One of Leo Strauss’s major contributions to the history of philosophy was to take seriously the fact that Plato’s Socrates is a textual character who comes to us through the medium of a literary form, the “dialogues of Plato.” Like the author of a play, “in none of his dialogues does Plato speak a single word”1, and one would be too quick, according to Strauss, to assume that Socrates is always his spokesman, or even that these dialogues are simple transcriptions of exchanges that actually took place. Strauss does not, however, give up the idea that, since it was Plato who wrote them, his dialogues nonetheless express his thought. To identify it, one must outwit the stratagems of obliquity and ruse set in place by the author who, “between the lines”2 of the exoteric writing accessible to all on a first reading, inserts another, esoteric writing — one that demands of a minority of careful readers the capacity, indeed an art, of reading “between the lines,” indispensable for grasping the author’s art of writing. This art of writing, a refuge of freedom of thought, makes it possible to circumvent the constraints that have weighed — and still weigh, according to Strauss — upon philosophy, that uncompromising search for truth, that attempt to move beyond opinion toward knowledge, the very paradigm of independent thought. To these constraints Strauss gives the name persecution, a particularly strong term to designate “a variety of phenomena, from the most cruel type, represented by the Spanish Inquisition, to the least severe, social ostracism”3.
Certain commentators have stressed, in Strauss’s work, the centrality of the “theologico-political problem”4, to which his various themes of reflection each refer in their own way5. They base this on the few autobiographical declarations in which Strauss evokes his early encounter with this problem as a “young Jew born and raised in Germany”6 at the beginning of the twentieth century. Raised in an orthodox family, he undertook the study of philosophy, which would lead him to question the soundness of the modern critique of religion, of which Spinoza is one of the founders. Spinoza would lead him to Maimonides and, from there, he would return to the dialogues of Plato by way of the Islamic philosophers Avicenna and, above all, al-Fārābī, indispensable for understanding “the philosophical background of Maimonides”7.
In reading what al-Fārābī writes about Plato, Strauss discovers the art of writing whose technique he would recognize again in all the philosophers who, right up to modernity, concerned themselves with politics.
The theologico-political problem also posed itself in terms specific to that moment in the intellectual and philosophical history of Germany. One was witnessing, he recalls, an “awakening of theology, associated (…) with the names of Karl Barth and Franz Rosenzweig”8, to whom must be added Hermann Cohen and Martin Buber. In various forms, the aim was to give renewed meaning to the openness to transcendence proper to the revealed religions, by reinterpreting them in the terms of modern philosophy. Strauss builds his reflection by setting himself apart from this kind of reinterpretation of Judaism, and from that of Martin Buber in particular, who transposes the categories of human dialogue (I–Thou) onto the relation between man and God.
The question that Strauss’s work would allow us to pose concerning dialogue — whether we analyze it through Plato or approach it in the terms of a confrontation between biblical revelation and philosophy — is that of the irreconcilables on which dialogues founder when they engage fundamental questions such as, for example, that of knowing what the best life for a human being is. The presentation I should like to attempt here is not meant to express adherence to all of Strauss’s propositions, any more than I shall ask to what extent his reading of the medieval philosophers is beyond dispute. I should like only to bring out the way in which Strauss restores relief to questions we tend to believe settled once and for all. He invites us to formulate our own dilemmas and to take responsibility for certain of our choices that until now had remained implicit.
I – The manifest secret of Plato’s Republic, or the ruses of the dialogue form
In a certain way, Plato himself puts us on the alert when, in the Republic, his Socrates distinguishes dramas from narratives9: in a narrative, the poet recounts what has happened and speaks in his own name, whereas in a drama he imitates the words of someone else, makes his elocution as similar as possible to that of his character, and, insofar as he makes several characters speak in turn, one may say that he conceals himself. Does not Plato’s Socrates likewise accumulate the signs of dissimulation, chiefly because his most famous trait is irony? The etymology of irony comes from the Greek present participle εἴρων, “one who questions” and even “one who feigns ignorance,” who conceals his wisdom, who does not answer or answers by posing a question. Whoever takes up a dialogue of Plato for the first time has difficulty recognizing in it what is generally meant by dialogue. A strange dialogue indeed, this exchange in which one of the protagonists does not say what he thinks but makes the other speak, then questions him about what he has said, strives to make him acknowledge his contradictions, destabilizes him to the point where he ends up no longer knowing what to say…
Writing between the lines is not a coded message to be deciphered with the aid of a key. The double writing rests on a discrepancy constitutive of the written thing and of the act of reading themselves: the reader’s attention is first drawn to the theme treated by the text, its immediate meaning, and it is only on re-reading that he may eventually attend to the way in which the theme is treated — a second moment made possible by the very materiality of the written compared with the fleetingness of the spoken. Thus, since Plato’s dialogues have a dramaturgical form, one must take account of all the elements of their staging, for it is by this means that “what Plato thinks about the subject in question (…) first appears”10. One must attend to the place where the conversation is held, to the number of participants, but also to the action, to what the dialogue does, and ask, for example: “On what sort of men does Socrates act by his words? What is the age, character, capacities, social position, and appearance of each of them?”, but also: “Does Socrates attain his ends?”11
Let us follow for a moment the trail of the character Thrasymachus. Every introduction to philosophy begins by recalling Socrates’s head-on opposition to the sophists and rhetoricians, and Thrasymachus, presented in Book I of the Republic as a raving madman, is one of the most emblematic of them. After his controversy with Glaucon and Adeimantus in the first part of Book II, the crucial moment is Socrates’s proposal to defer the elaboration of the just as such in order to apprehend it as political justice, by means of a magnifying effect: justice being “the affair of the individual man, but (…) also the affair of an entire city,” one would recognize it more easily by considering it “on a larger support (…), seeking in the visible form of the smaller the resemblance to the larger,” even if one must then return to the individual, to the smaller. The point is not to examine the respect or non-respect of justice in real cities, but to consider “in speech a city in the process of coming into being”12 — a city intrinsically just and rational, of which there is and has been no example in reality. A city in speech, but written nonetheless, what is to be seen in it being “the same letters, but larger”13. Each would do in it what it suits him to do by nature; some would be artisans or farmers, others would govern, and between the two the guardians would be charged with defending the city. Having already faced the incredulity of his audience when he had launched the community of women and children as one of the conditions of the just city, Socrates expects to find himself flooded “with ridicule and discredit” when he lets the secret out: it is necessary “that philosophers reign in the cities, or else (…) that those who are called kings and powerful men should philosophize in an authentic and satisfactory manner”14.
Attending to Thrasymachus’s entrances and exits, to his silences and his interventions, all the while relating them to this declaration, Strauss shows that, pressed further by Polemarchus to treat of the very possibility of the just city, Socrates admits that the “restoration of justice on the new plane requires the support of Thrasymachus’s art, the art of rhetoric”15. Socrates nowhere says so explicitly, but Strauss infers it from one of his innocuous remarks at the moment when the question of the possibility of the just city joins that of the behavior of the multitude. Granting that one could forge the loyalty of the guardians by means of the “noble lie” of birth from a common mother-earth that makes them all brothers (Book III), of collective festivals organizing the betrothals (Book V), or of the institution of the community of women and children meant to make the future guardians incapable of knowing who their fathers and mothers are, how could the philosophers persuade the demos — unconcerned by the education reserved for the guardians — of their capacity to govern? After having described in striking terms the behavior of the great popular animal manipulated by the sophists, Socrates concludes, on the one hand, that “it is impossible for the mass to be philosophic” and, on the other, that “it is inevitable that those who philosophize be disapproved of by the mass”16. While he maintains throughout that the mass cannot be philosophic, the second assertion is less firm. A little further on, Strauss notes, Socrates defends Thrasymachus against Glaucon and declares incidentally that they “have just become friends, without indeed having been enemies before”17. If “the mass of people,” Socrates continues, “is not persuaded by what we say,” it is because “they have not sufficiently been the listeners of discourses at once beautiful and free”18 capable of persuading them of the necessity of a rule of philosophers, whereas today they hear only slanders about them. To persuade the masses (and not to transform them into so many philosophers), Strauss concludes, one would have great need of “the art of Thrasymachus, mastered by the philosopher and placed in the service of philosophy”19.
This hypothesis is, however, silently abandoned a few pages further on, and the whole of Strauss’s decipherment consists in showing how Plato undermines all his Socrates’s explicit assertions about the just city by multiplying the indications of its impossibility — that of the community of women and children in particular, “given the fact that men seem naturally to desire to have children of their own”20. What is at stake here is the “nature of political things,” constitutively imperfect and limited, for reason and the “Just Discourse”21 will never predominate over the minds of men, even though the political dimension is essential to human existence. Provided, according to Strauss, that its openness to a transpolitical dimension be recognized — a dimension indicated by the differentiations that spontaneously structure all political life (justice/injustice, virtue/vice, courage/cowardice, etc.). Aiming at the knowledge of this dimension, political philosophy takes its support from men’s opinions on the subject, beginning by posing the question “what is?” justice, virtue, courage, piety — in short, all the values to which political conflicts appeal.
Plato’s work of undermining also concerns the presupposition of a correspondence between the city and the individual that justified examining justice in large letters in order then to return, by analogy, to the small letters, to the individual. Socrates had very early defined the just man as the one in whom the parts of the soul do their work well, that is, the one in whom “reason commands his infra-rational powers” — something only the philosopher who “has cultivated his reason” is capable of attaining, even if the city in which he lives is unjust. The scandalous explicit formulation according to which the just city would be the one where philosophers were kings or kings philosophers conceals a “manifest secret”: “to lead a just life is to lead a withdrawn life, the withdrawn life, par excellence, of the philosopher”22 — “secret,” because expressed indirectly thanks to an art of writing, “manifest,” because legible to whoever has known how to read and to give its proper weight to the following passage: “there, I said, my friend, when this manifests itself in a certain mode, is what justice may well consist in: minding one’s own affairs”23. According to Strauss, this indicates that Plato admits a gap, and indeed an irreducible incompatibility, between philosophy and the city:
If the best city itself rests wholly on a fundamental lie, even if it is a noble lie, one may well expect that the opinions on which imperfect cities rest, or in which they believe, will not be true, to say the least. Precisely the best among the non-philosophers, the good citizens, are passionately attached to these opinions and consequently hostile to philosophy (…), which is the attempt to move beyond opinion toward knowledge.24
It was the condemnation of Socrates to death by the tribunal of an Athens once again democratic after the rout of the Thirty Tyrants that, according to Strauss, prompted Plato to recognize “that philosophy was in itself suspect and odious to the majority of men”25. Like the very specific manner Socrates had of conversing with his contemporaries, “philosophical inquiry,” D. Tanguay comments, “begins where the first and immediate confidence in the truth of what has been transmitted by hearsay is shaken”26; it questions the opinions that form the cement of a society, the self-evidences of common sense, the values admitted by all, and first of all religious certainties.
II – Can dialogism save Revelation?
Just after bringing to light Socrates’s mention of his new friendship with Thrasymachus — that is, the admission of the necessity of integrating his art into the better city — Strauss notes that, to his “knowledge, the only one to have studied the Republic and understood this crucial fact is al-Fārābī, an Islamic philosopher in full flourishing around 900”27. A native of the Baghdad region, called the “second Master” after Aristotle by both Averroes and Maimonides, and the author in particular of two works on Plato, it is in al-Fārābī that Strauss, leaving aside the Christian readings of Plato, discovers a reading that plays on both the exoteric and esoteric registers, in a context common to Judaism and Islam28. Al-Fārābī, encountered — let us recall — by a “young Jew born and raised in Germany” for whom the “theologico-political problem” was central. Even if he gives this problem a scope that concerns Western modernity in general, Strauss approaches it from the specific way in which it presented itself to the Jews of his time. Jewish orthodoxy — that is, “belief in the creation of the world, revelation at Sinai, the reality of the miracles of the Bible, the immutable and obligatory character of the revealed law”29 — was being called into question both by Zionism and by the Enlightenment, convinced that they had refuted its premises, premises to which modern Jews had enthusiastically subscribed. One was also witnessing an enterprise of rescue of traditional Judaism, in order to show a possible reconciliation between orthodoxy and philosophy — by way, why not, of a dialogue.
Strauss’s intellectual awakening coincided historically with the establishment of the Weimar Republic, the first liberal democracy Germany had known. It proved extremely weak, so that “the situation of German Jews (in it) was more precarious (…) than in any other Western country”30. Liberal democracy had originally understood itself as the opposite of the “kingdom of darkness” evoked by the Middle Ages, where the social bond was constituted by the Christian religion of the Catholic Church. In this vein, the Weimar Republic granted the Jews the fullness of political rights, and most of them believed that liberalism had solved their problem. On the one hand, the State declaring itself neutral with regard to any religion whatsoever, they were Germans of the Jewish faith, this religious preference henceforth to be lived privately; on the other hand, the Jews supposed that the same held within German society and culture. Contrary to their expectations, not only did discrimination against them persist, but, by the very fact of its liberal structure, the State proved incapable of preventing the resurgence of hatred against them within society: unable to enact a law adapted only to a part of the population, it would have had to prohibit discrimination by law “in all its forms,” which would have meant nothing less than “the abolition of the private sphere, the negation of the difference between the State and society”31.
To escape discrimination, individual Jews could choose assimilation, that is, cease “to be recognizable as Jews”32, cease to be Jews. Strauss set this choice aside from the outset and then found himself confronted with three possible outcomes.
The first, which “concerned itself more passionately and more seriously with the human dignity of the Jews than any other movement”33, was that of his student youth. Having brought to light the limits of liberalism, political Zionism broke at the same time with traditional Jewish hopes in order to regard the Jewish problem as a purely human problem: the Jews had to understand themselves as a nation like the others and establish a modern, liberal, secular State on a land — at first, any land at all. Cultural Zionism, to be sure, rebelled against this narrow approach by demanding that one take account of the spirit of Judaism, of the “Jewish culture having its roots in the Jewish heritage”34, but Strauss poses to this conception a question decisive for understanding what he means by the theologico-political problem:
“the foundation, the authoritative ground of the Jewish heritage, presents itself not as the product of the human mind, but as a divine gift, as a divine revelation. Does one not completely distort the meaning of the heritage to which one claims to submit faithfully when one interprets it as a culture, similar to any other culture?”35
A second outcome was that of teshuva, of the return to orthodoxy, coupled at once with the Jewish way of life and with the messianic expectation, convinced that salvation would come from a divine intervention if and only if the Jews held firmly to the Law. Such a conviction collides head-on with the consciousness of the modern Jew formed in the Western Enlightenment. Has it not been “reduced to nothing once and for all, not by a blind rebellion, but by an evident refutation”36? According to Strauss, this position is problematic: “Must not the Jew who cannot believe what his ancestors believed admit, on the one hand, that his ancestors devoted themselves to an illusion” and resolutely commit himself to assimilation in the name of reason? This illusion, Strauss continues on the other hand, had something “heroic”37 about it, by comparison with the prosaic attitudes engendered by assimilation in the Western countries, such as, for example, the “kind of glorification by Jews of any more or less intelligent and brilliant Jewish mediocrity, which is just as pitiful and laughable”38.
These questions had prompted Strauss to turn, in the years 1925–1928, to Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise, celebrated and almost canonized by modern Jews as the man who first conducted a rational refutation of the presupposition of divine revelation and defended the freedom to philosophize. The result of the inquiry conducted by Strauss is that this refutation misses its mark, for it does not form an exact representation of the plane on which orthodoxy resists. Strauss admits that if orthodoxy claims “to know that the Bible is divinely revealed (…) or that the miracles (…) actually happened,” then Spinoza has refuted it. But what happens if it is content to “affirm that it believes in those things”? Such belief would be rationally refuted only if one could demonstrate that what one believes is strictly impossible. Now even modern cosmology has never demonstrated, for example, the impossibility that the solar system “came into existence miraculously in the manner described by the Bible,” by the doing of “an all-powerful God whose will is unfathomable, whose ways are not ours, who has decided to dwell in deep obscurity.” The intractable premise on which orthodoxy rests is that such a God “can exist.” If one admits this, the rest (the miracles, the revelation) is also possible. Now, according to Strauss, neither Spinoza nor the modern Enlightenment has refuted this possibility, the sign of it being that they “owed their success in their struggle against orthodoxy to laughter and derision”39.
Contemporary with the modern crisis of reason, there was a third outcome, a return to religion and an acceptance of revelation that did not pass by way of pure and simple alignment with the traditional religious dogmas. This path was explored in particular by the new thinking of Franz Rosenzweig. Setting out anew from the attack of the Enlightenment and from the failure of every rational theology entangled in the sophisticated search for proofs of the existence of God, Rosenzweig acknowledges that “there is no objective proof whatsoever in favor of revelation”40. It is another track that must be taken. Revelation is the subjective experience of an unexpected alterity that comes from outside in the manner of an encounter exceeding my capacities of comprehension, “it is the experience of God as Thou, as father and king of all men (…) who asks that one love him with all one’s heart, with all one’s strength, with all one’s soul”41. The dialogical form of such an experience is formulated in a particularly clear way by Martin Buber, for whom relation is “in the beginning”42. He apprehends it from the words of men: I/it is the word of the relation to things, I/thou that of the relation to the other man. The relation to the other man is denatured if one states it in the categories of subject and object. “To say Thou,” Buber writes, “is to have no thing for an object (…). Thou borders on nothing. He who says Thou has no thing, he has nothing. But he offers himself to a relation”43. The relation par excellence is the relation between humans, whereas with things one would speak rather of a connection. To say Thou is to respond to the presence of the other. Or again: as presence, the other announces itself to me in a mode other than that of the inanimate objectivity of things. Moreover — and this is essential — according to Buber, each Thou is implicitly addressed to an eternal Thou; each encounter opens toward a Wholly-Other whose call designates me in person, me and no other. In Strauss’s terms, “what (according to Buber) the authors of the Bible say is never more than a human expression of the wordless call of God, or a human response to that call”44. Human, that is, apprehended in dialogical terms.
Strauss voices several reservations with regard to such a dialogical turn supposed to permit a return to Judaism. As D. Tanguay writes: “modern thought wishes to overcome (the) modern surpassing of religion by a return to religion that goes beyond modern philosophy”45. That is where the shoe pinches, according to Strauss. He addresses to the new thinking the same critique he addressed to cultural Zionism: “Rosenzweig never believed that his return to biblical faith could be a return to the form in which that faith had expressed or understood itself in the past.” Although his principle of selection is not the same, he “agrees with religious liberalism as regards the necessity of making a choice among the traditional beliefs and rules”46. As for the dialogical version of revelation as experience of the Wholly-Other, it leaves entire the question of the content of the encounter. In what way, Strauss asks, does it permit a return to Judaism rather than to any other religion? What in particular becomes of the specificity of revelation as the proclamation of the Law, that is, of “a social order, an order encompassing everything, regulating not only actions but also thoughts and opinions”47? If one is incapable of transmitting clearly what the experience transmits, the experience risks being delivered over to all sorts of interpretations that one might suspect “of being attempts to hide the radical destitution, dereliction, and exposure of man”48.
III – The irreducible uncertainty of foundations
There is no doubt that Strauss remained “attached his whole life to an orthodox conception of religion.” But one must not be mistaken about this. The observation of orthodoxy’s resistance both to the attacks of modern reason and to the “contemporary attempts, conscious or not, to save religion by adapting it to the modern world”49 in no way leads him to align himself with Jewish religious orthodoxy. The argument against Spinoza — and through him against the Enlightenment — can be turned back against orthodoxy: if the Enlightenment did not succeed in demonstrating that an all-powerful and creating God is impossible, orthodoxy, fundamentally, maintains nothing more than the idea that this God is possible. It is therefore not impossible either that God be impossible… And it is doubtless of himself that Strauss speaks when he writes that “the deepest problem (of his contemporaries) would be solved by (a) return” to orthodoxy, but that “intellectual probity forbids them to sacrifice the intellect in order to satisfy even the most vital need”50.
It is this same intellectual probity that pushed Strauss to criticize the way in which the modern rationalism issuing from the Enlightenment claimed to satisfy this vital need. The self-consciousness of the Enlightenment is progress, the conviction that the present is better than the past and that the development of the sciences would bring happiness to humanity through the conquest and mastery of nature. “The incredible barbarization to which we have, alas, been witness in the course of this century”51 has tragically belied this optimism. So too, “modern man is a giant compared with the man of former times. But there is no equivalent progress in wisdom and goodness. Moreover, this development of modern science culminated in the conception according to which man is not capable, in a trustworthy manner, of distinguishing good from evil — the famous ‘value judgment’”52. The successes won by this development led to the depreciation of all knowledge that is not scientific. And philosophy began to recognize “Science with a capital S”53 as the sole authority, ending by foundering in historicism and relativism. It thus cut itself off from the major preoccupation of its Greek origins: the openness of the human mind to the question of the Whole of natural things and the definition of wisdom, sophia, as the knowledge of all things.
In recalling this initial orientation, Strauss reactivates a conflict between “Greek wisdom and biblical wisdom, (each of which) claims to be the true wisdom.” Modernity had believed it could definitively transcend this conflict, even seeking to reinterpret biblical revelation in its own terms. For Strauss, the incompatibility remains entire: “According to the Bible, the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord; according to the Greek philosophers, the beginning of wisdom is wonder.” To state this incompatibility in its radicality is to do justice to both, by formulating them in the terms in which they conceive themselves, as if one had them appear before us: “we are open to both and disposed to hear them both”54.
To fear the Lord presupposes having accepted the covenant with the One who has revealed himself to men through his commandments, by the intermediary of Moses, but who remains “mysterious to the rest of the chosen people,” while being “the source of the knowledge of good and evil”55.
The other beginning of wisdom is very different. If wonder is a passion56, it is a recoil before what is, inaugurating the question “what is?”, from which will emerge that of the relations among beings, that is, of the Whole. If the Whole “is,” it “cannot ‘be’ in the sense in which ‘is’ any thing that ‘is’ something.” In this sense, the Whole “is” not; it “must be ‘beyond’ being”57. But whereas “the Torah is said in the Torah to be ‘our wisdom in the eyes of the nations’”58, philo-sophy is not a wisdom but the love of wisdom, the relentless effort toward the knowledge of the Whole and not the certainty of having attained it. For Strauss the energy of philosophy, the pleasure felt in the search for truth, is erotic, and the always-deferred possession of its object only renews its dynamic. An unexamined life is not worth living, Socrates affirmed. Understood in the manner of the ancient philosophers, this search means more than an intellectual pleasure; it implies a way of life entire, held to be the best. Strauss attaches fundamental importance to the distinction between sophia and philosophia. The oracle of Delphi had nonetheless indicated to Socrates that he was the wisest of all men. Socrates does not take this declaration literally; he wishes to verify it for himself and, to this end, goes to question those who were reputed the wisest of his time. From these interviews he emerges each time convinced of one single thing: I am wiser than they, for I know that I do not know59. This attitude is to be maintained, right into our most incontestable cognitive advances. Strauss himself characterized what he meant by philosophy: “as such, (it) is neither dogmatic nor skeptical, and still less ‘decisionist,’ but zetetic (or skeptical in the original sense of the term). Philosophy, as such, is nothing other than the genuine awareness of the problems, that is, of the general and fundamental problems”60.
To have the two wisdoms appear before us in this way is not to make them dialogue. Nor is it a matter of remaining oneself external to them, for the openness and the hearing that summon them represent in themselves a taking of sides: “As for us, we are not wise (…). We are seekers of wisdom, philo-sophoi. And in saying that we wish first to hear and then to act, and to decide, we have already decided in favor of Athens against Jerusalem”61.
Such would have been the true Platonism of al-Fārābī and the reason for its masking through recourse to an art of writing. The medieval philosophers developed in exoteric fashion a political interpretation of revelation as a Law given to men by the intermediary of a prophet: this Law procured no knowledge but stood in for the theological foundation from which a certain social and political order arose. Theologico-political, this order recognized “neither philosophy nor the right to philosophize,” and so “philosophy and the philosophers were ‘in great danger’”62. The attitude of political prudence adopted by the medieval philosophers — and before them by the philosophers of antiquity — was nonetheless not due solely to the necessity of protecting themselves, but stemmed from the very nature of the philosophical way of life. The happiness it procures does not reside in the certainty of having found an answer; the writing between the lines hides no truth. What must not be divulged is the possibility that the principles to which our moral and political life necessarily appeal may be undemonstrable, because the ontological presuppositions on which they rest are themselves undemonstrable. In this sense, the search for truth that animates philosophy incites it to go beyond the common morality it respects without being, any more than anyone else, in a position to demonstrate it. The prudence of the philosopher also means that, as a man, the stability of political life matters to him and that it would seem to him dangerous to lead the city to doubt its values. What Strauss discovers in studying the medieval Enlightenment is the fact that human reason did not wait for the modern Enlightenment to stand on the crest of such an uncertainty regarding the foundations of social and political life. Modernity would only have rediscovered what the philosophers of antiquity and the Middle Ages had always known. The difference is that it makes this uncertainty public — Strauss having set himself the task of showing that this did not have only good sides. While he subscribes without reservation to liberal tolerance and respect for individual liberties, as well as to the possibility of expressing oneself without censorship, he also insists on a corollary frequent to this openness: relativism, the belief that all points of view are of equal worth, and hence the risk that, concerning its fundamental principles, liberal democracy renders its citizens incapable of defending them. As the Argentine philosopher Claudia Hilb shows, Strauss arrives, by another route, at what Claude Lefort analyzes as the upheaval characterizing the modern democratic revolution: democracy assumes that the political order be radically severed from any transcendent theological anchoring and that it be impossible to produce an ultimate answer on the legitimate and the illegitimate, while recognizing the very legitimacy of conflictual discussions on the subject63.
On the political plane Strauss is a conservative. Like Plato he is wary of public discussion, where only opinions that contradict one another confront each other, each unhesitating to contradict himself as needed. One can truly begin to dialogue only from the moment when each will have recognized his own contradictions and the conflict of opinions gives rise to what Plato calls dialectic — that search, through free discussion, for a passage leading from opinions to knowledge. If the written dialogue is an encrypted device, placing Socrates in the presence of non-philosophers, the Republic mentions dialectic as a search between two that cannot concern just anyone. Better still, writing between the lines would select its readers, institute a kind of community of the elect that would span the epochs — a prefiguration of what the Renaissance would call the Republic of Letters. The inflection of Straussian thought is elitist and not egalitarian.
Having decided in favor of Athens, Strauss could only have subscribed to the conviction of Éric Weil, for whom the Socratic injunction to give an account through language signifies a refusal of violence, a suspension of armed conflict. In this, to pass from direct conflict to the conflict of opinions in ordinary dialogue has a moral and political virtue. Better to discuss than to fight. Strauss points out, however, the illusion that would consist in believing that, thanks to dialogue, one could arrive at the unification of certain fundamental existential options. Never will any dialogue be able to reduce the irreconcilable presuppositions that set philosophy and revealed religion against each other: “The philosopher denies the very premises on which any demonstration of the truth of any revealed religion is founded. One may say that this denial comes from the fact that, being a philosopher, he is insensible to, or has never tasted, this ‘divine thing’ or this ‘divine commandment’”64. And yet, against all odds, “we remain Jews”65…
Notes
L. Strauss, “On Plato’s Republic,” in The City and Man (La cité et l’homme), trans. O. Berrichon-Sedeyn, Paris, Agora, 1987, p. 69.↩︎
L. Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (La persécution et l’art d’écrire), trans. O. Berrichon-Sedeyn, Paris, Agora, 1989, p. 57.↩︎
Ibid., p. 66.↩︎
L. Strauss, “Preface to ‘Spinoza’s Critique of Religion’” (« Préface à “La Critique spinoziste de la Religion” »), trans. O. Berrichon-Sedeyn, in Why We Remain Jews. Biblical Revelation and Philosophy (Pourquoi nous restons juifs. Révélation biblique et philosophie), Paris, La Table ronde, 2001, p. 61.↩︎
See in particular Daniel Tanguay, Leo Strauss. Une biographie intellectuelle (Leo Strauss: An Intellectual Biography), Paris, Grasset, 2003, or Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss. Le problème théologico-politique (Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem), Paris, Bayard, 2006.↩︎
L. Strauss, “Preface to ‘Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,’” op. cit., p. 61. Cited by Daniel Tanguay, Leo Strauss, op. cit., p. 17.↩︎
L. Strauss, Al-Fārābī’s Plato (Le Platon de Fârâbî), trans. O. Sedeyn, Paris, Allia, 2002, p. 8.↩︎
L. Strauss, “Preface of 1964” to The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (La philosophie politique de Hobbes), trans. A. Enegren and M.-B. de Launay, Paris, Belin, 1991, p. 11.↩︎
Plato, The Republic. On the Political Regime (La République. Du régime politique), II, 392d–394c, trans. P. Pachet, Paris, Folio, Gallimard, 1996, p. 156 ff. See L. Strauss, “The Problem of Socrates,” in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism (La renaissance du rationalisme politique classique), trans. T. L. Pangle, Paris, Gallimard, 1993, p. 220. The art of writing is not limited to dialogical writing. Strauss would decipher it also in works written in the form of treatises.↩︎
Ibid., p. 224.↩︎
L. Strauss, “On Plato’s Republic,” op. cit., p. 80–81.↩︎
Plato, The Republic. On the Political Regime, II, 368e–369a, op. cit., p. 114. My italics.↩︎
Ibid., 368d.↩︎
Ibid., V, 473c, p. 293.↩︎
L. Strauss, “The Problem of Socrates,” op. cit., p. 227.↩︎
Plato, The Republic, Bk. VI, 494a, op. cit., p. 324–325.↩︎
Ibid., 498d–499, p. 332.↩︎
Ibid., 499a, p. 333.↩︎
L. Strauss, “On Plato’s Republic,” op. cit., p. 159.↩︎
Ibid., p. 151.↩︎
L. Strauss, “The Problem of Socrates,” op. cit., p. 229 & 230.↩︎
Ibid. In French in the text.↩︎
Plato, The Republic, Bk. IV, 433b, op. cit., p. 225. This is not the only secret; there is another, “deeper” one, requiring for its decipherment an art of reading still more subtle (see “The Problem of Socrates,” op. cit., p. 238).↩︎
L. Strauss, “On Plato’s Republic,” op. cit., p. 161.↩︎
L. Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, op. cit., p. 67.↩︎
D. Tanguay, Leo Strauss. Une biographie intellectuelle, op. cit., p. 244.↩︎
L. Strauss, “The Problem of Socrates,” op. cit., p. 228.↩︎
I follow here the approach of D. Tanguay, who brings out the importance of what he calls the “Farabian turn” (ibid., p. 126 ff.) in Strauss’s itinerary.↩︎
Ibid., p. 252.↩︎
L. Strauss, “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique,” op. cit., p. 64.↩︎
L. Strauss, “Why We Remain Jews,” ibid., p. 19.↩︎
Ibid., p. 18.↩︎
Ibid., p. 24.↩︎
L. Strauss, “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique,” ibid., p. 69.↩︎
Ibid., p. 69–70. A humanist and secular Judaism, in a sense…↩︎
Ibid., p. 108–109.↩︎
L. Strauss, “Why We Remain Jews,” ibid., p. 35.↩︎
Ibid., p. 33. “It reminds me of villagers who have seen the birth of their first physicist and who, for that reason, acclaim him as the greatest physicist who ever was. I refuse,” Strauss continues, “to quote precisely, but when I read assertions in Jewish newspapers concerning Jewish celebrities, I always recall this story” (ibid.).↩︎
Ibid., p. 108–109. My italics. As D. Tanguay writes: “The true philosophical argument against revelation should be in a position to exclude absolutely the hypothesis of the existence of an omnipotent and mysterious God. Now philosophy has always failed to constitute a rational system that would render the whole of the real transparent. Strauss holds that neither Spinoza nor Hegel succeeded in this enterprise” (Leo Strauss. Une biographie intellectuelle, op. cit., p. 274).↩︎
L. Strauss, “Progress or Return?” (« Progrès ou retour ? »), in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, trans. P. Guglielmina, Paris, Gallimard, 1993, p. 342.↩︎
L. Strauss, “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” op. cit., p. 74–75.↩︎
Martin Buber, I and Thou (Je et Tu), trans. G. Bianquis, Paris, Aubier, 1992, p. 38.↩︎
Ibid., p. 21.↩︎
L. Strauss, “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” op. cit., p. 79.↩︎
D. Tanguay, Leo Strauss. Une biographie intellectuelle, op. cit., p. 235.↩︎
L. Strauss, “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” op. cit., p. 84.↩︎
L. Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, op. cit., p. 38.↩︎
L. Strauss, “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” op. cit., p. 80.↩︎
D. Tanguay, Leo Strauss. Une biographie intellectuelle, op. cit., p. 252.↩︎
L. Strauss, “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” op. cit., p. 72.↩︎
L. Strauss, “Progress or Return?,” op. cit., p. 320.↩︎
Ibid., p. 317.↩︎
Ibid., p. 319.↩︎
L. Strauss, “Jerusalem and Athens,” in Why We Remain Jews, op. cit., p. 139.↩︎
Ibid., p. 158. “Let us never forget that there is no biblical word equivalent to the word doubt” (ibid., p. 140).↩︎
“It is wholly characteristic of a philosopher, this pathos: to wonder. Philosophy has no other origin” (Plato, Theaetetus, 155d, trans. A. Diès, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1963, p. 177).↩︎
L. Strauss, Natural Right and History (Droit naturel et histoire), trans. M. Nathan and E. de Dampierre, Paris, Flammarion, “Champs,” 1986, p. 117. Cited by D. Tanguay, Leo Strauss. Une biographie intellectuelle, op. cit., p. 276.↩︎
L. Strauss, “Jerusalem and Athens,” op. cit., p. 138.↩︎
More precisely: “Here is a man who is less wise than I. It is indeed possible that neither of us knows anything beautiful or good. But he believes he knows when he does not, whereas I, just as in fact I do not know, no more do I believe that I know!” (Plato, Apology of Socrates, 21d, trans. L. Robin, Paris, Gallimard, “Pléiade,” 1950, p. 153–154).↩︎
L. Strauss, On Tyranny, Correspondence with Alexandre Kojève (1932–1965) (De la tyrannie, Correspondance avec Alexandre Kojève), trans. H. Kern, revised by A. Enegren, Paris, Gallimard, 1997, p. 228. Cited by D. Tanguay, Leo Strauss. Une biographie intellectuelle, op. cit., p. 278.↩︎
L. Strauss, “Jerusalem and Athens,” op. cit., p. 139.↩︎
L. Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, op. cit., p. 47.↩︎
Claudia Hilb, “Leyendo a Claude Lefort: tras el rastro de Leo Strauss,” Foro interno: anuario de teoría política, vol. 15, December 2015.↩︎
L. Strauss, “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” in Persecution and the Art of Writing, op. cit., p. 153.↩︎
L. Strauss, “Why We Remain Jews,” op. cit.↩︎