguments and actions. What the “older moral reasoning” offers “is not in its essence a philosophic, but rather a prephilosophic, prescientific reasoning,” which remains within what Strauss calls “the natural horizon of human thought,” a traditionalism that leaves room for the “awareness or discovery of nature” precisely because it remains within that horizon.

Such a traditionalism holds up the image of a providential God or set of gods who initially granted human beings a peaceful condition of life, a condition, however, conditioned upon obedience to divine law. Return to something like that condition “is done in repentance, return (t’shuva) for having lost the right way, the way indicated by that divine law.” By contrast, the modern ‘state of nature’ denies the existence of any providential divinity and presents nature as harsh but stupid, deserving of and vulnerable to human conquest. The German nihilists detested the civilization the moderns had made but, having no regard for an original, providentially ordained past, they “retained that civilization’s emphasis on autonomy” of the human will, demanding the destruction of the civilization that they rightly intuited to have somehow gone wrong. They sought not “a vision that emerges out of the natural human consciousness,” but the modern assumption that man must ‘create’ or ‘construct’ his way out of the modern crisis, after having ‘deconstructed’ the civilization that had landed itself in crisis. But their underlying moral sensibilities sought “knowledge, and not mere belief” of what is right. For that, they would need to undertake a return—some, indeed, to the divine law, with a renewed appreciation for their own religious traditions, others to the reasoning way of life lived by the old philosophers.

The fourth and final Straussian writing that Burns considers, his review of Eric Havelock’s The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics, was published in 1959. [15] Eric Havelock was a Cambridge-educated classicist who held academic appointments at the University of Toronto, Harvard University, and Yale University. Active in democratic socialist politics while in Canada, he courted scholarly controversy as well, claiming that the pre-Socratic philosophers, several of whom wrote in verse, were more akin to Homer and the other oral poets than to Plato, Aristotle, and the philosophers who wrote dialogues and treatises. (Plato, famously, is said to have burned the poems he wrote in his youth.) This thesis was part of Havelock’s historical claim that the shift from oral to literate ‘culture’ in ancient Greece marked a watershed in Western civilization. But more important to Strauss, as Burns shows, is the supposedly poetic character of the substance of pre-Socratic thought, its supposed piety. In this, Havelock—socialist, liberal in the ‘progressive’ sense, and positivist—gives us the opposite side of the Heidegger coin. Both men say that pre-Socratic philosophy was not committed to reason but to poeticizing, but while Heidegger celebrates this, evincing an especial sympathy for Heraclitus, Havelock celebrates what he claims to be the progressive-liberal, democratic themes of Greek philosophy and even Greek tragedy. Both men are historicists, while expecting far different outcomes of History.

Disagreeing with both, Strauss respects Heidegger but has little regard for Havelock. Positivists claim to be ‘value-free’ thinkers, yet the decry all those who question a “certain kind of democracy.” Havelock detests Plato for exactly that reason. He also distinguishes between savage and civilized men and esteems ‘progress.’ Heideggerian existentialism is more serious than positivism because it confronts the crisis of modernity and does so in an internally consistent manner. Like positivism, it dismisses classical political philosophy as obsolete, but on very different grounds: its premises are not self-evident but arbitrary, as is all thinking; its rationalist claims to universality are only products of its historical epoch; it is irreligious, advocating a civil religion, only. 

Strauss begins by contrasting Havelock’s modern liberalism with classical liberalism, recalling Aristotle’s description of the free man as a citizen as distinguished from a slave, with the virtues to match. For the classical political philosophers, ‘liberal’ also meant “freedom from stinginess or greed,” a virtue based on the notion that “there is an activity that is good in itself rather than for whatever monetary profit might come out of it,” namely, “the mind’s activity,” which need not be made subservient to bodily desires but is capable of elevating itself to consideration of the common good, the good of the city, and, potentially in some, to nature, to what is good by nature. “The genuine classic liberal is a republican and a gentleman.” Strauss finds little of this in modern liberals, who define liberty democratically, as doing as one likes, basing politics on consent (so defined), and denying “fixed norms, finding all norms to be responses to historical needs” and therefore impermanent. “Optimistic and radical,” modern liberalism allies itself with technological modern science and internationalist economics. “It is pragmatic, scientific, nontheological, and nonmetaphysical.” Whereas Greek ‘anthropologists’ considered human being as “not accidental to but necessary to any ordered whole or cosmos, which is to say that they understood the human mind and its noetic and sense perceptions to play a decisive role in the formation of being of that ordered whole (which, incidentally, can be the case only if there is no divine mind),” positivism ascribes the existence of the human mind and of human being altogether to chance. More, positivist science cannot, strictly speaking, ascribe the existence of anything to anything, restricting itself as it does to observations. In this, they are Cartesian in the sense of rejecting sense perception “as providing a natural knowledge of the world as it is,” Humean in the sense of denying any way of inferring causation from the sequence of events. In this, they contrast with the prephilosophic knowledge, which is based on sense perception and makes exactly such inferences. Once again, the distinct variations of historicism seen in Havelock and Heidegger both register the modern attempt to set human beings against nature. Havelock claims to find evidence of his form of historicist liberalism or progressivism in several of the ancient Greeks, a pretension Strauss has little difficulty batting down. The lesson Aeschylus teaches in Prometheus Bound is hardly a celebration of the protagonist’s theft of fire but rather the lesson that wisdom comes to man by the harsh path of suffering, suffering he presents as having been ordained by wise gods who know how to keep human beings in their rightful place in the cosmic order.

Heidegger extracts still another lesson, that for Aeschylus techne means ‘knowledge,’ and knowledge is far weaker than fate. Human knowledge leads not to resignation, as in the classical political philosophers, but to defiance of the gods, ultimately of fate—a futile effort. Concurring with Nietzsche’s famous claim that God is dead, Heidegger laments the “forsakenness of modern man in the midst of what is,” rejecting knowledge conceived as possessing answers and redefining it as questioning. ‘Existentialism’ means, in Heidegger’s words, to “will the essence of science understood as questioning, unguarded holding of one’s ground in the midst of the uncertainty of the totality of what-is.” It is “this will to essence” that “will create for our people,” we Germans, “its world, a world of innermost and most extreme danger, i.e., its truly spiritual world.” The only effective human defiance of fate comes not through knowledge as defined by the classical political philosophers but by poetry: “making (poein) is essential to its defiant activity as techne.” For his part, Strauss much more modestly describes all techne or art, from shoemaking to Homeric poetry, as “a pursuit which can be transmitted from teacher to pupil because it consists of rules.” There is no ‘creativity’ in it, if creation means creation out of nothing, being out of nothingness. That is quite beyond human natural capacities. Nor does Strauss overlook Heidegger’s appeal to German nationalism (“create for our people”), his ambition to guarantee national greatness “under the leadership of university teachers committed to “knowledge service” under German law. Creativity, Strauss may think, is quite beyond the capacities of university professors. Strauss considers techne “to be distinguished from (even if it stems from and hence will be related to) the knowing that is available as dianoia or as episteme; techne, as rules prescribing a transformation of what is given, already shows within it the conscious possibility of technology, and its possible autonomy from political control—an autonomy rejected by the ancients,” as seen in Aristotle’s critique of Hippodamus, the man who wanted to treat law as if it were an art, rewarding innovative lawmakers. Aristotle understood “the deep gulf separating the moral/political life from the philosophic or contemplative life, and to arts/technology as destructive of that by which a healthy society (as opposed to the philosopher) must take its bearings. Philosophy is not technology, does not lead to technology, is aware of ‘technological’ thinking, and opposes its liberation from political control,” that is, the rule of prudence, practical reason. [16] 

As to Heidegger’s claim that Platonic political philosophy, in its rationalism, somehow led to modern rationalism and its technocratic soullessness, Strauss, unlike Heidegger, “actually undertook the examination of all of Plato’s dialogues that Heidegger dismissed, at the start of his interpretation, as impossible.” [17] Heidegger’s cardinal interpretive error may be seen in his failure to understand “what a Platonic dialogue is.” In one sense, Havelock’s claim, that the move from oral teaching to written teaching makes a major difference in “the question of the relation between society and philosophy—a claim one might infer from his interest in the transition from oral to written poetry, and to writing in general—makes good sense to Strauss. But only so long as Alasdair MacIntyre’s later riposte to Havelock (“One must recall that Socrates left no writings”) is observed: the transition from oral to written dialogue is the crucial element in question. Heidegger naively assumes that Socrates is Plato’s mouthpiece in the dialogues, but this assumption is no more warranted than it would be to ascribe that role to, say, Shakespeare’s Prospero, although this too has been done.  Further, whether deliberately or not, Heidegger relates the Greek word for nature, phusis, “not to phuein (to grow) but to phaosphos (light),” ascribing growth to history, to “man’s being rooted in a human past, in a tradition, and creatively transforming that tradition.” He “fails to reckon with the possibility that the ideas are presented to Socrates’s interlocutors, especially Glaucon, as something that accords with their own moral opinions and as part of Socrates’s efforts to make philosophy acceptable to them, an effort that requires a false (‘utopian’) account of philosophy.” The image of the ascent from the cave, towards the ideas, implies that philosophy must begin with the laws and opinions of the city and not, as the pre-Socratics had it, straight to nature without regard to the city and its citizens. [18] Put simply, Strauss sees in Heidegger’s failure to appreciate the character of the Platonic dialogue the reason why Heidegger is a historicist in the sense of being a historical relativist; he sees in Heidegger’s conflation of nature with ‘enlightenment’ the reason why Heidegger is a historicist in the sense of associating ‘history’ with organicism, even as Dewey (!) does.

Havelock’s “whole thesis depends” not on his reading of the Greek poets and dramatists but on his reading of Plato’s Protagoras. Havelock wants to educate ‘the many,’ as does the sophist, Protagoras. Or so Protagoras says. But Strauss remarks that Protagoras demands money in exchange for his teaching; in reality, he favors oligarchs, not democrats. Beyond the political implications of sophistry, Socrates takes care in testing potential students for their capacity to philosophize, a capacity teachers don’t see every day. “That philosophic nature—one that craves clarity and awakeness—is, as other Platonic dialogues stress, rare, and there is no ‘teaching’ anyone’s way to it.” By contrast, Protagoras will take on any student who can afford to pay him. The Socratic standard for selecting students is nature; the Protagorean standard is a convention, money. “Havelock resembles Protagoras in being unaware of this difference between Socrates and Protagoras.” Although both men, the sophist and the positivist, take pride in what they take to be their superior knowledge, they are conventionalists without knowing it. But for neither is the term ‘natural’ “a term of distinction,” any more than it is for modern philosophers, very much including the historicists. Heidegger responds to this error by radicalizing historicism; Strauss responds by returning to classical political philosophy. This includes a recognition of “what Socratics had in common with the pre-Socratics,” in sharp distinction to the moderns: “the recognition of the need for esotericism,” in view of the fragility of the humanly indispensable city; “the recognition of the need to show that first things (whatever they might be) are not gods,” but privately, and only to those whose souls may bear this thought with resignation, not despair; “recognition of the antithesis of nature and nomos,” legal convention; “recognition of the deceptive character of the ‘world’ of nomos“; and “recognition of the crucial philosophic need to accept one’s mortality and that of all human accomplishment.” The modern liberal, Havelock being the example nearest to hand, “has lost sight of all of these things.” He would be a sophist but “lacks even the sophist’s liberation from the range of the many that moves in the direction of barbarism”—although here not entirely, for, as Tocqueville sees and foresees, modern sophists might ensconce themselves in the administrative state, raking in a lot more money and enjoying a lot more power than any sophist ever did. This aside, “the modern liberal manifests thereby evidence not of the progress that s ever on his lips, but of a regress.”

Summarizing his thoughts, Burns begins by observing that while Heidegger and Strauss both “encourage the recognition of human greatness and the preservation of a humanity perceived to be threatened by the mass society that technological science has produced,” Strauss calls not for the “new thinking” of radical historicism but “a sustained recovery of an older political thinking, one that can be broadened and deepened by a liberal education in friendly confrontation with Socratic political philosophy”—one that, moreover, treats “ancestral tradition” with respect, as needed ballast for any decent political regime and as indispensable for the beginning of philosophizing in the rare souls who will engage in it. This “preliminary activity of dialectic,” of dialogue with citizens, exercises and tests the theoretical reasoning capacities of the philosopher and the potential philosopher while showing them the prudential reasoning that citizens, and especially rulers, very often possess. Prudence will guide philosophers away from “attempt[ing] to guide a political-moral transformation or revolution” by means of “philosophic thought,” which properly aims at theoretical knowledge, knowledge of nature, not at the practical knowledge of the politician. 

As an example of what a young philosopher or potential philosopher should be, Strauss memorialized his student at the University of Chicago, Jason Aronson, whose premature death unsettled his many friends at the university. Strauss reminded them that as a Jewish man, Mr. Aronson had taken the moral commands of God to his heart while keeping the tasks of philosophy in his mind. This separation is wholesome because “the heart would impede the mind, while the mind might ‘stifle’ the heart.” “One might say that Strauss lets them stand in their necessary, implicit, and fruitful tension, while Heidegger, intent on overcoming the problem of the global dominion of technology, wishes to found, through the elaboration of the phenomenological structure of existenz, a universal education and new rootedness that would somehow combine the two.” But “this new kind of brave decisionism” lacks the prudential character that makes decisions choices, that is, reasoned decisions. Strauss elsewhere permitted himself an aphorism: “Philosophy, we have learned, must be on its guard against the wish to be edifying—philosophy can only be intrinsically edifying.” Edification is better left to God and His Bible and to the statesmanlike prudence embodied in sound political constitutions. 

Liberal education’s fostering of an “aristocracy within democracy” means neither the attempt to make college students into philosophers nor to make philosophers into politicians. It does mean that liberally educated men and women might “see in the philosophic life” a kind of life worth living, if not for himself then for some. “The example of the activity of [philosophizing could…humanize the gentleman’s political life.” This will provide “a sufficient common ground to be able to afford philosophy the dialectical activity that it needs to justify itself, and a political defense of philosophy that allow[s] it to find a home within the city.” In modernity, a philosopher can even discover some traces of the traditional moral and civic virtues in the egalitarian regimes, bringing the most conspicuous men who exhibit those virtues to the attention of students. And Burns concludes that “the critique Strauss offers of German nihilist youth is one that applies to contemporary postmodernist critics of liberal democracy, who likewise oppose science, reason, the notion of a single truth—in however apparently tame or academic a manner.” A manner that has become increasingly untamed, recently. This “untenable amalgam of Marxism and Heideggerian opposition to the West, in what has come to be called ‘identify politics,” opposed as it is to “modern constitutionalism,” “moves in the direction of a new, secular despotism.”

 

Notes

1. Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America, Volume II, Part Four, Chapter 6: “What Kind of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear.” Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop translation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
2. On the other hand, it should be noticed that Hobbes also characterizes tyranny as merely “monarchy misliked,” a formula that inclines toward another characteristic of modern philosophic doctrine, moral relativism.
3. The full text may be found in Leo Strauss: Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968).
4. See, for example, Shadia Drury: The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005 (first edition published 1988) and Drury: Leo Strauss and the American Right (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994. 
5. “All the great writers of antiquity were a part of the aristocracy of masters, or at least they saw that aristocracy established without dispute before their eyes; their minds, after expanding in several directions, were therefore found limited in that one, and it was necessary that Jesus Christ come to earth to make it understood that all members of the human species are naturally alike and equal.” In this formulation, Christianity revealed not so much God as the nature of man. Strauss is much better in refuting the kind of claim Tocqueville makes about the supposed limitations of the ancient political philosophers, as distinguished from the ancient writers, showing that the philosophers were eminently capable of differentiating the gentleman-aristocrat, the man to be liberally educated, from the philosopher, an “extremely rare” human type. On this, indeed, Strauss corrects Tocqueville’s apparent historical relativism, although of course one might argue that Tocqueville argues in this way for the purpose of persuading contemporary aristocrats to think beyond their ‘class interests.’ As Strauss is famous for saying, when a competent man makes a glaring error, one may suspect that it is a deliberate error. In addressing his fellow aristocrats and those in France who still celebrated the divine right of kings to rule, Tocqueville may well have wanted to ‘sanctify’ the origins of the understanding that all men are in some sense created equal.
6. Indeed, “One might say that sovereigns in our time seek only to make great things with men. I should want them to think a little more of making great men; to attach less value to the work and more to the worker; and to remember constantly that a nation cannot long remain strong when each man in it is individually weak, and that neither social forms nor political schemes have yet been found that can make a people energetic by composing it of weak and pusillanimous citizens.” (II. iv. 7). See also Volume II, Part Four, note XXIV on the “divine idea” of the greatness of the unity “of the social power,” which Tocqueville prefers to the “human idea” of that unity.
7. See Tocqueville, ibid., II. i. 17: “On Some Sources of Poetry in Democratic Nations.” As for the historicism some (not necessarily Strauss) claim to detect in Tocqueville (misidentifying what he means by “a force greater than man”), one should consider his July 22, 1854 letter to his friend Francisque de Corcelle. Tocqueville had been visiting Germany, in which he finds political confusion but an enduring faith in “free institutions” and a desire for “political happiness.” Hegelian philosophy has been the source of the confusion. “You doubtless know the role played by philosophy in Germany for the past 50 years, particularly the school of Hegel. You are undoubtedly aware that he was the protege of governments, because his doctrine established in its political consequences that all facts were respectable and legitimate simply because they occurred and merited obedience”—a succinct description of historicist determinism, and in particular its attempt to fuse the ‘is’ of events with the ‘ought’ or morality in yet another attempt to answer the argument of David Hume. Further, and anticipating Strauss, Tocqueville remarks that “this doctrine ended up giving birth to all the anti-Christian and anti-spiritualist schools which have sought to pervert Germany for twenty years, especially for the last ten, and finally to the socialist schools which so favored the confusion of 1848”; Tocqueville likely has the writings of Feuerbach in mind. (See “Feuerbach’s Materialism” on this website, under the category “Philosophers.”) This being so, Tocqueville optimistically sees in Germany now a “revival of the religious sentiment in all the different beliefs”—that is, Christian sects—and especially among German Catholics.
8. Republished in Liberalism Ancient and Modern, op. cit.
9. Hence the title of Charles de Gaulle’s memoir of the founding of the Fifth Republic in France: Mémoires d’espoir. And his political ally and Minister of Culture, André Malraux, titled his Spanish Civil War novel, simply, L’Espoir. Even the not-so-religious Spanish republicans and their allies in the Communist Party needed a suggestion of immortality to bring them into action, to put their lives on the line.
10. See Diogenes Laertius: Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. James Miller translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
11. In an important footnote, Burns calls attention to an important difference between the classical and modern philosophers, as seen in the contrast between Aristotle and Bacon regarding the classification of the study of human nature. Aristotle considers the study of human nature “a part of natural philosophy,” whereas Bacon considers it “a part of human philosophy.” For Aristotle, man is a political animal, an animal that lives in a polis, but his nature is not simply bound to the polis; nature is a matter of theory, the political a matter of practice. Human nature is not identical with the “human things.” Bacon wants human beings to conquer nature, to subordinate it to their practice, for the human things to rule all of nature, eventually including human nature itself. 
12. To the obvious question—Strauss, are you the only philosophically inclined thinker in modern times to see all of this?—Strauss readily answers with the name of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who “recovered the fundamental difference between the understanding peculiar to political society and to the philosophic life, and hence having seen the religious foundations of the former, found unenlightened despotism (insofar as it did not rely on force) preferable to emerging enlightened despotism,” anticipating “the terror of Robespierre,” which itself foreshadowed the still worse tyrannies of Strauss’s century. 
13. “German Nihilism” is a lecture delivered in February 1941 at the New School for Social Research Graduate Faculty. The occasion was a symposium on a book by Hermann Rauschning, The Revolution of Nihilism: Warning to the West (E. W. Dickes translation, New York: Longmans, Green, 1939). Rauschning was a German conservative, a monarchist, who joined the Nazi Party soon after it came to power but then repudiated it and fled the country, eventually arriving in the United States. The lecture may be found in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 26, Number 3, Spring 1999, pp. 353-378.
14. For an account of Duhamel’s stance, see “Anti-Americanism of the European Right, Then and Now” on this website, under the category, “Nations.”
15. Leo Strauss: “The Liberalism of Classical Political Philosophy,” Review of Metaphysics, Volume 12, Number 3, March 1959, pp. 390-439. Havelock’s book was published in 1957 by Yale University Press.
16. In an illuminating footnote, Burns shows how Strauss further compares and contrasts philosophy with art and both from “the biblical alternative.” Both ancient philosophy and the arts rely on sense perception, reasoning, and noesis, an awareness of the eye of the mind rather than the physical eye. These three ways to knowledge can, should, work together, as the human intellect reasons about the pragmata the physical senses bring to its attention, eliminating contradictions, those things that cannot be at the same time, in the same part, in relation to the same thing, and then, finally ‘seeing it,’ perceiving the truth. Strauss then “distinguish[es] this awareness, informed by sense perception form the biblical alternative.” Whereas philosophy “turns to examine the ‘impersonal forces’ like moira, which, in mythology, struggle with the gods, as necessities,” the Bible “removes necessities, attributing all things to one omnipotent, mysterious God who has revealed himself and established a free covenant with men, whose experiences of God are not based on sense perception,” or, more precisely, not upon reasoning based on sense perception. For the poets, the gods were not free but ruled by fate (a point Nietzsche adopts); for the classical political philosophers, the gods don’t really exist, but human beings do, and they are ruled by necessity. For the Bible, a Person is the one who rules, freely. 
17. Further proof of the possibility of this enterprise may be seen in Catherine Zuckert: Plato’s Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
18. “The great advantage Platonic philosophy enjoys over [pre-Platonic philosophy] is its recognition of the need to establish that the prephilosophic or prescientific ‘world,’ the human ‘world’ given its shape above all by divine law, is one that, given the unknowability of first things, cannot be lightly dismissed but must instead be shown to find its true fulfillment in the philosophic life.”

Carlo Altini: Philosophy as Stranger Wisdom: A Leo Strauss Intellectual Biography. Albany: SUNY Press, 2022.

 

Plato’s Athenian Stranger is a stranger because he is a foreigner in Magnesia, where the dialogue of the Laws takes place. More generally, Altini writes, “due to his nature, the philosopher is a stranger at home” as well as abroad, “belong[ing] to the city without however completely identifying in the citizen,” an exile wherever he is. If one believes “that knowledge is provisional,” not settled, that “the foundations of human life are a mystery,” not revealed, and that “the complexity of the world is irreducible,” not fully manipulable by human beings, then he will find a home neither in the city of man, the city of God, nor the city of Utopia as conceived by modern philosophy. Philosophy is rather “search for, not control of, truth.” The Apostle Paul ridicules certain women, latter-day Eves led astray by evil men, as persons who are “forever learning, never able to come to the knowledge of the truth” (2 Timothy 3:7). Manly, soldier-like Paul—who finds no meaningful distinction between philosophy and sophistry because each demurs when confronted with the things of God—evidently finds the way of life of zetetic inquiry a Hell-bound way, a way of life animated by the wrong kind of love, erotic rather than agapic. Machiavelli would later concur, as regards the philosophy of Plato, while adding Christianity to the list of womanish preoccupations. In contrast, Leo Strauss, admiring Socrates, considered that “philosophy has an intrinsically edifying character, showing the primacy of contemplative life over practical life, of comprehension over engagement.” In this book, Altini traces the course of Strauss’s life, showing how each way of life he encountered, including those he considered for himself, raised questions leading to further inquiry. Philosophy is therefore “stranger wisdom,” the wisdom of those who turn their souls to “the search of the truth on being” and thus take a critical stance toward “any established authority, any normative habit, any political myth, any social custom, and any religious tradition.” But this stance is not often openly critical, scoffing, because the Platonic philosopher is politic, understanding that the philosophic way of life must be practiced within the political way of life, within whatever city of man and of God he finds himself. Altini suggests that “in Strauss’s thought, political conservatism is the other face of the coin of philosophical radicalism.” “Moderation is not a virtue of thought, since thought has to be radical. However, its public expression has to be moderate, due to the problems posed by persecution, social responsibility, and the necessities of material life.”

Strauss did not begin with that stance. Just the opposite. His furtive reading of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche during his Gymnasium years showed him an alternative to the orderly regime of the Kaiser and “the traditionalist and nationalist” (i.e., German-nationalist, assimilationist) Jewish community of the Marburg region in Germany. Thus, although remaining confident in the prevailing hopes for the liberal humanism of German schools, he already knew the arguments of its critics, their animadversions against bourgeois dullness. And, as it happened, not only dullness: the Kaiserreich disintegrated in the Great War. In the war’s last year, Strauss served as a medical assistant; unlike many German civilians, who could not understand why Germany surrendered, he saw the results of carnage wreaked by modern battlefield technology. Nietzsche’s apocalyptic predictions were right; the Last Man was not only an imbecile but a dangerous, self-ruining imbecile. The modern liberal project of turning Jews into Last Men, of making them like all the other Germans, had also failed. He became attracted to political radicalism, but not to the radicalism of the Left, which “appeared to him a radicalization of liberal democracy.” And so, he turned to political Zionism, “convinced that the ideals of German humanism, which he had loved during his school years, were part of a glorious past, now dead and incapable of providing nourishment.” His university studies put him under the tutelage of the neo-Kantian thinkers, Ernst Cassirer and Hermann Cohen, themselves the intellectual progeny of the Enlightenment-era Jewish philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn. As Strauss later wrote, Cohen “belonged definitely to the pre-World War I world,” politically, and had no good answer to “the emergence and ever-increasing power of phenomenology,” of Husserl’s critique of modern rationalism. Neo-Kantianism was anything but vital, by then. Both political and philosophic modernism had failed. “Husserl had realized more profoundly than anybody else that the scientific understanding of the world, far from being the perfection of our natural understanding, is derivative from the latter in such a way as to make us oblivious of the very foundations of the scientific understanding: all philosophic understanding must start from our common understanding of the world, from our understanding of the world as sensibly perceived prior to all theorizing,” Strauss wrote. Heidegger’s lectures on Aristotle’s Metaphysics pushed Heidegger’s insight still further, showing that “our primary understanding of the world is not an understanding of things as objects but of what the Greeks indicated by pragmata, things which we handle and use.”

Meanwhile, in his political thought Strauss turned to the political Zionism of Vladimir (‘Ze’ev’) Jabotinsky, against Martin Buber’s softer cultural Zionism and Max Nordau’s spiritualist neo-Orthodoxy. Strauss wrote several articles for Zionist newspapers; while sympathetic, he did not conceal his misgivings about political Zionism’s lack of “cultural awareness and intellectual depth.” When he met Jabotinsky and attempted to steer the conversation toward the Bible, Jewish history, and political theory, “Jabotinsky abruptly interrupted him, asking him about his ability with guns”—a query very much in keeping with one of Jabotinsky’s most famous monitions, “Jewish youth, learn to shoot.” For his part, “Strauss did not show any interest for the practical and organizational aspect of Zionist policies,” and became increasingly impatient with political Zionism’s poorly conceived atheism, which substituted secular nationalism for Judaism. Against its own intention, political Zionism “strengthened the de-Judaizing tendencies of emancipation,” “being modern itself,” attempting to make Jews “a people like all the others” even as it rejected the assimilationist ambition to make Jews like all the other Germans, Jews, Englishmen, and so on. “Zionism considered emancipation at a community level, liberalism considered at the level of the single citizen’s rights,” but “the substance remained the same, a conception of “the Jewish issue as a purely human and social issue neglecting the essential aspect of Jewish tradition: faith.” For their part, his Zionist colleagues began to lose patience with the young man’s “sarcastic and aggressive tone” toward them.

Buber’s cultural Zionism was no better. Cultural Zionism “interprets the Jewish legacy a human and national culture.” But Judaism isn’t a culture, at all. It is “a divine gift and revelation, the meaning of which ends up being completely distorted once it is interpreted in the sense of ‘culture.'” While the founding of a modern state of Israel was a good thing, it cannot solve “the Jewish problem,” which is fundamentally unsolvable. “Human beings can only solve finite problems, not infinite ones, and, for this reason, they will never be able to create a society void of contradictions.” This holds true for Zionism, but also for Marxism, liberalism—all the ‘isms.’ As Strauss impishly put it, the Jews are indeed the Chosen People—the people “chosen to prove the absence of redemption.” And so, reading Franz Rosenzweig’s Hegelian ‘correction’ of his teacher, Hermann Cohen, and neo-Kantianism, Strauss immediately saw historicism with a Jewish inflection as yet another form of secularist modernism. Such a putative return to Judaism wasn’t authentically Jewish, and therefore no return at all. 

“All that the young Strauss was left with was orthodoxy, the sole legitimate representative of Jewish traditional faith” in sharp contrast to Jewish neo-Kantianism and Jewish neo-Hegelianism. “Still, an eminent obstacle weighed on orthodoxy: Spinoza.” Strauss asked a “simple and audacious” question: “did the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus—that is, modern Enlightenment—really refute Jewish orthodoxy?” 

“German Jews considered [Spinoza] the emblem of their emancipation.” Spinoza wanted the freedom to philosophize; he saw the path to that freedom in a kind of political freedom, namely, “the State’s freedom from ecclesiastical pretensions,” now called the separation of church and state, along with “the constitution of a liberal democracy” as distinguished from either a tyranny of one ruler or a tyranny of many rulers, ‘majority tyranny’ of the sort that inflicted the death penalty on Socrates. Spinoza wanted to guarantee freedom of inquiry, “rendering it independent from both temporal and ecclesiastical powers”; one element of that guarantee was “to show that the Scriptures cannot be an authority to limit freedom of research.” To do so, Spinoza needed to depart from Orthodox Judaism. Claims that liberalism can be derived from a continuous Judaic tradition cannot be true, instead evidencing what Strauss calls “the typical mistake of the conservative, which consists in concealing the fact that the continuous and changing tradition which he cherishes so greatly would never have come into being through conservatism.” Spinoza sees that “the foundation of the liberal State requires the abrogation of the limiting character of the Mosaic Law,” a law limiting Jews because it prevents their assimilation into any given state as rights-bearing individuals (liberalism) or within their own sovereign state among other states (nationalism). Indeed, Spinoza teaches that the foundation of the liberal State requires the abrogation of the limiting character of religious law generally, “against revealed religion in all forms, including Christianity.” Any “return to Judaism” would be possible only “after having completed a confutation of Spinoza, i.e., of modern rationalism.”

But was modern rationalism adequate to its purpose? In Berlin, where he and his wife lived between 1925 and 1932, Strauss continued and deepened his friendship with Jacob Klein. Klein, too, had studied Heidegger, taking his work to allow “a return to classical Greek philosophy and especially the possibility to make a radical distinction between ancient and modern,” especially between ancient and modern rationalism. Strauss, however, found Heidegger’s understanding of Plato and of ancient philosophy generally unpersuasive, “not a true return,” any more than Cohen and Rosenzweig had effected a true return to Judaism, but “a radicalization of modernity that abandoned the level of philosophical rationality” altogether. Heidegger extended and further radicalized Nietzsche, with whose writings Strauss had himself become, by his own account, intoxicated in the second half of the 1920s. With his characteristic themes of angst, resolution, and authenticity, Heidegger opposed modern rationalism, valorizing the will, ‘existentialism,’ decision, and the consequent abandonment of “the idea of truth,” the ancients’ quest for being. “While for the classics ‘being’ meant ‘being always,’ for Heidegger ‘being’ mean ‘existing,'” the things that change, ‘history.’ Existentialism opposes theory in the classical sense, “necessitat[ing] a radical criticism of contemplative life” in favor of the human freedom to create meaning, a freedom made possible by the recognition that being is nothing permanent. 

German liberalism was embodied by the weak and philosophically shallow Weimar Republic, with its mechanistic, modern rationalism already seen as potentially destructive in the Great War, its politics consisting of egalitarian homogenization and government by bureaucracy. Even at the university level, the regime never went beyond neo-Kantianism and neo-Hegelianism, both derived from Spinozian rationalism. These hardly sufficed when confronted with the irrationalism of Nietzsche and Heidegger. And if irrationalism gave rise to a radical Rightist politics likely to threat European Jews and Gentiles alike, what then? Strauss “began to sense that modern reason was not the sole model of rationality, since the querelle des anciens et des moderns precisely regarded two different models of rationality: the first, the pre-modern one, founded on moderate skepticism (which he later defined zetetic); the other, the modern one, based on a dogmatic skepticism.” Could the older model of rationality avoid the self-destruction suffered by modern rationalism? To address this question, he took “two different and complementary directions”: first, to study medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophy “as bearer of a different model of rationalism” than that of the moderns; additionally, to deepen his study of modern rationalism by considering Hobbes, Spinoza’s precursor,” the philosopher “most representative of the modern conceptions of natural right.” Eventually, he would go behind the Jewish and Islamic philosophers to Plato, and behind Hobbes to Machiavelli. “The distinctive trait of Strauss’s thought,” even when preoccupied by theological and political concerns, remained “his substantially rational nature.”

In the early 1930s, Strauss considered Hobbes as the first philosopher to “determine the specific modern concept of culture, visible in the conception of the civil state as opposed to the natural state.”  By civilization, Hobbes mean “a rationally based cohabitation of humanity,” founded on a ‘social contract,’ “which works with the aid of scientific progress until it becomes a community of production and consumption,” a community designed to overcome the nature in which man initially finds itself, a nature hostile to his very survival. Critics of modern liberalism, contemptuous of “bourgeois individualism,” never really address the philosophic challenge Hobbes mounts both to ‘ancient’ reason and to revelation. They fail to see how Hobbes (and also Descartes) not only practice skepticism with regard to religion (which everyone who has eyes to see, sees) but replaces religious dogmatism with “scientific dogmatism,” a dogmatism animated by “the faith according to which the human being can progress towards every greater freedom by subduing nature,” a conquest that “ends in nihilism” in theory (Nietzsche) and in practice (the Great War). “Strauss’s confrontation with Hobbes was not the result of an occasional historical or philosophical choice, but rather of the necessity to confront the highest expression of the philosophical-political paradigm of modernity.”

The philosophic core of Hobbes’s theory consists of a critique of both Scripture and Aristotle. “Strauss identifies the moral —not scientific—basis that lies at the foundations of Hobbes’s political theory and of the entire modern political philosophy.” Before the age of forty, Hobbes had thought within a framework set by Scholasticism and Puritanism in religion, the Renaissance Humanists in philosophy, and “the aristocratic atmosphere in which he lived.” But the modern scientific project envisioned by Francis Bacon reoriented Hobbes away from the high-minded, ‘aristocratic’ conception of virtue upheld by Aristotle, toward the more ‘do-able’ task of conquering nature for the relief of man’s estate, and thus towards a morality of usefulness. In this, the Christian and especially Puritan critique of aristocratic honor—that it is only pride issuing in endless fighting, never in peace—holds firm. For Hobbes, however, there is no God who punishes the prideful. Men punish themselves; not fear of God but fear of men, and especially of men inflated with pride, suffices to sober them. In Strauss’s words, “the most important and most difficult task is then to show how the project of a mechanistic-deterministic account of nature arises from this new moral principle,” namely, the fear of violent death. That is, in Hobbes’s philosophy, the moral principle is rationally prior to the mechanistic science. The moral principle in question is “right as distinct from the ancient concept of law.” But law provides a standard, a criterion of moral judgment; fear of violent death is only a passion, not a reason; it provides civilization with no foundation “that has the stature of truth.” “Strauss identifies in Hobbes’s theory of passions the roots of liberalism and modern culture, because the individualistic character of natural right constitutes a turning point in respect to Platonic and Aristotelian theories of natural law.” Modern natural rights are, in Strauss’s words, “subjective claims, originating in the human will,” neither in the will of God (divine law and the Scholastics’ version of natural law) nor in the natural law of the ‘ancients,’ pervading the cosmos that envelops and pervades human nature. In this, Hobbes rejects Aristotelian teleology; nature has no purpose, human beings no perfection, the summum bonum having been replaced by the summum malum—again, the fear of violent death, an egalitarian passion, one shared by all human beings who are honest with themselves. This is the moral foundation not only of modern science but of modern liberalism: “If the State does not have the function of promoting virtue or good, but rather that of safeguarding the natural right of each human being, then the State’s power finds its limit in the individual natural right, unpassable and inviolable,” but only so long as one ignores the nihilism beneath the surface of scientific rationalism at the service of moral irrationalism. Reason serves the passions, looking for sensible ways of self-preservation, which Hobbes finds in the mighty Leviathan, monarchic because any other regime permits dissent, inevitably leading to factional dispute and ending in the return of the war of all against all, the ‘state of nature,’ and commercial because peaceful commerce re-channels human ambition into the more modest, ‘bourgeois’ intention to make a buck. “The passage from vanity to fear represents the passage from [warlike] aristocratic virtue to [peaceful] bourgeois virtue” whose objects are utility, peace, security. “Work and accumulation, commerce and industry, freedom and capital are the characteristics of the modern ideal of civilization.”

The moral basis of Hobbesian philosophy notwithstanding, “the clear awareness of the deep fracture with philosophic tradition that is implied in Hobbes’s new and revolutionary moral conception only surfaces with his discovery of Euclid.” To empower man, to make his conquest of hostile nature complete, one needs a political science of surpassing precision, as seen in geometric proofs. But why would Hobbes suppose that geometry, one of the most ‘abstract’ forms of reasoning there is, could account for the actions of a nature said to be exclusively material? He pointed to Galileo, who showed that the planets, material bodies, move in predictable geometric patterns. Strauss, however, identified a more troublesome problem, a problem for Hobbes’s political science: “exact passionless mathematics is indifferent to passions; exact passionless political philosophy is in conflict with the passions.” Unless political scientists can show that human passions act like planets, they won’t really be ‘doing science.’ This has indeed been a persistent attempt of, and a persistent difficulty for, political scientists and of ‘social science’ generally, for the past several centuries, a discipline that has achieved very mixed results.

Finally, Hobbes’s anthropology opens philosophy to Nietzsche’s ripostes. According to Galileo, nature has no purpose; it just goes around in circles (or ‘epicycles’). For political philosophy, this “requires the systematic elimination of the issue of the State’s purpose” in terms of a rationally discernible good, a move that “is clear in [Hobbes’s] subordination of natural law to natural right.” Human beings deploy reasoning as a means to ends proposed by the passions; morality becomes a matter of the impassioned will. As a result, people learn to be morally impressed by resolution. The crisis of nihilism awaits, inherent in modern moral and political philosophy from the outset.

Strauss thus began to wonder if the problem wasn’t rationalism itself (as Nietzsche proclaimed) but the modern use of reason. He had already been studying Maimonides on the theological-political question, in a successful attempt to get away from the superficial understanding of Jewishness seen in political Zionism and also to confront the serious challenge to philosophy posed by Orthodox Judaism. Central to Judaic claims to know is prophecy. In Maimonides, he saw for the first time that there was an older model of rationalism, one “capable of identifying a balance between philosophical radicalism and political conservativism, between the search for truth and the necessity to accept common opinions, between philosophy and the city, between Athens and Jerusalem.” In considering the claims of prophecy with Maimonides as his guide, he saw that revealed religion posited not so much a philosophic theory but a political regime. A regime is, among other things, a form of government that ‘channels’ citizens in a way of life towards one or more purposes. Forms, ways, and purposes are rationally discernible and possible to reinforce with laws. Strauss addresses these matters in one of his least known books, Philosophy and Law, published in 1936, a book “in which Strauss builds, through an original reading of medieval philosophy, a strong philosophical and political interpretation of modernity,” a book in which he “seriously takes into account the impossibility of an immediate return to orthodox Judaism (the theoretical foundations of which are undermined by Enlightenment), as well as the impossibility of accepting the relativism resulting from the transformation of modern rationalism into historicism, i.e., modern sophistry.” He “began to think” that not only Maimonides but the Islamic and Greek philosophers addressed “the idea of the divine Law intended as a unique and total law that was, at the same time, religious, political and moral law.” Maimonides and his Islamic predecessors in philosophy—especially al-Farabi—take as their “central theme” not “the opposition between faith and knowledge, but between philosophy and Law,” a “Law that aims at its own perfection as well as that of humankind.” And behind these philosophers stands Plato, author of The Laws, a book that “provides medieval thinkers the starting point whence they can philosophically understand revelation, thus expressing the philosophical, skeptical, foundation of faith in revelation.” Maimonides appreciated the need for “the legal foundation of philosophy, a justification of philosophy in front of revelation,” God’s revelation of His comprehensive Law, and hence His regime. But Maimonides went further, “consider[ing] the necessity of the philosophical foundation of the Law, because the practical usefulness of the revelation cannot disregard the supremacy of theoretical life over political life.” That is, prophetology is “the place where the Law becomes an object of philosophy.”

And because any philosophic foundation will unsettle unphilosophic minds, the overwhelming majority of minds in any city, philosophers who consider that foundation will need a measure of reticence when they speak and write. Prophets, Maimonides teaches, need to employ “a metaphorical and imaginative language” in justifying the law before the bar of public opinion. Unlike the philosophes of the modern Enlightenment, who attempt to bring philosophic truths to everyone but end up in oversimplifying philosophy, turning it into ‘ideology,’ “Maimonides and his Islamic predecessors are skeptical thinkers, rationalist philosophers who deal with the relationship between philosophy, politics, and religion in a perspective that is at the same time (privately) radical and (publicly moderate, clearly different from the moderns’ anti-religious radicalism.” This can be done ‘in good faith’ because “the purpose of the Law coincides with the purpose of philosophy: the happiness of the human being, rendered possible by knowledge of truth, gain through contemplative life.” This contrasts with modern rationalism, which takes human purposes as irrational, a matter of the passions, and so makes reason primarily practical, not contemplative-theoretical. Prophecy aims at establishing “good legislation and a rightful government” aimed at the “moral and spiritual perfection of the human being.” “The purpose of prophecy is essentially political because the prophet has the duty to establish a society inside which the human being may attain its supreme perfection: theoretical life.” That not all, or even many, human beings will do so at a given time in a given regime does not mean that ‘the few’ are out to injure ‘the many,’ inasmuch as their philosophic inquiries in no way exploit their fellow citizens by conceiving of themselves as masters and ‘the many’ as slaves. Following Maimonides’ guidance, Strauss leaves that sort of claim to Nietzsche and Heidegger. Genuinely politic, prudent philosophers know that “theory, not politics, is the greatest good,” but they also know that “politics, not theory, is the ‘first’ good, because the human being, as a political animal, can only live inside a society.”

Against the modern claims that civilization is man’s much-needed improvement of what nature gives him—a life that is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short—and that religion is a failed or at best inadequate claim, within this cultural-civilizational effort, to produce such improvement,  Strauss argues that “religion cannot be sufficiently understood inside the concept of culture, which expresses a way for the human spirit to produce, while religion is not a product of the human being, but it is given to it.” According to the prophets, speaking to ‘the many,’ religious revelation is given by God, the political regime given by God. According to the philosophers who lived before the modern philosophic project took hold, “religion and politics are the facts that transcend culture” because human beings are political animals by nature. Whether given by God or by nature or by God through nature, politics is a ‘given.’ Philosophers properly start their thinking with it and within it. 

What Altini calls “stranger wisdom” comes in practical-prudential as well as philosophic form. Strauss demonstrated it, repeatedly, during the 1930s, always staying two steps ahead of the Nazis—in France, where he moved a year before Hitler came to power (he made several interesting friends and acquaintances there, including the Russian émigré, Alexander Kojève, while disliking the “disorderly Parisian way of life) and then in Great Britain (where he was pleased by the “measured political life,” “the sobriety of its literature”—especially the novels of Austen and Thackeray—and “the image of the gentleman,” but where he had no friends, except for Hans Jonas, and could find no secure academic appointment). He moved to the United States in 1937, an event Altini relates near the center of the book, as it did amount to a sort of hinge in his life, America being the place where he became a citizen, attracted students, and published his most important books. Many of his family members died in the Holocaust.

Teaching at the New School for Social Research throughout the war years, Strauss deepened his appreciation for al-Farabi. He had already understood that al-Farabi is no neo-Platonist doctrinaire, as some scholars had claimed, but “a skeptical philosopher,” alert to the “opposition between reason and revelation, philosophy and religion,” a man who effected “a fundamental turning point in the history of political philosophy,” decisively influencing both Islamic, Jewish, and Christian philosophers by teaching them the Platonic dialectic “between esotericism” or philosophic inquiry and “exotericism” or “reticent” writing “that characterizes all pre-modern philosophical-political thought.” Studying the Farabian texts in more detail, now, Strauss now came to understand how radically skeptical the philosopher was, how he deserves the honor of being considered “the founder of philosophy in the context of revealed religion and as Plato’s ‘heir.'” This discovery, and others like it, “consolidated” his critique of historicism, as it showed that the outward conformity of philosophers to the prevailing opinions of their times and places scarcely served as evidence for the claim that they were ‘products’ of those times and places. Given the way in which al-Farabi learned from Plato, and subsequent philosophers learned from both, Strauss concluded that “the essence of classical philosophy (in particular of Platonic and Aristotelian politike episteme) was not Greek, but rather universal,” and quite capable of “radically contest[ing] the Cartesian subjectivist foundation” of modern rationalism and the geometric-materialist reductionism of Hobbesian morality and the political science derived from that morality.

Although Strauss had little doubt that Germany would lose the Second World War, he saw that German philosophy was “colonizing” other Western countries, including the United States. This was conspicuously the case at the New School, which had been founded twenty years earlier by John Dewey and others who had been influenced by Hegel, Marx, and other historicist thinkers, ‘Right’ and ‘Left.’ Although German nihilism primarily occurred among philosophers of the ‘Right,’ German progressivism animated the ‘Left,’ which accounts for what Altini mistakenly calls “an internal contradiction of Straussian thought.” The supposed contradiction is that Strauss criticized “the political foundations of German culture that allowed the advent of Nazi barbarism” while criticizing “liberal and democratic modernity,” betraying “a certain sympathy towards the radicalism of right-wing thinkers against the domination of technique and economics that characterized Europe in the early twentieth century, in both its capitalist and communist version,” its “denunciation of mechanization and rationalization.” As Altini himself has already made clear, sympathy toward a radical critique of modernity does not mean the endorsement of such critiques in the forms they have actually taken—forms which, as Altini has noticed, often unwittingly partake of the ‘modern’ assumptions their authors intend to overturn.

Altini well describes Strauss’s main accomplishment during his years in America, his recovery of Platonic political philosophy by exegesis of Platonic writings themselves, unmediated by Maimonides and al-Farabi, although he continued to study both of the later philosophers throughout this period. In considering the Platonic dialogues, Strauss saw that Plato had found an answer to philosophy’s dilemma. While Socrates’ way of life, interrogating and thereby offending his fellow citizens with regard to their theological-political convictions, a way of life leading to his death, Plato saw that writing, particularly “reticent” writing, could enable a philosopher to continue his inquiries while staying alive. For his part, in best-known book, Natural Right and History, Strauss addresses his American fellow-citizens less in terms of divine or natural law, more in terms of natural right—that is, in terms Americans then revered. He distinguished, however, between modern and “classical” natural right, even as he had distinguished between “ancient” law and modern ‘rights.’ In this, he was aided by his discovery of the ‘modern’ who preceded even Hobbes and Descartes—Machiavelli, who does not dwell upon rights of any kind. The root of modern ‘rights’ in the unrighteous Florentine cleared the way for a critique of modern nihilism that does not depend upon the valorization of law as either divinely or naturally ordained, while providing a non-legalist and at the same time non-relativist criterion for moral and political thought and practice. 

During these years, Strauss was able to show how later ‘moderns’ transformed Machiavelli’s teaching without altering its core. This is the argument of his 1959 book, What Is Political Philosophy? in which he describes “the three waves of modernity” along with the several splashes each of those waves made. Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke generated the first wave, undermining Christianity with a materialist naturalism that went beyond Epicureanism to claim that human efforts can conquer chance and nature itself. Rousseau, Burke, Kant, Hegel, and Marx generated the second wave. “Rousseau takes the decisive step in the criticism of classical natural right by elaborating the concept of ‘general will,’ which begins to delineate the process of historicization” of human thought. Whereas Hobbes and Locke take natural right to hold as a standard after civil society arises, “Rousseau changes course, underlining the necessity that civil life be built with the purpose of making such an appeal completely unnecessary A civil society built precisely following natural law automatically produces the right positive law, exemplified by the general will, which replaces natural right. However, if the ultimate standard of justice becomes general will, then no standard external to will constitutes the reference point for justice and for law.” This clears the shore for the third wave, generated by Nietzsche, Weber, and Heidegger, who radicalize the historicism of Hegel and Marx. For radical historicists, “the human being experiences suffering and the abyss,” as “nature and eternity are by then two categories void of sense in front of an essentially irrational services of events, dominated by the will to power.” Previous historicists retained an esteem for reason, holding that there are rationally discernable ‘laws of history.’ But with the radical historicists claim that “truth is neither desirable nor edifying, but mortal.”

Since reason no longer counts for much, the distinction between the philosopher, hitherto considered the man of reason par excellence, and the citizen, whose reason is prudential at best, simply disappears. Marxist-Leninist tyrants, who clung to second-wave modernity, justified mass murder as the rationally valid means of hurrying historical progress to its end, its culmination in the fully rational, faction-free, communal society, prevailing worldwide. But “history is not the court of the world” because the supposed end of history, “the universal and homogeneous State” is a thing of questionable justice (here, Nietzsche’s animadversions about the ‘Last Man’ come into play), and the human assumption of Providential power and wisdom is equally questionable. “Political philosophy does not deal with salvific expectations or secularized anticipations of the afterlife, in the certainty of their forthcoming accomplishment.” As for radical historicism, Heidegger’s adherence to the supposed “inner truth and greatness” of Nazism, even after real Nazism ended in catastrophe, confuses power, an instrumentality, with justice, an end.

As for the modern democracies, now in the grips of the milder historicism of Progressives, New Dealers, and their progeny, Strauss considered them very indirectly in his 1966 book, Socrates and Aristophanes. Aristophanes mocks the powerlessness of Socrates, of philosophers generally. They cannot “persuade the citizens that fill city squares and, therefore, [cannot] carry out a direct political power.” In this, the poets are their superiors. Yet, “Aristophanes expresses a sentiment which is midway between admiration and envy for Socrates, because the comic playwright knew” that the philosopher’s political impotence “is counterbalanced by a true advantage philosophy has over comedy”: the philosopher does not depend upon the applause of the crowd. Socrates enjoys “perfect freedom,” while the poet does not. The democratic politician acts under the same constraint, his rhetoric being a sort of political poetry. In Liberalism Ancient and Modern, published in 1968, Strauss contrasts modern, historicist liberalism, which cannot really liberate, with ancient or classical liberalism by means of a discussion of liberal education, by then under attack in America, the land of modern liberalism, from the New Left. “The concept of liberal education does not have success in the modern world, where the term ‘education implies a universal and popular education,” thanks to the regime of modern democracy and its “mass culture.” A genuinely liberal, liberating, education understands the “difference between philosophy and the city.” To learn to think along with a genuine philosopher, to read one of his books, requires sustained and intelligent attention to the particulars of that book, not the ‘quick takes’ that busy democratic citizens prefer. An introduction to philosophy requires time and patience, neither of which enjoy much esteem in democratic regimes. “What we call education today very often does not mean formation of the character,” moral or intellectual, “but rather instruction, training, and conditioning, which is a reduction of education to the leveling of consciences.” In democratic regimes, philosophers and their scholarly allies can nonetheless provide enclaves in which students are reminded, and thereby re-minded, “of the sense of human excellence, provid[ing] the antidote against conformism.”

In his last years, Strauss returned to the figure of Socrates as depicted in the writings of Xenophon. Under Strauss’s careful scrutiny, Xenophon may be seen as having distinguished the gentleman-citizen, the philosopher, and the tyrant. The citizen differs from the tyrant in his disinterestedness, his genuine concern for the good of his political community. Both differ from the philosopher. Part of the difference “resides in the different form of eros that animates the philosopher and the political man, which regards theoria in the first case, while in the second case it concerns popular recognition,” or, in “the worst cases, unbridled personal economic interest, ambition, or desire of power.” A philosopher, seeking wisdom, “wishes to be admired by a small minority, the political man wishes to be honored,” to be recognized, “by everyone.” One conceives of liberty as freedom from the need for popular applause, the other as the enjoyment of that applause. “The philosopher does not wish to govern”; “Xenophon does not mention courage or military virtue in his enumerations of Socratic virtues. This is because, strictly speaking, the philosopher is not part of the city. The only teachers that have a constitutive part in political society are priests.” In all of this, Xenophon takes a very different stance than Machiavelli, with whom he is sometimes compared. Machiavelli would have philosophers and the princes they instruct replace the priests, take control of chance, which by his time was labeled divine providence. Consequently, Strauss notes, Machiavelli cites none of Xenophon’s Socratic writings, confining his references to the histories. There is, nonetheless, one “important point of contact” between Xenophon and Machiavelli: neither “believes in the omnipotence of the word,” the claim of rhetoricians and sophists. In this, both men are philosophers of politics, thinking about what really is, not deceived by those who beckon us into wishful thinking. 

Strauss’s The Argument and the Action of Plato’s “Laws” appeared after his death. The book “not only represents the completion of Strauss’s long studies on Greek classics, but also an ideal spiritual testament.” Strauss regard the Laws as the most important of the dialogues concerning politics, Plato’s “political work par excellence.” He continues to read Plato’s work “through the interpretive key elaborated by al-Farabi.” Strauss “retrace[s] Plato’s text almost line by line and inserted his reflections as a reader in dialogue with the text, questioning its contradictions and obscurities, posing questions, problems, and solutions more explicitly (but not entirely explicitly) than they appear in Plato’s writing.” Altini prudently recommends that readers of Strauss’s book first read it “for itself,” then re-read it while comparing it to Plato’s dialogue, “in order to verify the variations that exist between the original and its copy, trying to understand the theoretical reasons behind these variations, inside a writing based on the models of ‘repetition’ and ‘imitation.'” 

There are two kinds of law. “The law is clearly the judgment of the city on the city’s business and therefore it is not physis, but nomos.” But conventional law requires justification; it is not self-justifying. In that sense, “the law aims to a higher judgment than the simple judgment of the city,” as “virtue is not limited to obedience to [conventional] laws.” Conventional laws, which “change from city to city, in an arbitrary way,” “must confront natural law,” “eternal and unchanging.” Natural law “indicates the limits of arbitrariness and shows the possibility of a good and just political order.” In his inquiries into nature, the philosopher must “elaborate strategies to preserve both freedom to philosophize and the possibility to live peacefully inside the city, respecting the requirements of political life.” As Strauss puts it, what is “first for us”—the law under which we live—is not “first in itself,” since nature precedes convention. To pursue the way of life that centers on inquiries into the natural law is to pursue a way of life unlikely to be entirely congruent with the “theological-political” way of life. “The philosopher is always a stranger, even at home, because he interprets the thaumazein,” wonder, “as a quest for knowledge, not as an original wisdom (be it revealed or traditional).” There is no “final solution” to this difficulty, only ways to lessen it.

 

Ludwig Feuerbach: Lectures on the Essence of Religion. Ralph Manheim translation. New York: Harper and Row, 1967 [1846].

Ludwig Feuerbach: Principles of the Philosophy of the Future. Manfred Vogel translation. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1986 [1843].

 

Although he attended many lectures offered by G. W. F. Hegel at the University of Berlin, Feuerbach broke with his professor on the question of materialism, rejecting Hegel’s dialectical immanentism. He also firmly denied both the Creator-God of the Bible and any suggestion of philosophic dualism. He was a thoroughgoing materialist, although not a ‘dialectical materialist,’ like his younger contemporary, Karl Marx.

Students at the University of Heidelberg, where Feuerbach had attended classes before transferring to Berlin, invited him to deliver a series of thirty lectures on “the Essence of Religion,” which he published in 1846. Speaking shortly before the revolutionary year of 1848, Feuerbach began by observing that “today every man, even if he supposes himself to be supremely nonpartisan, is at least theoretically a partisan, though he may not know it or want to be,” since “today political interest engulfs all other interests and political events keep us in a state of constant turmoil.” Indeed, “today it is actually the duty—especially of us nonpolitical Germans—to forget everything for the sake of politics”; more, “mankind” itself “must at certain times forget all other tasks and activities for the sake of one particular task and activity if it wishes to achieve something complete and worthwhile.” Inasmuch as religion “is to be sure closely connected with politics,” and we now “demand that the word become flesh, the spirit matter,” having become “as sick of political as we are of philosophical idealism,” we are “determined to become political materialists.” Feuerbach’s critique of religion serves as the foundation of a republican politics, a ‘youth movement.’ At around the same time, Tocqueville would publish his book on the French Revolution, remarking that it was the political inexperience of the French revolutionaries that led to the Terror. Feuerbach does not consider that possibility, and neither would most Germans, for the next hundred years.

“Truly free, uncompromising, unconventional thinking, thinking that aspires to be fruitful, not to say decisive, requires an unconventional, free, and uncompromising life,” he tells his young listeners. “And anyone who wishes in his thinking to get to the bottom of human affairs must have his two feet physically, bodily on their foundation,” namely nature, “cast[ing] aside all extravagant, supernatural, and unnatural ideas and fantasies.” Readily seeing through the calculated ambiguities of Bacon and Hobbes (he had written a study of Bacon’s philosophy, published in the 1830s), he sees, adopts, and advocates their materialism, while reserving especial praise for Spinoza, “the only modern philosopher to have provided the first elements of a critique and explanation of religion and theology; the first to have offered a positive opposition to theology; the first to have stated, in terms that have become classical, that the world cannot be regarded as the work or product of a personal being acting in accordance with aims and purposes; the first to have brought out the all-importance of nature for the philosophy of religion.” In response to Spinoza, Leibniz is “the first modern German philosopher” to earn “the honor, or dishonor, of having once again tied philosophy to the apron strings of theology,” an effort Feuerbach ridicules as the philosophical equivalent of the astronomical contortions of Tycho Brahe, who vainly attempted to combine elements of the Copernican system with the system of Ptolemy that it had correctly replaced. To mix philosophy and theology, as Leibniz attempts, can result only in “a monstrosity” because theology holds only the sacred as true, “whereas to philosophy, only what it holds true is sacred.” “All my works have been written in opposition to a period when every effort was made to force mankind back into the darkness of bygone centuries,” the centuries before the modern Enlightenment. Even the pious philosophers of earlier centuries understood the need to separate philosophy and religion, “arguing that religion is grounded on divine wisdom and authority, while philosophy is grounded solely on human wisdom.” But “the most recent philosophers”—Leibniz but, more impressively, Hegel—stand for “the identity of philosophy and religion, at least as far as content and substance are concerned.” “I criticized the Hegelian philosophy,” with its dialectical immanentism, its ‘Absolute Spirit,’ “for regarding the essential as nonessential and the nonessential as essential in religion.” Against this, I, Feuerbach, declared the essence of religion to be “precisely what philosophy regards as mere form,” immaterial in both senses of the word. “I replaced the abstract, merely cogitated cosmic being known as God by the reality of the world, or nature,” while also replacing “the rational being deprived of his senses, which philosophy has extracted out of man, by the real, sensuous man endowed with reason.” There is, for example, no immortality of the individual human ‘soul.’ “Intellectual, ethical, or moral immortality is solely the immortality a man gains through his works,” and his soul, animating those works, is only “what he passionately loves, what he does with passion,” and “men’s souls are as diverse, as particular as men themselves.” Feuerbach thus full-throatedly endorses not only the materialism of the moderns but the individualism of the moderns and the ‘democracy’ of the moderns, their esteem for liberty defined as doing what one likes, passionately.

Accordingly, rightly understood, “theology is anthropology” because it “expresses nothing other than the deified essence of man”; that is what ‘revealed religion’ reveals. Overlying nature, convention skews man’s conception of himself and therefore his conception of the divine; “the pagan is a patriot,” his gods the gods of his polis, while “the Christian is a cosmopolitan” whose God is universal. Universalism thrives on the habit of generalization, abstraction, and sure enough, “Christianity is idealism, an edifice crowned by a natureless God or spirit who makes the world by merely thinking and willing, and apart from whose thinking and willing the world has no existence.” But, Feuerbach asserts, there is only nature—no ideals and no God or gods. The only difference between human nature and the rest of nature is human consciousness; he intends to awaken that consciousness to the emptiness of religious belief (in these lectures) and of philosophic idealism (in Principles of the Philosophy of the Future), to “demonstrate that the powers which man worships and fears in his religious life, which he seeks to propitiate even with bloody human sacrifices, are merely creatures of his own unfree, fearful mind and of his ignorant unformed intelligence.” Morally and politically, this means that he wants “man, who is always unconsciously governed and determined by his own essence alone, may in future consciously take his own human essence as the law and determining ground, the aim and measure, of his ethical and political life.” No fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. This will begin the project “to transform theologians into anthropologists, lovers of God into lovers of man, candidates for the next world into students of this world, religious and political flunkeys of heavenly and earthly monarchs and lords into free, self-reliant citizens of the earth.” 

“Hear, O Israel.” Religious men hearken to nature’s terrifying thunder, a noise perceived through “the ear, the organ of terror”—the ear, which is “the womb of the gods.” Feuerbach goes so far as to claim that “if man had only eyes, hands and the senses of taste and smell, he would have no religion, for all these senses are organs of critique and skepticism.” The fear and love commended by religions are passions of dependency, not self-reliance. The ultimate sign of human helplessness is mortality: “If man did not die, if he lived forever, if there were no such thing as death, there would be no religion.” Belief in immortality is man’s defense against death (presumably including Feuerbach’s work, which he could only justify by saying that it is an effort to achieve the only possible form of immortality). Primitive man worships nature, which he deifies; Feuerbach calls this religion but not theism, a term he reserves for belief in a god or gods distinct from nature and man. “It is theism, theology, that has wrenched man out of his relationship with the world, isolated him, made him into an arrogant self-centered being who exalts himself above nature.” “In religion man projects his essence,” but primitive man (with unintended modesty) merely projected his sensations, having yet to develop the abstract thought that enables him to conceive of an abstract or spiritual god. Primitive man is entirely dependent upon nature; religion registers human dependency; primitive religion deifies nature because primitive man fears nature, divinizes it, hoping to propitiate the imagined divinities that are nothing more than aspects of nature. We should not make this mistake, return to paganism, “since man’s true culture and true task is to take things as they are, to make no more, but also no less of them than they are. Nature religion, pantheism, makes too much of nature”—the earth is indeed our mother, but we are now adults— while “conversely, idealism, theism Christian make too little of it, and indeed ignore it.”  Politically, this means that while we should understand but not follow the pagans in making “the nature in which they lived and breathed, to which alone they owed their individual character, in short, the nature of their country, [into] an object of religious worship,” modern man might still respect “the nature of this country,” his country, “for it is to this country alone that I owe my life and what I am.” “How untrue we Germans have become to our source, our mother, and how unlike her, thanks to Christianity which taught us that heaven is our home.”

Feuerbach further claims that egoism is the essence of religion, “the self-assertion of man in accordance with his nature and consequently of his reason.” Since “to man life is the supreme good,” man inclines to idolize, to deify, anything that protects or enhances his life. But these idols are in fact “dependent on man; they are gods only insofar as they serve his being, as they are useful, helpful, appropriate to it.” Christianity only replaced paganism when the idols were seen as useless, “because the pagan gods did not give them what they wanted,” whereas the Christian God is the “very essence and likeness” of man himself, who by now had begun to think abstractly, therefore seeking a universal, all-knowing, all-powerful deity. This enables ‘we moderns,’ we post-Christians, to discover the “ultimate subjective ground of religion in human egoism,” human desire. Aristotle’s god, the ‘god of the philosophers,’ gains no adherents among most people because it is neither a helpful nor a harmful god. It is useless. “In calling egoism the ground and essence of religion, I am not finding fault with religion,” which only reflects the nature, the essence of man in this regard. Rather, Feuerbach faults an ‘idealistic’ religion that holds man above nature, “tak[ing] an unboundedly egoistic, contemptuous attitude toward nature,” exhibiting an egoism no longer bounded by the limits of nature alone, as seen “in the Christian belief in miracles and immortality,” evidence of “an unnatural, supernatural, and chimerical egoism, exceeding the limits of necessary, natural egoism.”

But if religion expresses natural human egoism, why do so many religions commend self-abnegation? Because a man might be a fanatic, carrying his natural feelings too far. Or he might hope “to gain the favor of his gods, who grant him everything he desires”—a cunning, self-serving self-abnegation, “only a form, a means of self-affirmation, of self-love.” This is the psychology of religious sacrifice, whether the sacrifice of animals, or “bloody human sacrifice” seen among pagans, or Christian sacrifice, which partakes “of a different, namely, psychological, spiritual order,” a sacrifizio dell’intelleto. In the spirit of Machiavelli, Feuerbach alleges that “the Church has at all times advocated moral, spiritual, and mental self-emasculation.” Christians are communists, “but communists out of egoism”; their “generous, imposing sacrifices” do not differ in principle” from “foul and niggardly sacrifices.” It is true that any attempt to combat “human egoism in the highly developed sense” amounts to “sheer absurdity and madness,” since “the design underlying all human impulses, strivings, and actions, is to satisfy the needs of human nature, human egoism.” But only with full ‘consciousness’ of the grounding of self-interest in nature, with no supernatural confusion added.

It is noteworthy that in the first nine of this series of thirty lectures, Feuerbach makes no arguments. He asserts. It may be that his failure to philosophize serves a rhetorical strategy, saying atheistic things that will shock many among his young audience while encouraging those who already deny the existence of God. He begins his tenth lecture in much the same style. It is egoism, he claims, that makes dependency possible (“where there is no egoism, there is no feeling of dependency”) and it is egoism that revolts against dependency (“I love freedom of movement”). Human beings are dependent, but not upon God. “How untrue we Germans have become to our source, our mother, and how unlike her, thanks to Christianity which taught us that heaven is our home.” Be true to yourselves, young Germans; turn away from religion to nature and to Fatherland.

But now he begins to philosophize, taking aim at the “cosmological proof” of God’s existence, that there must be some ultimate Cause-of-causes, some First Mover of all subsequent movements in nature. Feuerbach dismisses this as proof only of human psychological neediness, not of the existence of God. “This need of mine to break off the endless series is no proof of a real break in the series of a real beginning and end.” “God” is only a name for our own inability to discern the true origin of things, or indeed if there was an origin at all, since the cosmos might be eternal. And “what is to prevent me from going beyond God?”—continuing the inquiry into what came before “In the beginning….” As far as we can see, “Nature has no beginning and no end”; politically (as it were) this means that “nature does not culminate in a monarchic summit; it is a republic.” Continuing to follow the evidence presented by his senses, Feuerbach says, “I cannot derive my body from my mind—for I have to eat or to be able to eat before I can think.” Reason presupposes my senses; my senses do not presuppose reason. “No more, or perhaps even less, can I derive nature from God.” That “the world of the senses is real” is an ineluctable truth in psychology, anthropology, and philosophy. Only the religions deny this, and neither do they, initially, since “Man’s first belief is his belief in the truth of the senses,” the foundation of “nature religion.” “The first beings of whom man had immediate certainty and consequently his first gods were sensuous objects”; more, “men’s senses were themselves his first gods.” He has no philosophic need for any others, inasmuch as “what a man does not know by his own lights, he does not know at all.”

What is nature? It is “the sum of all the sensuous forces, things, and beings which man distinguishes from himself as other than human.” Nature is no god but “a manifold, public, actual being which can be perceived with all the senses.” The physical attributes of the Biblical God—power, eternity, infinity—are all “rooted in nature.” His moral attributes are rooted in human nature, attributes that make Him useful to man. God’s moral and also his intellectual traits are nothing more than projections of natural human capacities upon an imaginary perfect being, proving that man is indeed egoistic. The infinity attributed to God only proves that man is “infinitely fond of himself,” ready to worship his own image. “In theology,” as distinguished from psychology, anthropology, and philosophy, “things are not thought and willed because they exist, they exist because they are thought and willed.” It is a teaching that inverts “the order of nature,” an inversion that is in a sense natural to man, even if mistaken, because man is rational, a being that “sets the class or class concept before the species and individuals, the abstract before the concrete”; “this explains and resolves all the difficulties and contradictions arising from attempts to explain the world as God’s creation,” a something inexplicably created out of nothing. “God is nothing other than the sum of generic concepts,” concepts generated by the human mind’s natural inclination to think of such abstractions as time and space, then to assume that these exist prior to the real things, the material, sensually perceived things. That is, abstractions are concepts, constructed in the human mind, which constructs or ‘creates’ by its nature—still another godlike attribute of human nature that human beings naturally attribute to their gods. Language itself abstracts, unable to express the particular, and so takes over our minds, making our minds think abstractly. Those among us who don’t think too much, those “who are more concerned with life than with study, who spend more of their time out of doors than in libraries, whose occupations and temperaments lead them to observe real beings,” understand this better than bookish pedants and priests.

Feuerbach is careful not to dismiss abstractions entirely. “I do not deny the existence of wisdom, goodness, beauty; I deny only that these class concepts are independent beings, either as gods, or as attributes of God, or as Platonic Ideas, or as self-positing Hegelian concepts; I merely maintain that they exist only in wise, good, beautiful individuals” as their attributes, as “characteristics or determinations of individuality,” not as “beings in themselves.” In terms of physical nature, my form consists of the outer limits of my body; someone can trace the outline of my body if I lie down on a large piece of cardboard, but that outline abstracts from my body itself, having no reality beyond the ink or carbon left behind by the instrument that traced it.

Feuerbach next turns to a refutation of the teleological proof of God’s existence, often called the argument from design—the Apostle Paul’s testimony, that the perceivable order of the world implies an ‘orderer,’ God. Feuerbach rejoins that “what man interprets as the purposiveness of nature is in reality nothing other than the unity of the world, the harmony of its causes and effects, and in general the all-embracing order of things in nature,” one that “gives man the impression of wisdom and purposiveness in nature,” but does not prove it. Feuerbach equally denies that the world “owe[s] its existence to any accident,” the “patently irrational notion” that it derived from “the fortuitous clash of atoms,” a fantasy “tantamount to explaining the genesis of a literary work, the Annales of Ennius, for example, by a chance combination of letters.” The sum of things does not exist due to intention or to chance, as far as perceiving and reasoning man can know. Being is ‘because’ it is, not ‘in order for’ anything or by fortunate concatenation. We only know that the universe is, not how or why, and we know that it is thanks to our senses, our only means of knowing anything. 

And even if teleology were real, this wouldn’t prove the existence of God or gods. “God is merely the hypostasized and objectified essence of the human imagination.” We “can give no reason for a natural law,” even if “analogy leads us to the belief, or rather the certainty, that the law has a natural cause.” To infer the existence of God from the natural order is to confuse nature, which is a ‘republic’ in which all elements interplay, with a monarchic Being who acts miraculously, counter to nature, by fiat. There “is only one regime” in nature, a republic. In human nature, “my head may be the president of my life, but it is not an absolute monarch, king by divine right,” having the same substance “of flesh and blood” as the stomach, the heart, or any of the other organs. It rules but “does not differ from them in kind, in race,” exerting no “despotic power.” if it “tries to play the prince and make unnatural demands” on the other organs it will be “stripped of its command.” And “just as a republic, at least the democratic republic I have in mind, is governed not by princes but by representatives of the people, so nature is not governed by gods, but only by natural forces, natural laws, and natural elements or beings.” To posit the existence of God, an immaterial being, “breaks off this necessary connection” between physical things, between the physical senses and the physical objects they perceive. “Calvin says explicitly that God in the Old Testament created light before the sun, in order that men might see that the beneficent effects of light were not necessarily connected with the sun, that even without the sun God is capable of doing what He now, in the customary but by no means necessary course of nature, does by means of the sun.” But “if there is a God, why the world, why nature,” a being that cannot achieve the perfection of God? “It has often been said that the world is inexplicable without a God; but the exact opposite is true: if there is a God, the existence of a world becomes inexplicable; for then the world is utterly superfluous,” as “nothing follows from God; everything beside Him is superfluous, futile, meaningless.” Biblical religion is nihilism, its claim of something coming out of nothing utterly irrational not only in terms of efficient and material causation but in terms of teleological causation, since there is no rational purpose for a perfect Being to create an imperfect thing. Moslem theologians are more rigorously rational than their Christian counterparts, maintaining “quite correctly from the standpoint of theology” that all things are entirely dependent upon God’s will, that there is no nature that acts in any way independently of God. Fire could cool things, if God willed that. ‘Christian rationalism’ of the sort propounded by Aquinas is only “theism attenuated by atheism or naturalism or cosmism, in short, by elements opposed to theism”—a “limited, restricted, and incomplete atheism or naturalism.” A God “who acts only in accordance with natural laws” is “a God only in name.” “Only an unlimited, wonder-working God, bound by no laws, a God who, at least in man’s faith and imagination, can save us from all trouble and affliction, is truly a God,” but a God “who is no more powerful than doctors and medicines, is an utterly superfluous, unnecessary God,” an “absurdity.” The choice is stark: no monarchy or absolute monarchy, no God and “an absolute God like the God of our fathers.” Make up your minds, young Germans.

To think straight, “man starts from what is closest to him, from the present, and draws from it inferences concerning what is further away; this procedure is common to atheist and theist alike.” The difference is that theists are, paradoxically, anthropocentric, attributing human qualities to an imagined God and (especially in paganism) to a mythicized, ‘personalized’ cosmos, while atheists “takes nature as his starting point and goes on to the study of man” as one instance of the nature of which he is a part. “The atheist puts nature before art. The theist puts art before nature; in his view, nature is a product of God’s art, or, what amounts to the same thing, of divine art.” The theist mistakenly derives “the unconscious from consciousness, rather than consciousness from the unconscious.” But the mind is no disembodied spirit breathed into man by a disembodied God; the mind is an effect of brain activity. The German mystic Jacob Böhme tried to get around this by claiming that God is corporeal, working himself up into spirituality. This “supernatural naturalism” deifies matter and is merely a product of Bōhme’s fertile, or perhaps febrile, imagination. The claim lacks any evidence, not even Scriptural evidence. “Either God or nature! There is no third, middle term combining the two.” Luckily, “for all his extravagant faith, man is unable to repress or relinquish his natural human reason,” which enables him to pursue “independent activity, diligence, education, self-mastery, and effort”—all needed, since “nature throws man upon his own resources; it does not help him unless he helps himself; it lets him sink if he cannot swim,” as part of nature, which changes perpetually, discarding one aspect of itself in favor of another, then discarding that one. Feuerbach slashes at God with Ockham’s razor: “If there is an eye watching over me, why do I need an eye of my own, why should I look out for myself?” On the grounds of religious passivity, even a man who shaves his own beard rebels against the course of nature, God’s creation. 

As for that creation, Feuerbach dismisses creatio ex nihilo as “a mere evasion”: “Where did the spirit get the nonspiritual, material corporeal substances of which the world consists?” And if, with Hegel, one claims that “He created it out of Himself, out of spiritual matter,” “how does real matter issue from spiritual matter, from God?” “What makes the world world, what makes body body and matter matter, is something that cannot be theologically or philosophically deduced from anything else; it cannot be derived, but simply is, and can be understood only in terms of itself.” Religion is the realm of imagination, of poetry, of man making gods for himself to worship. “I should merely like man to stop setting his hear on things which are no longer in keeping with his nature and needs, and which he therefore can believe and worship only by coming into conflict with himself” as a rational being. Being a thing of the imagination, a thing of poetry, of making, religion permits a morality of man’s own making. “Russian prostitutes are…full of reverence for the saints. When they receive visitors, the first thing they do is to cover their icons and put out the candles.” No less ridiculously, in Feuerbach’s estimation, a Christian “need only hang the cloak of Christian love, of divine grace, over God’s punitive justice and proceed to do anything he pleases.” More comprehensively, man’s imagination, “molded by his nature,” makes God “in his image” and remakes nature, too, “into an image of man.” The imagination enables men to behave as despots over all. Only reason can discern the natural limits of man, who in reality lives within a cosmos that is “blind and deaf to the desires and complaints of man.” Not only does man not need religion for obtaining happiness, religion impedes his pursuit of it. But “as soon as man opens his eyes, as soon as he ceases to be beclouded by religious ideas and sees reality for what it is, his heart revolts against the notion of Providence…by the way in which it saves one man and lets another go to his doom, destines one man to happiness and prosperity and others to abject misery.” Only Enlightened materialism truly promises justice.

While “religion arises solely in the night of ignorance,” a night in which dreams, products of the imagination, rule human minds, it “also springs from man’s need of light, of culture, or at least of the products of culture,” being “the first, still crude and vulgar form of human culture.” This “why every epoch, every important stage in the history of human civilization, begins with religion.” It must not end there, however, since “religion merely suppresses the symptoms of evil, not its causes.” The “radical cure” of “bestiality and barbarism” comes “only where the actions of mankind flow from causes inherent in the nature of man,” in “harmony between principle and practice, cause and effect; only then can man be complete and whole.” The union of principle or theory and practice may be seen in modern science, which may be undertaken by the right kind of education. “All history down to our own times demonstrates that the greatest horrors are compatible with religion, but not with education,” an asseveration that begs the reply, ‘Just you wait!’ Be this as it may, Feuerbach points to the supposed impossibility of “progress” within the horizons of traditional religions. “A new era also requires a new view of the first elements and foundations of human existence; it requires—if we wish to retain the word—a new religion!” To establish this new religion, the old ones must be extirpated; mere religious toleration is not enough. In this new religion, work will replace prayer. Whereas “a Christian’s wishes exceed the limits of nature and of the world,” atheism “is a complete and thoroughgoing rationalism,” one that refuses the illusory promise of immortality the old religions offer, the appeal to wishful thinking, replacing it with the reality of the true God, the “unity and equality of the human race,” of which the false God of the religions is only the “personified” disembodiment. “Those human desires that are not imaginary and fantastic are fulfilled in the course of history, of the future,” desires that “will someday be fulfilled,” will “one day be reality.” “We must therefore modify our goals and exchange divinity, in which only man’s groundless and gratuitous desires are fulfilled, for the human race or human nature, religion for education, the hereafter in heaven for the hereafter on earth, that is, the historical future, the future of mankind.” And just as the old religions insist on a public presence, so should the new ‘religion of humanity.’ “The atheism that fears the light is an unworthy and hollow atheism,” the atheism or privately held, esoteric zeteticism of the old philosophers. “True atheism, the atheism that does not shun the light,” does not merely deny the existence of God but affirms “man’s true being.” True atheism is “liberal, openhanded, openminded,” joyful, life-affirming. “We must replace the love of God by the love of man as the only true religion,” its task being “to transform friends of God into friends of man, believers into thinkers, devotees of prayer into devotees of work, candidates for the hereafter into students of this world, Christians, who, by their own profession and admission, are half animal, half angel, into men, into whole men.” 

And who shall be the evangelists of the religion of humanity? “I am not for eliminating the cultural aristocracy. Far from it.” You, my university students, can become the vanguard of human progress. The new aristocrats will be aristocrats of the intellect, but deploying intellect in a way that departs in some measure even from previous ‘moderns.’

To do so, they will need not only to reject religion as it has been, not only to plan the religion of the future, but to become the philosophers of the future. His Principles of the Philosophy of the Future provides the roadmap to this new way of life. The “task” of the philosophy of the future is to lead philosophy “from the realm of ‘departed souls’ back into the realm of embodied and living souls; of pulling philosophy down from the divine, self-sufficient bliss in the realm of ideas into human misery,” the “mud in which [man on earth] has been embedded.” That is, Platonic and even Hegelian philosophy (“the philosophy of the absolute”) levitate above human misery instead of helping to remedy it. In this, Feuerbach is not far from Marx’s preference for changing the world instead of attempting to understand it, and he regards the first task of the philosophy of the present, prelude to the philosophy of the future, to provide a “critique of human philosophy through the critique of divine philosophy”—a foreshadowing of the ‘critical thinking’ of Marx and his successors to this day.

The book consists of 65 numbered sections. The central, thirty-third section bears the number traditionally symbolizing Jesus Christ, Who is said to have died at age thirty-three. And the first step toward the philosophy of the future, according to Feuerbach, was taken by Christians, the Protestants who provided a “religious anthropology,” discoursing not so much on God ‘in himself’ but “what he is for man.” Philosophers took the next step, denying that God ‘in himself’ exists, instead claiming that God is “the essence of reason itself.” “That which is object in theism” became in philosophic hands the “subject in speculative philosophy,” with God now the “thinking ego” of man.” Feuerbach charges that “ordinary theology” presents a “self-contradictory” God, one who is human in all his thoughts and feelings yet “supposed to be a non-human and superhuman being,” an “abstracted being”—that is, a being human beings have abstracted from their own distinctive characteristics. The men Feuerbach calls “speculative” philosophers—Descartes and Leibniz, eventually followed by Hegel—rejected God as ” a being of fantasy, a far-removed, indefinite, and cloudy being,” making Him (really It) “a present and definite being,” not a holy but an absolute spirit. “Absolute idealism is nothing but the realized divine mind of Leibnizian theism; it is pure mind systematically elaborated,” as for example in Hegel’s Logic, wherein “the objects of thought are not distinguished from the essence of thought” because the Absolute Spirit is immanent in all of being; Hegelianism is a new form of pantheism, first proposed in modern philosophy by Spinoza. Feuerbach contends that pantheism is in fact “the naked truth of theism” because the things God created, according to the Bible, must have existed in God’s mind before he created them, so the mind of God does indeed comprise all things. That is, if God made matter, “how, why, and from what” did he make it” “To this, theism gives no answer” apart from mere fictions. Only pantheism gives a rationally consistent answer, if one remains within a theological framework.

It only remains for Feuerbach to reject that framework. In Hegelianism, modern science studies the material manifestations of the Absolute Spirit. “But if we were once to have no more objects and no world apart from God, so would we also have no more God—not only an ideal and imagine, but a real being—apart from this world”—a point, it should be said, that Spinoza and the rabbis who attacked him understood very well. “Pantheism connects…atheism with theism, the negation of God with God; God is a material or, in the language of Spinoza, an extended being.” “Matter is not God; it is, rather, the finite, the nondivine, the negation of God,” and pantheism amounts to “theological atheism or theological materialism.” Pantheism is “nothing other than the essence of the modern era elevated to a divine being and to a religiophilosophic principle.” 

Feuerbach dissents from pantheism on ‘Ockhamite’ grounds: If you say God is immanent in matter, why study God at all? You only need to study matter. Medieval scholars were poor scientists because they “had no interest in nature.” ‘We moderns’ no longer know much about God, devils, and angels because “mankind in the modern era lost the organism for the supernatural world and its secrets,” having lost “the disposition toward the supernatural world.” That is, knowledge follows not the head, not reason, but the heart. They were led to his heart-change by Spinoza, “the Moses of modern freethinkers and materialists”—a thought suggesting that Feuerbach conceives of himself as the Christ of such men. Spinoza has done the preliminary work of negating theoretical theology; Baconian empiricism negates practical theology by marking out experience, including experimental science, as a realm of ‘not-God.’ But empiricism by itself is sub-philosophical; modern philosophy must elevate it to theoretical status, and that is where Feuerbach comes in.

“Matter is an essential object of reason,” inasmuch as “if there were not matter, reason would have no stimulus and substance for thinking and thus no content.” In a sense, “God exists,” for moderns, but only as “a tabula rasa, an empty being, a mere idea,” a manifestation of “our ego, our mind, and our essence.” “Modern philosophy proceeded from theology; it is indeed nothing other than theology dissolved and transformed into philosophy,” from Descartes to Hegel. “The culmination of modern philosophy is the Hegelian philosophy,” a “pantheistic idealism.” This idealism must be purged from philosophy altogether by the philosophers of the future, following the lead of Feuerbach. “The historical necessity and justification of modern philosophy attaches itself…mainly to the critique of Hegel.”

The problem with Hegel: his Absolute Spirit, unfolding dialectically in time, amounts to God’s “self-liberation from matter,” albeit strictly within the human mind. Some of the previous philosophers had taught that philosophers, and philosophers alone, liberate themselves from matter, that this “self-liberation [is] the virtue of a human being,” but they didn’t posit anything like the Absolute Spirit, and so did not embrace historicism, the notion that all events up to Hegel’s metaphysics were ‘relative to’ and propaedeutic of the ‘end of History,’ the culmination of this eons-long process. In Hegel’s theory, “God is God only because he overcomes and negates matter,” which is the negation of God. “Only the negation of [this] negation is the true affirmation,” but as far as Feuerbach is concerned this returns us to “the point from which we started—in the bosom of God.” “The secret of the Hegelian dialectic lies, in the last analysis, only in the fact that it negates theology by philosophy and then, in turn, negates philosophy by theology,” resulting in “a self-contradictory, atheistic God.” This isn’t quite fair to Hegel, for whom God or the Absolute Spirit is not a ‘he’ but an ‘it’; it would be better to complain that this returns us to a sort of neo-Platonism, a triumph of mental force over brute matter—the victory of a form of energy over matter. [2] At any rate, Feuerbach alleges that the “speculative identity of mind and matter” seen in Hegel is “nothing more than the unfortunate contradiction of the modern era,” which cannot quite relinquish the divine. “Just as the divine essence is nothing other than the essence of man liberated from the limits of nature, so is the essence of absolute idealism nothing other than the essence of subjective idealism liberated from its limits, and, indeed, rational limits, of subjectivity, that is, from sensation or objectivity in general.” ‘Absolute’ theology, seen not only in Hegel but in such non- or pre-historicist idealists as Kant and Fichte, mistakenly attempts to ‘objectify’ the goings-on in the brain, thereby alienating man “from his own essence and activity.”

Such philosophers quite literally talk “nonsense”—non-sense—by rejecting the evidence of the senses or rather attempting to overcome sense-impressions with ideational illusions of various sorts. “The proof that something is has no other meaning that something is not only thought of.” Anything that is only thought of doesn’t really exist. Concretely, if “I have one hundred dollars only in the mind, but the other dollars in the hand,” the dollars in my mind “exist just for me” but the dollars in my hand “also exist for others” because “they can be felt and seen.” Feuerbach derives the thought of right from what would seem the unpromising soil of materialism by arguing that if I am merely an idea in the head of someone else, “I must put up with everything.” Other persons could “portray me in a way that would be a true caricature without my being able to protest against it,” whereas “when I am still really existing, then I can thwart him, then I can make him feel and prove to him that there is a vast difference between me as I am in his conception and me as I am in reality, namely, between me as his object and me as a subject.” As an abstraction, I am only “a being made up and invented, without the essence of being,” but as a material, sensually perceived object, “I am a liberal,” a man free of anyone else’s imagining and conceptualizing. To think ‘abstractly’ is to lose all sense of reality, of limits. Materialism is of the earth, earthy, and that is a very good thing because without limits “we would arrive at the negation of all rights, for rights are founded only on the reality of the difference between this and that,” difference sensually perceived. A real philosopher, a follower of the “new philosophy” of Feuerbach, sets material, sensually perceived limits on his thinking. “The reality of the idea is…sensation. But reality is the truth of the idea; thus, sensation is the truth of the idea”; “truth, reality, and sensation are identical.”

In the thirty-third, central section of the book, Feuerbach rejects the spiritualized love of Platonism, philosophic eros (what Marx would soon deride as “a passion of the head”) and the spiritual love of Christianity, caritas or agape. “Love is passion,” material passion, “and only passion is the hallmark of existence.” The lover distinguishes, sensually, this from that, who or what he loves from those persons or things he does not love. That is, the core of Feuerbach’s teaching makes the senses do the work of what rationalist philosophers and religious men had bestowed upon reasoning, with its eros for the truth, and/or divine inspiration, with its transformational and creative spiritual love, the love of a holy God, a God separate from His creation. It is “in feelings,” not in thoughts, that “the deepest and highest truths are concealed,” since “love is the true ontological proof of the existence of an object apart from our mind. “That object whose being affords you pleasure and whose nonbeing affords you pain—that alone exists.” “The new philosophy itself is basically nothing other than the essence of feeling elevated to consciousness; it only affirms in reason and with reason what every man—the real man—professes in his heart,” which “does not want abstract, metaphysical, or theological objects” but “real and sensuous objects and beings.” This is indeed a philosophy well designed to attract young men stuck in a university classroom.

“The secret of immediate knowledge is sensation.” This is Feuerbach’s version of Locke’s “self-evident truths,” rejected by the previous German Romantics and by subsequent German philosophers (Nietzsche, Heidegger) as English, all-too-English. But Feuerbach regards the English philosopher is the true philosopher of liberty.

Feuerbach nonetheless does not reject ideas as illusory, if they are rightly understood. If so understood, ideas are “refined” sense perceptions, as distinguished from “the vulgar and crude senses or through the eyes of the anatomists or chemists.” Such refinement comes about when we see that we cannot by ourselves distinguish between genuine sense impressions and illusions. “Only through communication and conversation between man and man do ideas arise. Not alone, but only with others, does one reach notions and reason in general” because “that which I alone perceive I doubt,” whereas “only that which the other also perceives is certain.” This doesn’t mean that truth is socially constructed, as some later thinkers will claim, but rather than it is socially confirmed. Genuine, “objective” ideas are those that are “acknowledged by another person apart from you for whom they are an object.” It is not clear why illusions might not also be shared, as they surely can be, and indeed as they must have been, up to this point, according to Feuerbach himself. At best, the requirement of ‘intersubjectivity’ might disqualify such ideas as cannot be shared; it cannot verify such ideas that can be shared and more, believed.

“Only now, in the modern era, has mankind arrived again—as once in Greece after the demise of the Oriental dream world—at the sensuous, that is, the unfalsified and objective perception of the sensuous, that is, of the real.” Contra the sham-modern Hegel, “not only is space not the negation of reason, it provides place for reason and the idea; space is the first sphere of reason,” since where there is no spatial being apart, there is also no logical being apart.” The distinction between one thing and another can only be perceived sensually if space exists between them. Logic, whether classical or Hegelian, collapses without it. This demonstrates that “the laws of reality are also the laws of thought,” not in the Hegelian sense but in the strictly material sense brought to us by the senses. Whereas Hegel supposes that contradictions are overcome by his ‘X plus not-X = X combined, ‘synthesized,’ with not-X, sensual perception enables time to unite such “opposing and contradicting determinations” by identifying the material reality underlying them, as when white paint and black paint combine to make grey paint, or when a human being can feel happy, then sad, form one intention, then the opposite one. 

“The new philosophy has…as its principle of cognition and as its subject, not the ego, the absolute, abstract mind, in short, not reason for itself alone, but the real and whole being of man,” who is not the measure of all things, which exist independently of him, but is instead “the measure of reason.” This leads Feuerbach to anticipate a bit of Nietzsche: “Do not think as a thinker, that is, with a faculty torn from the totality of the real human being and isolated for itself,” but “think as a living and real being, as one exposed to the vivifying and refreshing waves of the world’s ocean.” Only if you “think in existence, in the world as a member of it, not in the vacuum of abstraction as a solitary monad, as an absolute monarch, as an indifferent, superworldly God” can “you be sure that your ideas are unities of being and thought.” In another play on Christianity, Feuerbach affirms that “only the truth that became flesh and blood is the truth.” The difference between man and an animal is that human sense perceptions (rather than illusory ideals, which exist only in the mind) are generalizable, universalizable, even as the religious doctrines of Christianity are said, falsely, to be. Animals care only for smells that serve them as particular beings—things that they can eat or dangerous things they must avoid. Man’s sense of smell is ” a sense embracing all kinds of smell; hence it is a freer sense, a sense that can be elevated “to intellectual and scientific acts.” Human senses perceive not only other men but man as such. “Even in thinking and in being a philosopher, I am a man among men,” engaging in “a dialectic between I and thou.” As a result, Feuerbach shuns the “double truth,” the claims of philosophy on the one hand, religion on the other. The new philosophy unifies both in “the philosophy of man,” “tak[ing] the place of religion because it “has the essence of religion within itself.”

The problem with Feuerbach’s vigorously argued materialism is that it begins with the assertion that sense perceptions are all human beings have to begin with, then excludes all other mental phenomena that might not derive from sense perceptions. If human beings had no sense perceptions, would they have no thoughts? Not necessarily. They might be thinkers thinking themselves. This suggests that those who maintain that philosophy cannot refute religion any more than religion can refute philosophy have a point. By closing the minds of young Germans to God, Feuerbach left intelligent but politically inexperienced persons without firm guidance. This ended badly.

 

Notes

1. On the religion of humanity, see “Manent on the Religion of Humanity” on this cite under the category, “Bible Notes.”
2. “To the neo-Platonic philosophers…matter—namely, the material and real world in general—is no longer an authority and a reality. Fatherland, family, worldly ties, and good in general, which the ancient peripatetic philosophy still counted as man’s bliss—all these are nothing for the neo-Platonic sage,” who is no longer capable of distinguishing imagination from perception. “That which is imagination and fantasy with the Neo-Platonists was merely rationalized and transformed by Hegel into concepts.” To Neo-Platonists, God is beyond being, beyond mind, beyond any determination; their imitatio Dei is an ecstasy or rapture; their God is in reality the objectification of this psychological state.” For them, “real man became also a mere abstraction without flesh and blood, an allegorical figure of the divine being. Plotinus, at least according to the report of his biographer, was ashamed to have a body.”