Leo Strauss - SpeedyLook encyclopedia

Biography

Leo Strauss is the son of Hugo Strauss and Jenny David. Raised a family of tradesmen in grains of Kirchain, the Hesse, whose Leo Strauss itself says that it practiced a Judaïsme pious, but without field crop, it enters in Gymnasium (college) where it contacts the traditional European letters. It east seems it at the end of its studies to the college which he discovers the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. He acknowledges that at that time, he “literally believed all that he read of Nietzsche”.

He then leaves to study with Marbourg, university town located at a score of kilometers then goes to Hamburg where he follows the teaching of Ernst Cassirer, under the direction of which he supports a thesis on the Théorie of Knowledge in the thought of Jacobi , subject which corresponds to the vagueness of Néo-kantisme in vogue at the time in Marbourg. He leaves finally to Freiburg-in-Brisgau to follow there the teaching of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, at side of which “Cassirer seemed to be a dwarf”. Leo Strauss takes part in the First World War as interprets on the Belgian face.

After a work on Spinoza and its criticism of the science of the Bible and an employment with the Academy of the Judaism ( Akademie of Judentums ) of Berlin under the direction of Julius Guttmann, Strauss obtains a grant Rockefeller to work with Paris on Arab and Jewish philosophies medieval. It meets Louis Massignon there and it joins again with emigrants met before with Berlin like Alexandre Kojève or Alexandre Koyré. In 1932, in Paris, he marries Mirjam (Marie) Berenson (or Bernsohn). The couple leaves Paris for London and Cambridge where Strauss will occupy a university station. He works on the manuscripts of Thomas Hobbes until in 1937 (it is of this period that will leave the work Political Philosophy Hobbes ) then gains only the United States this year. Mirjam and Leo Strauss will not have a child but Mirjam had already a son of a preceding marriage. It and Leo Strauss will adopt the niece of Strauss, Jenny, orphan into 1942 of her mother, Betty Strauss (sister of Leo Strauss) and of her father Paul Kraus, one orientalizing specialist in Arab sciences, deceased in obscure circumstances in Cairo during the Second world war.

It occupies various stations in Colleges (of which a post of researcher to the Université Columbia of New York), then joined in 1939 in New School for Social Research of New York, where already many German immigrant intellectuals are (like Hans Jonas and Hannah Arendt), to teach political science and philosophy there. In 1949, it is invited to the University of Chicago by Robert Maynard Hutchins, whose intention was to renovate the teaching of humanities in this university, by proposing his Great Books Program . Hutchins thought that it would not know to have there really liberal education without the study of the large books of the tradition. It is in this spirit that he thus proposes in Leo Strauss a post of professor in Faculty for Social Science of the Université of Chicago (Strauss will never teach in Faculty off Philosophy). In 1968, reached by the age limit, Strauss the University of Chicago leaves and goes in California to teach there during one year in Claremont College. Professor emeritus in Chicago, it is invited at the end of his life by his friend Jacob Klein, then dean of Saint John' S College at Year (suburbs of Washington, D.C) in the Maryland. It is at Annapolis that Strauss finishes its days on October 18th 1973, victim of a pneumonia. He is buried in the Jewish cemetery of Annapolis.

Sets of themes

Philosophy first examines the doxa

Interpretation straussienne of philosophy takes support on the thesis developed by Plato in the République : what is first for us, and which appears with the letter like Phénomène , they are the Opinion S ( Doxa ). Leo Strauss considers that philosophy first is the study of the opinions in the City (it is then political philosophy which is the philosophy first and not the Métaphysique). Strauss diagnoses (after Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Friedrich Nietzsche) three waves constitutive of Modernité.

Three Waves of Modernity

The first wave, founder of the “liberal” representations of the political life, is the anti-theological crisis articulated in the work of Nicolas Machiavel.

The second wave is carried by the Lumières, which relegate the Foi to the row of Superstition and which give each other for explicit goal to popularize Science. This second vague door in it a major critical element which accompanies its deployment: the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

The third wave, resulting from the scientific Positivism and the Historicisme, in the line of Hegel and Auguste Count, carries in his center the European Nihilisme, such as it was spread before and after the First World War with German militarism and the Nazisme and such as it is announced and with final worked out, on a side by Nietzsche and other by Martin Heidegger.

Liberalism in question

Strauss wonders about the “crisis of our time” while reflecting on the ancient Libéralisme and modern liberalism and while bringing answers which put in charge the Relativisme values, relativism present in the middle of modern social sciences. He preaches a reflexive return on the problems worked out by the traditional ones, in particular Aristote and Plato, but especially seeks to think the reasons for which ancient liberalism was abandoned. This question opens the properly archaeological company of Leo Strauss, which consists to read again and reinterpret the European philosophical tradition and to confront it with the literary traditions of the three monotheisms, on the one hand by reactualizing the Querelle of Old and Modern the and, on the other hand, by questioning the set of themes théologico-policy.

The crisis of Modernity

Great number and small number

The calling into question of the opinions the best widespread ones in the democratic regimes (“continuation without joy of the joy”, to give a formula present at Locke, or the “passion of the equality”, as notes it Alexis de Tocqueville) seems to legitimate certain a elitism, present at Plato, although the question of the better mode (and on the basis of the better legislator ) is not in proper that of Strauss. The supposed elitism of Leo Strauss rests on the taking into account of a topos aristotelician: the Plaisir could not be confused with the Bien . However, the greatest number operates this identification. Crowd ( oi polloi , " large the nombre" , " the plupart" , " the foule" , " the vulgaire") seek the pleasures of the body more than the good: she seeks material happiness more than she is not with research Zététique of the Vérité. This distinction between the elite and crowd (distinction moreover current in antiquity) is underlined by Strauss, which insists on the difficulty in adhering to the stakes vita philosophiae (life according to philosophy).

The question of a distinction between the great number and the small number is not only one business which relates to the research of the philosophical truth: it is also and especially a major articulation in the ancient discussion on the best political regime. It is the small number which has the means of being devoted to the load of the political matters. However, all the difficulty of the political regimes, like points out it Aristote in its book on the Constitution of Athens , consists in making live the " together; small nombre" (rich person, scientists, experts…) and the " large nombre" , without scorning this one.

Philosophical esotericism

The equalization of the material living conditions, the birth of the middle-class and the middle-class in the historical horizon of the democratic nations will color this question again. This one, presents throughout the political history, hiding place another difficult question: the philosophers need the City, but the City hardly appreciates the philosophers (see the figure founder and emblematic of Socrate, condemned and put at died by the democratic clan, under the charges of Mélétos and Anytos). It is in this context that the esotericism appears necessary: the popularization of Science, or the intemperate use of certain truths, presents a true danger to the stability of the social link (it is a topic worked by Rousseau in its Discours on sciences and arts ). The political life is the arena where poetry enters in fight with philosophy. This topic is worked by Strauss on many occasions, in particular in its works which treat indirectly or directly relationship between Aristophane (the comedy) and Socrate (philosophy).

Liberalism and conservatism: the question of the progress

Leo Strauss is one of the contemporary philosophers (with Hannah Arendt, Erich Voegelin, Raymond Aron or Claude Lefort) who knew to revitalize the political Philosophie, in particular while reflecting on the relationship between the Loi and the natural Right .

Admiror of William Shakespeare and Winston Churchill, saying readily that “the friends of the democracy are not its flattering”, Leo Strauss passably seems an astonishing philosopher, clashing and out-of-date , whose difficult reading lends itself to many misinterpretations. Marginalized on the American university campuses by studies with counter-current of the fashion of the day, its pupils could, that and there, to influence the theoretical representations which accompanied recent rise to power by the American foreign politics.

Certain American néo-conservatives, who refuse the traditional Conservatisme the their elder ones, claimed to find in the reflections of Leo Strauss a fulcrum for their own step, in particular in the appreciation of the concept of progress , even in the evaluation of criticisms against the tradition ( the criticism of the tradition became in its turn a tradition ). The permeability of the academic world, where one sees the professors leaving their pulpit to occupy a station to advise or of leader-writer in a newspaper of opinion, could make believe that of The National Interest with the Weekly Standard while passing by Commentary , everyone drew its ideas in the work of Leo Strauss, which could feed some theories of the plot or make it possible some to easily throw Leo Strauss in the “pot with unpleasant”. One could say thus that Paul Wolfowitz, in spite of his own denials, was the most faithful pupil the néo-conservative of Strauss. Leo Strauss would answer, being the bond between its work and the militant political activity of right-hand side, like left: “Let custom beware off pursuing has Socratic goal with the means, and the temper, off Thrasymachus. ”

Analyzes theses

Difficulty in reading Leo Strauss

To approach the theses of the thought of Leo Strauss requires an attention and a smoothness constants. Indeed, its work is absolutely not presented like a systematic philosophy , or like a series of school talks, but more readily in the form of a succession of studies and account-returned which are given like studies of history of philosophy .

An good example of the difficulty in reaching the thought of Leo Strauss is seen in the title of certain articles, where one can read the promise of propaedeutics (" To start to study philosophy médiévale" , " Some notes within Beyond the good and the evil of Nietzsche" , " Literary character of the Guide of Perplexed the of Maïmonide" , etc). Actually, far from being led to elementary questions for beginners, these texts are very dense talks which, under cover of an introduction, weave fundamental theses, that the reader will regularly find with the wire of the corpus straussien. Moreover, this style " introductif" or " liminaire" , which is found in the title of many tests, by which the reader is invited " to start with… " , is the example of the ironic style of Strauss and in any case the mark of its own art to write.

To develop this report concerning the difficulty in front of which one is vis-a-vis the thought of Leo Strauss, it is that the reading of its “notes” and articles are nourished of a vast scholarship: Strauss knows the history of philosophy perfectly (authors and their works) and if it is this history which interests it, it is as it is the place of a battle of the Ideas, whose core is the conflict between the Law and Philosophy.

Another difficulty, that we will treat further, consists in the fact that Strauss borrows from the talmudic method of the comment, but also with theses found at Lessing, an art to write which consists in entering the examination of details to emphasize general theses. One can support as his interest for what it calls the tension between Athens and Jerusalem , difficulty is nourished of thinking a philosophy (Greek) in the light of problems resulting from the Jewish and Christian world (and vice versa). The question of a rationality specific to the world Jewish and specific to the Christian world, under the aspect of a Jewish philosophy (Maïmonide) and of a Christian philosophy (Thomas d' Aquin), if it is not clean work of Leo Strauss, finds at his place original colors.

One could thus follow Strauss and perhaps try an approach while following to more close his intellectual biography, while seeking to include/understand how a young Jew of the Weimar Republic comes from there to be interested in Spinoza, then in Hobbes, Maïmonide, Plato, in Rousseau, Farabi, Nietzsche, and alii.

Within the framework of an article for an encyclopedia, whose objective is to propose to the reader a faithful report, but synthetic, thought of a philosopher, we will propose the implementation of such a step. Our matter, manifestly synthetic, will invite of as much the reader to go to attend the works in which Leo Strauss invites it to go to read the Large Books.

Reason and revelation

The thought of Leo Strauss is articulated initially, as we have just said it, with a series of interrogations on the relationship between the Philosophie and the revelations resulting from the Bible. In a made speech with Saint John' S College at the end of its life ( An Unspoken Dialogs Holy At John' S ), Strauss very early affirms to be taken “ in the grip off the theologico-political problem ” (“in the vice of the problem théologico-policy”). The question of the relationship between the “Reason” and the “Révélation” is central in all the work of Strauss and obviously problems, since when Strauss speaks about the “ factum brutum ” of the Revelation, one can wonder what it refers. Obviously, this question is not interesting in oneself, as if it were suspended above the vacuum: it becomes it when it is a question of wondering what is put under the concepts of “reason” and of “revelation”.

The stake relates to the representations that we are done of the philosopher like carrying out a certain way of life and philosophy like this life even. These representations and the place which is made to them in the political life (in the City), are reported by the large texts, such as the history of philosophy brings back them to us. The relationship between the philosopher and the City is thématisé by the figure of Socrate and singularly at Strauss, by an extreme attention with the figure of the Thrasymaque, such as it is presented in the dialog of Plato, the Republic . One remembers that the bill of indictment against Socrate with its lawsuit comprised elements concerning the blasphemy, or in any case questioning of the character Sacré of the Loi. The philosopher, who is this man enthusiast of the desire of truth that describes the Banquet of Plato is confronted with the charges that the City carries against him (charges old ranges by Aristophane: “Socrate is devoted to the study of what is in the sky and under the ground” - cf Aristophane, the Clouds ) and which have like reason to defend the political life in its opinions, like only possible life and at the same time to defend the crowned character of the Law. The public character of the law and its rooting in such a public religion it (what is the case in the Athenian life, as in the Roman republic, because the gods are there, as recalled by Fustel de Coulanges, in its work “ the Ancient City ”, from the “municipal gods”) will be the paradigmatic starting point of the work of Leo Strauss. It is however interesting to note that this paradigm will be developed in detail, with the studies devoted by Strauss to the figure of Socrate, the end of its life, joining the work developed in 1935 in the work Philosophy and the Law ( Philosophie und Gesetz ).

However, as point out it researchers as perspicacious as Remi Brague, it is necessary to be attentive with the way in which Strauss reads Plato and the way in which it interprets it. The little of case made of the doctrines of the ideas, or the immortality of the heart or quite simply the grid of reading adopted in the comment of the Republic of Plato (in the City and the Man , the comment stresses put on relationship between Socrate and Thrasymaque), is indices which make sign towards a some platonism. The stress laid on the religion in which the Law is a major horizon, induced the reader to be wondered about the intellectual decisions by which Strauss questions Christianity. It is, seems T it one of the points which remain to be worked in the commentators of Strauss: the designs of the philosopher of Chicago suggest, by apparently leaving them in the shade, a whole of indices, which find an echo in the problems developed by Karl Löwith and Gershom Scholem on the question of the report/ratio of theology with the history. To be clearer, Strauss is interested of very close in intrication of the religious Law in the political life. Also, while seeking to work out the model of the traditional political life (represented by Athens ), it inevitably will evaluate what it is report/ratio of the Faith to the political situation of the man Juif and Christian.

The initial matter of Leo Strauss is anti-theological anger, initially in the work of Machiavel, then at Spinoza and in the work of Hobbes. To note that it is initially by Spinoza, then Hobbes, that Leo Strauss undertakes its exploration of the crisis of modernity, although in the continuation, it is of Nicolas Machiavel that it will make the “large ancestor” of this crisis. Let us note immediately that the intellectual course of Strauss seems to go from Spinoza to Socrate, since it publishes in 1935 its work on Spinoza and 1972 the Xenophon' S Socrates . In the interval, Strauss will explore the question of philosophy in the Judaism and medieval Islam, while going back with Moïse Maïmonide and Al-Farabi.

The key question which makes it possible to tie the tension between reason and revelation is that which relates to the Vérité of the Law: what good life? Which is best the Régime? What justice? How does one reach T the knowledge of the Law? Here, we can circumscribe the matter with essence: the questions concerning the Justice, the best mode and the truth of the Law are traditionally carried in the City by the poets, the philosophers, the legislators and the prophets. However, if we examine our opinions , we see well that in the categories stated above, some are, in the Modernité, disqualified. Force is to note a backward flow of the Religion, or to say it in a way wrongfully clear, but suggestive, a Sécularisation of religious topics. The religion changed aspect, not to say that it does not remain any more it, here and now, that scraps of a morals.

The Strauss young person, reader of Nietzsche, are sensitive to the Crise of modernity, with the set of themes of the Dernier man . The religion of the Former Greeks and Romans, but also of the Jews and the Moslems, is a religion of the Law, i.e. a religion which gives its laws to the City. Thus the question arises of knowing which is the relationship between philosophy and the Law, on the one hand at the Old ones, and on the other hand in the modern Rationalisme, marked by the Christianisme and the crisis introduced at the end of the Latin medieval world by the Protestant Réforme. The work of Strauss on Spinoza thus will be an investigation at the same time into philosophy and biblical criticism, but also into modern rationalism and its reports/ratios with the Christian revelation, while announcing later work on the medieval rationalism of Maïmonide. As announced higher, the problematic dimension of the work of Strauss here very whole is not contained in the difficulties suitable for the question of “art of writing”, that Strauss precisely proposes in the framework of its studies of the medieval thinkers like Maïmonide and Al-Farabi, but this dimension nourishes primarily the EC what there is to find at Al-Farabi. The interested reader will refer, on this point, to the article “Plato de Farabi” and to the text of Farabi itself, “the Philosophy of Plato”.

Art to write

Parallel to the installation of the terms of the tension between reason and revelation, tension which is the Problème of the philosopher, Leo Strauss will reactivate the philosophical esotericism, which is a topos of old philosophy, but that the modern readers underestimate naively since they underwent the poisonous charm of the Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Under the concept of esotericism, it is necessary to hear the following thing: what in the old philosophical schools was taught with the pupils was not the same thing as what was revealed with the greatest number and vulgar, i.e. with those which were not initiated with the implications of the theories professed inside the School, often dangerous for the company. Even Rousseau, which however professes an unbounded frankness, acknowledges in its writings of justification which it employs a certain art to write, in order not to reveal with the bad readers what it really thinks. This art to write, Strauss discovers it at Lessing thanks to Jacob Klein met in Marbourg. Its own perception of what is the philosophical esotericism will be detailed in a small work which is entitled off Persecution and the Art Writing (1953).

Very logically, Leo Strauss will apply to its own works this manner of building its matter very attentively, of stressing unimportant details and of knowingly concealing theses which an informed reader would expect to read. One of the difficulties of the reading of works of Strauss, and the great incomprehension expresses of which it is sometimes the object, is due to this art of the composition which transforms the work of reading into a true labyrinthian exploration for which it is necessary to be very attentive and seriously equipped. Leo Strauss is indeed, one said it, not only one extraordinary scholarship, but its matter is not of manifest darknesses or notes désarçonnantes; a speed reading lets see a tone sometimes slightly ironic, which lets show through a whole of allusions or references, often indirectly quoted. Nevertheless, Leo Strauss invites its reader to read again, on the basis of this prudence specific to the good reader, the large texts of the philosophical and literary tradition. It invites there sometimes explicitly, for example in its article on what liberal education is the , but often implicitly, because its argumentation is actually an examination of the Western tradition in political philosophy.

to see the texts to which Strauss refers, if possible in the original, is a task to which little is able, would be this only because it is necessary for it to devote much leisure. To check the arguments, to flush out the traps by which Strauss seeks to mislead those which cannot read (whoever reads the notes with the bottom of the pages of Strauss knows what means diverted being) is a full-time work which can reject the reader surface or in a hurry. As a practitioner art to write, Strauss reactivates a reality which we had forgotten, now that the effects of the modern Lights are visible, for the benefit of the " science for tous" , which could not be confused with the universal truth .

Strauss discovers in the philosophical tradition of medieval Arabic, Averroès, Avicenne, Razi, and in particular Farabi, the Master of Maimonide, the Ideal-type of the philosopher necessarily related to the crucial questions: the Religion and the Policy. From where, in a great part, its famous book The Persecution and Art off Writing . Art to write, which seems to be a practice which astonishes our contemporaries (since we are the heirs to the Lights, where each one is equal in front of science and the truth), made sign thus towards a intellectual environment which does not seem any more to be ours. The question is to know why this art is not employed any more; it would be necessary to inquire initially to know if it is true that it is not it any more. To answer this question, it is necessary to locate of it the range within the more general framework of major political progress, who is perceived like the progress of freedom. It is not absolutely impossible only the political Libéralisme, which is the major axis of the Modernité, tended to neutralize, at least partly, the need to conceal its thought, to mask it, or to gum the aspects of them more provocants. Today (can we say), nobody is put at died in the political regimes where reign liberalism, like Socrate, because of his activities of teaching. Nobody is imprisoned and does not have to answer of its life, because it published a work which calls into question the most widespread opinions, whereas one should remember that a Rousseau saw seizing and burning its large book on education, the Emile. Without being able to claim to solve here this question of the Censure, at least can we say that the conditions of the political life, if they changed in the field of the Liberté and its expression, do not remain about it less tributary of the Opinion S. It would be necessary, from this point of view, to propose nuances: freedom to think and criticize mask badly the difficulties without number which await that which would call into question the crowned bases of the modern political regimes which, mutatis mutandi , must be able to answer the philosophical examination, since their same bases are enracinent in intellectual probity and the free rational examination. It is this examination, as a free practice authorized with all and each one, which is the subject of the sourcilleux examination of Leo Strauss, when it reactivates the Querelle of Old and Modern the.

The Quarrel of Old and the Modern ones

With the first access the bond between this quarrel and the thought of Strauss are not obvious. Strauss takes again on its account the terms of the debate to question the representation that modernity is made popularization of philosophical research. One of the characteristic of modernity is the will of the equality, it even founded on an popular education. It is manifest that the modern Lumières had like concern for éradiquer the Obscurantisme and the superstition for to make place with the reason and the faith (it is the formula which Kant employs in the Introduction to the Critique of the Pure Reason). The 18th German century is rich dedicated works with this question of the Education of mankind (to quote the title of a work of Schiller), by which people formerly composed of poor are supposed to take in hand his destiny and to accelerate the movement of the history towards the Progrès of the Right. The political history will have to give an account of this movement that Eric Voegelin called, being of Hegel and Marx, the Nouvelle Gnosis.

The idea according to which the present gives lessons to the past, precisely because it represent a notable progress in manners, the ideas, the political organizations, arts, etc are deeply anchored in modernity. The Quarrel of Old and Modern is the symbol of what will become the stake of the fight between the philosophical spirit and the historical spirit, historical spirit represented by the German Idéalisme and the Positivisme French. The man, known as Nietzsche, became a to be historical , notion that it is necessary to hear in the remarks of Strauss, like the last of the illusions of modernity: to believe that technological advance, resulting from the popularization of sciences, is necessarily accompanied by moral progress and the social progress, and that it is thus a good in oneself . As Leo Strauss underlines it, the fact that many are the engineers able to manufacture an atomic bomb does not ensure of anything the existence a political prudence, guarantees of a policy encadant the use of the nuclear weapon. Proof in support of the opposite, them violent crises having shaken the Europe at the 20th century. Strauss thus takes again the thesis of Rousseau which, at counter-current of its time, had warned against this research without brake of progress, characteristic of modernity.

The historicism and the positivism of social sciences are the fruits problems of conceived science with new expenses by the modern ones, whose stake is separation between the facts and the Valeur S, even the disappearance of any concept of a natural Right specific to the human being. The quarrel of Old and the Modern ones, if it were to find its result in the victory of the Modern ones, would see triumphing the Relativisme and the Nihilisme moral, accompanied by an indefinite juridicisation of the human reports/ratios.

The distinction enters the facts and the values

The attentive reader will see that the works that Strauss publishes in the Années 1950, like certain articles, comprise a whole a direct or indirect attack against the Social sciences. It is the case, for example, of the first pages of Natural Right and History . One can allege that while arriving at Chicago, Strauss will not teach in the department of philosophy, but in the department of social sciences. On the pediment of this building, one can read still there a formula of Lord Kelvin: “All that is not measured cannot be object of science. ” It is probably not only in one report/ratio of Contingence that it is necessary to apprehend the report/ratio of Leo Strauss in Auguste Count or max Weber and in a general way to the Sociologie. He is explained some besides very clearly: to distinguish the facts and the values is to accept the fact that the political advisers, who can be scientific experts of the nuclear power, do not have any idea as for the question of knowing when, why against which and up to what point it is necessary to make use of the nuclear weapon. However, the Social sciences, which first of all seek to give each other instruments of quantification of the human phenomena, could be of no help, because of their concern of belonging to the Science, which they assert, in so far as they do not see in the human phenomena that they however study, a political component which first of all rests on a system of Valeur S. the claim of a axiologic Neutralité is problematic; not only owing to the fact that the object of science is the human fact, but because to act it human is not, in last analysis, deprived of any political orientation. The question: " What the better mode ? " could not be a question that one can consider clearly in distinguishing the facts from the values. The political life, which is the characteristic suitable for the natural human, rests obviously on acts which it is advisable to seek, because in this research, it is the human Bien which is accomplished. We thus see digging the difference between philosophies of freedom resulting from the Lights and the positions from Strauss which seem to raise of the Téléologie of old philosophy. Strauss agrees to the formula of Aristote: " Any art, any action, is accomplished for some good " and not for " to affirm by there our freedom " (cf Descartes, Letter with the P. Mesland . February 9th, 1643).

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